William S. from Connecticut shares his story.
This is as much as I can recollect about being raped as a child. It was a day that stood out of my entire life. I was not at all sick. I was walking around fine. It started with I didn’t get a very big breakfast that day, they told me I had to do something later. They drove me to a place that was not my regular doctor. A different building. It was likely the hospital I was born and the fact they were brining me back there joking about returning me if I misbehaved was disturbing in itself. I was truly feeling fine, why did they bring me here to the medical place?? I had already got my shots at the pediatrician. It was many years ago. But I remember this all far too vividly, walking into the building with apprehension. Despite my perpetual asking what this was, they still would not tell me what it was for. Only that it was something I “needed”.
I was taken into a room, my (late, now deceased) parents were both there with me. At least my mom was there throughout it. Once it started my dad had turned away at some point and then left the room, I couldn’t see his face anymore. A bit of some drama, in the begining a somewhat lady like man had trouble getting me into a restraint board device. I was already too big for it. My mom partially held my arms from behind me. It was a Circumstraint, a child, 4 quarters body restraint board. I was an immensely huge boy growing up. 11.+ lbs born, and when I was brought in for this I was walking, talking brilliant boy of possibly like around 2 year old. Give or take. I really do not know if it was way before, or somewhat after..
I do not have kids of my own. I knew only that I could walk, talk and had started to bathe on my own. Later on, By the start of kindergarden I was as big as a 2nd grader and read on a high school level. I was literate above all child standards. When this trauma happened my dad had stopped carrying me most of the time. He was older, 50s and I was that huge child.. After I was lifted up onto a cold table with something strange on it…
The restraining was then done. I was held down totally, I couldn’t move at all. All I remember was my mom telling me to calm down. I was in a total panic. Asking why?? She still wouldn’t tell me the reason I was there only that it was “something boys had to get” Mom never ever failed to share technical details, she was a retired USAF flight instructor. After being held down for no idea how long, I had no clothing throughout this. I was cold, but I was sweating. I did not feel right, or safe, the first time I did not feel safe next to mom. I looked at her and she looked elsewhere.
My heart started to pound out of my chest. My ears started ringing. I was dizzy for some reason. Maybe I had started a tantrum? I was beyond uncomfortable and would not stop asking why-why-WHY-why-WHY is this so? This person is NOT my Doctor! (I loved my regular pediatrician until I was 19 years old). As I yelled and questioned mom. She still wouldn’t say. That lady like man that was not my regular pediatrician was vigorously fondling my no-no parts, and I could not even lift my head up to see. That was just the tip of the horror. My mom told me to stay as still as I could. She even made a rather inappropriate comment about you better not jump around too much you don’t want him to mess it up. MESS WHAT UP? I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE!!!
Then the pain started to hit me, intensely beyond any lifetime experience of pain even now decades later. I remember it searing through my body. I will never have any pain in my life that intense. In my adult life I’ve broken my neck, scraped my entire face up on 20 yards of gravel, broke two ribs, my foot, a finger. Been burned, sliced open, surgeries, Only a broken rib left me hunched over and barely able to move. The pain of what they were doing made stars flash dance in front of my eyes. My head was pounding like hammers going at the sides, top. I heard my heart pounding. It felt like my most sensitive boy part was mashed under something that weighed a thousand pounds. I wanted to swing and flail but I was totally restrained. Well, I learned after all the memories came resurfacing… a vital organ of mine was actually being crushed by hundreds of pounds of pressure in a circumcision clamp that I could not see. The most sensitive part of any baby boy’s anatomy, with over 20,000 nerve endings was being crushed inside a piece of metal designed to amputate 60-90% of a male’s nerve endings that have the greatest feeling.
I was held there with my bundle of concentrated nerve endings being crushed for several minutes, as was the brutal cosmetic ritual I didn’t consent to. The pain at this point was beyond blunt drill bits being jammed into my body & mallets pounding my head. I would say white hot pain, but I’ve been burned by things white hot, you only hurt for a second and then you don’t. This pain, continued, and continued, and continued. I know I blacked out at several points from the screaming, or the shock my body had just gone into. I have vivid memories specked with periods of nothing. Feeling violated just scratches the surface of what was going on in my young brain. If they had used any anaesthetic, it didn’t do a god damn fucking thing. I felt every bit. Continued through this horrible genital pain I was being tortured and blade raped with, still mostly conscious. I likely went into shock, and lost blood. I remember there was blood all over. I have always been very outspoken, proud, independent, and strong, even as a toddler.
