Male circumcision and female pleasure

I read with much interest last month’s huge interblog discussion of male circumcision. And I have to say, I find this article from Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle a bit offensive. I’m all about debating the merits of circumcision based on public health — whether the procedure makes it less likely for men to transmit HIV and other STIs to their partners. But it seems flat-out wrong to make female pleasure a major factor in this debate. (Here’s one for the MRAs: Feminists oppose female orgasms! OMG! Ok, sorry, couldn’t resist.)
This is just strange:

For years, O’Hara says, she suffered pain and discomfort during sex with her husband. She wondered if the problem was hers. The problem, she finally concluded, wasn’t her own dysfunction — what psychologists used to call “frigidity” — but “the abnormal structure of the circumcised penis.”
Like 85 to 90 percent of American men born in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, O’Hara’s husband, Jeffrey, was circumcised at birth. Twenty-one years ago, he went through a foreskin restoration process and ever since, O’Hara said in an e-mail from her home in Massachusetts, “sex became a beautiful thing again and was no longer painful. That’s when I realized that millions of women are having abnormal sex because of circumcision, and millions of women fake orgasm because of it.”

When I hear “abnormal sex,” all sorts of morality-police alarm bells start going off in my head. And is it just me, or does “foreskin restoration” sound a little disturbing? This one woman’s radically different experiences with circumcised and uncircumcised penises do not a trend make. As Susie Bright points out,

“Some people make a cause out of their sexual preferences, and find an eager audience,” Bright said by e-mail from her home in Santa Cruz. “You can buy books about how black men supposedly have larger or more ‘magic’ penises than white men, too. The myths are apparently catnip to many.”

During the aforementioned interblog discussion, Ezra linked to a study showing circumcised men experience a significant decrease in sexual pleasure. Which, to my mind, is more relevant to this debate than anything that appeared in the SF Chronicle article. When we’re talking about a procedure that’s done to men’s bodies, it makes sense to keep the discussion focused on male pleasure and health and, more broadly, on public health. Not women’s preferences.
This is actually familiar territory for us. All too often, discussions about women’s bodies and sexuality are put in terms of how it affects men. Tint your nipples for men. Have “re-virginization” surgery or labiaplasty for men. Orgasm faster for men. And on and on. Just like male pleasure and preferences should not have a place of prominence in discussions about women’s bodies, women’s pleasure and preferences should not be at the forefront of the foreskin debate.