Stand by Your Manhood (13 page)

This rude awakening came at the same time her chart-topping brother announced his engagement to long-term girlfriend Sofia Wellesley, the granddaughter of the Duke of Wellington.

‘It’s important to get the right girl and, as a man, to be aware of the law,’ Guy adds.

Fortunately, although his name might sound like Cockney rhyming slang, the ‘You’re Beautiful’ singer is anything but a fool. He’s accustomed to strength in adversity no matter what happens. Not just in Kosovo, where he once served, but somewhere much scarier: online. When one woman famously trolled him on Twitter saying: ‘I have this dire need to listen to James Blunt when I’m menstruating,’ he replied: ‘Useful feedback. I’ll pass this on to my marketing team.’ When someone else asked: ‘Who is a bigger twat: James Blunt or Robin Thicke?’ he said: ‘Me! Me! Pick me!’ Then, when another posted: ‘Jesus Christ, James Blunt’s got a new album out. Is there anything else that can go wrong?’ he deadpanned: ‘Yes. He could start tweeting you.’

Now that’s having the last laugh.

Hopefully, Guy might get his one day, too – although, when we catch up three months after our initial meeting, I realise that it’s not likely to happen any time soon.

‘We’ve just received news that Isabella’s been moved to Australia – conveniently, right before her eighteenth birthday,’ he says, gutted. ‘The entire family have emigrated for good. Just like that, even though my ex isn’t legally allowed to relocate without informing me first, but since when did rules matter? All that counts is that I keep paying up. The nightmare just never ends.’

Thrown, I offer some optimism, but it falls spectacularly short. Nothing I can do or say could possibly make a difference because, ultimately, nothing ever
does
make a difference. Not the law, not the courts, not even the Prime Minister when he’s confronted in Parliament.

It all colludes to mark the start of an awkward silence that nothing can fill.

Then, something happens. ‘Oh, by the way, did I ever tell you that James’s fiancée works for Tony’s wife, Cherie Booth?’ he chips in, brighter. ‘That’ll be a bloody interesting wedding. Let’s hope we’re on the same table.’

We both force a laugh and swallow our frustrations. It’s only weeks later, when I’m having a tour of the Houses of Parliament – with, bizarrely, Sir Ian McKellen – that I see a glass panel separating the public gallery from the debating chamber.

‘This was put in after a man threw purple flour at Tony Blair – and scored an impressive hit!’ the guide says, unaware of my connection. ‘Poor bloke, just wanted to see his daughter – but clearly didn’t realise that once his ex made her mind up, that was it. Not even the PM could change that.’

It’s only then that it hits me, hard.

It’s not politicians, world leaders or judges who stop fathers seeing their children. Nor is it the creaking family law courts. The unpalatable truth, which goes against our instinctive values as protectors, is that it’s women.

Until we acknowledge this fact head-on – and end the romantic myth around matriarchs – it’ll remain the mother of every father’s inequality.

WHEN A LEOPARD-PRINT-CLAD
Rod Stewart sang Cat Stevens’s classic ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’ back in 1977, it was a simple reference to the broken-hearted, but listen to it now and, thirty years on, it seems the raspy rocker may have had an early insight into where
the politics of the penis would eventually end up. Because those famous lyrics – ‘She’s taken almost all that I’ve got / but if you want I’ll try to love again’ – could easily be lifted and superimposed onto a more serious, cutting-edge issue for lads and dads. A practice which fuses religion with history and – more importantly – sharp knives with penises. A combination that should never meet in the same sentence, never mind real life. Yet, every year, hordes of baby boys endure exactly that: they have a blade taken to their foreskin within days of being born – some in the name of religion, some for lazy tradition, others for a parent’s vanity.

Whatever the reason, let’s be clear: it was highly appropriate when comedians Penn and Teller trashed it in their Showtime series
Bullshit!
But allow me to elaborate.

According to statistics from the National Center for Disease Control, more than a million unnecessary circumcisions are performed in the US alone every year. That’s one every thirty seconds or, by Premier League standards, Anfield Stadium filled twenty-five times. Here in the UK the number of modified kids is thought to be considerably fewer, around 20 per cent of British boys, but that’s still a teary-eyed tally of thousands.

The very first circumcision is thought to have happened in Egypt centuries ago and, since then, has been performed for religious reasons in Jewish and Muslim
communities across the Middle East. But it only became popular in the West during the late nineteenth century when Victorian killjoys wanted to discourage people from masturbating. No, seriously.

