How old were you when you discovered you could retract your foreskin?

My sexuality started when i discovered i could pull my foreskin back. the men around me were cut, my dad, uncles etc and no one even told me about cleaning behind there,

so at about the age of 8 i was in the bath and discovered i could pull the skin back and expose the head which i really liked the look of and for some reason made me feel like the men i saw. i liked how the head felt exposed to the air and it would make me feel so horny too.

wondered what the experience for others was.

Sadly I did not discover it myself. It was at about 5 yo after a very painful examination where the doctor did a synechiotomy detaching the prepuce from glans with a pair of hemostats. When at home I realized exactly what they did to my penis.

@Spengle How come were all these men cut but not you?

@obertaller Essentially your prepuce was “glued" to the glans and he freed it?

We lived at a boarding house and at the age of 5 the landlords teenage daughter crept into my bedroom thinking I was asleep, I pretended I was, I was nude.

She examind my penis with gentle care and pulled back the foreskin. Now I knew!

My mother did it to wash under there beginning at age 1 day so I knew from my earliest memory.

I vaguely remember my aunt and grandmother checking that my foreskin was healthy and all because of the big drama my father made of me not being cut. My mother's side of the family being Belgian, had no truck with circumcision at all, considering it a religious and dangerously undesirable thing to do to males, since it had only recently before my birth, been a marker (one of many) used to identify Jewish males for deportation and worse. The memory of the war was too fresh, let alone the whole principle of circumcision.

However on my own, it wasn't until my later teen years or around 20 that I started doing the retraction myself. And I was quite tight actually. However i worked on it by myself, inserting a finger under the foreskin or using two small (lubricated) tea spoons inserted under and then opened up like a sort of makeshift instrument. I also liberally applied any kind of skin cream or body lotion of my wife's I could find.

My self-treatment worked very well and was quite fun as well.

@Pecan_nutjob it was partially adherent to the glans, I almost never retracted it before due to disconfort. He pulled the foreskin with a pair of pliers while inserterting a pair of hemostats and opening it in dorsal and lateral aspect between the inner prepuce and the glans. He also dilated the prepucial ring. This finally permit a retraction he did manually exposing completely my glans.

Mine was almost fully retractable by the time I have any memories of my penis at all. I know it could go down to show the entire glans when flaccid, and was tighter if I were erect. I'm not sure whether mine was forcibly retracted as a toddler or whatever, but wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. If so, there was no lasting damage. 🙂

My dad used to retract mine in the bath for cleaning from an early age (3 or 4).

I amazes me that so many boys are not taught how to pull back their foreskin, and have to discover it for themselves. I've seen accounts from boys/men who reach their late teens or even twenties before they learn that they should be able to retract their foreskin, and then find that it's too tight.

My Aunt Helena bathed me and my Cousin Victoria together.

She would always lower my foreskin until her glans appeared completely hers, she would wash it with soap and raise it to its normal position.

Me and my cousin Victoria 7 years.

Then my cousin and I bathed alone.

Once my Aunt said:

Children, have you bathed yet?

My cousin said:

I am washing her "pilila", I am washing her little head as you do.😃

And he already washed me "el chichi".😃

My aunt came angry:

"la Pilila" washes it himself and "el chichi" you wash it yourself, as I told them.

She put us in OTK position and spanked us.😢

From that day on, only she bathed us or first one and then the other.

But never the two alone😞

Was circumcised at birth , so never had a foreskin to learn to move . To my memory I never had a forskin and being I grew up to be incontinent , I am happy to not have any specialty moisture or fecal management required during diaper changes , all my aide has to do is ensure I am diapered.

I was 19 before I even was able to see the glans of my penis, so I was never able to retract my foreskin. It was phimotic and very long such as to cause significant overhang. Got circumcised in college.

At first i could only retract my foreskin when i was flaccid. feeling the air on my glans would usually give me an instant erection but i couldnt get the skin back over the head when i was erect. one day i managed to pull my foreskin back when i was erect it hurt for about a week or so like a niggling little pain. but after that when i got an erection my foreskin would snap back behind the head but i still couldnt get the skin back over the head when i was erect. i use to be left with raging skin backed hard ons that would rub in my pants.

@Pecan_nutjob i really dont know, my dad was cut so were my uncles, even my best friend.

i was always confused why my cock didnt look like theirs. i thought you was meant to leave your foreskin rolled back so it would look like that.

This is an odd one for me because I was never able to retract my foreskin, and I always thought that was normal because nobody ever told me otherwise and I had no way of finding out for myself that you were supposed to be able to retract the foreskin and expose your tip/head. I always found my tip very sensitive, the part of it that I could touch that just about poked through my foreskin, and thought that was how things were supposed to be, so either don't touch myself there or be prepared for a bit of excitement/shock if I did, and look out when my willy did that thing where it goes really hard in my pants for no reason…

I discovered the truth when I got an infection under my foreskin that meant it hurt when I peed, and I admitted it to someone looking after me one day because I had to explain why I wasn't myself and felt uncomfy and couldn't sit still, and I didn't want to go to the bathroom, and she said ‘Tell your mum, she needs to take you to the doctor because you might have an infection’. So I did tell my mum, and low and behold I did have an infection, and my doctor took one look at my dick and said I needed a circumcision. I asked my mum what that meant and she actually explained it really well - it was the removal of some skin on my penis that meant I would be ‘more comfortable as I got older.’ (Totally ironic, I didn't quite clock that she meant when I got an erection, but I'd already experienced them and thought my slight discomfort because of the tight foreskin was normal, and then my mum got to see me get one in my pants while being examined by the doctor for my circumcision pre-op medical aged 9 at the hospital, which I've written about in a couple of other topics…see ‘Auscultation’ on here…last thing I expected was a full medical where the doctor listened my hearbeat and breathing just because I was going to have my dick operated on!)

