"No," he said.

"You should," Dad replied.

"Why?" my brother asked suspiciously.

"He was your moyel."

The little old guy reached one quivering, shaking hand, but instead of clasping it, my brother gave it one look and ran screaming from the room.

Alas, my brother wasn't alone in his reaction. Sex writers from to Betty Dodson to The Guide to Getting It On have railed against the practice. Plastic surgeons offer gruesome foreskin-reconstruction procedures, Web sites such as the delightful SexuallyMutilatedChild.org present rotten.com-style galleries of babies with their innocent penii clamped in Clockwork Orange-looking devices, and even Israeli-born Dr. Ruth makes it conspicuous by its absence on her Web site. If the sheer volume of voices raised against the practice is any indication, circumcision is currently the great unvoiced political debate in America.

Of course, spin is everything. You can call circumcision a "useful medical procedure," you can call it "a testament of faith in God," or you can call it "an obscene mutilation." Contributing to the more hysterical reactions, I feel, is the normal working of the male ego. The truth is, when we're in the locker room together, we peek—and no one likes to feel that their equipment is somehow lacking when compared to the next guy's. The anti-circumcision camp's statistics on the miles of blood vessels and acres of nerve endings that frolic on the human foreskin like Smurfs in their mushroom houses doesn't help the situation any.

Now, we're not defending lopping off bits of flesh given to us by Mother Nature. Certainly, unless there's a pressing medical condition or a cultural mandate to snip, it's an unnecessary procedure. Circumcision of newborns first began in the late 1800s as an anti-masturbation measure, but in keeping with the Hippocratic Oath's injunction to "do no harm," the AMA has not recommended circumcision since 1971. Much like universal literacy, universal circumcision in America is becoming a thing of the past.

But what of all the teeming millions who have already been snipped? Are we to go through life feeling that our wangs are sub-par? Is this why American men are seen as lousy lovers, or why kinks such as S&M and a penchant for three-ways are so prevalent in the States, as an attempt to find an alternative eroticism?

I'm afraid to inform the anti-circumcision lobby, and our friends overseas, the truth is that if you never had one, you don't miss it. Our perceptions of the world are filtered through our brains, and sex is a learned response. Whereas critics may make ridiculous statements such as that circumcision makes the penis 30% less sensitive, the truth is, if you never had a foreskin, then your experience of sex (and masturbation) is foreskin-less. As Yogi Berra once said about baseball, "half the game is 90% mental." It is impossible to quantify sexual pleasure, but there is no evidence that guys who are snipped, or their partners, enjoy sex less than the great unsnipped masses.

Or, as Dan Savage so eloquently replied to a reader, "When you claim that 'a man loses much of his capacity for sexual pleasure when he's cut,' all the cut guys out there reading your letter—guys like me and my boyfriend and most every guy we know, gay and straight—think, 'Hey, I'm cut, and I derive plenty of "sexual pleasure" from my cock. These anti-circumcision crybabies are full of shit.' And comparing male circumcision (the removal of the foreskin) to female genital mutilation (the removal of the clitoris) doesn't help, either. Removing the clit is comparable to cutting off the head of the penis, not the foreskin, and comparing the two procedures comes off as cheap, 'me too' victim mongering. A little less hysteria, a little less overstatement, and a lot less anti-Semitic rhetoric, and anti-cutting forces might change more people's minds."

Speaking of anti-Semitism, we also have to ask if Jewish (or Muslim) culture isn't more important than some supposed erotic ideal. After all, getting one's rocks off as the be-all and end-all of existence is a pretty recent idea, but circumcision and various other sorts of genital body modification have been practiced by cultures throughout the ages, from Native American cultures in Middle America piercing themselves with porcupine quills to Australian Aborigines cutting open their own urethras to gay porn stars' Prince Alberts. Obviously, being Jewish, I have to admit my own bias:. Every time I take a leak, there is a reminder that I belong to a millennia-old faith, fact that is a large part of my personal identity. (Of course, why it's OK to cut off part of my dick, but my mom screams bloody murder about the idea of my getting a tattoo, still eludes me.)

It also begs the question: if we decide to pass some sort of law against circumcision, will Child Protective Services be breaking down the doors of mosques and synagogues, taking away children from their parents to give to unbelievers to raised by unbelievers? One might argue that the child's best interest trumps some tradition from the Dark Ages, but a counter-argument would be that this amounts to a politically correct pogrom that, in the hands of the religious right, could eliminate Judaism and Islam in America within a generation. (Never mind, of course, that Jesus was circumcised himself.)

As a final counter to the radical anti-circumcision camp, even if I potentially would have gotten more sensation if I hasn't been snipped, I'm glad that I can go long enough to, shall we say, fully satisfy my partner as many times as she wants me to. Whenever I read the polemics in which some guy rants about how circumcision destroys the capacity for male sexual pleasure, I think, "Who the hell wants to sleep with a guy who's so focused on his own dick?" Sex is not just about putting your schlong somewhere soft and wet: What about going down on a girl, or using your fingers or toes, or long, sensual massages? What about all those people whose dicks don't work at all? Would you say they have no sex lives?

Face it: The real reason guys can't feel anything during sex isn't circumcision. It's those goddamn inch-thick Vulcanized American condoms.