The first time you realize, I'm going to bed, I've just stripped off, I'm going to bed and I haven't seen my glands the whole day. It was like the day I earned my pilot's license. Almost. Level of Joy. The Intact Again podcast is an oral history project where we share stories from men who have been circumcised and are working to restore what has been taken from us. Our hope is to inspire each other with our collective stories of loss and recovery.
Our next guest is as classic as the classic cars and planes. He loves to fly and drive. He was one of the first people to apply Jim Bigelow's techniques from his book the Joy of uncircumcising all the way back in the nineties. In fact, he's so classic, he's actually in the book, he tells us his fascinating story of the techniques and how they evolved over time and how a lot of the things back then were trial and
error. He's a straight man and ally from California who is proud to report he is a CI seven. Now let's find out together how we got there. I think for most straight men, at least my age and younger, it is a hindrance because there's so much gay fear that they're afraid to be called gay or seen gay. And anytime they talk about a penis. Why are you gay? I've always been a little bit socially oddball, so it didn't faze me much and just the luck of having a best friend who was intact. I think
he had more paranoia about it. I just had curiosity of how the hell does that work? Did you see him naked? Like, how does that come about? Yeah, well, we, both of us were never shy to hop in a river or lake at three in the morning and go for a swim. That does make sense. That was more common at the time. Yeah, well, also, we live in a rural area and we're both nocturnal. And so it's like, wait a minute, are you intact? Well, at the time, the word wasn't intact. Are you uncircumcised?
And it's like, oh, and of course he gets a little shy right away and all it's done is piqued my interest. And hey, that's different. We'd known each other a couple of years, but I mean, it's hard to remember. Is it first when we were swimming up at the lake when I saw it? Or was it when I first was complaining to him about adolescent problems with things that are, why am I waking up with my penis stuck to my sheets because of tears in the remaining inner skin. And I remember him,
I don't have that problem. And it's like everything I listed that was bugging me at like 14. I don't have that, I don't have that. And the reason he didn't have that, he says, and he has a foreskin. When you found out, was that more like a feeling of relief or envy, would you say? More curiosity at first, because the first I had known that I was circumcised, I was really tiny, but I knew scars meant you'd been hurt. And I had a
scar on my penis. And my parents excuse, when I was like five or six, my parents excuse was, oh, you know, it's where the doctor just snipped off some extra skin. And when you're five, you buy that when you find out in your early teens that that guy hasn't had any of the trouble I'm going through every damn day. And no doctor cut off a part of him. Boy, does that perk up everything. Ears of going, hey, what is, what's really here? What's going on?
What's the truth? Where were you born and raised? Mutilated at Queen of the Valley hospital at Napa, California. You seem to have not only a curiosity about how to fix the mutilation that happened to us, but you also have an interest, it seems, or at least have the knowledge. I haven't heard from anybody else of what techniques and devices were used in people's mutilations. I find it fascinating. Somebody will describe an issue they have and you'll go, ah, they use this device.
I've always dug deep into just about anything I get into. That's why a friend used to call me the repository of obscure and useless knowledge. I've always been someone who has to dig at every. I can't go partway into something if I'm interested, I will go crazy. And so the history of mutilation and then the history of those trying to repair it back to the repairs of Celsus, I just digging. And so the devices, they like any, any mechanical thing, they leave their mark. The different techniques
leave different mark. What was the one used in Houston? Plastabelle. The Hollister plastabelle. They started those in the late fifties and people today are still sold it as, oh, it's this new bloodless method, nothing new about it. When the thing is, you know, over 50 years old and bloodless. That's all lies. Because they smash, they use forceps and they smash the dorsal side of the foreskin on the infant after they've shredded the connective tissues so it won't bleed when they take
the knife or scissors to it. So you don't see the blood, but you're causing all the damage. When you were growing up, people thought of children more as property. Do you think that's gone away or. I think it's, at least on the surface, less. In my day, children should be seen, not heard. Was still around. The dean of boys at my junior high had been in the troops that had stormed Iwo Jima. Those people still had a lot of influence, and there was a lot of following
authority, stoicism. Kids, just obey your parents, and child's opinion didn't matter at all, basically. Now kids often seem to use it almost like a, I'm a kid, and it's a shield to get away if things the kid does know are wrong. But that shift, I think, has led to allowing kids more freedom to know themselves. And hopefully that'll reduce the butchering rate as time goes on because you just be shot down so quickly. Have you noticed, like, and over the years, the butchering
rate going down? When I was in my late teens, I thought, well, by the time I'm an old man, this should be dead and over. It's so obviously a violation of fundamental human rights. I'm glad it's been going down, but horrified that it's still around, I did not expect it to last this long, but cognitive dissonance is strong in those who are butchered and don't want to admit they are damaged. It's true.
And it's a hard thing for people to admit that the people that were supposed to protect them would do something like this. What was your family's thoughts on restoration and circumcision as well? Well, my mother, it took her a while, but she finally accepted I was angry about it. To say I'm stubborn is putting it mildly. So she actually wrote the check and mailed it off for a couple books back when I was first
finding all the details I could about it. She was fairly open about new ideas, but she couldn't accept how bad it caused damage, just that, well, he's my weird son. She was willing to help, but she wasn't willing to accept the culpability in the decision. Yeah, there's definitely none of that. A lot of the typical pass it off on. Well, the doctors at the time said, I knew it through her for another loop when she heard my brother say,
well, we're born with it. There's no reason it should be gone. They should leave it alone. And I know that threw her for a loop. My father just wasn't that swift. And just before he died is when I finally was beginning to see the wheels turn when I was able. You know, there was a thing on tv showing a girl being mutilated. And he did the. Oh, that's horrible. I go, and the difference with what was done to me is what. And the wheels began to churn. Sometimes it's a gradual process for people to.
