Quote:
Originally Posted by
LaneyMeyerÂ

I think there's a lot more validity to the "looking like father" argument than you all give credence to. A boy WILL see his father naked early in life (though, obviously, not later on), and he'll develop his early feelings about sexuality and his sex organs from comparing himself to his father. Having a penis that looks like his father's penis is very different than a little girl not having breasts; she can be told she will grow them later, and that they are a distinguishing feature of a mature woman. In the same vein, a boy obviously doesn't have the same size penis as a grown man, but knows he'll get there. A fundamentally different-looking penis, however, can impact his feelings about his genitals. Similarly, having a penis that looks different from those of most of the other boys in the locker room (when he's in school) might make him feel uncomfortable. MOST middle class, white boys are circumcised in the US (whether this is right or not), so uncirc'd boys in that demographic are in the minority. In the end, what bothers me is that circumcision is a much bigger deal for an adult than for an infant, and what if I don't circumcise him and he later wants to have it done?
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Here's the thing - not all circumcised penises look the same. When we were considering this issue my Mom told me that at one point she had to explain to my brothers why theirs didn't look like each others. They were done by different doctors who had slight style differences. I'm assuming they didn't look like my Dad's either though the thing they questioned was looking like each other. I suspect that brothers are more likely to compare penises than father and son.
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Some doctors leave more skin some leave less. There are also several different ways to perform a circumcision that leave a slightly different look and different doctors prefer different methods. It's hard to judge on an infant how much skin that person will need as an adult erect male. So, doctors do leave skin for the boy to grow into. This means that, once again, it won't look like Dad's.
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A good friend got her son circumcised and it's much looser than they did at the time that her husband got his done. For a matter of fact she was asking me the other day how I kept my son clean when he was a baby as she was having tons of issues with stuff getting under the leftover foreskin. I had to explain that while both our son's had some foreskin my son's also had a sphincter on the end that made this a non issue for us as my son is intact. She's also had to deal with adhesions and other issues we didn't
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So basically you may end up having a conversation about differences in look regardless of what you do. I'd rather tell my son "We cut part of your penis off so you'd match Daddy, but they didn't get it quite right", or "They thought it was necessary to cut of part of a boys penis when your Dad was a baby, but we learned that it really isn't, so they didn't do that to you". I know which of those two statements my (now 8 year old) son would want to hear.
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If he does want circumcised later in life he can get it done at a time when they know the true eventual size of his penis allowing them to do a better job (making it cosmetically look better), when he's not wearing diapers to get feces on it, and when he can have more effective pain medication.
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With circumcision rates changing quickly approaching much less than 50% in many parts of the country it is actually far more likely that if anyone is going to be teased in the locker room it will be the boy missing his foreskin than it is to be the boy with one.
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