I’m Swedish / Scandinavian / German, but born in Connecticut . I remember standing up and feeling very, very dizzy. The room was spinning. I felt as if my private parts had been smashed with a sledge hammer several times, then left under a bank safe. The pain was still immeasurable but it had changed intensity from a burning to a massive weight on my private part. My legs were shaking, my head spinning. My penis was still partially trapped under a bank safe, but I was walking. Sort of. I started to leave the room and go down a hallway. I was upset and determined to walk on my own and leave these people that had pretended to love me but taken me for this torture. I finally stopped, leaned up against the wall. Not moving. Building spinning. I could carry myself no longer. My dad picked me up and carried me out of the building. He was already in mediocre health.
I feel strongly this was the last time in my life that my late father ever carried me. He died of a brain cancer when I was 24. The majority of the rest of the day there are no more memories. The next clear memory about the traumatic event was bath time. I don’t even know if it’s the same day or the mid day after. Several things about this are vivid, traumatic, as if they are on the best 4k 3D TV made. I was taking my clothes off at a bath my mother had drawn in a tub. My mom was across the hall in her bedroom. I was in the bathroom alone. I took the bandage off. My jaw dropped. WHAT DID THEY DO TO MY PENIS?? IT WAS NOT AT ALL THE SAME !? It did not even look like my fathers intact penis. I was so angry, shocked. There was a brief conversation. My asking her what was done, what, why, why, why did they change it? I had no complaints or problems. I didn’t say that I wanted that. Even at that age I knew it was wrong. Why did they hurt me, alter me?
Thoughts bounced through my tiny head. My mom adamantly told me it was to protect me from things as I got older, what, you dont want to get problems later in life do you? It was preventative. Your penis could fall off if you didn’t have it. You’ll get penis cancer, you’ll get urinary tract infections. You’ll catch something. (These are lies). I said, but I don’t have problems yet, I said I don’t understand this and it hurts now. I want the Penis I had back. Fix it now. Take this action back. She told me that’s how it was going to be from now on. She acted like it was some sort of prize that I didn’t have to clean behind the foreskin anymore (she didn’t mention or likely know that I wont feel sex nearly as much, for life either).
I remember in my first year or two of life prior to the cutting, mom was almost borderline obsessed with pull the foreskin back and clean it. I’ve since learned, on baby boys, do not ever retract the foreskin. Leave it until its comfortable for the owner of the skin to move it.
Mom was taught very wrong by misinformed doctors and many are still misinformed to this day. Seriously it’s like America is still in 1948 with boy’s genitals. I think I started to get mad at her at that time & bury some very subconscious rage. I’m not sure at all, that may have been the beginning of a slow downfall of our mother-son relationship. I just don’t know.
The feelings of being violated wouldn’t go away. As far as my penis, I didn’t know how I felt about that drastic change. I started to gradually lower myself into the bath water that day. It still felt like my part was trapped under a heavy safe but it was not ten tons as before. Just as if it had a massive weight crushing it. I could not touch it at all or pain would radiate through my entire body. I urinated on my own leg and the floor a couple times, that on its own felt as if I was urinating pure acid. I started gradually lowering myself into the bath, I was so very sore, worn out, so difficult to go slowly. My penis touched the water and it was as if I had put it into molten volcanic lava. The pain came back and radiated through my body like lightning waves of agony. I finally got myself into the water for a quick bath, got out, I passed out again. End of specific memories other than a “I’m glad its finally healed up” one. Buried deeply in corners of my brain for decades, yet still vivid.
That’s the majority of the memories of my circumcision, or male genital mutilation, involuntary modification that I suffered. In one group, I’ve heard myself referred to as “a survivor”, it’s because there is an American baby boy fatality rate with this genital blade rape. That’s not something most mothers are ever informed of. The defects, the necessity of the organ, the times they mess it up. Its very vascular. The health issues happen 100% of the time to boys.
