Follow-up on yesterday’s post about circumcision and HIV: the studies that seemed to demonstrate that at least for African men who were circumcised for the study the rate at which they contracted HIV went down and the rate at which they passed it to their partners appeared to go down even further.

Yesterday I mentioned Kelly Cogswell of A dyke abroad’s bitter point that “Forgotten also are all the circumcised men in the States that dropped dead before ARV’s came on the scene. A foreskin more or less didn’t help them. Or don’t faggots count when you’re counting heads?” And in comments to that post A of A traveling spouse, who’s no slouch when it comes to research, said she couldn’t find an explanation for why American gay men clearly weren’t protected by circumcision.

Quick digression: years before I started writing about sex I participated in the old Usenet pregnancy and parenting forums. While there were lots of things to talk about there were two that, no matter what just. Wouldn’t. Go. Away: breast vs. bottle and circumcision vs no circumcision. My conclusion after listening to way too much of that debate was that we’d leave it up to our (then newborn) son to decide, with the bonus observation that at least in our neighborhood back then tattoo and piercing parlors were opening faster than coffee shops and that I was sure that by the time he was of age piercers would be offering not just plain but fancy circumcisions.

Anyway, thinking about that got me thinking about body piercing in general, and that reminded me of a couple of bloggers who talked about the recovery period for their cock piercings and ampallings (I think I spelled that right.) Anyway the short answer was that recovery for piercings takes months. And months.

Months during which I’m guessing that even with a condom to keep everything from pulling and tugging you’re not going to want to be doing anything where friction’s going to be involved. Like, say, sex.

And so my next questions about the study (and don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure the researchers would taken these things into account) are:

- Just how long does it take for an adult man to recover from a circumcision anyway? Enough to be interested in sex again, for instance. Especially in the kind of dry, high-abrasion style intercourse allegedly (and I mean that, allegedly) too-often favored by tradition in sub-Saharan Africa. For instance.

- How long were the studies that led to the circumcision recommendations? (Remember that at least one such study was cut short because the success rate for circumcised men was so high.)

Anyway, the point being that the men in the study were all freshly circumcised as part of the program, and you’d want to make sure the results weren’t skewed by, say, reluctant celibacy while the wounds and/or secondary infections related to the wound heal. If, and I’m only saying if, that was a factor, and I’m not saying it was, then the long-term benefits might not be so high and, especially, it would account for the perceived lack of protection for men (American gay men, North African straight men) who are traditionally circumcised in infancy.

The old punchline has it that we know almost all circumcised infants are unable to walk for up to a year after the procedure. But how long for an adult?