Nancy L. Cohen cites some victories and defeats in "The War on Sex" (September), but she leaves out a significant continuing loss in the wider war on sex: circumcision. Most American men have suffered from this forced penile-reduction surgery, but one hears nothing about it from the erstwhile men's rights movement.
The Victorian era's fixation on sex as original sin faced the dilemma that eliminating sex would also eliminate human reproduction. The solution:
Take the pleasure out of sex and limit its duration via circumcision. John Harvey Kellogg, an early proponent of circumcision, was a bit easier on girls, prescribing the application of phenol (carbolic acid) to the clitoris. For boys he advocated a tight circumcision without anesthetic for "salutary effect," though it would cause both immediate trauma and pain during erections over a lifetime. The procedure was promoted
as a way to protect boys from insanity caused by masturbation, but it impacted all men and their partners (who were treated to the sensation of being poked with a broomstick). Genital mutilation has a continuing direct, pervasive and negative bearing on the sex lives of both men and women. What is the Playboy Philosophy doing to liberate them?
Jon Willand
Minneapolis, Minnesota
In the July 1964 issue Hef devotes an entire installment of the Playboy Philosophy to repudiating Kellogg's book, Plain Facts for Old and Young, which contains, among other ideas, misguided advice on using circumcision to curb sex drive. The Philosophy contains no specific guidance on circumcision, but Hef's opinion of Kellogg is clear: "He knew a good deal more about cornflakes than sex."