They often do not tell the complications that will happen to parents. Some are severe, some are nuisance, some are not as severe. But EVERY SINGLE male its been done to in America and Israel has issues from a genital cutting. It is not done at all in Europe, they learned, circumcision harms. The difference in men is, the ones that don’t think they have issues have not read what its supposed to be like, naturally for an intact male. I thought until my late 30s that the painful erections with the skin way too tight were natural, how things were. Before she passed away, I yelled at my mom that she didn’t have the right to alter me and put me at unneeded risk of life and health as a baby.
After watching the BBC programme, “Doctor Money & the boy with no penis”, a very moving documentary from 2004, about a boy who lost his penis entirely from a circumcision & was raised as a girl with a forced gender reassignment. I knew I’d lost some feeling from the cutting, but I’ll never know how much & that will stay unknown for life. I knew I had lost too much skin. As any boy victim has. What I lost was the average cutting in America called a Radical Amputation of foreskin or.. some Jewish term, but I’m not Jewish, and neither were my parents. My freedom of religion & genital autonomy was totally stolen from me. I am a firm believer in My body My choice for humans. Women are 100% entitled to it, but those mothers must not be hypocrites and make life time genital altering ignorant choices for boys. Let them decide after 18. That’s genital autonomy or body integrity.
My mother was not sincerely apologetic. She had some dementia by this age. It was pointless trying to explain to a woman her age & level of stubborn about how she had mutilated me for life. I had less feeling than an intact man, it was not her right to inflict that. I explained it a couple times more to her and then gave up. She passed of many health problems later that decade.
In my 30s I thought that the BBC “Dr Money & the boy with no penis”, David Reimer documentary was a mostly isolated incident. In my 40s, now, I’ve learned that it is far from an isolated occurrence. Trauma, horrific memories, physical & mental issues happen all the time. I’ve never had a sexual partner complain about how my parts worked, like I said, I thought things were all normal down there. Until my 40s. Then I learned. Its not a normal phallus by global standards. I was mutilated, I was blade raped. This is not what a natural birth intact penis looks like, or how it works. It’s the interpretation of that femmy male pedophile that chopped off several square inches of nerve dense skin, 4 or 5 different parts of my manhood when I was a defenseless child. Do what you love, love what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life they say!
Its taken me a month to write this without totally loosing my shit. My Frenulum, my orifice rim, my ridged band, my frenulum muco-cutaneous part of my penile skin are all totally gone. Possibly made into womens facial cream back then. There is no way to ever know how much but I’ve lost, 60??-90??%, of the feeling my penis was supposed to have from mother nature, god, evolution, the flying spaghetti monster, what have you (it’s your choice!). It’s never coming back.
I learned all this in a tremendous life altering reading binge in my 40s, as work was slow from winter, and the city partially shut down from the global COVID virus panic. I am now part of group of many thousands of people trying to end this “tribal cutting” or “Cosmetic genital modification” …..The Religious blood sacrifice. The torturous event that plagues boys in America to this day. It is a profoundly evil thing to do to men, and boys. It’s perpetuated by a medical financial complex that feeds parents pure, absolute total misinformation, or even worse, no information at all and sexually biased lies. The Religion that owns hospitals, and the banks, perpetuates the misinformation. It’s not something I can ever be silent about again. I don’t know why when they cut many men it’s as if they cut out part of their tongue. This may have even altered some of my listening habits. One of my Pandora stations was seeded with the musicals “Man of La Mancha”, “Anne”, & “Fiddler on the roof”. Sometimes I like broadway sound tracks I remember from childhood… but I don’t know if when I hear the song “Tradition” from “Fiddler” again I will still love it, or if it will make me become physically ill… After all that I’ve now learned.
William S. Connecticut.
Having recently watched the videos on the “Men Do Complain” website, and recently the BBC programme “A Cut Too Far”, I now realise the need to express my feelings, frustrations, and anger at how this practice of male circumcision has affected me.
