> # Re: Bared Glans

> Written by Harold at 04 Nov 2000 19:59:25:

> As an answer to: Re: Bared Glans written by R J Knight at 21 Oct 2000 00:42:46:

> I don't have any impression that Any acquaintances of my generation were skinning back. WWII probably circed some inductees. My high school class was about 85% circed. I felt hesitanr about showing up in gym class skinned back when I had been covered, so would draw the foreskin forward gym days am=nd didn't "go public with the exposed until my WWII physical. I always did and still enjoy the sight of the uncovered more. It just seems more mature and manly. The nuances in color around the glans tell me don't hide it! By the way, no gay leanings 52 yrs married to one woman.

> I can cover the glans and did a 3 mo trial of this to see if the "intacters were right. My glans assumed a moister, softer look and changed in sensitivity. The change was strictly a change to an owie response replacing "that feels good" when my wife touched me. It was impossible yo be odor free with washing because the last drops of urine always soaked into the skin. I ended the experiment and am back to enjoying that exposed glans.

> I do feel that it is time for the MDs to again get behind this valuable alternative for the uncirced with their numbers increasing some. If we can get some rational thinking, without the hype there may be some benefit to the flaming. I understan that some Drs in Japan are doing circs by removing a skin area closer to the base of the penis rather that the tip. This makes good sense.

