The Equally Blameless Foreskin?

Hello, there is a part of your body which enhances sexual pleasure due to the presence of nerve receptors and perhaps, offers lifelong protection kinda. In spite of all its qualities and not, it harbours dirt... we will have to chop it off. No, don’t ask why.

(Conversation that happened in my head: Hello, this is your brain. Do you really want to write this and be known as the young woman who wrote about this?)

Well, I did not have the good sense to listen, so, here goes:

Dick, prick... Words I have learnt to blush saying or hearing all my life. Especially “prick” a word I loathe very much. There is a story in there for another day. I take particular offence to the word “prick” because it reminds me of a lewd sick man (Now, I hate to even use the word “sick” in relation to the man, he contaminates the word) I met as a girl of fourteen. He was the first person to use the word “prick” to me. I hated his insinuations, his tone of voice, his lewdness; to cut it short, my encounter with him signalled a lifelong feud with the blameless word “prick”. Blameless, yes, because it is not about the word “prick”. What is wrong, for example, with a person saying “I pricked my thumb with a needle?”

It is about what it referred to: penis. Yes, I said it. Penis. A word we so love to shy away from saying. Did you know it was not pronounced “pe-nis” but “pi-nis”? As I grow older, I have found myself using the word on occasion and when I do, I sit up mentally and become all serious. Like, I dare you to make a joke of it. Yet, it is not about the word “penis”. If the word “penis” referred to school children marching on a lawn for example, there would have been no hush-hush around it. I have heard parents call it “tomboy”, “wee-wee”... children pick up the ... from their parents. I did. There, you have it, my penis subtext or history.

Before setting out to write this post, I spent a whole car-ride from Ibadan to Osogbo pondering where to begin. Should I begin with an announcement that I am taking on something people would prefer me to leave alone? I remembered my father looking at me as I made a point as a secondary school girl and advising: “Don’t be a leftist.” We always communicate in Yoruba. You can only imagine the seriousness that warranted that English.

Should I begin with a reference to the my status update on Facebook over a year ago on Female Genital Mutilation? We all spoke about it, angrily, passionately. It turned up important posters, one of them, a name I had only ever seen in magazines. People were angry. We were talking about the barbarism of mutilating the “blameless Vulva” as Alice Walker refers to it. We, amazons, picked up our spears and dashed out in fear of the blameless vulva. My sister and I, who can barely agree on women affairs, agreed on it. Female Genital Mutilation is a beast, Hitler, the devil, the this, the that. It was atomic bomb and all. We called it Female Genital Mutilation and addressed it as such but what we were essentially defending, which we did not mention, was the vulva.

Then, recently, I started to think of the foreskin which Sorrells et al (2007) refers to as the most sensitive part of the penis. Was the foreskin equally as blameless as the vulva? I remember my baby brother, boisterous, being taken to the hospital. He was some few weeks old. When he returned, he was subdued. He was not crying but he had the look of someone who had cried till he was emptied out. He returned as a half-empty sack of potato. Yes, children forget pain. I am sure if I asked him now, he probably would not remember the pain on a subconscious level. Yet, some people do not have the privilege of forgetting; one of them, my father, who vividly remembers his circumcision at the age of fourteen and the hellish two weeks that followed.

I started to wonder, why is there so much noise about FGM while everyone is very accepting of male circumcision? How many people know that every year, over hundred boys die from circumcision every year in the US alone? What is more, the deaths are often not attributed to circumcision in the death reports but to other causes like infection, bleeding, etc. And yet, experts, when pressed, attest to the point that circumcision has no intrinsic benefit. My question is not “why do we have to circumcise our boys?” My question is “Why do we have to cut off the foreskin of our boys, while ignoring their shrieks? What purpose does it serve?

Dan Bolinger’s stance, which seems pretty sensible to me, is that circumcision, which could be harmful and dangerous, should not be carried out on minors or babies. I agree with Bolinger that such decision should not be made for a person. Why is the foreskin the business of the society?

You would ask me if I would circumcise my son(s) if I had them. Well, to be honest, the answer is that I do not know. I think being able to stand and be honestly confused is the beauty of my journey as an individual. I had a lecturer when I was an undergraduate that would ask, “Are you confused? It is good to be confused. It shows that you are thinking.” In secondary school, I remember ending debates with a flourish, “I hope I have been able to convince you and not to confuse you that moinmoin is better than akara.”

Here, however, I do not wish to have convinced you. Heck, I am not convinced myself. I wish to confuse you. Our humanity lies in our ability to be confused... to be able to stop in our tracks and ask, but why did we choose this path?

N:B: In case you didn’t know, there is a process known as “Foreskin Restoration” and a movement, “Intactivism,” simply put, let the equally blameless “foreskin” be. I have heard the case for “Intactivism”, I have not heard the case for chop it off...

I'm all ears...