Circumcision is a sensitive topic. That’s why Anthony Losquadro, the founder of Intaction, New York City’s largest anti-circumcision group, is trying to rebrand. “About five years ago, we made a change in our advocacy efforts to be what we call foreskin-positive,” he said the other day. “We want to talk about the benefits of having a natural, intact body and not talk so much about the gloom and doom of circumcision.”
It was a chilly afternoon in Union Square Park, and Losquadro, along with a crew of other “Intactivists,” had convened to pass out pamphlets with such titles as “The Intact Dude’s Guide to Foreskin Super Powers” and “Circumcision: I Did Not Consent.”
“You know, foreskin can prevent frostbite,” Craig Adams, a technical editor and a longtime member of the group, said as the wind picked up. Adams, a tall, square-jawed fifty-year-old, was wearing a leather jacket. Like Losquadro and most Intaction members_,_ he is without a foreskin. “I was subjected to circumcision. I’m an amputee,” he said. “Nobody ever told me why it was done to me.”
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Losquadro, who is fifty-nine and has a short black ponytail, had driven from Glen Head, Long Island, in his “mobile education unit,” a converted flatbed truck displaying a billboard-size photo of a half-dressed couple in a compromising position. The caption: “Foreskin . . . A girl can hope.”
“Everyone talks about the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, but when it comes to babies’ genitals, they have no rights,” Losquadro said. “And, you know, what’s wrong with the foreskin? The foreskin never killed anybody. A foreskin just wants to give love, connection, and happiness.”
Losquadro’s day job is in real-estate management, and he runs Intaction from a small studio in his office where he records YouTube videos with titles such as “What’s Causing Young Men to Fall Behind?” and “Can We Have Bigger Penises in America?” It’s also where he updates Intaction’s Web site with research, press clippings, and interactive features, including a survey asking visitors to vote for their favorite uncircumcised celebrity (among the options: Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom).
As part of his advocacy, Losquadro lobbies state representatives to end Medicaid coverage of circumcisions, arguing that it creates an incentive for a medically unnecessary procedure. Last month, he visited Concord, New Hampshire, where the state legislature will vote on the issue later this year. Because his cause attracts supporters on both sides of the aisle, he tries to remain nonpartisan.
Intaction is not Losquadro’s only foreskin-related side gig. He is also the inventor of Alpha Armor, a moisturizing penis-health cream for circumcised men who suffer from dry skin, available on Amazon for $37.75 a tub. An advertisement for the product on the side of Losquadro’s truck reads “Now cut men can get that silky European feel.”
Cartoon by Seth Fleishman
Losquadro likes to invoke, as organizing principles for Intaction, “the four powers of foreskin”: pleasure, protection, lubrication, and connection. This ethos is what snagged Adams’s attention. His circumcision, he believes, caused medical complications later on, including an invasive surgery when he was five. There were practical concerns as well, including impaired masturbation. He started doing research, initially consulting pediatric urology texts, until finally he found a community of like-minded anti-circumcision advocates.
“I would say most of us who are Intactivists are sensitive people,” Adams explained. “We really feel that it’s wrong to alter children without their consent.”
David Grant, a fellow-Intactivist, who had on a T-shirt that read “Foreskin is Fun-Skin,” chimed in to explain the relationship between a foreskin and a satisfying sex life. “There’s so much talk about female dryness in the U.S.,” he said. “But it’s not only women who are supposed to have lubrication.”
A group of high-school girls approached the men. Giggling, they explained that they saw the truck’s billboard from down the street. Grant handed them some pamphlets and suggested that they check out the interactive demo mounted on the back of the truck. He walked them over to a glass box encasing an anatomically correct baby doll in the midst of a circumcision procedure. A sign hung over the box: “Infant Genital Cutting Exhibit.”
“If you push that red button, you will hear an actual circumcision being performed,” Grant told the kids. One pressed the button; the sound of a screaming baby filled the air, and two animatronic latex-glove-covered hands wielding bloody instruments came to life. “A doctor shared this on the Internet, and we just took the audio,” Grant explained. “Imagine being put through that pain just a few days after being born. This is your welcome into this world—being sliced up.”
The teen-agers’ laughter stopped, and their faces twisted in revulsion. “How long does this last?” one asked, straining to be heard over the recorded screams.
Her friend said, “Imagine how the baby feels.” ♦
#Intactivists #Campaigning #Cut
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