This was the late 60s, early 70s. We had mental hospitals. They were like prisons. They were not nice places. And that's not a place you want to go. It wasn't like going to see a psychiatrist or a psychologist to go get some counseling or something. These were where you went and lived. And everybody that I ever knew that went in never came back out. Well, that scared my parents too. So we just learned to shut up, you know, I did too. I just said, okay, you can't help me.
So then I just started thinking, there's just got to be something that I can do about this. It just didn't seem right. The Intact Again podcast is an oral history project where we share stories from those who have been circumcised and are working to restore what was taken from us. Our hope is to inspire each other with our collective stories of loss and recovery.
Welcome back to the Intact Again podcast. In this episode, we interview Estimato, the man that invented manual methods all the way back in 1968. He quite literally took matters into his own hands. In this three part series, he discusses how he learned to forgive, how he was threatened with being thrown in a mental asylum for just complaining about the painful erections that were caused by circumcision and how all this restoration stuff changed throughout the many
decades that he's been doing this. Here is Estomato's restory. The Invention of Manuel, Part 1. What were your family's attitudes about circumcision? And was there agreement amongst the family like when you were growing up? Was everybody on the same page on that? I was raised adjacent to the Jewish faith. Not Jewish, but in a fundamental religion that believed a lot of the things that Jews did. But I don't think that my parents or it was not a religious
belief to get circumcised. It was just something that the doctors told them they needed to do and they did it. I've often wondered if my grandfather was circumcised. You know, I never knew. I knew my dad was. I don't know about his father. His father died before I was born, knew nothing about him. But I had a grandfather that I knew on my mother's side and I was always curious whether he was circumcised or not. I imagine he probably was not. He was raised in a Catholic orphanage in New Orleans.
Catholics didn't just normally go around circumcising people that I know of. Not back then. What time period are we talking about? Oh, we're talking about in the early 1900s. Doubt there was any circumcision going on back then? I don't really know. Yeah, that was way before the craze of that started. Yeah. Being religious, we knew of the Bible talking about the Abrahamic covenant and how God told Abraham to circumcise his son.
My dad explained that to us, what that meant, and that's why his two boys have a circumcision scar across their penis. You know, we understood what that was, and it was just kind of like, well, that's what we did. And at the time that that got explained, I was not even an adolescent yet. I was probably in elementary school. We never talked about when it happened or anything like that. But he was circumcised. My brother and I were both circumcised. It just was what it was.
But no, they were all on board. I mean, it's just something that's. That happened. And I never questioned them later. Why'd you do this? I was not raised in an environment where you questioned your elders about their motives and decisions. Parents did as they pleased. You were a kid, you just did as you were told. How was sex discussed in the family? I know you grew up religious, so I'm guessing not much. But I've been
surprised by the answer to this question before. Even as children, we knew my parents had sex. They had it behind a locked door, but I had the bedroom next door to theirs. And I knew what was going on. As a child, I never knew exactly what they were doing, but it sounded like they were wrestling and it sounded like they were having fun. But we were taught that sex was for marriage, it was for creation. Nudity was not a big deal. We only had one and a half baths for six people. You know, we ran
around. My mother told my sister when she was about 16 that she needed to start wearing more clothes. We always wore underwear back then. You know, everybody had a pair of underwear on, but that was about it. My mom would run around sometimes in a slip and a bra, but that was non sexual nudity. I was the oldest, but I recall a younger brother at one time running around with an erection in his pants, you know, and he was probably five or four, I don't know how old he was.