Oh, yeah. And, you know, he'd been told so many things about it, and having been mutilated in 1928, he'd known nothing else. But my brother didn't defend his own grandchildren. You know, he has voice that he thinks is wrong, but then keeps his mouth shut and doesn't say a thing to his daughter when she mutilates all of his grandchildren. I know the feeling as you, as, you know, being the lone. What is that like? I know what it's like for me, but what is it like for you when you're the lone voice
trying to prevent these things? It's been so constant in my existence that I'm usually the lone person in the family on just about anything. Now, you mentioned how you found out that you were circumcised, but I find the story you've told how you found out about restoration wonderful. I just lucked out because I used to every so often get on the phone, had a huge 800 nationwide, 800 telephone number directory, massive thing. And I would randomly call urologists and plastic surgeons. Is there
anything I can do? And circumcised and hate it. Is there a way to reverse this? And there were ones that just hung up. There are ones that go, well, I don't know, a way. And one day in a newspaper was a little article about no circ, and there was a phone number, so I called it and Marilyn Milos answered and she goes, oh, yes, there is. And Wayne Griffiths happens to be right here next to me, so can I hand
the phone to him because he can describe it to you? And that day, Wayne told me all about foreskin restoration and then sent me photocopies of a lot of stuff about it. And from then, I've been well hooked into keeping up with all the restoration stuff. Wayne and Marilyn are my saviors of it. They gave me the first good news I'd heard in my entire life. At least I can
do something. The power to actually change your fate when it comes to this is so empowering and so for the people in the audience that might not know, could you describe those two people and who they are and the significance of them in the community? Well, Marilyn Milos is practically the. Well, she is the founder of the modern restoration movement. When she was working as a nurse, a doctor had told her I.
That, you know, there's no reason to do this. And from then she dug into it and then dug in her heels. That started a group to nurses were not going to participate in it. Starts no circ, start spreading the information. Wayne was a man who was restoring him. He was restoring himself and he was always open to sharing with everybody his restoration. Back in the late eighties, early nineties, how often would a man take pictures of his penis wearing weird devices and publicly
with his name on it? Here's this. Try that. They started the modern movement in a way. During World War two there had been people trying to hide from the Nazis and go back to Rome and there were. There's always been people trying to stop this. And you, you got into a very famous book, I hear.
Yeah. When Jim Bigelow wrote the joy of uncircumcising, he took a letters you get from people because he was the guy you contacted when you'd grown a little skin and wanted the more complicated techniques and making the foam cones and stretchers and all the early homemade stuff. And so he took quotes from the letters and took out everybody's identities and in the margins of the joy of uncircumcising or all these quotes. And I'm one of them. That is legendary. It's bizarre to open a book and.
Oh, yeah, I know who wrote that. Yeah, the initials are. Well, the initials match, but yeah, that's me. So we know your family's attitudes towards the restoration thing and circumcision, but what about your family's attitudes towards sex in general? Did that play any part in your discovery process? It was weird to come from conservative farmers and it's fairly open about a lot of things. Well, my mother used
to make jokes that would mortify her friends. She would tell dirty jokes with my grandfather and this is in the 1940s when women telling dirty joke. And with her father, sex has never been a fearful thing on my mother's side. And she always said, I don't have to worry about teaching sex ed to any of my kids because, well, see all those farm animals? Yeah. That's what they're doing. There's no hiding it. When you live on a ranch,
there's what the animals are doing. And she would tell you the truth about what they're doing. My father had been a lot more shy about that kind of thing, but he also had no shyness about running around the house naked. Or if, you know, you've been outside getting something grungy, and he's like, oh, yeah, take your clothes off, spray it down, water, you know, he doesn't care, especially anything that was just plain, simple nudity. That was no phase to him.
But he wouldn't talk about sexuality much. There is a distinction between nudity and sexuality, and a lot of people. Oh, yeah, that's one of the things I have trouble still understanding with some people. It's like the nudist groups are right. Nude is not lewd. They don't have to be connected. My mother's response for, you know, when I'm. When I was chasing girls was like, keep it in your pants. That was it. That was her advice? Yeah, keep it in your pants.
Fortunately, I didn't have those kind of weird problems put onto my head by my parents. None of those shames over something that let's to be ashamed of. If I had been gay, I think my father would have had a trouble with it, but I don't think he would have ever pulled, like, some gay friends I know that have been disowned by their families and treated like real shit. I think he would have had trouble with it. My mother probably would have just kind
of shrugged her shoulders and said, oh, well. So, you know, there was never that fear, either, of trying to please them. With my choice of girlfriends. There was no racism. There were a lot of racist people still running around openly in the seventies. They kind of went into hiding for a while before you know who showed up. The cheeto that won't be mentioned. Yeah, cheeto, caligula, mango, Mussolini. Well, my mother's one of her stories. In the 1930s,
her mother let her. During the depression, let her pick out a baby doll, because little girls all end up with a baby. Well, not all, but most take to a baby dog. She picked a black one. In the 1930s, my father, when he was working at a warehouse, a lot of the men working there were black. And say, you want to go to a soul restaurant after work? He'd go do it. Now, anybody that has realized the damage that is done by circumcision, this question
will be, obviously. But for those that it's not obvious for, why did you decide to restore. Oh, God. I was in the drugstore buying tape right after I talked to Wayne. It wasn't even the next day. Just being able to start repairing what was done to me. Amputating body parts when there's no disease, no damage, no good reason, is just horrifying to me. I'm not a custom car. You don't remove my parts and try to smooth the deck lid. To me, it was just barbaric what had been done.
