TLC TUGGER

A hundred million years ago, when sex was being invented,
The mammals, looking for a way to keep themselves contented,
Evolved more copious penile skin, till every male was wearing
A gliding sheath, a loose prepuce, a kind of rolling bearing.
 
It kept their glanses moist and warm and sensitive and soft,
And made their sex so easy, if they could've they'd have laughed.
But best of all, that folded tube was full of nerves for pleasure
And shot them into ecstasies that none of them could measure.
 
And all was well for eons, till the human head grew large,
And some were slaves beside the Nile, and others were in charge.
Perhaps some jealous Pharaoh who'd been born with not much tassel
Said: "Cut them off!" They cut, 'cause that was safer than to hassle,
 
And kept on cutting, even when that king was pyramided.
The custom spread, though they had long forgotten why they did it.
And still throughout the Middle East, though no-one understands it -
They say, but now with tongue in cheek, their jealous God demands it.
 
And, strange to tell, this craze befell the English-speaking nations,
While Europe and the Eastern world disdain modifications,
And even Jews - a few - refuse to to keep up the tradition:
"No god demanding cuts to putzes merits that position."
 
The total in the whole world's less than 25 per cent,
And some are cut in surgeries, and some cut in a tent,
And some are cut for ritual, and some are cut for shame,
But when you cut the bullshit, domination is the game.
 
Of course, no-one would cut a child professing naked power.
Instead, a hundred different silly reasons on us shower;
Excuses to reduce the male sex's pride and joy,
As cut ones take what they have lost, and never ask the boy:
 
"To make him look the same as me," or "different from the others,"
"To make it bigger," "make it smaller," "make him like his brothers,"
"To make him sexy," "make him chaste" or "tell the twins apart,"
And when you shoot one reason down, a dozen others start:
 
"To save him from diseases, from the scourge of leprosy,
From STD and UTI and also HIV,
From prostatitis, hernia and hydrocephaly
From rupture, and - of course! - from homosexuality."
 
And cutting them as babies makes sure none of them remember
The pleasure without measure given by an intact member,
Though men who lost their prepuces in adulthood would find
That having sex without one was like going colour-blind.
 
Well, now the custom's faded out in England and Australia,
And Kiwis and Canucks say postheëctomy's a failure,
But still one country where the foreskin's very seldom dangled
Is the homeland of the brave and free, whose banner is star-spangled.
 
For in the States at market rates, the scalpel's still a-flashin',
A boy is born, his foreskin's shorn, the doctor rakes the cash in -
And meanwhile by the back door, there's a lab-assistant waiting
To take the skin and grow it, hefty fees anticipating.
 
And never mind that one boy's blind, and others end up dead,
And many lose their frenulum, and some will lose their head,
And all of them are scarred for life, and all lose some sensation:
"We've made them men, we've made them clean, discouraged masturbation!"
 
And always it's presented as the parents' free decision,
But let a Mom's or Dad's opinion come into collision
With Matron's, doc's or in-laws', then they'll find they have no voice,
As a none-too-subtle pressure makes a travesty of choice.
 
"They'll mock him in the locker room!" the hapless parents hear.
In fact, these days it's boys who're cut who'll have to face that fear.
"He must look like his father," says his grandad, old and wise -
Yet when Junior peeks at Daddy's, what he'll notice is its size.
 
And strange to tell, as through the boys the scalpels slice and whirl,
Those self-same people think that to incise a little girl
Is horrible and cruel and a breach of human dignity,
And anyone who cuts them must be driven by malignity.
 
From half way round the world, of little girls they hear the screams,
And rush to pluck out distant motes, ignoring their own beams,
While near at hand there grows a growl, a rising tide of anger,
From men who've found out what they've lost, and want back all their whanger.
 
All is not lost. At some small cost, and trouble worth a mention,
You can produce a new prepuce by gentle, constant tension,
Which lacks the nerves, but still deserves careful consideration;
A gentler way than surgery, more use than litigation.
 
The doctors fear the lawsuits - just a few would make them poor.
They fear the judgement summonses, and bailiffs at the door
(Those gentlemen who ask them so politely: "May I trouble you?
I've come to seize your golf-clubs, and your yacht, and BMW").
 
So they attack, distract, fight back, with arguments ad hominem:
"They'll break into our surgeries, and then they'll put a bomb in 'em!
Don't listen! They're extremists, on a flap of skin fixating!
We know what's best!" but you'll have guessed, it's writs they're contemplating.
 
So here's an operation, done as often as one blinks,
That had its strange beginnings in the shadow of the Sphinx,
And carries on for reasons neither sound, humane, nor valid.
That story's told. I'll now unfold the moral of this ballad:
 
To cut a cock's a load of crock, no matter how they cut it.
These words beware: "Just sign down there." They'll try to scare you but it
Would do your son a wondrous boon to treat them with derision:
"You'd dock his dick? My God, that's sick!" To hell with circumcision!

© H. Y. 1998

The Rape of the Cock was read to a party of the Sixth International Symposium on Genital Integrity in Sydney, December 9, 2000.

Its first public performance was at a record store in Dallas, Texas, on Saturday, August 31, 2002 by Alexander W.  Other public performances of it will be posted at Circumstitions.com if you notify Hugh.