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Welcome to The New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to another episode on The New Books Network.I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Jonathan Allen about his book titled Uncut!
A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin, published by the University of Regina Press in 2024, which looks at the foreskin, obviously, as the subtitle suggests, but through a very interdisciplinary approach.
What does it mean in today's Anglo-American culture?Why does it mean that?
What sorts of things around language, around religion, around art, around public health have contributed to this kind of particular understanding of the foreskin that we have today?So, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
Thank you.It's a pleasure to be here.
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
So yeah, I'm Jonathan Allen, and I'm a Canada Research Chair in Men and Masculinities and professor at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada.And I teach English drama and creative writing and gender and women's studies.
So I'm almost always interdisciplinary.I can't seem to see a way out of that.And why I decided to write this book, I don't know if it's an interesting story or a common story. But it begins with reviewer two, as they always do, I suppose.
And at least this is how I remember the story in my mind, right?I had written something.I don't even remember what it was anymore.And they left a comment that I just thought, what?What does that have to do with anything?And it was about circumcision.
And I just sort of said to the editor, like, thanks, this is an interesting comment.It's clearly for another paper, that sort of standard academic response. But I couldn't get it out of my head.
And so I started following the breadcrumbs, if you will, and started piecing together things and thinking, well, maybe there's something here.Maybe there is an article or something.Sure enough, there was more than something.
There was a book, which took a long time to write. And it really brought together a number of sites of inquiry, which was interesting to me.It wasn't as if it was just in gender studies or just in medicine.
It was all over the place, everywhere I looked.I didn't even have to be looking, and I seemed to find the foreskin or circumcision.And so I thought this could make an interesting book, and I think it does.
That's a really interesting sort of foundation.I think many of us have encounters, I suppose, with Reviewer 2.And similarly, the idea of maybe there's something here.Maybe it's an article.Oh, wait, hang on.
There's loads of stuff now that I start looking for it.So given kind of the idea of encountering all these ideas and bringing them together, as you said, it's very much an interdisciplinary book.
How did you go from that moment of, oh, maybe there's something to look at here, to the specific questions of the book?Can you tell us what you ended up focusing on and how you decided on that?
I mean, that's also sort of interesting, because I sometimes think I'm too broad in my approach, maybe.Everything interests me.I just can't not be interested.So, at first, it was just overwhelming.
There's just so much there, where people seemed ready to go to war over the question, should I or shouldn't I circumcise my child? And I thought, this is interesting.What's going on here?And then it became questions about sexuality.
It became questions about medicine and health.It became questions about aesthetics.And so when I started, I thought, as I think many people who write on this do, with that question to cut or not to cut.
But as I started reading and thinking about this, I became more and more interested in the question about, well, what is cut off?What's removed?What feelings do we have about this?Or what ideas do we have about
the object or the piece of skin, right, that's removed from the penis during a circumcision.And so my original title for this was horribly academic in a way.It was The Foreskin Archive.
And I just thought, I'm just going to chase around the foreskin and see what happens.
And that became really interesting because it shifted the original sense of the book towards that object, right, towards the foreskin and why the foreskin itself provokes such responses.
Yeah, that's definitely kind of an interesting evolution from what was cut off or why things were cut to then, oh wait, hang on, what actually was happening?
I wonder then if we can get into kind of some of the answers that you found in this interdisciplinary investigation.
you start the book, or at least towards the beginning of the book, there's a section talking about the religious reasons for foreskin removal and a section about the medical reasons for foreskin removal.
Can you help us do a bit of kind of compare and contrast?Because those are, at least from my understanding, not often ideas that are kind of put in conversation with each other.
So to what extent are these ideas coming from the same sort of origins or is it just two separate trajectories that have ended up in the same place?
This is a tough one, because they're so deeply embedded with one another at this point.My sense is that they are distinct, but that they overlap.
So today, we might circumcise a child or a neonate, right, for religious reasons, but we also recognize, say, that there might be some medical benefits to this or some hygienic benefits.
or conversely, we might do it for hygienic reasons and have an added religious reason for it, right?So they get caught up with one another.
And that's interesting because how that happens is sort of itself a history that's waiting to be written in the ways that they just sort of interdigitate with one another.It's really hard to separate the two.