So the ability to at least start reversing some of what the monsters had done to me, it would be like if I had been a jewish person in world War two and had the tattoo. I would want that tattoo off my arm. I'd want that mark of the monsters taken off of me. And the same thing with the mutilation. It's like, okay, this monster with a plasto bell and a bunch of metal tools has put his mark on me. Get it off me. Even though it's a psychological itch, it's almost like
a physical itch. There is a mark of somebody else on me. It's foreign to my body. It's not part of my body. It's a foreign object. It's like my immune system needs to attack it. Your psychological immune system is. Yeah, I still don't like it. Even though it's hidden now. I don't have to see it. I still don't like it. And I know it's not just the psychological aspects of it and having that mark on your body, but I. It was also causing significant problems for you too. Oh,
yeah. When you're a 14 year old boy and you wake up and your penis is stuck to your sheets and it's dried blood from my remaining tissue, what little they left me had torn during a nocturnal erection. Well, scares the hell out of you the first couple times. And on top of it, what's, you know, the insecurities of adolescents are of already terrifying. And that
amplifies that up. It just ramps it up. In high school, they were pushing a lot of stuff about, oh, teenagers think they're invincible, and, you know, they've got this false bravado. And I was always like, well, I sure don't have that total opposite. I'm constantly paranoid, you know, like, I needed another insecurity be stuck on me. Did you have anybody that you could talk to about that issue at the time? There's a few. My friend
who's intact. That poor guy got an earful for years, that poor bastard. A female friend of mine. She slowly came around to it, and her son is intact, and he will loudly tell you he's glad of it. Well, that is one success. Yeah, he's in his mid twenties. Well, it turns out the man she married was just like me about hating having been mutilated. I'm sure that helped his chances. Yes. Although I know his. I actually know his father's response to him complaining about it. His father said, does it
work? Then shut up about it. That makes a very good point. When it comes to men and a problem in society. I've had women point this out too, is that men tend to only be valued for their value, their ability to do something the penis is only for. Can you procreate with it? It's not the pleasure of it. Yeah, there's. Look at all the history of our species. Who do you send off to fight in the wars, man? Women and children first when a ship is going down.
Yeah, and we're programmed as little kids. Even your father has to go overnight for work or something. Okay, you're the man of the house. Take care of your mother. And they think they're making a little boy feel proud. Well, he might smile for that first minute, but if he starts thinking a few minutes after. Wait a minute, I'm seven. I can't protect her. I think a lot of. A lot of people, men and women both when they're
little, aren't particularly introspective. But if you're an introspective kid, that stuff is just baggage. Adult women are often treated by society as property of whatever man they're married to. And it's like, how is. That's not equitable, folks. She's a human being. We have a lot of women who are good allies. But unfortunately there are women who, like my niece, kept defending the mutilation till I cut her off. Yeah, it's very close to home, but I won't get into that.
Everybody's got their own attitudes and stuff. But to me, cutting off normal, healthy tissue that doesn't belong in opinion and attitude, that's a simple, blunt violation of the fundamental human rights of that child. What I find fascinating is that if it's done by a parent against their own child, it's considered normal by american and some other societies. But if it's done in warfare, it's a war crime. War crime? Yeah, it's actually codified. And I've run into people
who. When you say it's a crime to cut a baby, well, where is that codified? Well, if we're going to go just by what's codified? Nazi Germany made it legal to kill the mentally ill. Yes. What's legal isn't often what's right? Yeah. Powerful people will alter the laws to suit them. And lobotomies at one point were legal and so was foot binding. Yes, all sorts of horrors were legal. The actual sterilization of both male and female children was legal in the mid 20th century.
And even in the United States, especially. In the United States, the Nazis copied us. That's true. Yeah, but I mean, even after the war, this country continued doing it for another couple decades. Oh, my kid's mentally ill. So neuter them. My daughter's mentally ill. We don't want to risk of her getting pregnant. Well, it's called birth control. You don't need to take and surgically alter the person. Once again, taking away
people's choice. Yeah. A man I known for, my God, I've known him since somewhere in the eighties. He has a serious developmental disability that was chemically induced. He was perfectly normal in his first year or two of high school. And then whatever drugs he was getting into with his buddies. He's permanently twelve. He's nearly 70, but he's twelve. And fortunately that things had changed. They taught him how to use
a condom. He found a girlfriend, you know, in his forties, and they could see where that was heading. And so he was instructed on how condoms work. Disappointed the problem. It doesn't require surgery. That goes to the things they always say about, oh, you know, it's cleaner. Couldn't you teach people hygiene? Well, you know, my ears get filthy. Shall we remove them? I mean, after all, it'll give me a cleaner profile, I won't have to clean. Less skin cancer and only a slight reduction in
the sensitivity to my directional hearing. Just think of how much faster you'll be in the water. That's right. Yeah. Since you've been restoring for such a fascinating length of time and time period. Because you're right at the start of the modern era. Can you give us like a timeline of the different devices and techniques you've used until today?
Oh, God. Well, the first thing was just a, you take a piece of medical tape for taping bandages on, cut off a small piece to put in the middle so it won't stick to your glance. Put it on the left side of your penis and pull forward across your gland to the right side. And all you're doing is using your glands as the pressure to pull on the skin. And that's why you got that little piece in the center. That's how I started. Then it becomes x tape because
you're putting more tension on you don't just one strap. Although urinating through the single is a lot easier because you can just flip it over almost like a bail on a Volkswagen valve cover. I equate everything to machines. It's bad, but you can just flip it over and your glands is out to urinate. And you push it back in and flip it closed with the four. It's a lot harder, but you can increase the pressure after that. Tape rings.
You make a ring, and it's almost like, because you have enough skin to actually close over the glands completely. And then the fancy one is you make the tapering when you're erect so it's wide enough that it can handle erections. And then you tape over the tape so you can leave the ring on for days. You can even shower that with that waterproof tape. But you remove the outer, smaller width tape, and that's what closes on and off. You just have this to protect your skin.
Then make your own tuggers. You teach yourself how to sew a little so you can go and buy suspenders, which back in the days of salesman, that was a bit of. What size do you need? Don't know yet. I'm jury rigging. Well, what's your pant size? Yeah, this isn't going on. Pants. You don't tell them where it's really going, but you're just trying to get rid of the salesman so you can picture it and go, yeah, okay, that'll probably
work. You sew them up, make them shorter, popping them over your behind your neck or over your shoulder or down your leg. And you're just using the clip from the suspender to clip together the tape and pull forward. The other trick was the foam cones. I was using dungeons and dragons foam that the miniatures come in. I was taping.
I was using those little cubes to make. Basically, you're making a shape that will fit in what amount of foreskin you have and then using a lot of surgical tape all around that, sealing it up, and every so often, adding a little more foam to make it longer and keeping it inside. You're just packing your neo foreskin full of whatever can fit. And then we made ones out of. It was called friendly plastic.