Not to put you off your breakfast, but one of the biggest advocates of this was Michigan physician Dr John Harvey Kellogg – yep, the man behind your corn flakes. A medical practitioner and businessman, he also doubled as a sex prude who wouldn’t consummate his marriage, slept in a separate room to his wife and adopted each of their children (rather than producing them the fun way). Not content with his own monastic life, he wanted to discourage everybody else from pleasure too, so suggested two ways of making this happen: young girls should receive a dab of carbolic acid to the clitoris, which would burn and produce numb scar tissue, whilst boys should have the hoods of their foreskins cut off.

Both methods were designed with one specific, leg-crossing aim: to tame lust in the young. This, they thought, would get people out of the bedroom and into the workforce, creating a wholesome, healthy, wealthy society that feared intimacy as much as it did God.

Fortunately, the former didn’t catch on – but the latter did. In modern Twitter terminology we’d say it started trending, but – decades on – long after Kellogg died, it remains the biggest legacy from the Victorian vault of
sexual eccentricities. Yet, because it happens to boys, who must surely deserve it for simply being boys, countless babies are still being lined up to have their tips snipped in what is, quite literally, a bloody liberty.

Dr John Warren was one of them. A retired doctor who worked at the Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, his experience formed a full revolution of opinion over forty years, going from cuttee to cutter to campaigner. He was so hacked off – pardon the pun – that he went on to form Britain’s first anti-circumcision organisation, Norm UK, which tells institutions like the General Medical Council to cut it out, not off. Their big break came when Jeremy Paxman invited him onto
Newsnight
and sided with them over a notoriously staunch rabbi, declaring that foreskin removal was indeed a sexist slice of life, not a symbol of faith.

‘There were three stages in becoming an intactivist,’ he tells me.

But it was only later in life that John, now seventy-one, experienced the reality of what circumcision meant in his own sex life. ‘I was getting middle-aged and I had very little feeling in my penis,’ he confesses, frankly.

Scientifically, what he describes is the helmet of a healthy penis keratinising, which means it hardens like a callus in the absence of a nourishing foreskin. Something that happens in varying degrees to all circumcised men.

Despite this, most people – especially new parents
– have no idea what the procedure does, yet they go ahead with it anyway, which is surprising given that boy-cutting doesn’t have a great track record. Perhaps most famously, it caused the death of David Reimer, whose tragic tale is the ultimate cock cover-up and was the first case to raise a question mark over the practice in the ’70s.

Born Bruce Reimer in Winnipeg, Canada, 1965, he was raised female after a botched circumcision totally destroyed his penis in a tragic, but surprisingly common, complication.

When he was just six months old, doctors used a method called cauterisation – the medical equivalent of ridding skin with a flambé torch – to remove the hood of his foreskin, but a trigger-happy practitioner went too far and damaged the entire organ. Panicked, doctors convinced his devastated parents to brush the complication under the carpet by raising him female with a combination of drugs, dresses and trendy social conditioning that said gender was learned, not embedded in DNA.

At twenty-two months old he underwent an orchidectomy, which means his testes were forcibly removed, then – as if that wasn’t bad enough – he had to answer to the name of Brenda.

From here he urinated through a hole in his abdomen whilst taking oestrogen shots to induce breast growth, never knowing he was actually a little boy starring in his
own equivalent of
The Truman Show.
Some time later he was scheduled to have a makeshift vagina built into his groin, but this was shelved when – at thirteen – he started battling suicidal depression. He diagnosed himself with gender identity crisis, which wasn’t far off the mark. The only difference being that his version was man-made.

In 1980, when he was fourteen, Reimer’s parents eventually came clean when they realised no amount of social steering could rewrite the genetic truth that he was male, not female. Nature 1, gender politics 0.

Reimer instantly resumed his male persona and underwent gruelling re-reassignment surgery to correct the damage, including a double mastectomy, testosterone injections and two phalloplasty operations, which saw doctors try to make a replica ‘penis’ with skin grafts. Eventually, in his twenties, he married and became a stepfather to three children, but when his wife left him in 2004, he shot himself in the head with a sawn-off shotgun, capping an utterly so-called life. He was just thirty-eight.

Since then, people haven’t just started questioning boy-cutting, but also the religion that promotes it – which is perhaps its trickiest sticking point. After all, nobody wants to offend or, worse, be seen as anti-Semitic. But in an age of Richard Dawkins and popular atheism, the debate isn’t quite so off-limits as it once was. For Ron Goldman from the American organisation Jews Against
Circumcision, such fear of offending is getting in the way of a bigger issue.

