This Penis Business

CIRCUMCISION CUTS THROUGH US ALL. Most Americans have never seen a normal penis, nor have we ever questioned the peculiar medical practice of removing the natural protective foreskin, or prepuce, from newborn baby boys. Yet, this unnecessary and most common pediatric surgery permanently reduces the size and alters the function of a boy''s penis for the rest of his life. Every year, nearly 1.5 million baby boys are assaulted in American hospitals and doctors'' offices, subjecting them to pain, functional and psychological damage, and a forever-altered sexual experience. (Less than 2 percent of all circumcisions in the United States are done for religious reasons.) Research shows that expectant mothers are pressured multiple times to sign a "consent" form allowing medical professionals to inflict this damage on their sons and permitting hospitals to do whatever they want with the "donated" foreskins-including providing the tissue to companies that repurpose them into commercial products like cosmetics. Parents who refuse circumcision and keep their sons'' genitals intact often later find them victimized by the gruesome, prevalent practice of forcible foreskin retraction at the hands of foreskin-phobic doctors and nurses. Georganne Chapin exposes the business of medical circumcision, tracing its U.S. roots from 19th Century fears of masturbation to stereotypes about race, class, religion, and male sexuality. What started as a way to keep men and women from enjoying sex morphed into a for-profit medical practice that is rare or unknown in Europe, non-Muslim Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She shows how physician organizations, especially the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), have worked for decades to fraudulently promote circumcision''s supposed benefits, suppress facts about circumcision harm and deaths, and refuse to acknowledge the procedure as a gross violation of basic medical ethics. An excerpt: "As used by Intact America [in our awareness campaign], "skin in the game" is an intentional play on the word "foreskin," the essential body part that is promiscuously and needlessly removed by medical doctors from nearly three-quarters of all baby boys born in the United States and implies that we are all inextricably linked through our participation in that enterprise. For parents, it means that they fought off, or paid money, to someone wishing to cut off part of their children''s bodies. If the latter, when the awareness sets in, they must cope with remorse, regret, and-all too often-the pain and resentment of their sons. For cut men, it means that someone made money so they could lose a part of their body, and that they are suffering the physical, sexual, and psychological consequences of the amputation. For doctors (many who themselves are also victims), it means having been taught to repeat the trauma by cutting other victims and participating in the commerce of the penis business. For spouses, partners, and lovers of cut men, it means coping (often unconsciously) with the physical and psychological consequences of having a partner who was sexually assaulted as a child. For our society, it means that most males have grown up with a baseline experience of sexual assault and its ongoing trauma, which then is perpetrated across future generations. Accomplice, facilitator, witness, victim, and perpetrator - all have skin in the game, skin in a tragic, money-driven game that thrives on surgically assaulting days-old male babies and which has produced profoundly harmful consequences in American culture over the past 150 years." This book is a punch-in-the-gut wake-up call that will enrage and empower anyone impacted by the multi-billion-dollar penis business.