You put it in hot water and you can mold it. So we would mold, basically, they were a lot like the foam, but you could leave an opening in the middle and try to urinate through them without making a disastrous mess. And then we made some out of Fimo clay that you bake in the oven. And I made several of those. And, you know, you with the FIMo, it's harder. And you start working on how to hook the suspender to the Fimo clay without breaking it and molding in
little clips and things to that. The tugahoy was one of the first devices advertised. I never did pick up a tug ahoy, but Ron Laos Tugger was one of the first devices I ever got. I didn't get a cat one, but I got a cat two. That thing's indestructible. It's still in one piece. I could stick it on right now. The thing would still. It's not the most comfortable in the world, but it. That is a workhorse. There was a device
in the nineties. It was about a six, seven inch long piece of hard plastic at the base, and it's a bottom shaft. And then there's a ring covered in black rubber that goes against the base of your penis. It's pushing against the fat pad, and out at the end is a little notch in the
plastic. And you have a film canister, and you tape, like, film, the old film canister technique, you tape that on, and then it's got a piece of surgical tubing, and you pull that and clip the end of the surgical tubing in the end. And so now you got surgical tubing being a somewhat flexible stress point pulling. And so it's pushing back against the body and pulling out at your taped up foreskin. Cool device. But, you know, it's massive. You can't.
You can't really wear it anywhere except home naked. But a good device, you know, you keep trying each of these and then modifying them here and there, like, oh, well, this would be easier if I cut that off there or add. This did a lot of adding of soft foams to these hard plastic things that were very common in the nineties. Then the. What was it called? The dial. That was a game changer for
me. The original dial was a super bowl with a hole in it and a piece of plastic, basically a plastic stud threaded in the end of the super ball, and then another superball at the end of that, and then a cap. You could do it without the cap, but with the cap, it made it so easy. The cap was a toothpaste tube cap with four notches cut in it. So you made what they called a modified j tape. It's almost a t tape, but it's a little more complicated to make.
I learned how to make a lot of them in bulk ahead of time. You use painters tape and rejuvenus tape. You set them up where there's, like, it's got wings like a woman's sanitary napkin. You get an erection, you put the tape on, put the first Super bowl ball down in, and you have adjusted the second one to whatever amount you think you can contain inside your neo foreskin. And the. The toothpaste tube cap goes on the top, and this has four tabs.
And with a hole punch, you've made four holes, one in each tab, and you pull the tabs over and clip them onto the toothpaste tube. So now there's a long stretching device that is by tension. It's a dual tension device that you can pop off to urinate by just popping the four tongues, pull it out, urinate, shove it back in, pop the four tabs over it. Game changer. It let me gain a lot of.
He made what he thought were improvements by casting his own rubber molds that were halves and not super balls. I always found the Super Bowls more comfortable than the later custom parts. He just had instructions to make this, or did he sell this? That was a commercial product. Oh, and the other way you could use it, there's a hole drilled in the back of the. I mean, in the front of the rod that. He had a metal key ring in it, a little tiny
one. And you could also tug at the same time. You were bi tensional stretching with the inserted device. It's really an ingenious little gadget. I think they're still around, but, you know, I've got old ones when I feel like throwing one on that still work. I did have to add the much longer rod. He used to start with a small rod, and then you could buy, and I ended up with a very long rod by the end of that. That was a, that was a really good device.
One of my problems between devices is every time I hit a milestone, like the first time, it stays rolled over without me having to wear something. Tight jockey shorts, man. And I wore them a lot. It's just nice to not have to wear something. So I end up with a long break. The first time it'll hold over without the tight jockey shorts is another. Hell, yeah. Great. You know, and there goes
another long period of. I'm trying to resist that temptation now because it's been almost three years now that I don't have to wear underwear. I can go hiking up in the mountains naked, hop in the river and go swimming, climb back out. I won't have seen my glands the entire day. I can urinate through the foreskin like an attack, man. Well, it's passed for doctors since 90 something. Doctors think I'm intact, but I'm a greedy bastard, and I want a little bit more.
I know. One of the most wonderful things I've heard from you and other restorers is just that feeling of being covered. It's a huge confidence boost in a way. It's almost like when you're little and you finally accomplish some hard task that people didn't think you could do because you're too young for that, or. Yeah, well, maybe you'll probably never get that. That's something your brother can do, but you're not good at it or whatever the put down is. Mutilation is a surgical put down on us.
So when we get a really good defeat over that, it feels good. The first time you realize, I'm going to bed, I've just stripped off, I'm going to bed, and I haven't seen my glance the whole day. It was like the day I earned my pilot's license. Almost. Level of joyous. You heard it here first. Restoring. Basically. It's like flying. Yeah. I'm curious, do you restore while flying? I have devices on, in the air, yes. And the newer stuff keeps getting more and more comfortable. My God,
you could spend all. Well, it's common now for me to get 4 hours out of a fit v four. I sure can't afford to fly for 4 hours at the cost of everything. So it would be no problem to go cover it up before you get to the airport, climb in, fly off and land, and never have taken it off. And I have worn a lot of devices in the air. The new air devices are great. The fit v four s, the car, the comfort level that these things possessed of was not even imaginable back in the day.
These things are truly amazing. It's. There's a bad side to being a younger man that needs to repair in that they're in the age group where out here in California, even in the redneck areas, it's down to 50 50. It's not the nearly 100% of my era, but they have so much better devices to repair the. But they're part of a smaller group. It's like, why wasn't I one of the ones on the
new curve of not being mutilated? You know, my class, small high school, it's a four year high school, and 500 boys in the class, three intact out of 500. That is no longer the case. People I know that have been in that school, well, a friend of mine is. What is he married? He got married at 22. I think he just turned 23. He's intact, and he says, well over half his classmates were intact and the same school. So to go from three men out of all four years to
he's just having to think the other way. Well, who's still butchered and in a redneck place that loves mango? Mussolini. It's an amazing change. What would you attribute that? And when do you think it switched? Was there a breaking point or. I think it's just been slow, although for here, I think the big shift happens. When the local pediatrician retired, we had one, and, in fact, I'm friends with the man and his wife. In fact, I worked with his wife.
We got along on just about anything. We both had weird interests in japanese anime, and we both ended up with full collections of all the Pokemon stuffed animals from Burger King. We're both giant ten year olds. But he always defended mutilation. That's what he had been trained when he was in med school in the early sixties, and he defended it till the day he moved off to Utah. He could not understand my point of view, and I gave it to him more than once,
pretty aggressively. But for him, that was, no, no, I've seen the trouble it can cause, and it's like, no, you're causing that by pulling back. One of my friends, her son was probably one of the last patients he had before he retired. And she was able to keep his paws off his penis for cutting, but he pulled him back, and fortunately, her kid was an oddball who was already loose, but he insisted on tearing back. Gotta make sure that there's no adhesions.
