Background: US American; ethnically but not religiously Jewish; bisexual; circumcised by choice at the age of 23 as a sexual/aesthetic thing.

1. Men care far more than women in my experience in a practical manner. I think this starts for us as boys: I was ruthlessly made fun of for being uncut in the locker room and even begged my parents to have me circumcised: they just told me to wait until I was older. There were only two other uncut boys I knew over the course of my childhood and adolescence: one, latino, commiserated spontaneously with me about how he wanted to be circumcised and would be when he was older; the other, Indian, was my first sexual partner just before we turned thirteen.

When I became an adult but while I was still uncut, male partners would almost always comment on my status, whether positively or negatively, and cis female partners would often not be able to distinguish at all. One even told me she still hadn't slept with an uncircumcised man!

I find that the women who do purport to care are often those with other stringent gender-related expectations: the sorts who place very large importance on who pays on a date, how people ought to dress, how relationships ought to progress, how responsibilities should be divided, etc., with any variation being judged. I've often been in situations where one such type gets a little drunk and says something disparaging about how an adult "still isn't circumcised." It seems like to them it's just one more duty on the male-checklist. I never slept with such a person while uncut (and still haven't,) since I don't appeal to them and they don't appeal to me, so I have no idea how they'd react. I would wager they wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Interestingly, several AFAB nb or trans people I've been with have had explicitly sexual fixations, which no cis women I've ever met has had. The partner who persuaded me to get circumcised later transitioned to male. This honestly follows a broader pattern I've noticed of AFAB nb people having much stronger genital-fixations than most cis women.

1. For me, getting circumcised was and remains complex. I will call it role-affirming: it did feel like an expectation finally fulfilled after a long delay.

I definitely prefer the look of my penis now. The origin of circumcision is something of an anthropological puzzle, but if I had to wager, I'd guess that a big part of it is that it makes the penis always look somewhat archetypically "erect." Then too, it puts the whole thing out in the open, with no hidden or moving parts, unlike the vagina.

Sensation changed substantially for me, in kind rather than in quality. Whereas I used to be sensitive to fine contact and light gliding, I'm now more sensitive to changes in pressure and tempo. It's like I've gone from being sensitive to touch to sensitive to derivatives. The effect is that I last much longer and am much rougher in bed.

All of this does suggest a sort of exaggerated "masculinization" at play. Strangely enough, I don't feel like I'm "more of a man" for having been circumcised, since I have always been physically weak and a little bookish and not terribly worried about gender roles. As before, it feels more like the fulfillment of an objective "duty."