Accepting being circumcised

Is that a safe-baby handling tip? (Hope so.)
Channeling the Duke a bit, I'll assume nothin' till I hear from you.

Actually, it was the clarity of your posts that had me shakin'.

You know nothing else, and the grass seems greener on the other side.

Find something else to focus on.

Yeah, I thought I'd give it one more try before going in. I'm surprised though, the first page HADN'T turned into a flame war.

I think you're short-changing the benefits of restoration. If you're unwilling to wait for regrowable parts, then restoration can help. I think, psychologically, that doing something about it would help. Better to light a match than curse the darkness. What is your specific opposition to restoration if it can give you most of the benefits and appearance of being intact?

Key: "Most of" and "appearance."

By this, I mean that I'd only be getting most of the benefits, and I'd only have the appearance of being natural.

I just don't feel like lying to myself.

To me, that sounds like an amputee refusing to wear a prosthesis that could provide more mobility. Of course it's your choice and I respect that but what you're doing is painting yourself into a corner where I doubt you'll find any satisfaction at all.

If you're truly serious about this, then I suggest this:

Get yourself a therapist, preferably a PhD or MD, who can vouch for your mental anguish over this issue. Have that doctor solicit the pixie dust people to run a trial. Now, I would do this only once the veracity of pixie dust has been verified, but you may feel the need to be guinea pig. If the stuff works, then you have your foreskin back exactly as it should have been. If it doesn't, then you may be no worse off than before.

There's not much we can do in life other than to accept the shit that happens to us and move on. If you're 18 and live in the US, you can sue the doctor and the hospital and temper your misery with luxury, or you can restore and do what you can to compensate. Either way, I think seeing a therapist would be a great idea. A good one will give you tools to cope and move on even if it seems impossible at this point in time.

Or empowering yourself, for that matter. You've made such a fuss over your missing foreskin; why not show the same concern for your testicles?

A tricky suggestion ... but astute.

I think there's something psychologically wrong when someone fixates on a certain body part or in this case, lack of a body part. It's called body dismorphia - a distorted view of one's own body where someone feels that those parts of their body are ugly or need altering.

I would suggest seeing a therapist about the issues you have concerning a missing foreskin. I would love to see you embrace your body and love your penis regardless of foreskin or sans.

Just make the best you can of the situation.

This is retarded..whats the difference between circumcised and not circumised? There's none at all, all it is extra skin or not lol. Never in my life has a girl asked me if was cut or not, frankly they don't give a fuck about a penis till they let you get close to them.

Okay. That does it: I'm resigning 18 years from now, so I don't have to moderate this guy's complaint.

ok....well now....thank you mindeye. I have now seen everything. I can now die, as I feel as my life has been totally fufilled after seeing that pic.

This is what persuades me: choice. The penis owner's choice, not the parents' choice.

Perhaps there is no wisdom in choosing to focus on one's missing foreskin, since there's no way to turn back time and keep the doctor (or intern) from performing the operation soon after birth (in the case of RIC), but there is wisdom in recognizing large-scale human rights abuses and alerting a culture to its hypocrisy.

Heath, I am appalled by this position as you have stated it here. This is of course congruent with United States law, so perhaps I should not be surprised, but damn. Do you understand the ramifications?

Let me take just the case of "intersex" babies, children who've been born with external genitalia sharing features of both male and female genitalia. (These people were called "hermaphrodites" not so very long ago, in the same way that "Mongoloid" became "Down syndrome.") Do you support some parents' decision to subject their intersex child to surgery--sometimes multiple surgeries--just to satisfy our culture's rigid gender conventions? Do you support this surgical "correction," with its inevitable scarring, loss of tissue, and nerve damage in an extremely important place? Do you support "normalizing" children who have been born somehow "abnormal" according to the understanding of the times?

I'm not talking about a life-threatening issue such as spina bifida or similar. I'm talking about merely having different-looking genitalia. Functional--pissing, erectile, even reproductive--tissue that, if surgically manipulated, will almost certainly be screwed up by doctors intent on the appearance of normality as opposed to tissue function.