And he never gave up that belief. It's insanity. Our glands and foreskin, it's fused for most boys for several years. There is connective tissue while it's developing. Tearing it loose now makes an open wound on the glands and on the foreskin. That open wound is what seals up and creates adhesions, skin bridges. It creates all sorts of problems. And for decades in this country, the doctors have gone, that's why we've got to do it. It prevents these adhesions. It is so rare that
the statistics for. It's one of the nordic countries, Finland or Norway. One out of 16,000 males have to have it corrected after they get into adulthood. One out of 16,000. Most of it's curable. A lot of people are very impatient and have the. Well, I've seen so many people on online forums nowadays. Well, I tried stretching the opening of my foreskin for a whole month and nothing happened. Give it some time. People want an instafix, and doctors, the instafixes will
just cut that off for you. One weird thing I've noticed with adult circumcisions, whether they be fetish people who wanted it or ones who said they didn't want it, but they had a medical condition, which, sadly, is usually curable, but their doctors don't know is they hate the ending and have it done again. Trying to fix. They're trying to get perfection. I mean, it's your penis and nobody wants a messed up one. And so, well, they took off too much on this side. I'm going to have
it revised and get it even. Oh, well, this doctor left stitch tunnels, you know, then the next thing is, well, I'm going to use this clamp technique so that doesn't leave stitch tunnels. Oh, look, the stapler made this zigzag shape all over me. They're constantly seeking. It's like me, I'm trying to seek a repair. I could declare myself done, finished, over, and if I don't tell you, you're not going to know I'm mutilated. But I'm seeking that last bit of perfection.
That's something we have in common with people who do get cut deliberately. They're never quite happy with what they've done to themselves. It's certainly not all of them. There's ones that they get it done and they don't care. But the big difference is they had the choice to say, I don't like what my foreskin is doing, so I'm going to have it removed. I was never given that choice. I was butchered by clearly a quack who didn't give a damn and given all sorts of problems.
At least if you choose to do it and you get a problem, you can be mad at your doctor, but you made the choice. You've recently switched to air. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm growing inner skin like I never have before, and that's how I've ended up with tunnel. If you stick your finger into the orifice of my foreskin, you're not hitting glands instantly. You got to get there. These air devices are great. And of course, that means inner skin clinging to decaratinized
glands, and that's a way better bond. So, yeah, I love these new air gadgets. The first air gadget I could never get to stay on. I forget what was even called. And the potential. Oh, the potential was there. I kept trying to modify it, but I could never make that plastic cup stay on? I kept popping it loose, then the foreskinned air cured that, but that's practically. It might as well say built at the spanish inquisition if you do have to wear it too long. Great device, but 2
hours is. I mean, I've pulled off more than 2 hours, but it's bad idea. But, yeah, that. That was the one that really took the potential and moved. Well, moved it from potential energy to kinetic energy. It works, but the fit v four has made it. It's not just potential. It's comfortable and stays on. I can still pop the car off. The car is hard for me to keep on if I'm doing anything, if I'm sitting out in the garden
communing with my plants, it's fine. If I get up and walk off and go to build another plant table, it isn't going to stay on. But it is the most comfortable of devices. If you work an office job or something, that is the one you. You might forget that you have it on when you go to bathroom and you drop your pants on. Oh, yeah, that's still there. The improvements in the old ones 20 years ago were good, but these things have just taken a quantum leap ahead with the molded silicons. I suppose
I should say thank you, weird porn toy industry, for making these. Soft silicones, including the intersex community, because they suffer. I've methadore and know several transgender people now. So the first impression is that kind of like, what? But I always said, well, the technologies that they're working on to make the transitions they want may be applicable to growing our tissues back. Something developed for growing a lady into
a man, to grow a penis instead of surgical. At some point, maybe hormonally, and altering the stem cells programming may allow them to grow a penis, and that would be great for us. So anybody that's bashing that while trying to regain their own is cutting off their nose despite their own face. These transgender people aren't trying to force anybody to become transgender. They're not trying to harm anybody. It's they feel they're in the wrong body.
And all the technology developed to help them can easily someday be our savior as well. Why discount them? They're still people. No matter what. Even if it never does help us, they're still human beings. I want the respect to be offered my own body. I should not have been disrespected by a quack. Why should they be disrespected? Intactivism and foreskin restoration lead one. If you're going to look at it logically to
have to respect all people. The thing you mentioned about having allies in different communities, the transgender community, the intersex community, the restoring community, the goal of uniting those groups is kind of why we started this podcast. Like that was the original objective of it. All of us are after the same thing, the genitals we want, not what society tells us we have to have, whether that be caused by a jerk of a surgeon or a quirk of genetics, it doesn't matter.
Our goals are the same. We want the genitals we want. I want my original genitals back. That other person may wish to have the opposite genitals they have, but we're both after the genitals that our mind says we must have. Why would I deny them that? It'd be the same as denying myself restoration. If a child is asking about restoration, I am hesitant because it is a body modification. Even though it's modifying back to the original equipment, it still makes me hesitate
because you are changing your body. It's difficult for me to openly let little kids change their bodies, even though somebody already has done it to them. The potential for making mistakes as a small child is a higher percentage than that of an adult making mistake. We're more likely to whoops that. Nope, got to take it off, rearrange it, put it, fix it back.
Whereas a little kid is. It hurts a little bit. So what I will also say, I really wish the medical community had the self reflection about consent and permanent alterations that you just demonstrated. Yeah, I hear both sides of the argument for, like, a. A child that has, I don't know what they call it, but, you know, we've all known people whose ears are practically hang gliding ears. They're sticking out a mile. And they do get teased as children.
And so some people will allow the surgery on a child to have their ears pinned way back. I see both sides of the argument. One is, well, the kid's gonna grow up, and that kind of teasing won't matter when you're older. But at the same time, if the seven year old is going, please, I want to have it done. They do have their own mind, their own thoughts, their own feelings. They are a sentient being. It's hard to weigh the pluses and minuses on how you choose at that.
