by Andrea Peyser
January 25, 2016 | 12:26am
Anthony Losquadro — a circumcision “intactivist” — with his anti-circumcision truck that he drives around New York City.
Anthony Losquadro is passionate about his penis.
“I think about it all the time,’’ the 50-year-old Long Island bodybuilder, real estate manager and married dad of a boy and a girl told me.
Losquadro is one of a small but growing breed of “intactivists” — men who believe they were mauled by the circumcisions they underwent as babies, and women who try to persuade the public to abandon a practice they consider excruciatingly painful, barbaric and unnecessary.
Intactivists claim that uncut penises deliver enhanced sexual pleasure to their owners and users, and liken male circumcision to female genital mutilation — even sexual assault and child abuse.
Losquadro won’t have his 6-month-old son snipped.
I asked if this obsession with foreskin is healthy, much less worthy of a movement modeled on the struggle for human rights.
“Do you think Martin Luther King was obsessed about civil rights?” Losquadro shot back. “Betty Friedan with women’s rights?”
Clearly, some men harbor deep-seated issues regarding their members.
Circumcision — the removal of the foreskin from the penis — has long been performed as a religious rite by Jews, Muslims and several ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa. In the 19th century, prudish Victorians believed it would prevent men from masturbating. (How’d that work out?) These days, it’s overwhelmingly an American thing.
But buoyed by recent declines in the practice in the United States, intactivists have created websites applauding uncut celebrities, including Charlie Sheen (yikes!) and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Photographs of Leo skinny-dipping reportedly were leaked online, which must have been awkward when he dated Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli.
Bernhard Goetz, the squirrel- and allegedly pot-loving “Subway Vigilante,” made quixotic runs for New York City mayor and public advocate on a pro-vegetarian, anti-circumcision platform.
Former Congressman Anthony “Carlos Danger’’ Weiner became an unwitting poster boy for circumcision, sexting pics of his excited and apparently cut junk to a variety of babes — penis pics I wish I could unsee.
About 81 percent of US males ages 14 to 59 have had their genitals snipped, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the percentage of newborns circumcised in American hospitals dipped from 83 percent in the 1960s to 77 percent in 2010, according to data published last year in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Another estimate put the US infant circumcision rate at 58 percent in 2010 — but the number could be higher, because procedures performed outside hospitals by, for example, mohels in Jewish bris ceremonies are not counted. The worldwide circumcision rate is a bit less than one-third; in some countries, the practice is practically nonexistent.
“I’ve actually thought that it [circumcision] was a wacky thing to do, that half the population needs surgical correction, ’’ said Georganne Chapin, 64, executive director of Intact America, who has tried, and failed, to persuade lawmakers to ban the procedure.
But mohels and doctors recently told The Post that an increasing number of grown men in America are now making the cut for religious, medical or aesthetic reasons.
Losquadro founded the organization Intaction and drives around the metropolitan area in a 30-foot van, handing out literature aimed at persuading parents to retain boys’ “genital integrity.”
He told me that in 2010, he confronted the then-88-year-old retired obstetrician who altered his manhood back in 1965.
“I asked him, ‘Did that make you feel like more of a man to do that to me when I was 8 pounds?’ ” Losquadro said. “He had nothing to say.”
Losquadro has concluded that restoring himself through skin grafts or by stretching the remaining skin would not make him whole.
Clinical research has found that circumcision can safeguard males from certain cancers, urinary-tract infections that might cause kidney damage, human papillomavirus and genital herpes, and can reduce the cervical-cancer risk in sex partners.
The World Health Organization revealed data showing circumcision reduces heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men by about 60 percent.
Intactivists counter that health risks are overblown, and contend that some 100 males die each year from circumcision-caused ailments including blood loss and infections.
I can’t help but agree with the babe characters on the TV show “Sex and the City” who, with the exception of slutty Samantha, enthused that shafts devoid of hoods were more pleasant to gaze upon and touch than intact ones.
I just hope that guys who spend their lives feeling wounded by circumcision, and the women who enable them, find new hobbies.
http://nypost.com/2016/01/25/circumcision-intactivists-dont-want-you-or-your-kids-to-get-snipped/
I wonder how Peyser would have felt if someone had strapped her down when she was born and cut off part of her vulva without her consent? Would she found a new hobby? Nobody should have part of their body cut off without their consent. Especially because some idiot thinks you look better after being mutilated!
I hope that Andrea Peyser can find another hobby besides advocating for the sex organ alteration of infant boys that somehow gives her some perverse satisfaction or pleasure. About 75% of the worlds infant males have not suffered the forced alteration of their bodies and are not keeling over with infected disease ridden genitals because circumcision has virtually no benefits. Perhaps due to her upbringing and cultural indoctrination Andrea Peyser has a perverted bias toward the genital mutilation of males. And yes it is mutilation to unnecessary alter someone body for some ridiculous reason they think it looks better to them. How about the many complications caused by this surgery designed too please the prurient desires of people such as Andrea Peyser. I worked with two men whose boys suffered this surgery and were botched. Those boys had to endure multiple surgeries up until their teen years to attempt to correct the damage done unnecessarily to them. If those boys had been left alone and not butchered by someone with some twisted ideas such as Andrea Peyser those boys would not have suffered as they have. There was a boy in my High School who attracted attention in the gym shower because of his butchered member. People such as Andrea Peyser need to rethink their position.