Note: Never have I gotten so many comments and emails in response to a blog post, much less rumors that I'm a man. I'll keep that in mind. And for the record, it wasn't until 2014 that I had the opportunity to put a man's intact penis in my very much female vagina. This frictionless appendage made me realize that sex doesn't have to be painful or cause hazardous inflammation. And with that image in your mind...

I was nineteen or twenty years old when a male friend of mine, we'll call him Bill, let me in on a most shocking fact: He was missing part of his penis, and so were almost all boys and men that I had ever seen in my entire life, as well as all the anatomical diagrams that I had ever seen. Ever.

Sure, I had heard of circumcision as a Jewish religious practice, but thought myself unlikely to ever see its results. Little did I know, all the male genitalia I had seen both in real life and as depicted in American anatomy books, had been edited in exactly the same way.  The shock from this revelation overwhelmed me for weeks, especially since I considered myself to be fairly knowledgeable about anatomy. (My interests included biology and drawing biological structures).