And I find that weighs on me when I think about restoration for children, because there have been children that have done it. Our culture loves to draw a line and go, that's the line. That's exactly where, at that age, you can do blank. And that's arbitrary. While one seven year old may be dead, sure he knows he wants to grow his foreskin back, or another seven year old wants to remove it. Another seven year old, maybe I saw this on a cartoon. It's cool
and changes my next week, right after the bandage comes off. I mean, something we've talked about with other people we've interviewed is that mental challenges? That's a huge part of it. It's not just the physical. Yeah. Knowing that you're not complete, at least for me, is brutal. I never am completely over it. It's improved. Well, my intact friend always goes, why don't you just call it a foreskin? And I go, because it's not for me. It's not. It's not original equipment. It's a restoration.
It works. It's way better than I was. But that's not the same as the factory part. And for some people, that doesn't matter at all. And I'm glad that they can do that. I cannot move from my mind that that is not original. Even if a regenerative company figures it out someday and they grow me a complete. Every last piece, no scar, I'm still going to know it's not original. It's still going to be in my mind. And whatever demon you deal with in your head is, well, your private
demons. For some people, that won't matter. But another part of being cut will bother them. They, you know, they were cut. In a culture that doesn't cut, and that's their biggest stumbling block. There's so many permutations of what can be on your mind when you've been physically assaulted as an infant. There's no way that's not part of your consciousness, even the ones, oh, I don't remember anything. Your body remembers. Everybody has unique challenges when it comes to restoring.
Do you think you could go over some of the challenges throughout the years that you've had to overcome to get to the, quite frankly, amazing CI level you are now? Work has been the single biggest pain in the butt because it's difficult to wear devices doing manual labor. Also, if you're working a lot of hours, like right now, I have three stinking jobs. There's a lot of days just tired. I don't feel like dealing with even the slightest new thing. I don't want
to turn that page. The calendar can stay a month behind. I'm too damn burned out and tired. And that definitely can happen with restoration. It is an added routine. Some people like routine. I've always been the opposite. Stick routine on me, and I tend to rebel against it. Utter mad chaos works far better for me. For a lot of things, I am quite stubborn. Even if things take many, many years more than other people do, I will do it, and I've always been that
way, and that's how restoration works for me. But my stubbornness has also led to my few injuries. One time with tape, back in the taping days, I managed to tape out blood flow in a small, little, tiny section. It took a couple months for that to heal, and that was just with tape. Because I'm stubborn. I know damn well, you know, it was like, well, it burns a little bit, but screw it. I'm not taking it off. I put it on. And some people don't get over that. First, boo boo. There's people that
have gone through without a single injury. There's a lot of us that have minor little. A little tear. The tape pulled off, and. Oh, man, you pulled it hard enough that you're bleeding a little or a myriad of things. You were wearing a hard plastic device, and you were dumb enough to go out and play soccer. Well, the ball hit you in the genitals, and that hard plastic combined with ball. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. There's people that. That's enough to stop them. They're done.
They've had their. Their tolerance for that is not overwhelmed by their stubbornness to repair that. There have been financial hurdles. Sometimes I'm just too broke to buy what I need. That has happened with so much as rejuvenus. Tape is expensive. It's no longer in production, and it was the best. Damn it. It's longer production. But, you know, that used to be a $30 box of tape. The prices can really add up if you're using something that's a consumable.
Yeah, you know, that's when I'm even cutting in half. And then using painters tape to make modified j tapes. That's a dollar 30 box of tape that I'm hacking up into a bunch of strips. Device prices. Sometimes it's like, well, there's that really cool device. I can't buy that one right now. Some are getting into the $300 range. Oh, yeah. I have not bought any of those. I've looked at the mentor. I like the concept. Yeah, that's more money than I've got laying around. Plus,
life gets in the way. I have never worn devices while hang gliding. It's too damn physical. But I taught martial arts with devices on a lot. But that's easy. I found this really comfortable cup. It had more than enough room. I'm not John Holmes, so there was room for my device in there. Worked great. Working at a laundry did not work well at all. I did it, but very sporadically. The heat, the sweating, the lifting hundreds of pounds of stuff and shoving it in, and you're
crushing it all into your chest while you're pulling it out of cartwheel. So if you had incidents where it's slipping off, you're with a customer or somebody and you're like, how am I going to snatch this up when it falls on the ground? Uh huh. Yeah. If it's other men, you can always do the adjusting your balls grab, because men don't give a damn if you're dealing with a lady. They find that a little rude. If you reach down, grab yourself. So, hand in the pocket and take care of the issue.
But pull out a knife, you're going to clean your fingernails. You're going to. Whatever you're doing, you can mask it as long as you pull a tool out of your pocket when you're done. That's always been a good hide. And I've always got pockets full of tools. My God, I have at least four knives on me right now. Pull your keys out, pull a handkerchief out as long as you can reach what
you need to. If it's coming loose and, you know, you can just shove it to the side and kind of wedge it where things are tighter, you can pull that off. I got good at tying strings to the GTR. You just tie that to inside your pants, and it doesn't matter if it comes off. I know you, you have a. An ingenious solution. Um, could you tell the people about your pocket modification? Oh, yeah. I don't know why people don't think of this one. You can just cut the
bottom out of your pants pocket. Now your hand has free access to your genitals. It's just a practical issue. If you're having to adjust a device or you're using one of the ones that has a set screw, pick a pocket so you don't put your keys on the one that has no bottom anymore and pop your hand in. Fix what you need to fix. I love these clever solutions. Yeah. You know, over the years, you do it. You have to.
I don't know how many sets of suspenders I've destroyed over the years, and I found it's a lot easier for me to pop them around my neck. But that means a lot more t shirts than button downs in the heat, because you don't want people to see the strap going around you. We touched on this a little bit. But how has your restoring process changed your perception of your body and how you feel about it? Well, one is just maturing. As you get older, you. Your body
just becomes. At least for me, it's just your body. The things dumped on you as a young person just aren't there. As an old man, I have really become. Bite me. As I say to a lot of people, I'm fat, old and ugly. If you don't like it, don't look. That is my usual response, even though I'm just shirtless. And then being covered again has made me even more comfortable in my skin and actually given me a little, almost childish pride in it.