After that whole episode I was officially snipped, which is uncommon for kids in England unless they have phimosis, which I definitely did have. In all my life I've only ever known one other person who got snipped for this reason, who was a friend of mine who got it done about a year before I did. It was SO embarrassing having to hide from everyone at school the reason I'd been in hospital and then had 2 weeks off school learning at home because of it. Even though it was worth it in the long run because I got two very cool medical exams as a result of the process that ended up resulted in my medfet as an adult, although they weren't related to genital exam, which to this day does nothing for me. I went to the doctor as a 16 year old with concerns about a painful testicle, and being poked and prodded down there did nothing for me despite the previous childhood memories of dropping my pants. I even remember the first exam when I went in with the infection, and my mum explaining to my sister ‘You’re going to have to wait outside because Alex is going to have to have his willy examined and it's going to be quite difficult for him so you're not to make fun or tease about this'. I wasn't really that bothered showing the doctor my dick; it was all just because I needed to get better and that was that. So I had the op and to this day I'm a snipped English guy who once went through major embarrassment but now really doesn't feel bothered talking about it.

@RocketStripe90 Were you surprised when you discovered the result of the surgery?

I discovered that it wouldn’t retract properly during a school medical at the age of 7 or 8 when the doctor tried pulling it back. It was able to retract much more easily from about 12.

@RocketStripe90 Were you surprised when you discovered the result of the surgery?

Yes, very surprised! When they took the protective dressing off it so I could try taking a pee to make sure everything was okay before they'd send me home, I remember thinking it looked totally different down there, so different that it was like I didn't have my dick operated on so much as grow a new one while I was knocked out. I didn't share that thought but I seriously remember having it. I just sat there on the toilet staring at it while a nurse kindly encouraged me to pee and turned a tap on because apparently the sound would help by making me less able to resist the urge. Which didn't work, it took me another 2 hours until I was bursting for me to be able to do it because I was afraid it would sting, and in the end it didn't really.

@RocketStripe90 A cousin of mine, same age as me, was circumcised at age 7 and when he saw the result he thought they had somehow changed the tip of his penis—same reaction as you! He had never seen his glans (except the tip part around the hole, I guess).

I think he really understood what had been done when he compared with mine a bit later.

Had you been told what would be done ?

When I read some messages, I can't believe that someone didn't know how to pull foreskin, that someone didn't teach him that, I remember up to the age of 11, I don't think a single day of bathin the evening went by without someone standing over my head and shouting that twist the foreskin and wash well, until I was 11 years old I could not pull the foreskin under the glans, I was also at the urologist almost ready for circumcision, but the persistence of constantly pulling the foreskin with the help of the cream helped to prevent it from happening, my mother was constantly by my side me and sometimes she twisted my foreskin a little harder, it was painful, especially if the cock was slightly erect at that age, but I suffered because I was afraid of circumcision at that age, I didn't even think of it as a kind of sexuality, I was ashamed that my mother constantly was by my side, although every time I remember it, I get very turned on and wish for it to happen again.

...I can't believe that someone didn't know how to pull foreskin, that someone didn't teach him that...

It seems that many parents do not teach their boys anything about penile hygiene, and it is then left to chance as to whether the boy discovers for himself that his foreskin can be retracted. If the foreskin is loose, this will inevitably happen when he starts getting regular erections and masturbating, but where the foreskin is long or somewhat tight, it may not occur to the boy to try pulling back on the skin, or doing so may be uncomfortable. Foreskin retraction is not always checked at school medicals - it wasn't at any of mine.

The reddit group https://www.reddit.com/r/Phimosis/ (a help forum for phimosis sufferers) contains frequent accounts from teenagers and young adults who only came to learn in their late teens or even their twenties that foreskins should be retractable.

It's not a new problem - a 1953 paper by Osmond "Is Routine Circumcision Advisable?" describes examinations of army recruits and deplores the lack of penile hygiene (many had accumulations of smegma). It contains the quote "many of them expressed surprise at the condition revealed when they retracted their foreskins; some of them had apparently never done so in their lives". I remember reading a magazine article many years ago, also about penile hygiene, and it referred to a study of teenage schoolboys. The study made a comment along the lines of "of those who could, a significant percentage had never even attempted to retract their own foreskin."

Better school sex education required? Or better parenting?

It seems to me that in this age of single mothers raising boys without a father around when they didn't have a father at home either, how would they know anything about what to teach their son?

I was diagnosed with severe phimosis during a school medical when i was about 7.

Against all the odds, i avoided circumcision but it took until i was around around 10-11 before i could pull it all the way back with ease.