Steve Belisle was circumcised as a child. Today he’s regrowing his foreskin. “I felt like I was mutilated, like I was missing something, like something was taken away,” he said.
Non-religious circumcision of male children began during the Victorian era, when doctors began performing the operation to prevent masturbation.
Steve Bélisle: circumcision “was the mentality of the time.”
Today, some doctors still perform circumcisions, citing “potential medical benefits” as justification for the procedure.
But according to John Antonopoulos, president of the Circumcision Information Resource Centre, “every rationale for the routine circumcision of a male infant has been discounted. In fact, circumcision does more harm than good.”
According to medical literature, complications arising from infant circumcision can include excessive bleeding, infection, gangrene, penile loss requiring sex reassignment, even death. Possible long-term outcomes can include extensive scarring, progressive sensitivity loss, painful erections, curvature of the penis and feelings of being violated.
If affected, most men simply shrug their shoulders. But some embark on the long and unusual journey of non-surgical foreskin restoration.
“I asked my mother why she did this to me. She said she did what she thought was best. That’s what the doctors told her to do. It was the mentality of the time. But I believe you can’t think for someone else. It’s important to think about the boy when he grows up. It’s his body. It’s up to him what happens to it.
“A few years ago, I started going to a circumcision support group. When I told my mother, she said, ‘Oh my God! Where are you going with this?’ But now she supports me.
“Talking about this with other men is very special. Men are so used to saying ‘I’m OK.’ But in the group, it’s not like that. Some guys feel so much emotion. They feel like they’ll never be OK. Sometimes they cry. But here they know they’re not alone. There are young men, old men, gay and straight. We feel close to each other. For men, that’s special.
“I don’t tell everyone about this. My close friends, they know. And everybody else, well, they’re not English, so they probably won’t read this.”
—Monique Dykstra’s E-mail address is monique@sprint.ca