If I get spotted naked, it's not so much of a, you saw me, or even the normal mature, just so what it's almost like, yeah, look, go ahead. Yeah, you can fix it. Bastards didn't leave their mark on me. I got rid of it. It becomes sort of that chai is proud of. Look, I did that. I mean, the mark put on us has so much baggage that people don't look at. Some people probably do not experience it, but I think a lot of people do and deny it.
Face it, every time you have sex, whether it's straight, gay, your parents and that doctor, they're in the room with you, that mark is still there. You're never completely alone with your body once someone has surgically altered it. How has sex changed for you when it comes to restoration? Before getting reliable coverage, it was never better than a 40% chance of me being able to have orgasm in a reasonable amount of time and actually enjoy
the time with a woman. After restoration, it's at least 60% chance of it being enjoyable, sometimes 70. The downside is so emotionally crushing for me that I find I turn down even offers. While I can be open about restoration, it's very hard to tell a woman who's interested in you, and I happen to be interested in her, that my dick is broken. And that's why you can't really catch me, because I don't want to risk the misery.
I've had women say, oh, but you just haven't had a woman who knows how to do and she'll describe some sex act. Yeah, I've had them try, yeah, doesn't fix it. My trigger is so broken. And I've known men who think that this is the greatest blessing in the world and think I'm the biggest asshole on the planet for hating it. But 45 minutes is not unusual for length of time. Insertive penetrative sex, and I still cannot climax. It's unpleasant after a half hour of constant thrusting.
It's downright painful. After 45 minutes, when you head up to an hour, I got to get out of there. And very emotionally brutal for me when that happens, to the point I want to go crawl in a hole now, it's much better. So it's easier to say yes. But now at 56, there's going to be natural decline occurring. So I don't know where this is going to shake out. In the end, you have one thing improving and one thing potentially, and you don't know. Yeah, I don't know when
that'll occur, if that'll occur. There's no way of knowing except doing. But doing is wrought with paranoia, so you kind of avoid the paranoia. It's a vicious circle in my skull. But not everybody has that. There's people that have the opposite, and they have. Their circumcision resulted in them having premature ejaculation that's uncontrollable. I've talked to people with that issue. Some of the same emotional problem for them that, yeah, I inserted and it
was over. And there's an important distinction I think a lot of people miss, is there's a difference between orgasm and ejaculation. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That is one of the swords that awaits you with successful restoration. I've had two orgasms in all the years. That probably was about, what, four years ago, and then maybe two years ago that were extraordinary. Nothing like I've ever had before. The full body that intact men talk
about. But the fact that I've had to, while it was glorious to experience it, it comes with the baggage of, am I ever going to experience it again? This is what I should have had all the time. This was taken away from me. This is what it should have been. It'd be like getting a horse that it plods along, it plows, it pulls the cart, and then suddenly one day it wins the Kentucky Derby. Could it
have done that from the start? What was kept from me and the fact that it's only happened twice in several years, I don't think I'll be ever seeing that become common. But I've heard other men who've restored, who have had better orgasms remain. There's a lot of men that say it gives them a lot more control, but I've never had any trouble with control. My trouble is actually finishing masturbation. You're dealing with your own anatomy, so you know exactly
the rhythm, exactly the pressure. And that has changed with restoration. It used to be friction as a teenager, because that's all there was. It very quickly in the first, not even year of restoration, it was moving what little skin there was rapidly behind the glands, but just using the little bit of loose skin, that was where it is. And now I can do the full foreskin on and off. Stroking it changes. And anything like that, of course, is going to change. I've changed the anatomy.
But what would that have been if I had been intact at 14 or. Intact the whole time? It is a hard thing to explain the experience. It's one of those words kind of fail you. It's just so good. But it's followed by melancholy of, this should have been my normal. Yeah. Just the idea of this is what was intentionally taken away from me. Yeah. And most people want to acknowledge it. They'll go, oh, it still feels good. It doesn't have to feel good. It could have felt great. It didn't have
to be just good. It could have been great. It could have been a v eight corvette with the full dual overhead cam, 670 hp engine. It didn't have to be one that somebody put a straight six in it and said, yeah, you only need 100 horses. Why did you surgically alter it? It's nuts. We're a weird species. And then I do try to temper my thoughts with those people. That's what they wanted. That's what they like. The men who decide they are proud of turning their penis into a dull stick and
call themselves things like dull stick. I don't. I don't get it either. But as long as they're not doing it to non consenting people, especially non consenting joy. Exactly. You put this on a child because you liked it. That is wrong. That child is still its own person. I don't have a right to alter a child if it's mine and that's not just its genitals. If the child is different sexually, it's not my business
if the child is different. Interest. If the kid wants to be a redneck, red hat wearing, orange mango psycho lunatic, I can try to talk him out of it. But he has his own he, she. It has its own opinions, police thoughts. When it comes to restoration, what is the end goal for you? Just. I would like. On the rare occasions I'm with a woman, I would like it to function as if I had never been chopped up. At least even if the nervous system responses off.
At least the mechanical function works, which it mostly does now, but, you know, after climax, wash up, don't see my glands. Have to pull it back to clean it, let go, and it goes back on its own where I'm no longer thinking about it as much. It already has changed a little bit. It's nothing. Constantly jabbing me in my balls with, hey, you're broken. It's not as constant. The most dramatic change was when I talked to Marilyn and Wayne, the day I talked to them, because I used to
cry myself to sleep as a teenager. Teenagers, you get erections if the wind blows, especially if your glands is exposed and there's nothing covering it. Every last thing is clobbering it. So you're getting erections constantly, and, you know, you have the time and privacy to indulge in that. And sometimes I would stop halfway and start crying. That has never happened again since I talked to Wayne and Marilyn, the day they told me I could start working on it. That's never happened
again. The most dramatic change happened the day I found out I could do something. Now, it would be nice if I could get my responses to work, but even if I can't, at least mechanically, 100% would be nice. So I suppose I'll keep adding length for nearly until I'm in a hole. It already behaves really well. I don't have to pull it over. I wake up covered, and I've had nocturnal erections, and it covers itself again, even without the frenulum. It's the perfectionist in me.