And what I tried to do, or what I hoped to do, was to say, I'm chiefly interested in the medical or the secular reasoning, not the religious reason. And the reason for that is fairly straightforward.I'm not a scholar of religion.
And I think it takes on a different symbolic meaning there.So for religious reasons, there might be a covenantal reason.That's different from, say, a secular reason where you want somebody to look like their dad.
got it.Yeah, no, that's definitely a different set of reasons.But interesting to understand that they're not the same, but there is still an overlap.Again, that's not necessarily something we always think about.
And it is, I think, particularly interesting in this context, because we think of ourselves, especially in sort of North American context as being in many ways, a very secular society.
But circumcision is still talked about really explicitly in terms of religious practice, or at least that's kind of understanding of what their reasons are. the medical ones being, I think, less part of those discussions.
So why is secular society still discussing this thing that sounds very religious?
That's the question I kind of wanted to answer too.I would love to know because the secular reasons tend to be
um looking like dad or looking like your brothers or a fear of the locker room that a kid with a different penis will be teased or ideas of hygiene and cleanliness but they're all they're all up for debate in a lot of ways right i mean the kid who might be teased in the locker room for instance
When his father was a neonate, right, as a baby, circumcision may have been much more normative than it is today, right?We see declining rates of circumcision throughout North America.
And so if you're going on the assumption that because you were circumcised and you saw a kid who was uncircumcised teased in the locker room, it might actually be the reverse at this point.
and yet it remains as a big fear, right?I mean, you talk about that as being a huge part of your examination of parenting manuals, right?That they're still really concerned about these ideas?
Oh, absolutely.I mean, I see this all the time, and parents seem in dispute sometimes, right?I can't remember where I was, and I think I talk about it in the book, too.I was at some sort of event
And somebody said to me, well, do you settle disputes between parents?As if I was like some sort of circumcised decider or something.
So it's interesting that the parenting manuals, and I looked at piles of them, frame this as a question about, well, what should you or shouldn't you do?And they really don't give an answer.It usually comes down to, do what you think is best.
The problem is, there's so much information, especially now in our sort of Google world, right, where I can just search should I or shouldn't I circumcise my kid, that it becomes overwhelming.
You can get answers from all sides, and you can leave that thinking, I haven't a clue what to do.The medical advice seems to say yes, but then there are just as many studies that say the medical advice is not sound.
There are hygienic reasons, but then there's people saying no.Then I look towards how will this affect sexuality in the future, right? does the uncircumcised or the intact penis feel more than the circumcised penis?
And again, the studies are just overwhelming.And then you get the Reddit and the Twitter and all of that sort of stuff.And if you ask somebody, well, what did you do?What should I do?You're bound to get piles of opinions.
And so it was striking to me that these parenting manuals, which ostensibly tell people how to raise their children, what to expect when you're expecting, all of these sorts of things, kind of refused to answer the question.
They said there were costs and there were benefits and it was kind of equal on both sides, which is striking because if I think about, say, the pediatric associations, most of them do not recommend routine neonatal circumcision because the benefits do not outweigh the costs.
So why not just say that?
Yeah, exactly.Why not just say that?That was really interesting to read your discussion of how the question is framed and then also what's not discussed.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounded like the parenting manuals kind of framed this as sort of an inevitable question that parents must consider.
Oh yeah, totally. it's the strangest thing in a way.It's like, you're having a boy?Are you going to, or are you not going to, to circumcise the neonate, right?
As if it's a decision that must be made, rather than not even asking the question altogether and waiting for the parents to say, I'd like my child circumcised, or something like this.
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So is it this idea then of the kind of fear of the locker room that is such a pervasive element of this?I mean, you go so far as to say in the book you called the foreskin fantasy. And is this the main element of it?
And why do you think it's kind of such a dominant model?
Well, what I think is we have to convince ourselves if we're going to circumcise or not circumcise.And so we create ideas or stories or fantasies, however, about reasons for doing it or not doing it, right?
And one of the things that came up over and over again in a lot of the research were these ideas of
locker rooms being hostile places, or kids being teased for looking differently, or not looking like dad, right, and that there's such a need for a son to look like his father.
