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" I&amp;#039;m grateful to my parents for so many reasons, but near the top of that long list is their seeing fit to birth me as a low-class Protestant boy in 1970s London, which meant that it never even crossed their minds to cut off the end of my dick. Only Jews and Muslims and aristocrats mutilated male genitals in Europe back then. Now there&amp;#039;s public wondering, verging on debate, whether Baby Cambridge will be carved up by druids, his foreskin ground with a mortar and pestle and scattered into a north wind at Stonehenge, under the light of a full moon. All I would dare tell William and Kate is that their beautiful boy deserves to go through his blessed life exactly the way they&amp;#039;ve made him. Let his royal penis keep its crown. I will confess that when we moved to North America, I grew up wondering whether my commoner&amp;#039;s penis had something wrong with it, beyond the usual adolescent complaints. My mom and dad, bless them, had no idea that children were routinely butchered over here \u2014 because if you didn&amp;#039;t already know that circumcision was something people did, would you ever imagine doing it? \u2014 and so they failed to prepare me for locker rooms, sex-ed films, and pornography filled with penises that looked like mine if it were trying to escape itself. To this day, I look at my penis and have no idea what would have been missing and what would have remained had I been born under a crueler star. It&amp;#039;s like trying to picture my face without a nose on it. The &amp;quot;argument&amp;quot; for circumcision, then and now, consists only of vague assertions of better hygiene, as though we still live in caves and rely on birds to pick us clean. If I stopped washing my penis, would it end up smelling like a cheese factory? Yes. I imagine an unwashed circumcised penis wouldn&amp;#039;t be in tip-top shape, either. But here&amp;#039;s how I avoid making trouser curds: I clean and maintain my penis, quite lovingly. I do the same thing with my fingernails, because sometimes dirt gets under them, too, and my parents also neglected to have them pulled out when I was born. In fact, I&amp;#039;d wager my penis is cleaner than average because I&amp;#039;m mindful of its upkeep and rubbing soap on it feels amazing. Unlike the doorknobs of dead flesh wielded by so many of my American cousins, the head of my penis remains, almost forty years after its construction, spectacularly sensitive. I don&amp;#039;t know what sex is like for circumcised men, but I know it&amp;#039;s not as good as it is for me. They have rods; my full brothers and I have lightning rods.  Amy Schumer has a pretty great and true stand-up bit about uncut guys never broadcasting their extra wares in advance, just in case they&amp;#039;ve found a woman who far prefers a cut dick. (That same woman would no doubt raise almighty hell if men said that her vagina would look better with its labia hacked off.) I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;ve told any of the women of my life what they were getting in advance of our hasty relations, partly because I didn&amp;#039;t know which piece of bad news to break first, but mostly because it took me a while to get over those terrible teenage feelings of abnormality. My boys, uncut both, will never bear that freak&amp;#039;s burden. I will tell them again and again that their penises are perfect and divine \u2014 probably not in public very often \u2014 and besides, they are lucky enough to have been born in a more enlightened age, when fewer and fewer parents are taking scythes to their prized infant sons all the time. Like so many insane things we once did in the name of mindless tradition, circumcision is slowly being relegated to history and its last-gasp glories, to a time when we never dared to counsel our future kings and queens, and we never failed to bow before their mangled little princes. THE ROYAL CIRCUMCISION: Tom Junod on the Tradition of Circumcision, Scott Raab on Why He&amp;#039;s Against It, Mike Sager on Circumcising His Son "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/health/news/a24100/happy-with-my-foreskin/>