Keeps wanting more. Well, you deserve more. You deserve to be whole. Yeah, there's things I can ignore. It took a while, but there's a lot of things I can ignore. I can ignore the terrors and upholstery. I can ignore that my house is falling apart, which most people can do. That. I can ignore that. So what? But I cannot ignore that. That's still not original equipment. It's always there. I don't know. I suppose a lot of people always have something niggling them.
It's like people who remember something they did in the first grade that still bothers them. That they hurt some little kid, or they said something to a teacher, or they got embarrassed in a particular way, and that they remembered every day, not just ten years later. Oh, yeah, I remember that. The thing that needles at somebody forever and shrinks will always just give people, well, we need to transference and go through it and. Yeah, that's.
I've never been good at any of those kind of things, because I'm like, oh, so there's your lie to yourself trick to make it go away. I can't find a way to lie to myself and make my penis become normal. What do you like most about restoring control? I have control over making. Fixing what I can. It no longer completely out of my control. My body never quite feels like my body. It's never been mine. Less than 24 hours old. They took my body and took
it away. This is returning some of it and my control over what's left. It gives me agency over my physical self, which helps my mental self. What do you like least about restoring that? I have to do it. It should have never been on my radar. I've heard this from a lot of people, and you have to have an unusual level of dedication to pull something like this off. Oh, yeah. You have to be willing to accept it takes forever. You have to have the, when you get up, the gumption to do it again. Push.
Push. It's like taking up difficult art. You're not going to become a great painter by just picking up a brush and a kit. It's going to take dedication and sometimes frustration, pain. You may quit for large periods of time, but you have to have the drive to go back. Same as learning a difficult instrument. It's something I need. That's awesome. This next question is a bit heavy, but I think it's an important one. How has resentment and forgiveness factored into your restoration journey?
I have an insane amount of anger and resentment. I haven't been able to forgive anybody involved. Wasn't able to forgot give. My parents, they never apologized. My mother kind of sort of hinted at it, but never, never an actual apology, a bit of deflection. People that do it to their kids make me angry. The doctors that promote it make me livid.
The one thing I know this isn't going to be any kind of solace, but the one thing I try to remember is something that Richard Dawkins pointed out is when people that deny evolution say that what's the use of half an eye? And people that are completely blind would do anything to get
half to half. That eye, they would for some, I don't know if it was a book or a tv show or a TikTok or something, but for some reason, a lot of the young folks I knew all at the same time, were all asking, if you could change one thing, anything in your life, what would it be? Sometimes the answer is, be allowed to be intact, not ever be surgically altered as a child, be allowed to grow into who I was meant to be, not what they wanted me
to be. But the way I look at you might identify with this, is that I think of as circumcision, as a disability, like any other disability. Yeah, it kind of is. But it's an artificially inflicted one. It is. It's really difficult for me to deal with the deliberately held down, why a doctor shredded my penis. You know, I have found that the full description sometimes gets the people thinking about cutting their kids to think twice.
There's something about graphically saying what was done to me that seems to wake some of them up a little bit when I go through. Okay. They held me down, stuck a stainless steel probe. They call it a probe. Think of it as a small ice pick. Ran it all around my glands, under my foreskin, to tear apart what they called adhesions, that are the natural connecting tissue, like under your fingernail. Then he took and smashed it with a pair of hemostats, or forceps, to crush the blood out.
Then after he's satisfied with that, he took either scissors or a scalpel and cut it in half. The dorsal side cut in half. Then peel that back, and the quack manuals will say, wash under where it was. What they're doing is wiping off the torn off of your body's remains from your glands, wiping it so it's nice and clear for them to work with so they can see what they're doing. And then he stuck a plastic bell over there, pulled up way too much of my skin, tied a ligature.
Think expensive dental floss. Tied a knot, which he twisted right under where my frenulum was before he took the spike to it, made a twist in it, and then took scissors or the scalpel and cut off what was left of my foreskin distal to the string. And then told my mother, that'll fall off in the diaper in a week or two. That description seems to help some people finally visualize that. Yeah, it's not a little snip. Yeah, the little snip thing.
And notice that they don't do this in front of parents. I don't know if I cried or not. My parents weren't in the room, but, yeah, they butchered me before they sent me home. Looking back, is there anything you would do differently when it comes to restoration itself? Try to not have the longer gaps. Just try to push through those miserable periods where I can't or
the jobs that got in the way. Fight harder to find a way to at least pull something off those long gaps have added at least a decade, so try to reduce those gaps. What advice would you have for future or current restorers to motivate them? Or just general advice on restoration? Become a bit of a self starter. If you're not, you're going to need it. It can be very lonely. Don't rely on other people for this. This is your journey. Use what you want from other people and discard what you
don't. Once again, your journey. Be willing to hear other ideas. Be willing to change up whatever you've done to something completely opposite. But always be willing to seek out new techniques, new devices, when you can afford one that you like the idea of, buy it. Definitely get over any of the gay fear crap. You're gonna be looking at penises. This is how we learn how other people have done it. It doesn't turn you gay to look at another man's penis. Be willing to
talk to gay people. They can help you. They often know the penis quite well. Listen to your own body's warning signs when it says you've been wearing it too long. If your body says, hey, there's this weird tinge, don't put it on that day. If you don't feel right about it, you got to let your body rest too. It's like weightlifting. You weightlift every day, you're going to tear something. Learn to listen to your body. It will help guide you on how pushy
you can be with it. Don't discount any of it. A lot of it sounds too good to be true and freaky. Well, look into it. Maybe it is too good to be true. Maybe somebody's trying to sell you on something, you know? Use your skepticism, but look. Trust, but verify. This new gadget looks great. Look around. In the end, it's on you. You're the arbiter of this. This podcast is hosted by Dick Guyver and edited
by Openroads. If you enjoyed this episode, please hit the subscribe button and share it with your friends. Want to join our weekly video chat? Click the link in the show notes for details. We also need your help to keep this podcast going. For just $3 a month, you can help us pay for the podcast and inspire others in their foreskin restoration journeys. Thanks for listening and look for new new episodes coming soon.