And so what I think happens is we create stories for ourselves to convince ourselves that we're doing the right thing, even when we might know that there's an abundance of information saying otherwise.
So if you do do the Google search and you do look for this and you find all kinds of stuff out there saying to go one way or the other, and you choose to go the opposite way, you need to make sense of that decision somehow.
And for many people, it's not an issue at all.The father says, I was circumcised, therefore my son is circumcised.Problem solved.But for others, it may become more of an issue.And then you have to start thinking, how do I make sense of this?
How do I explain this later on?What you see on the Internet are questions about Well, what if the child doesn't want it when he's older?Well, how are you going to explain that as a parent?Why did you do this to me, mom or dad?
That's where this sort of idea comes up.Well, we need a reason.We need to have an explanation for it.
So it could be like a family tradition, or it could be the fear of the locker room, or it could be the fear that a future sexual partner would not want an uncircumcised or an intact man, right?
So it becomes a kind of way that we tell a story to ourselves about what we're doing and why we're doing it.Whereas if you have maybe a religious reason, the answer is fairly obvious.It's covenantal.
Right.Yeah, you don't have to think about the decision as much as you might otherwise. I wonder if we can then pick up another thread that you mentioned as part of this book that I found really interesting.
It's not just about the religious reasons or the medical reasons or how parenting manuals discuss or don't discuss this decision.There's a lot of other elements that you discuss, going back to the interdisciplinarity of it that we mentioned earlier.
So you talked about aesthetics.Is that a discussion that can be had in terms of the foreskin?
And why do you think that's a discussion that we can not only have, or maybe even should have, but in fact that it might be a political gesture to talk about the foreskin in those terms?
Yeah, I think the aesthetic one is really interesting.And I think when we frame it in those terms, that also shifts the debate a bit.
So the book opens with this sort of scene out of Sex and the City, right, where Charlotte says, like, it's not normal.And what's not normal, of course, is she's seen an uncircumcised penis, right?
But there are lots of these anecdotes in popular culture.Another one here was this example from Masters of Sex, where she refers to the penis as looking like an anteater.I'm so glad you're, speaking to her partner, not deformed like that.
I've never seen such a thing.I didn't even know it could happen to a man. as if it's so repulsive, right?And the fiancé says, not being circumcised, what, you saw foreskin?Right, where she's shocked by the very idea of it.
And so there's so often we get these ideas of it being ugly, the ugly foreskin, right?So what does it mean then to actually think about it in aesthetic terms?
So if we think about, say, Michelangelo's David, he's uncircumcised, or he appears to be uncircumcised.
I recognize that there's some small debates there, or not small, but some debates there about the nature of circumcision, that maybe Michelangelo knew something, but he appears to the modern eye uncircumcised.
And yet he's a paragon of male beauty, right?And so if we look at statues, for instance, foreskins are everywhere. If we look at so much of Western art, we see foreskins everywhere.
So why is it that they're ugly suddenly in the North American context?And so to see the foreskin then becomes a kind of political gesture, I suppose, because it's so rarely seen in the American context or the North American context.
And to imagine it as like an object of beauty would be to rewrite the entire idea of penile aesthetics.
And is that how the conversation would be shifted through this lens?
I think we could shift it, yeah, and just sort of say, you know, it is beautiful in its own right, like a kind of body positive lens, right?Let's not see it as ugly.Let's see it as natural.
I mean, after all, everyone's born with one and reframing it that way may actually help change some of the debate or maybe not change the debate, but at least recalibrate the debate, refocus it.
Yeah, it would certainly make an impact, given, as you said, kind of the way it's talked about in American media. Speaking of which, I wonder if we can turn towards kind of another arena, I suppose, in which this is discussed, right?
We've talked about sort of TV shows, parenting manuals.You also talk about sex manuals.And this is picking up, I think, on something you briefly mentioned earlier about kind of the feeling side of it, you know, the sensory sensation aspect.
You highlight a really interesting difference between how sex manuals talk about the foreskin and how like scientific research talks about the foreskin.
Can you briefly give us an overview of kind of what each of these bodies of literature is saying and then try and help us understand why there's such a difference?
Yeah, so I mean, to oversimplify this, right, the scientific literature tends to say things like there's no sensational difference or there's little sensational difference between a circumcised and an intact penis.
