"I hear a thousand times a year from men who don't feel that they look like most other men in the locker room. In our society, there's an overriding preference for circumcision," says Cornell, who performs 250 procedures a year on men who, for cosmetic reasons, want a circumcision or a revision to one they don't think looks right.
Circumcision constitutes 30% of Cornell's urology practice. He charges $2,500 for the procedure and does not take insurance. Though frequently attacked by anti-circumcision activists, he says, "I'm doing a cosmetic operation on a consenting adult. Why he's doing it is his business."
The social pressure described by Cornell is what drove Dave, who works in the adult entertainment industry as a producer and actor, to get circumcised eight years ago.
Now 31, Dave was born in England, where infant circumcision is not common. He came to the United States as an infant and recently moved from Irvine to Miami.
As an uncircumcised young man, he says, he felt awkward in gym class. "I read that being circumcised makes the penis easier to clean and less susceptible to sexually transmitted disease. I had friends in medical school telling me, 'Dude, you should do this.' " So he did. But hygiene was not the chief motivation. "I wanted to fit into American culture. When you're circumcised, there's less rejection from women," he says.
Today, he's glad he had the procedure; but, he says, fitting in now is less of an issue in Southern California and Miami because so many more men aren't circumcised.
