Niki Bezzant (“I’ll have what he’s having”, March 4) may be dead right about the clitoris but her first paragraphs about male anatomy are wrong in relation to the male foreskin. The silence on the foreskin, in medical texts and sex manuals in the English-speaking world, where surgical infant circumcision flourished (and in the US, still flourishes), is deafening.
Denial of its sexual role was and is rampant. To repurpose Bezzant’s comments about the clitoris, the foreskin “was seen as the source of no end of trouble, but also so unimportant that men wouldn’t miss its removal”.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, it was literally excised from many more baby boys than clitorises were ever cut by doctors from baby girls. It wasn’t until 1995, when Canadian anatomist John Taylor studied the foreskin in detail and published his findings, that the full, accurate anatomy of the organ was known.
In the case of the clitoris, doctors may have been motivated by sexism, but in the case of the foreskin, it