He was running around in his underwear, you know, in. In the tighty whities. You could see it poking out, you know, a little bit. And she's like, hey, when you're like that, you need to go put pants on. So, you know, we got taught a little bit of modesty there, but, you know, I skinny dipped with other kids until I was 12 or 13 years old. That was no big deal. We lived on the edge of the suburbs, and there were creeks and ponds and things that we could go swimming in,
and we did all that. So that was nudity. But sex was totally reserved for marriage. You were not supposed to have premarital sex. And I managed somehow not to. Seemed like every time I was going to commit to it, I got caught and somebody nixed it, you know, and said, oh, that's not happening right here. So I never ended up never having sex until I was engaged to my wife. And we did have sex before we were married, but, you know, just a few times, and we were already engaged. So as long
as we didn't have any babies, we were good. Nobody knew. I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, and I was a withdrawn child. I did not want people touching me. I was a touch me, not. I couldn't display affection hardly at all. I was one of those people that was just kind of cold. And I really believe that stemmed from the circumcision. You know, I was one of those babies that would not nurse. I was one of those babies they had to coax into living. I was detached, and I
didn't trust anybody. That has been my entire life. I have only learned trust in the last 10 or 15 years. How did you first become aware that you were circumcised? And could you describe the feelings you had when you first found this out? Well, as I started puberty, my erections hurt, and my penis was bent to the side. My left side was shorter than my right side, and I also had kind of a lump down in my testicle area. I talked to my dad about it, and he's like, well, I don't
know what's wrong with you. Well, go to the doctor, go to the doctor. They said, oh, there's nothing wrong. You're fine. Don't worry, dad, you'll be fine. But yet every time I had an erection, it hurt. I went to the doctor several times because they tell me everything was fine, but it wasn't fine. You know, when you have pain and your erections hurt, it's a highly personal thing. Erections were not something anybody talked about in my family, but I had to confide in my parents because they
were the only adults around. So they took me back to my pediatrician. I was probably 15 or 16 years old. And he looked me square in the eye and he said, you know, you've been in here three or four years times he said, there's nothing wrong with you, you just need to man up. Or we can take you to the mental hospital and get somebody to look at you psychologically. This was the late 60s, early 70s. We had mental hospitals. They were like prisons. They were not nice
places. And that's not a place you want to go. It wasn't like going to see a psychiatrist or a psychologist to go get some counseling or something. These were where you went and lived. And everybody that I ever knew that went in never came back out. Well, that scared my parents too. So we just learned to shut up, you know, I did too. I just said, okay, you can't help me. So then I just started thinking, there's just got to be something that I can do about this. It just didn't seem right.
Foreign. Hi. It's open roads and I just wanted to break in here for a second to let you know how our Patreon is doing. We have a few members and we ran our first Google Ads over the Christmas break. We're also working on a way you can make a one time donation. I'll keep you posted on our progress. In the meantime, thank you for helping us tell more men and parents about the harms of circumcision and the possibility of restoration. Let's keep growing this together.
There was an old farmer whose wife was an English teacher that lived a few miles from our house. And I helped him muck out stalls and things like that. He was really, really old, but he had every single National Geographic ever published. Just a whole shelves full of them. And him and his wife were all about education. We didn't own a television. We never did. So I read National Geographic magazines from COVID to cover. I'll just check them
out like a library. I'd bring four or five of them back and get four or five more. And it just dawned on me that these people that I see in those pictures, they've stretched their lips until a big wooden plug would fit in it. They stretched their ears. They've done all kinds of things. I said, I wonder if I could just stretch the skin, because that's where it hurts. The skin is what hurts. So I started tugging on my skin with this express effort of making it longer.
And basically that's how Manual Method one got started. I just started tugging and then figured out that I could wrap both fingers around it in an okay symbol and bingo. Mm2. And I just kept doing that. I was going through puberty and growing rapidly at this time. And fact is, I had about a 5 inch erection and I actually grew till it was 7 inches long and it took about 4 or 5 years. So I guess I grew at least 2 inches of new skin. And the lump in the base of my penis went away,
the curve went away. Everything was straight and everything was fine. Has all the things that you've gone through because of, well, let's call it what it is, medical malpractice, has it affected to this day your view and trust of the medical system? Absolutely, yes. As an example, I have taken medications occasionally, but as soon as side effects start cropping up, I stop. I'm 68 years old and I don't take any medications that other 68 year old people take.
I use herbs and natural means of controlling blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, all of the things that normally crop up when people are old. I don't partake in any of those drugs. I do not believe that the pharmaceutical system has our best interest at heart. Nor do doctors have. Their main interest is making money. You know, I don't want to condemn the entire medical establishment, but 98% of them, I think, are only in it for the money.
