The Fantastic Foreskin

Still, many restoring men claim that the process has enhanced sex for both themselves and their partners. This concept was even the thesis for a book written by the wife of a restoring man, Sex as Nature Intended It. Author Kristen O'Hara cites a survey she conducted claiming that women prefer uncut men nine to one. O'Hara's Web site for the book includes testimonies from herself and other (unidentified) women who liken sex with a circumcised man to being pounded with a jackhammer, while uncut men are more gentle and responsive. As supporting evidence, she includes alleged testimony from a woman who writes that her first sexual experience involved a guy lying down beside her at a beach, spontaneously masturbating and then raping her. Her next sexual experience, a year later, was a pleasant romp with an uncircumcised man who did not rape her. Case closed.

"It was almost like a relief to me to know that there wasn't something wrong with me," she says, later adding, "He's more sensitive, so he doesn't have to, like, thrust as hard — there doesn't have to be as much friction for him to get the sensation, so it's gentler." In an e-mail, she likened the before-and-after experiences to "going from watching TV on an old black-and-white set to a digital Technicolor plasma screen with surround sound."

Enhanced sex has been especially rewarding to Keith Akers, who started restoring about five years ago.

"I credit the restoration with the fact that I now have a 17-month-old son — who, by the way, was not circumcised," says the 47-year-old Atascocita man.

Akers started restoring with the help of an O-ring and now uses the TLC Tugger, with great results. The proof is in the penis: Akers says he's gone from less than 1 on the CI scale to a 3.5. His goal is to have "full coverage" when he's erect.

While the promise of better sex was his primary motivation to restore, Akers mentions an added benefit.

"Part of it was to make myself different from what my dad is," he says, adding later, "It was something that I did for myself because I have no relationship with my dad to speak of at all...at the time that all of this started, I...finally came to grip with some things and I got some treatment for some chronic depression and with the family issues...this was another thing that kind of helped me feel better about myself and to kind of set a little distance between me and the way I viewed some of the problems."

He also understands what brings others to the restoring community: "A lot of the guys on these Web sites, they really feel violated, that something was torn away from them. I don't feel that as strongly...as they do about it, but I can see their point. And I can agree with them."

Ron Low remembers the moment he decided to restore the way someone might remember a wedding anniversary.

About ten years ago, Low (sounds like "cow") noticed his libido was flat-lining. Sex just wasn't what it used to be.

"For me, intimacy just wasn't getting any better. It was getting worse. And at the same time, it was getting better for my wife. You know, here we are approaching 40, and I felt like...'I can't believe nature is so cruel that intimacy would just get worse and worse and this is all I have to look forward to.'"

He found some information about restoring online, and then came that magic moment: "It was April 1, 2001, at about nine o'clock in the evening," he says, speaking on the phone from the Chicago suburb of Northbrook. He and his wife "were sitting in front of the TV set and I said, 'Hon, I've got to tell you about something. I'm going to start applying tape to my penis every day because I want to stretch my skin and make a new foreskin grow.' And she said, 'Well, that's crazy. That's ridiculous.' And I had to look her straight in the eye and tell her I was deadly serious. 'It's not crazy, and I'm going to need your support, dear.'" And she's been supportive ever since.

Low started with the film canister method, but used his training as an engineer to design a new device — what turned out to be the TLC Tugger. He says he secretly tested it on himself, not wanting to announce his invention until he knew it worked. Even his mother, who lives next door, did not know her son was walking around constantly stretching the skin of his penis.

"For a long time she would see me wearing shorts and notice a knee brace on one leg, which was there to conceal the tugging straps, and she would express concern about my poor knee," he says. "I usually just said I strained it."