TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to talk about the subject of male circumcision. And let me say for starters that I was circumcised as a little boy. The day that I was born, I was circumcised by a doctor in a hospital in New York City. And the funny thing is, I really didn’t even know that it had happened until much, much later in my life.
Because every single person I saw in school, when we were changing in the bathrooms, and when I looked at my dad when he was changing, looked exactly like me. And nobody told me that I was circumcised. I didn’t even know that circumcision existed. But what happened is, as I got older, I heard a little bit about circumcision. I think I read about it in books somewhere, but I still didn’t really even know what it was. I didn’t know how it had any relation to me.
However, it really came home to my awareness when I was 19 years old and I was working in a summer camp. I was a camp counselor, and I had a camp counselor who I shared a room with. He was my co-counselor who was from Europe. And I remember one day we were changing our clothes. I think we were going to swim time. We were putting on bathing suits, and I looked over. And not that I was even staring, but I noticed, oh my God, he has a genital deformity. And it was sort of shocking and disturbing, and I felt so bad for him. I was embarrassed, and I looked away. I didn’t want to look anymore ’cause I didn’t want to make him feel bad because, well, he had a genital deformity.
And I didn’t think about it much, but I just remember treating him more kindly after that because I knew it must be he must have a real insecurity around it. Well, then what happened is we got another counselor who came in, another co-counselor who was also from Europe. And maybe a couple weeks later, we were changing our clothes, getting ready, and I noticed again that I looked, and I realized, oh my God, he has the same deformity.
I remember thinking it was sort of a scientific way: what is the statistical likelihood that I would have two counselors that both have the exact same genital deformity and they were from different countries? And then suddenly it hit me. The pieces came together, and I realized, oh my God, they don’t have a genital deformity. It’s me! I’ve been circumcised. They were not circumcised. They never went through male genital mutilation when they were babies.
And it did something to my mind. And I thought about it, and I realized, oh God, every single person I’ve known up until now that I’ve actually ever seen without clothes on, every male that I’ve known has gone through this procedure, and I didn’t even realize it. It really made me think.
Well, as time went on, I thought about it more, but I still really didn’t know what it meant. I never considered myself traumatized in any way because I had no memory of what I had gone through. Well, though the next thing that happened is when YouTube came out, or maybe it was even before YouTube came out, there was a video that somebody sent me that showed a little boy being circumcised without anesthesia, which is what happened to me. I wasn’t given anesthesia. I looked into it; they weren’t doing anesthesia back then in the early seventies.
Well, I saw the video of it, and I realized by watching the look on this little baby’s face and listening to him scream like an animal, it was torture. This baby was being traumatized, and somebody was videoing it, and all these people were standing around watching this, and no one was doing anything. And the doctor was literally cutting his flesh.
Well, after that, I became much more aware, and I started talking to some friends of mine who were doctors. And I remember one friend of mine who was a doctor who wanted to become an OBGYN doctor. And she told me, she said part of their, when they went through the specialty of training to become OBGYN doctors, they had to circumcise babies. And she found it so awful and absolutely horrible. And I think, by the way, this was in the 90s. She said she couldn’t do it, and it really made me think: what is up with our society where we do this to little boys?
Now I know nowadays there are lower and lower percentages of people who are circumcising their children, especially in the United States, circumcising their little boys. But it’s still, I think, a fairly high percent. I don’t know what the numbers are, 60, 70 percent, maybe more. However, why do we do this? I read articles all saying, oh, it’s good for the cleanliness of the little boy. But then there’s also articles showing easy, easy proof that you just do minor, minor cleaning of the child’s foreskin, or maybe even don’t clean it at all, and it’s okay. Nothing bad is gonna happen.
People were around with foreskins for thousands and probably millions of years, and they were circumcising their boys, and their penises weren’t becoming infected and falling off. There was really no need for it. So where did this cultural practice come from, and why? And why does it stick around? And how do I deal with it? How do I deal with the fact that I must have been traumatized as a baby, especially having viewed that video, knowing what I went through? I must have screamed. I must have shut down emotionally. I must have felt completely helpless and powerless and tortured, and nobody heard my screams. Nobody cared.
And then they wrapped me up and put a little this or that over my genitals and brought me back to my mother, and she held me and loved me and peeked at me. She probably felt bad for me a little bit. She probably felt a little guilty, but she probably was also relieved that it was done. That’s really what I believe. But what about me? How do I deal with this, and how do I get over it?
Well, I’ll say this: sometimes, a few rare times in my life, I have cried about it. I’ve really actually sobbed about what I went through. But was it actually what I went through? I don’t know. Sometimes it’s just my imagination, my fantasy that maybe that’s really what I’m crying about. But it’s hard to know at one day old, can we really access those feelings?
I know people who’ve said, oh, I have grieved my birth trauma. I have grieved my trauma that happened when I was in my mother’s womb. Pretty much, I don’t see the evidence for it. I don’t know how it’s really possible in any way to know that we are connected to those memories. However, I know that it did set the stage for trauma in my life.
And the other thing is, I wonder this, and I’ve heard a friend of mine say this, and it really rang true with me. He said, I think part of why our culture, of why moms of white dads let the little boys be traumatized at birth is we are showing them we are dominant. We control you, and you are powerless. And you better learn your place. You better learn that you are not in control of your life. You’re not in control of your body, and you are just an object for us to do things to. And there’s some part of me for which that rings true. I really do believe that because it’s a pattern again and again and again and again.
I saw in my childhood that I had to obey. I had to honor my parents no matter what they did to me. And I think by letting me be circumcised, they were showing me early on who was in charge.