> My foreskin was n ot particularly short. It took a few days of concerted effort to achieve the convertible state. I read a comment that this was perhaps more achievable if you could roll the foreskin back on itself. The exposure of the glans has benefits in that it permits the corona to expand slightly and be mmore a part of sensual perceptions, and the entire glans is of the correct sensitivity. I feel that the tendency for the foreskin to over center in either position, and moreso after puberty was (imperfectly) part of the divine plan for how it was meant to be after puberty. For all guys that can I endose it!>>*Enjoy*! Ive had a lifetime of this experience and heartilyy endorse it and believe the medical community should endorse it as they did before circ became routine. Also all "intacters and "mothers against circ" etc. should be offering the suggestion to their offspring at puberty that this is a very viable alternative to the covered look>John, there's another term for your condition I failed to mention yesterday, less elegant, but descriptive, and the one we used in the army: "skinned back." So, if you prefer, rather than virtual circumcision or autocircumcision your penis is just skinned back. The Lakotah branch of the Sioux Indian tribe as a whole kept their penises this way if we can believe what we're told about them, and their word for the adult penis translates as "foreskin pushed back." As to why the tribe as a whole adopted this practice, it may be because the fully exposed glans is always fairly clean and not subject to infections that can afflict an uncircumcised penis that is allowed to stay dirty, as it may under field conditions where water can be in short supply. If your survival depends upon being able to hop on a horse and ride away at a moment's notice, you can see there's a definite health advantage in having "virtual circumcision" or a "foreskin pushed back" so it stays clean. (Of course, unlike the Plains Indians you yourself have access to soap & water, but the Sioux often didn't!) Their neighbors the Ojibway (or Chippewa)are said to have practiced genuine circumcision, cutting off the foreskins of their young boys at a tribal ceremony, but the Lakotah evidently were able to get the same effect by keeping their foreskins pushed back. [So much for the history lesson!] Cheers, RJK.
> >>>>Yes John, there is a name (or 2 or 3 names) for it. Robin Stuart has recently termed it "virtual circumcision" since the penis looks and acts as if it were circumcised but is not. A doctor from Saginaw, Michigan, writing in a medical journal in 1951 coined the term "autocircumcision" for it, since he thought it was usually done intentionally by the owner of the penis, thus was a "self-circumcision." Somewhere else I saw the term "circumcisionoid" used, meaning it was like a circumcision even though no surgical circumcision had ever been done. The Michigan doctor in 1951 estimated that of American men born in 1900 about 5% were circumcised, 15% were "autocircumcised," and the remaining 80% of the 50-year old male population were uncircumcised. When circumcision became nearly universal after World War II, considerably fewer boys had foreskins to experiment with, so there were lots fewer men who wound up autocircumcised. When I was in the army, a couple of the guys I knew there had short foreskins that left the glans totally uncovered. They made no complaints about their condition, lived normal sex lives (one was happily married, the other chased women enthusiastically) and nobody else looked at them as if they were strange. (Of course they looked more or less like any other circumcised guy.) Your condition is perfectly natural in that it represents one kind of development of the normal penis. In late adolescence the shaft of your penis simply grew faster than the foreskin, and this left your glans permanently uncovered. There is of course nothing whatever wrong with you and you apparently quite wisely have left your penis alone, with the various parts staying where they "want" to be. In human development, most grown men have a foreskin that just covers the glans; others have long ("redundant") ones that hang over the end of the penis; you are at the other end of the bell curve with a normal, but short foreskin. So you can tell your girlfriend that you are just what you told her, never surgically circumcised but "autocircumcised" or "virtually circumcised," and you've never been cut. What you both need to do, in my humble opinion, is to relax and enjoy it, and not worry about how it got the way it is. Best wishes (and keep your cool!), RJK.
> >>>>>I am in my late teens and are uncircumcised but my glans is totaly bared at all times. Before pubety my glans was covered, in my early teens my foreskin started to retract with errections and every morning I would pull my foreskin foreward over the glans, but it would always roll back as my glans had enlarged now that it was free of my foreskin. In the end I gave up and left my foreskin where it wants to sit, retracted behind my glans. Do many other uncircumcised guys have a bared glans like this and is there a name for it as my girlfriend insists that I am circumcised when I know I am not?
> >Harold, I was interested in your comment about doctors having encouraged training the foreskin to stay back in the days before "universal circumcision". I saw an old medical book that had belonged to my great grandfather that said there was some protection from venereal disease when the foreskin was removed by circumcision or was kept "withdrawn" behind the glans. Some of the woodcut illustrations also showed bare glanses. The condition of keeping the penis "skinned back" is of interest to me because I believe a large number of males born before 1945 kept themselves like this, and yet there's been very little research on the subject. All I've seen is a paper by a doctor from Saginaw, Michigan, who in 1951 estimated that 15% of American men 50 years old at that time were skinned back or "autocircumcised", as he put it. One reason the subject interests me is that my own father had it done to him when he was very young by his grandfather, a country doctor, who evidently did it to put a stop to inflammations resulting from infection under the foreskin. The fathers of a fair number of my schoolmates were skinned back (we boys talked about it, of course), and when one of the boys asked his father about it, he said it "just got that way." This may have been the literal truth, in view of what you've said about tendencies of the foreskin to retract behind the growing penis. While you and your contemporaries are still alive, I think it would be worthwhile to collect information about your experiences, in view of the immoderate statements of some anti-circers who wrongly, I believe, contend that circumcision is never necessary. It might be possible to get information from men who solved their foreskin problems without surgery in the days before routine circumcision. I gather that you know a good bit about this subject, and if you don't mind some nosy questions, I'd appreciate any answers you might be willing to give. For one thing, do you know any other guys in your age group who've kept their glanses bare? If so, did they do this themselves, or was it done to them by the doctor, an older family member, or somebody else? Have wives or girlfriends of men with a bare glans expressed a preference for men with this condition? Some Maryland women filling out a questionnaire 40-odd years ago reported their husbands as circumcised when doctors found they were not: I expect the ladies may have misinterpreted their husbands' condition based on their observation of "autocircumcised" penises. I gather from what you wrote that you're suggesting that if routine circumcision ceases, as it already may have in California, doctors and teenagers should all be informed of the potential of keeping the glans bare for controlling penile problems (and pleasing sexual partners). This may be an old/new idea whose time is about to come! How about your thoughts on the general idea? Cheers, Bob.

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