The Effect Circumcision Has Had on Me Personally
By Gregory Becker
In this video, I want to talk about the effect circumcision has had on me personally.
I was circumcised as an infant. I didn’t even know that I was circumcised until I was about nine years old. I was told by my mother, and when she revealed this to me, she laughed at the shock on my face. It was so shocking to me. It was just a very surreal feeling to discover that I was somehow purposely made to be different.
What made it worse is I didn’t even understand why. I mean, there was no real reason for it, so I didn’t understand why or even what took place. But I know subconsciously I just began hating every thought that crossed my mind about the subject.
After I was told, I became overly obsessed with looking at my penis, trying to figure out what happened to me. I also became extremely self-conscious about what others thought. I mean, I was literally thinking about it so much that I imagined that everyone was thinking about it, and so it was like everyone was looking at me. It was a very bizarre kind of feeling.
The scar from my circumcision became this permanent reminder that I was assaulted sexually. I wouldn’t make that connection probably until later, that that was a sexual assault of some kind, because I wasn’t really thinking about sex when I was nine years old. I just thought that, you know, I was assaulted.
But, you know, as you mature and you become a sexual being, you can’t help but link sexuality with this assault. You can’t help it.
I remember, right after I was told, trying to find information at the library, like before the computer age, and it was just impossible back then. Talking to a librarian about a subject like that, they would have said, “You know, that’s beyond your age range. You shouldn’t be looking at stuff like that.” They were constantly looking over your shoulder, that sort of thing, so they kept you in the kids’ sections, basically. You know, they didn’t—and I almost never went to the kids’ sections. But it was just impossible to find information on it.
Eventually, I ended up just putting it in the back of my mind. I guess my self-image was modified by it, and my self-esteem and confidence were, I guess, diminished.
I was definitely different, and it has affected me ever since. I’ve always, like, overcompensated to present myself to the world as valuable in some way or another. And I believe that’s directly related to how circumcision makes me feel about myself, even to this day.
Being circumcised makes me feel hurt. I feel betrayed, very sad. I feel cheated.
I’m worthy of protection. That’s a big one—not being worthy of protection from even your own parents. You hear a lot of times that people will die to protect their children, but it didn’t take place, you know, when it came to this.
I’ve had very, very vengeful feelings, I guess, feelings of vengeance, varying levels of madness, or like somehow spiraling down.
I’ve actually had these private conversations with myself in an attempt to protest, like on behalf of my own body. I secretly practice my defensive arguments as if I were a child about to undergo circumcision, or directly after, arguments that, you know, I guess I would make to somehow justify my humanness or advocate for myself in some way. You know, try and change the hearts and minds of those that participated in hurting me, because I can’t undo what they did.
Though, like, I somehow always lose the arguments.
I’ve imagined erasing my love and trust so that they suffer a loss that can’t be regained, the same way I suffered a loss that can’t be regained. I tell the people that they gave up their right to be loved by me, and, you know, I withdraw it. You know, I just end up picturing them laughing at me, because, I mean, how can someone erase their mother or their father? It just causes me to spiral down even further at times.
I do it in private, and I don’t let anyone hear me because I don’t want people to think I’m crazy. And so it makes it even more isolating than it already is.
I don’t feel like there’s anything about my penis that belongs to me. It belongs to those that cut me, and society in general, I guess. Every circumcision that just takes place, it’s like I’m clearly told that what happened to me is a socially approved trauma of some kind.
It’s weird to say it, but it’s somehow disconnected from me. Somehow, in my mind, it’s a disconnected working. And so I even go as far as telling myself, “This is not mine. You know, it’s not mine. This was not meant to be mine.” I’ve had all those conversations inside my head, or just, you know, just talking to myself, I guess.
I’ve had a sex life, but, you know, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to say that it was good, simply because I won’t be able to experience it naturally the way it was meant for me to experience. And so it just makes you not even like the idea of sex. You know, it just has that effect.
Now I feel a certain jealousy of men who have not been circumcised, and yet, at the exact same time, this is the part that gives me a lot of mixed emotions about it: I’m happy for them also, at the same time.
It becomes so difficult to talk about because, you know, people think it’s funny or they support circumcision and don’t want to believe anything outside of the state-sponsored propaganda, I guess, associated with it. Any form of complaining brings—you risk being ridiculed. Everyone tells me to just get over it, and it’s just really bizarre. It’s just an amazing feeling associated with it, how people treat it.
People love to tell me—I have these, you know, I’ve been told this so many times—I have issues, or that I have a problem with women when I bring it up because I talk about the beliefs that, you know, people hold about the opposite sex. And everything I say, it just gets deflected to something else.
Someone else is suffering worse, so forget about what you’re suffering about. It’s just like you can’t get someone to focus in on it. I don’t feel like people will ever really listen.
And so, if I don’t matter to society, then why participate in it? I mean, why participate in a society that doesn’t even treat you like you just don’t even matter? You don’t matter, so participate anyway. It makes me not want to even participate socially.
