1539 Warning - Adult Topic

Friday, November 9, 2007

I had mentioned that one of the presentations I had gone to at the Chicago Mensa gathering was "Foreskin Restoration for Fun and Profit".

The speaker was Ron Low, inventor of the TLC Tugger (warning - website has explicit photos). From the program notes: "Ron Low has been curious about what circumcised men might be missing ever since the issue was debated in the letters section of the Mensa Bulletin in the '80s. Flash forward 20 years; he has not only restored his own foreskin, he has helped over 8000 men undertake non-surgical restoration. In a lively and explicit audio-video format, Ron will tell you why men do it, [and] how it is accomplished...."

How could I not go? When my daughter was born, in Missouri in 1975 (back when we didn't know the sex of a baby until it was born), I caused a bit of a crisis in the hospital when I arrived in labor and told the doctors that if the baby was a boy, they were NOT to circumcise him. They said that of course he would be circumcised, ALL baby boys were circumcised, the state said they had to be* and that was that. I told them that if they circumcised MY baby boy against my explicit wishes, I'd sue their asses for mutilation and disfigurement. Luckily, Daughter was a girl, and the hospital lawyers relaxed.

I've always had an opinion on the topic.

The first half of the presentation was all about the physiology of the penis, especially as pertains to the nerves, the different types of nerves, where they are, what they respond to, and so on. Frankly, this was the part most interesting to me. Um, most useful. Gonna take that info into the lab and check it out.** Oh, yeah.

Circumcision actually removes or damages the most sensitive of the nerves, the J-shaped sensors at the joint between the foreskin and the glans. (They respond to being bent and straightened as the foreskin moves in normal sexual activity.) Then over time, the remaining nerves are desensitized by the now-exposed glans drying out and rubbing against clothing.

You'll never get the lost nerves back, but simply providing a natural covering for the glans can allow it to regain some sensitivity, and that's a reason to attempt to restore a semblance of the foreskin.

He showed a lot of photos of the results of various methods of restoration. Surgical restoration seems to be the ugliest. They kind of drag skin up from the scrotum, and you end up with, uh, no other way to say it, a hairy penis.

The non-surgical way is to stretch the skin over time.

He showed several methods for stretching, most involving tape and weights. His invention, the TLC Tugger, doesn't use tape or weights, and is supposedly easier to put on and remove. If you go to the website (link above), you can see how it works. There's a cap over the glans, then you pull some skin down and put another cap over it, and then hook all that to an elastic arrangement attached to your leg. Eventually the skin stretches.

It looks weird, but he says it's quite comfortable. I caused a bit of a sensation in the Q&A period when I asked, "What happens if you're wearing this thing, and you get an erection. Does the cap tiddly-wink across the room?"

When the laughter quieted down, he said that's another advantage of his cap over the systems that involve suspending weights. In those, if the cap pops off, it falls out of your pant leg, and it's a little difficult to ignore or explain. Because his is attached to the leg, it just falls and dangles inside the pant leg. And, his has an "emergency cord" you can reach from inside your pocket that will release tension when necessary.

So, that's what that was all about. Just your normal Mensa presentation.

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Footnotes -

*The Missouri legislature, who was not, as far as I know, a medical body, also mandated that if an abdomen was opened for any reason whatsoever, the appendix was to be removed. This is the same crew who passed a law in response to Roe V. Wade that ok, abortions were allowed, but all abortions would be performed by hysterotomy (i.e. Cesarean section), not vaginally. That law didn't last long - the doctors rioted.

**The theories check out. The man knows whereof he speaks. He taught this old dog some new tricks. Oh yeah....
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