And so there's a question there, okay, well, if there is no difference, then does it matter what we do either way, in a sense, right?
Whereas when I started looking at sex manuals, which was everything from books like The Joy of Sex to advice columns to, you know, examples online, there seemed to be a very different story.And the story was that, indeed, there is a difference.
There's a difference for both the person with the penis and the partner.And so I thought, well, how is this, how do we square this?How do we make sense of this, that all these sex manuals talk about
the foreskin as an erogenous zone, as a pleasure-giving and pleasure-receiving part of sexuality.And yet the scientific literature wants me to believe that the difference is minimal to the point of not worth mentioning or
to saying there is no difference, whereas it was consistent.Sex manual after sex manual after sex manual would point out the idea of the foreskin and how to please a foreskin or something like this.
And it would speak of the friendly foreskin if you've never seen one before and the advantages to it.
so much so that one of the sex manuals even provided the reader with advice on how to mimic the sensation of the foreskin for your circumcised partner.And so, clearly, there's a difference of opinion there.
And scientific literature, of course, is scientific in its nature.It has all the sort of rigor of study, of method, whereas sex manuals are more anecdotal in nature.But I don't think we dismiss that anecdotal information.
I think there's something there.Whether it is real or not, I don't know, but people do feel there's a difference.And that's interesting to me.And that's where I think maybe we need to go back and rethink the question, right?
I mean, if the sex manuals are saying that there's such a sensational difference, there's probably something there.
In a lot of ways it seems to come back to that idea of kind of what terminology do we use and how does that sort of frame which questions we do or don't ask, which is something that comes up in another section of the book as well.
I'm wondering if you could speak to the idea of foreskin restoration.
Yeah, so foreskin restoration is about circumcised men who restore their foreskins, right?
They essentially stretch the skin so as to create a new foreskin, if you will, which has its history back to the ancients, but it's something we don't know a lot about necessarily in scholarship.So,
There's some recent studies, like Tim Hammond and colleagues have a landmark study on foreskin restorers.And what's interesting about that is these men seek out foreskin restoration, which is not an overnight process, right?
This is a lengthy process that can take months to years to accomplish to get a foreskin back. And they do so for any number of reasons.They like the look of it.They are upset that they were circumcised against their will.
They believe that there's more sensation with the foreskin, and they've experienced it as such.So again, I keep coming back to these questions, right?So you think back to that foreskin fantasy.
What do you say to the child who says to you, you circumcised me, why?I want to regrow my foreskin now.I want it back. And that's why these stories are so important.We tell ourselves stories to make sense of the things that happen or are happening.
And so foreskin restoration becomes another one of these stories.It's very real.People are doing it.There are like Facebook groups and subreddits about it, right, where people help one another.
and describe the things that work for them or don't work for them.So, I still think, I mean, I assume it's relatively small.
I don't know how many folks are doing this, but it's a topic about which we need to think more, because if there are folks doing this, we need to understand what's happening, why it's happening.
I've read stuff where people go to a therapist or a doctor and say they're interested in their foreskin being restored, and they're just dismissed as being mentally unwell.So how do we make sense of that moment?
What does a doctor say to a patient in that moment?And how might that affect their own sense of being, their own sense of self?
So speaking then of the stories that people are telling about themselves and how it relates to those questions of identity, what about the intactivists?Who are they and what stories are they telling?
Yeah, so intactivists are anti-circumcision activists, and they're fairly diverse in terms of their goals.Some would just have neonatal circumcision come to an end.Others are more focused on genital integrity for all, right?
So not mutilating girls with female genital cutting or not correcting genital corrections for intersex folks. and others are completely 100% against it all the time, right?So even an adult should not be able to consent to the procedure, if you will.
What they're doing is they're raising awareness about circumcision and what they perceive to be as harms of circumcision.So their point is to challenge our ideas about circumcision as normative and to ask folks to think about not circumcising.
And one of the common, I think common, ways of thinking about this is to say, let the boy decide for himself.If he wants to be circumcised at 18 or 20 or 25, he can do that.But before then, just leave things the way they are.
Leave nature to its course, if you will. And so, intactivists have a wide range of perspectives and approaches to this.