There are a few that truly do want to help their patients, but that's my cynicism there, that's my attitude. So I take everything with a grain of salt. I get on the Internet, I research every little thing I can to figure out how I can keep from having a doctor put a pill in me. I remember you saying that it took 60 years for you to undo the psychological consequences of circumcision. Do you feel like you are, I don't want to say over those things, but more able to trust now? Yes,
you're never over it. I mean, you learn to forgive for your own sanity, but you never forget. What was it like when you did have your children to be able to protect them from being circumcised. So yeah, with my kids, that was not a challenge for my children. We had our children at home. They were not in a hospital, they were not at a birthing center. My wife spent a lot of time in the hospital as a child and she said, I don't like the way the doctors birth babies.
They do episiotomies to women. They do all kinds of things. I'm not having that done to me. So we educated ourselves on how to have babies and we had ours at home. I caught every one of my babies as they came out and they're holding intact. But now with my grandsons, yes, they were born in military hospitals and the military Tried to circumcise all of them. One wasn't so bad, but one grandson. I had to actually get into an argument with the nursing staff, with the doctor on duty.
I told them, we need to call the MPs, because I'm going to start legal proceedings immediately. And we need this documented. And the MPs have cameras. You know, if you're going to take this baby out of my arm to circumcise it, you're going to get hurt. You also have twin grandchildren, Right. Can you tell us the struggle you had with your daughter over trying to convince her not to circumcise her twins? My daughter was married to a man who circumcised.
And of course, when we did not know the sex of the babies, that was the very first thing I asked her, if it's a boy, what are you going to do? She goes, what do you mean? I said, well, what about circumcision? You know, I'm not bashful about bringing that subject up to nearly anybody. And she said, well, we'll circumcise him. My husband is circumcised. I said, no, we're not doing that. And we. We kind of had a serious disagreement, which became
null. After about four or five days. We found out that the babies were girls. So that argument got taken out of our hands. Yeah. So when they were born, I said, so when are you going to have them circumcised? And she looked at me with typical horror. You were going to do it to the boy, why wouldn't you do it to the girl? What's the difference? It's the same tissue. She got that look on her face. It's like, oh, my God.
There was a realization that came across her face that she realized that what a bigoted, horrible decision it was to say that I'm going to mutilate a boy, but I'm not going to mutilate a girl. Could you talk about how with your first son, a doctor was convinced that somebody had to retract his foreskin? That's the thing I did wrong. With my son, I had no knowledge of a foreskin. I only read that it needed to be cleaned,
which was false. I'd never read the data that said that it was naturally adhered to the glands until a certain age or, you know, until puberty at least. But, yeah, he had a rash. And you put an ointment on that rash? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And said, so have you cleaned his foreskin? And she says, how do you do that? I'm like, I don't know, I think you're supposed to retract it. And she's like, I don't know how to do that. And so we look at it and it doesn't retract. Well, there must
be something wrong with it. So you asked the pediatrician, right? Then he said, well, let's just take a look at him. Sets his co kid up on the table. And my son remembers this to this day. He's 40 something. When that doctor just reached over there and went, RIP. And he says, that was the worst pain I ever suffered in my life. That was my only regret. I had that boy retracted and it was wrong.
His wife had all her babies naturally, as natural as possible, you know, in a hospital, and they're all intact. There's still more to come from Estimato. In the next episode, he gets more into the details of how he was able to use manual methods to gain enough slack skin to have enjoyable and non painful erections. Here's a clip from the next episode. I mean, if you're going to tug, you might as well tug what you want. New cells grow new in the area of tension.
If you're tugging scrotal skin, you're getting more scrotal skin and you're going to have hair in it. So you have to start with the end in mind. You know, you have to have a goal. You have to think about those things before you start. This podcast is hosted by Dick Guyver, ed, edited by Open Roads and promoted by Turkish Restore. If you enjoyed this episode, please hit subscribe and share it with your friends.
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