Here's the specification of my dick: 6 inches long, 1.5 inches wide, uncut. It's uncut not because of my choice, but because that's the norm in Japanese culture. I never had a reason to have my dick go through a surgery for practically nothing. Thank God.

A friend of mine, a father of a beautiful 1-year-old son, recently told me about his experience of having his son get circumcised. He actually didn't know what was going to happen to his son, and he said jokingly that he almost fainted when he saw it.

Obviously, I am biased in this topic, having only one side of the experiences around circumcision. What I attempt to do here is to analyze the dominant ideas around foreskin and highlight the practice of removing it in the context of sexual assault, comparing with pedophilia and statutory rape.

I was told by a male teacher in sex education class in 6th grade that foreskin would naturally peel back and the head would become exposed as we grow up and mature. I didn't figure out that it was false until years later. I'm not too familiar with Japanese dicks, but I have barely encountered naturally cut Japanese dicks in my life. I don't know why the teacher said as if all dicks would become cut; however, there's a whole industry that offers Japanese men in their 20s and 30s circumcision as cosmetic surgery, based on the myth of naturally cut dicks, which I guess all adult men are supposed to have. Here, uncut dicks represent immaturity and femininity, and cut ones maturity and masculinity.

There are various cultural reasons behind male circumcision; some say that it was introduced to prevent boys from jacking off. I don't know what it's like to jack off without foreskin, and I feel quite awkward when I give a cut dick a hand job because I don't know exactly how to jack it. I'm always scared that I might be pulling too hard or rubbing too much or grabbing it too tight. But I guess they still enjoy manual stimulation in general, which is good news. Meanwhile, I never had problems jacking off mine and feeling great. I cannot personally compare which feels better, with or without foreskin, but it seems like there's no point in removing it if we're all happy about our all-time favorite activity anyway. Oh, and some say it's for better hygiene--a big bullshit.

In fact, I hear that some men report varying levels of negative experiences resulted from circumcision, including PTSD. I also hear that mothers approve male circumcision just because they don't know much about what it means to men. Well, I don't have any empirical evidence about that at hand, but I wonder why they still practice it today, religious reasons or otherwise. I mean, what kind of boys today would really try to avoid jacking off? Removing foreskin now seems not only pointless but also fundamentally harmful and oppressive, because most men don't have choice over what happens to their dicks when they're babies or boys due to adultist nature of circumcision. If they don't have choice, wouldn't that be basically the same as sexual assault?

Now let's think about ideas around pedophilia. Many years ago, there were no such laws that prohibited children from having sex or adults from having sex with children. Then the idea of statutory rape was introduced, as adolescence was invented when education became normalized. It varied country by country, but in the West the legal age to have sex was around 12 to 15 years old only a few decades ago. As these societies developed under capitalism, they needed their young people to be working and not reproducing. Thus, it was necessary that they raised the legal consenting age up to 16 or 18 years old. I had a culture shock when I learned that dating a minor is a serious issue in the US (and I thought it was stupid). Similarly, pedophilia was socially constructed as childhood was. Before then, nothing distinguished pedophilia from adult sex. It became illegal because they invented childhood as something innocent and thus in need of protection. It was completely arbitrary.

What we see here is that childhood is determined and defined by adults who control them. And minors' sexuality and agency are too often disregarded, disrespected, denied, degraded, and destroyed. It is ridiculous enough that some adults seriously believe that they can control what information about sex their children can access to, as if they had completely forgotten how they grew up. Boundaries between children and adults are essentially arbitrary, and it should be considered as taking away whatever-they-think-are-children's freedom of (sexual) expression when they refuse to provide accurate and detailed information about sex and gender, as well as to forbid minors unlimited sexual pleasure.

So I wonder why pedophilia is illegal and circumcision is not? They can be equally harmful, oppressive, and traumatizing. They can be both considered as sexual assault. What does this say about the interaction of sexual oppression and adultism? What does it mean for men and boys to be forced to go through irreversible alteration of their bodies basically for nothing, if not something worse?

What I hear more recently is that circumcision reduces the "risk" of HIV transmission by 50%. This Western-centric medical discourse poses threat to Third World bodies when it is used to justify circumcising men in sub-Saharan Africa for their conquest of the epidemic. Hey, they used to tell me that condoms work almost 100%. If circumcision is a sexual assault, what does it mean when it's done to those "at-risk" populations in "Third World" countries?

When I believed my foreskin would peel back, I used to wait impatiently for that to happen, sometimes attempting to assist that "natural" process. Now that I know what's really natural to my body, I am very comfortable with it. After all, the best thing you can do to your body is to accept it, love it, and enjoy it.