I was born with hypospadias. Three pissholes, in fact, two of which closed off soon after birth, the third of which--along the ventral midline of my penis (the raphe) about an inch from where it "should" be--I use today for pissing and ejaculating. Yes, mine looks different from other guys' penises--but it's what I know, what I've been used to all my life, and what's "normal" for me.

If I'd been subjected to surgery soon after my birth in 1969, I almost certainly would have experienced significant scarring, significant loss of sensation and/or sexual function, likely considerable pain (especially if there were multiple surgeries), and significant resulting psychological damage. Even with modern microsurgical techniques, if I'd been born just a few days ago I'd still risk these results if my parents agreed to allow surgeons to operate on me. And I'd have been circumcised, likely, in order for them to use the skin to reshape my penis into something they thought was more "normal"--but with attendant loss of sensation and loss of sexual function. (Say what you will, you cannot convince me, a gay man of broad and varied experience, that circumcised and intact penises are equally sensitive--not when I have just lightly touched most intact men's penises and they almost jumped out of their skin, but I had to use considerably more pressure and friction in order to stimulate the vast majority of circumcised men I have encountered.)

Remember, all of this surgical "normalization" would have been performed without any medical need to do it--just like the vast majority of routine infant circumcisions, which are performed for cultural, not medical, reasons.

I think you can follow my point, but I'll just go ahead and say it so there's no confusion: Your stance, as stated above, supports human rights abuses. A person has a right to a whole body, not a body snipped or otherwise irreversibly modifed against his or her will to suit a transitory cultural imperative.

NCbear (whose "default" mode of human interaction is unmoderated--all puns intended)

My first circumcision was a partial circumcision.

I was absuletely extactic about having my ugly long foreksin shortened so it would automatically expose head during erection, and leave tip exposed when soft. I felt just a gain, no loss at all.

a number of years later, I found myself realising that my penis had become perfectly normal, as if I had been born that way. That is how I was. Yeah, I had a "logical" memory of my original foreskin and the fact that I had had surgery, but the memory of the original foreskin had become just factual. It is only if I saw some dude in locker room with a long foreksin like I used to have (not that often) that I was reminded of what I was like.

Over the years, my curiosity for circumcision continued and grew to a point where I was seriously considering it. But the fear of circumcised masturbation without mobile skin, and the fact that I was happy being semi cut kept fighting that desire and winning. But eventually, I realised that desire wasn't ever going to go away unless I went ahead with it.

One of the major aspect that made me make the decision was my experience in getting used to it. Once done, like it or not, I would get used to it and in time, it would become second nature to me. And once done, I would no longer fantasize about getting cut, I would have runned out fo options :-)

Two years later, I find myself realising that my penis is starting to feel totally natural. Initially, when masturbating, I would be reminded that I could no longer bring skin over head. I had no choice, I just couldn't. Now, I don't think about it, it has become natural that teh skin only moves on shaft. It is when I see an uncut penis with skin over head that it loosk strange because to me, the norm has become to have an exposed head visible when I drop my underwear. That is the way my penis is. I have no regrets about my circumcisions.

So, just like I had thought when deciding to go ahead for the full circ, I have gotten used to it and it works quite well. At first, I had some regrets because masturbation was difficult, but once I started to change my technique to adapt to my new penis, the pleasure returned with a vengeance. New techniques, new stimulation. New awareness. But now, it has all become normal. My penis is that way. I am happy with it and certaintly don't think about restauration. In my case, having experienced what it was like to have long foreksin, I know that I don't want to go back there.

Now, to the original poster: when did your resentment about being circumcised begin ? Was it due to the propaganda on the net ? Remember that they have greatly exagerated everything. And remember that a certain percentage of uncircumcised males end up with a permanenetly exposed head once adult. So circumcision simply emulates a natural condition for certain males.

If your really cannot get over being circumcised, then your only option is to start restoring. If being cut makes you truly unhappy and you see no way to fix that, then restauration might be for you.

In my case, I flip-flopped on a decision to get the full circumcision for years. But eventally, I came to realise that the desire wasn't going to go away and that it was oprobably inevitable I would eventually go ahead with it and there was no point in postponing what was inevitable. So I went ahead with it.

If reading on the net has made you uncorfortable about being circumcised, and this has taken deepo roots in your personality then do something about it.