-- It goat so fuckin tight it just went ping! Gally elaborates. -- Up like a fuckin Venetian blind. Ah wis in agony. Ah thoat it wis jist the burst Durex wrapped roond thair at first, bit it wis way too sair. Then ah realised that it wis ma fuckin foreskin! Aye, like a fuckin broken roller blind wrapped roond the bit whair the shaft meets the bell end, cuttin oaf the blood supply ay blood. Ma bell end went blue, then black. The Brook sister phoned the ambulance, they took ays up tae the hoaspital: emergency circumcision job.

(He didn't have to: see paraphimosis.)

[English Paul and German Joachim are washing themselves, naked, in their Cologne hotel room in 1929.]

Joachm turned round, away from the mirror, and said in his American drawl, smiling, but with unusual slowness as he looked Paul up and down: 'Well I guess that you and Ernst have one thing in common.'

Horribly embarrassed, Paul asked: 'What?'

'Well, I'm sure you must realise,' said Joachim, watching him all the time -

Paul could not go on standing there, being looked at. Trembling, he sat down on the edge of his bed. Then he said in a voice that he tried to make sound detached, scientific, indifferent -

'In England, being circumcised doesn't mean being Jewish.'

'What does it mean then?'

'Oh, I suppose it is done for medical reasons.'

Joachim stated: 'Unless it was absolutely essential for medical reasons no German parents would let their son be circumcised.'

'Why not?'

'Because they would not wish his school-mates to think he was a Jew.'

In the same choking, scientifically indifferent voice, Paul provided information -

'In England, boys from upper-middle-class parents tend to be circumcised. Not boys of the lower class.'

Oh. Why is that?' asked Joachim, with his usual wide-eyed amazement at the English.

'I don't know I suppose because the doctors of the poor don't think the parents can afford such luxuries.' He tried to laugh.

He wanted to dress, but he feared that if he did so Joachim would think he was hiding that mutilation which he had in common with Ernst. He resisted an impulse to bury his face, scarlet with embarrassment, in his hands. Suddenly, trembling, he was overwhelmed by the sense of those primitive rites which still divided whole peoples - white skins, black skins - into tribes: cutting across nationhood with connections far more primitive, going back to eras when foreskins were cut off with flints. Under their clothes men concealed the marks which revealed which side they were on in the secret, still haunting wars between the races of the circumcised and the uncircumcised. He thought of the Old Testament.

... He stood up, said you bet he’d like to see Jack’s room, recalled one of Jack’s stories about this old man. Jack was dick-clipped and the old man was not; it bothered the son, who had discovered the anatomical disconformity during a hard scene. He had been about three or four, he said, always late getting to the toilet, struggling with buttons, the seat, the height of the thing, and often as not left the surroundings sprinkled down. The old man blew up about it and this one time worked into a crazy rage.

"Christ, he licked the stuffin out a me, knocked me down on the bathroom floor, whipped me with his belt. I thought he was killin me. Then he says, ‘You want a know what it’s like with piss all over the place? I’ll learn you,’ and he pulls it out and lets go all over me, soaked me, then he throws a towel at me and makes me mop up the floor, take my clothes off and warsh them in the bathtub, warsh out the towel, I’m bawlin and blubberin. But while he was hosin me down I seen he had some extra material that I was missin. I seen they’d cut me different like you’d crop a ear or scorch a brand. No way to get it right with him after that."

First published in the New Yorker, October 13, 1997

This story gets it right, that when a circumcised boy discovers what he is missing - especially something his father has - he is traumatised. In a circumcising society he may take comfort from being the same as his peers, but for many this only delays the shock and loss.

Howard's normally placid, waspy features contorted with frustration. A vein on his temple pulsed. "Max, the other hosts weren't naked under their bathrobes. It's just - well, there's no excuse - seven-year-old-children and their mothers just should not know that you're uncircumcised."

As this conversation progressed, Deyfu leaned close to me and asked in a whisper why I was so different from them.

Startled by the question, I began to grope for explanations about my relative large size and white skin.Deyfu cut short this tangled speech by pointing between his legs and saying,"No, hia" (Not that, here!).

At once the point of the question became apparent- I was circumcised while they were not. Mustering my finest Pidgin, I expounded "Ol tumbuna bilong mi i save rausim laplap bilong kok bilong pikinini man" which translalates roughly as "My ancestors developed the habit of cutting off the little skirt of skin that grows at the end of their children's willies".

Deyfu looked at me solemnly for a moment or two, then tried to translate this explanation for his eagerly waiting clansmen. After a few words he fell to the ground, choking and writhing.

He was in a paroxysms of laughter!

As he spurted the words out, all our companions fell about helplessly in a similiar manner. For a long time, no-one could look at me without becoming hysterical again, and it was at least twenty minutes before the mirth finally subsided.

While all this was going on I began to reflect upon my attitude towards the Miyanmin and their body decorations; their pierced nasal septums bearing pig's tusks had seemed the height of bizarre, outrageous and primitive fashion. Until this moment, I never considered that they could conceivably view me in the same way.

His penis seemed enormous in comparison and the hood of skin over its tip remained, while mine had been removed at birth, which according to my father had been a horrible mistake.

"Your mother wanted it done. If I'd had my say I would have spared you the pain. Circumcision," he said, "it's mutilation. A conspiracy, Bobby, on the part of the American Medical Association in the name of public hygiene. A crock of shit is what it is. All they care about is making that first quick buck off every little pecker in the world. Ain't no reason in hell for it except simple greed at your expense."

His theory stuck me as eccentric, and yet for the longest time I harbored this absurd vision of doctors, gathered in secrecy for the express purpose of deciding the fate of my precious foreskin and those of our nation's male population. I pictured the scalpel, the blood, and though I couldn't recall the pain I knew how sensitive I was down there and could imagine it intensely enough. My father further contended that my loss, in terms of future sexual pleasure, was of greater consequence than I'd unfortunately ever know.

"The head gets numb without the skin and after a while you can't feel much, like a callus," he said, "on your hand. It gets toughened from use."

I could not, of course, ever make the comparison, and I didn't see how he could, given that he hadn't suffered my fate, but I hoped, regardless of the contradiction, that someday I'd have the opportunity to put his theory to the test.

My father's earlier contention regarding the loss of my foreskin, and how it would have a numbing or deadening effect on my future sexual pleasure, proved highly inaccurate.