Some are very invested in the sort of intellectual arguments around the ethics of circumcision, the morality, while others are more what we would call more traditional activists.Let's say they're protesting at the Urology Association meetings.
They're, you know, the men in white suits with the red dot on the groin. they're calling attention to it in ways that are more, I don't want to say in your face, because it's not what I mean, but more visible, more public.
And of course, they're very active on the internet.And you'll see this when you do this sort of search, like, should I or shouldn't I circumcise my child?That's where you'll get a lot of information.And these folks We'll say, no, don't do it.
These are the reasons not to do it.There's no medical reason to do it.It causes harm.It makes the penis smaller.It has psychological harm, right?There are just so many ways that they are trying to change the narrative.
And they're also calling attention to sort of the mismanagement of some medical conditions, right?Sometimes it's suggested that, oh, you need a circumcision.And they say, well, wait a minute.There are other alternatives before this drastic measure.
So I would say that mostly they're creating awareness around the issue, but that it's a fairly diverse movement in terms of its approaches and who it aligns itself with.
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Yeah, that's definitely worth highlighting.Speaking then of this idea of kind of the comparison and the what if it's against my will and what if I wish this had been done or had not been done, that's kind of come up a few different times.
One topic that is again discussed in especially popular media is the conceit of penis envy.Is this something we can relate to these discussions around the foreskin?
I think it is.I think it can be part of it, maybe in a playful way, right?Not in the sort of Freudian sense, but in the sense of, yeah, that penis looks better than mine, or vice versa, right?
Or, I wish I knew what it was like to be uncircumcised, or I wish I knew what it was like to be circumcised. whatever the decision, right, it's a one-off situation in a sense, right?
So you don't just go get circumcised and experience it and then go back.So you might wonder, well, what does the other side feel like?Is the grass greener on the other side?Is it cleaner or do I feel less because I've been circumcised, right?
So I think there's a lot to be said there around penis envy.And I mean, I think that in a lot of ways, it kind of makes sense.There are two options and I have one or the other.What does the other feel like?What does the other look like?
Would I feel better with one or the other?And I think this comes up especially in those who regret that they were circumcised against their will.They never were given a choice.They couldn't make the choice for themselves.
And so we see folks articulating powerful stories about how circumcision has affected them in deeply personal ways.
And again, comes back to these questions of stories and identity and kind of what discussions are or are not being told.Is there anything else you wanted to mention from the book that I've not asked you about?
I don't think so.I mean, there was a lot of material left on the cutting room floor, if you'll forgive the pun.
So I continue to work on these ideas because I continue to find things that are interesting that just don't make sense to me or that I don't understand.
And so I'm curious about how this debate continues, where we're going to go from here, what the future of the foreskin is. And will we see a return to neonatal circumcision as routine?
Or will it be a movement the other way, where it'll be a sort of outlawing of the procedure?And will we ever get to an answer?
So is this the sort of thing you're going to keep working on now that this book is done?
So I'm still working on this.I can't let it go because I find it still interesting.And what I've started to do now is to think about anti-circumcision activism.So there's a lot of, or there's not a lot.
The research that exists is mostly sociological.And so we get very contemporary stuff.And I'm interested in the history.When did this become a thing?When did folks start organizing around anti-circumcision? how did it become a movement?
And I think we can trace it back to the 1970s or so, which I think changes how we might think about it as we understand it today.Who were the movers and shakers at the beginning?How did they start this movement?
What were the questions that they were asking?How has the movement progressed?How did the movement respond to accusations of anti-Semitism, for instance? right?
So argue against circumcision might be to argue against a very important part of religious tradition.And so I want to understand that history.
I want to understand who was there, what they were doing, what they were thinking, what the resistance was, what the acceptance was, where the challenges were, and where do we go from here?
What is the next goal for anti-activists and anti-circumcision activists?
Well, who knows?You might find out.That certainly seems like a very interesting continuation of this research.So, best of luck with that project and thank you for giving us a sneak peek of it.
Of course, listeners who want to get into all the details of the book that's out, you can go read it.It's called Uncut, A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin, published by the University of Regina Press in 2024.
Jonathan, thank you so much for coming to speak with me on the podcast.
Thank you so much for having me.
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