It’s just very isolating. You know, I turned to online platforms, like making this video, where I can at least go on record publicly and leave a testimony, you know, of how I feel about it. And it’ll mostly be ignored in a sea of testimonies that also get ignored.
It’s just become so easy to ignore people now, in an age when, you know, we’re all told that connections cost so much. I mean, it’s as easy as changing the channel. People feel like they’re investing too much when they connect with another human being. That’s just what it’s turned into.
There’s nowhere to turn for support, and there’s no way to undo the harm, and so I have to teach myself to accept it.
Well, I just don’t want to accept it. I simply don’t want to accept it. I don’t want to somehow deny or invalidate myself so that everyone else can be okay with it. It feels like the worst lie, and I’m being told to believe it for everyone else’s benefit. You know, it serves everyone else for me to believe the lie.
One of the most difficult things to listen to is the opinions of women on the subject, especially those that are for circumcision. For some reason, it seems like their opinions matter more, and that really bothers me.
It’s like women have somehow granted themselves some kind of authority or self-appointed approval power over male anatomy in order to gain control over how men feel about themselves through the lens of female acceptance.
You know, this allows women to secretly celebrate that you can do anything, and he will still love women because of how men hate being rejected by women.
I mean, it’s no secret that women like men who demonstrate resilience or a high level of survivability because women basically choose who has the most courageous attitude. You know, they choose the guy who has somehow overcome the odds, and that promotes their own survivability.
It just adds this unnecessary component of complexity between men and women to the subject of circumcision, and it focuses more on women than the men it actually affects.
I’ve heard a lot of women say that uncircumcised penises are ugly, including my own mother. That was one of the reasons why she said she had me cut, because uncircumcised penises are ugly. That’s what she said to me, despite the fact that she married two guys who were uncircumcised.
It’s just very hypocritical to hear a woman make these sexist remarks about circumcision or just male anatomy in general when they would never allow that to be a valid argument in regard to their own anatomy.
I don’t see how a woman’s critical ideas about male anatomy and aesthetics are even relevant unless they’re promoting a man’s natural body. I just don’t see how it’s relevant.
Whenever I hear these sexist comments and opinions, I don’t feel like I have a right to my own body, and that I’m thought of as flawed for my natural physical being. You know, it sends a message as if nature made a mistake when it didn’t make a mistake.
There’s a lot of people online who have posted many videos of actual circumcisions and opinions on circumcision. Their opinions, and I think to myself, this is like watching a rape, like a televised rape or something.
I make it a point not to listen to women who support circumcision because of how they go out of their way to try to make men hate themselves or associate a difference with men. You know, it kind of provokes this, “How can you not feel anything?” You just want to scream at them and say, “How can you not feel anything? How can you be so indifferent?”
And I think it’s designed to provoke people. You know, it’s just provocative or sensationalized, in that sense, in order to get men angry. And it works. It works.
The comment sections of all those videos are just filled with comments about God and religion or medicine and statistics and all the excuses that go with it.
I mean, it’s very rare to find support or empathy, and so I know this video is not going to have any different effect. But I do commend the men and women out there that don’t think circumcision is a right of choice for parents and religion, and who are actively advocating on behalf of boys. I actually commend them for that.
Here in the United States, we’re supposed to have equal protection under the law, and we clearly operate from double standards when it comes to circumcision. Girls are protected, and boys are not, and there’s no escaping that double standard.
I don’t believe that girls should be included in circumcision in order to even things up, to make a single standard out of it. But if parents exercised the choice to mutilate their girls, there would be—and, well, we have laws against it. We have the Female Genital Mutilation Act, which only passed, by the way, because they took boys off the legislation. Actually, boys were on that legislation. It wouldn’t pass until they took boys off.
It just continues to go on. I mean, society knows that this is wrong. I am absolutely convinced of that. They know, and that’s why I just can’t forgive it.
I can’t forgive because, in so doing, life will go on, and people will conclude that men eventually get over it, and so it’s okay. You know, it’ll be a way for them to rationalize circumcision as okay, and I disagree with that.
It’s true that I have to live with circumcision and I’m powerless to do anything about it. But, you know, I mean, I just—there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s just a fact. But it doesn’t mean I have to be okay with it. It doesn’t mean I have to forgive it. It doesn’t mean I have to accept it.
I tell you what. Let what I’m about to say next really sink in.
Circumcision has taught me a very sad truth about people and the world we live in.
When a man has suffered circumcision, he thinks that because he still feels something or because he can have an orgasm, he’s experiencing the fullness of what he was meant to experience. But, in fact, he’s only operating from a mutilated fraction of what he was meant to experience.
Similarly, I truly believe that the world has suffered an emotional circumcision. Empathy has been cut away from the human body of emotions, where we are most sensitive. And because people still feel something that resembles empathy, they think they are operating from the fullness of what they were meant to experience, when, in fact, it’s only a mutilated fraction.