‘We are a group of educated and enlightened Jews who realise that the primitive practice of genital cutting has no place in modern Judaism,’ he says. ‘And we should know. Jews are some of the smartest people in the world,’ he jokes. ‘We hold a third of Nobel Peace Prizes, which means we’re smart enough to understand that mutilating a little boy’s penis is not an acceptable practice in modern times. Besides, God did not mandate circumcision. In the original version of the Torah, the book of J, it’s not even mentioned.’

Another US campaign group, Beyond the Bris, are equally vocal. A grassroots anti-cutting site which steers fellow Jewish parents away from the procedure, it’s run by mother-of-three Rebecca Wald, who’s already kick-started new thinking. ‘Things are definitely changing, even in my average, everyday neighbourhood,’ she says from the East Coast. ‘The internet has helped spread a lot of information and people are finally waking up. When Jewish people themselves make this choice about something so traditional, it speaks volumes. We’re a liberal bunch.’ I tested this theory myself. When I called two of London’s most prominent modern synagogues – the West London Synagogue and the Central Synagogue – neither of them had an issue with me bringing my
fictitious, non-circumcised son to services. One of them even added: ‘It’s not like we’re going to check.’ Thank God for that. Not least because it means we’re not anti-Semitic for wanting to stop our sons having their bodies modified at birth.

And there’s even more good news. Although it’s still in its infancy, the ‘intactivist’ movement, which is a genius bit of branding, has already seen procedure rates take a 10 per cent drop in popularity across the United States as knowledge – like flood water – finds a route past obstacles. Look at the stats: almost two-thirds of US boys in the late ’70s were cut, but that percentage dropped to around 58 per cent in 2010.

It’s official: times are changing.

San Francisco has been on the cusp of change for years, with everything from green issues to the technological boom. It’s also the place that brought us Instagram and Twitter, so it’s no coincidence that the City by the Bay was also one of the first places to try to ban circumcision in law. Just like Australia gets the first taste of New Year sun, San Francisco seems to be the same with new, progressive concepts. A formal motion to outlaw circumcision was filed and would’ve passed, but it was dropped from the Senate ballot by a senior High Court judge at the last minute. Still, it was a start – and one that sparked a chain reaction. A short time later there was a circumcision ban
in Cologne, but Angela Merkel overturned it and now it appears Norway is about to implement a similar ruling.

Objectors aren’t exclusive to the US though. There have also been mainstream, credible British equivalents. The late, great Christopher Hitchens was one of the few people who dared discuss this subject in public. There’s a brilliant video online of him ‘hitchslapping’ a rabbi who claims ‘My son cried more at his first haircut than his bris,’ at which point Hitchens spins around and says:

You could hear a pin drop in the auditorium.

But fair play to him. After all, a penis is just as valuable as a vagina – right? Well, so you’d like to think. Yet the debate around circumcision has already become gendered, meaning boys are expected to put up and shut up, whilst women demand an end to girl-cutting. And only girl-cutting, even though they’re similar.

‘Oh, there’s absolutely a comparison,’ says Rebecca Wald.

Interestingly, she also sees it as a woman’s issue. ‘Most of my audience are women,’ she adds. ‘Which is interesting, because it’s a son’s mother who hands him over to be operated on in the first place. Her boy is taken with her full consent, when – like a lioness – she should be opposing it. But where are the feminists?’

Good question. Currently, London’s biggest free newspaper, the
Evening Standard,
is edited by Sarah Sands. She’s made it her mission to put female circumcision on the map as an issue of misogyny, yet says nothing when the equivalent practice affects boys. In fact, she pretty much refuses to acknowledge it at all. When I met her at a party in Battersea Power Station for London’s
most powerful 1,000 people, she’d given a speech introducing the night’s entertainment – a woman who had suffered female circumcision and, for the benefit of party guests, was going to sing about it. In detail. But when I approached Sands to ask if she could expand her paper’s standpoint to include boys, she shushed me.

I tried again, but was given a death stare. The difference, she said, was that, for girls, the procedure is designed to affect sexual function, whilst for boys it is simply a hygiene issue.

‘That’s bullshit,’ says Jonathon Conte, a Californian campaigner who’s part of a radical new generation of anti-cutting activists across the USA, peacefully protesting everywhere from paediatric conferences to the White House.