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In season two, episode nine of Sex and the City, ‘New Dogs, Old Dicks’ (1999), the four central characters, Carrie (Sarah-Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin David) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), meet in their characteristic formation around the table of a café. In this episode, Charlotte is dating a restaurant critic, but runs into a problem when she discovers something shocking: he is not circumcised. In the typical parlance of the show, a conversation ensues whereby each woman’s reaction tells us something about her: Charlotte is verging on horrified as if his penis offends her prim waspish New England sensibilities. Miranda is suspicious and declares she likes things to be ‘out in the open’. Carrie makes a balanced comment, citing that 85 per cent of men are not circumcised (a shock to the table). As the sexually adventurous and relatively unjudgemental relief, Samantha embraces uncircumcised men, boasting that they are ‘the best’ and that she has slept with five. In this scene, men can be placed into one of two categories, circumcised and uncircumcised - sets that form a simple equation for which all can be designated.
Perhaps I thought about this scene when I began reading Jordan Osserman’s Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural, Psychological, and Gendered Dimensions of the World’s Oldest Surgery because, not having a penis myself, my relationship to circumcision is closer to the Sex and the City scenario than the author’s. In other words, I can discuss but cannot embody either side of the dividing line of the practice Osserman systematically investigates through the realms of religious tradition, medical practice and, more recently, a point of gathering for men’s rights activism, as well as his own somatic and cultural experience. As such, in reviewing this book, it seems pertinent to point out that I have no ‘skin in the game’, though this is obviously not a requirement for engaging with the detailed and dedicated study that Osserman