Talk:Prepuce

Female prepuce
I was checking in my dictionary for whether the spelling is prepuce or praepuce (it doesn't have the latter), and found that the covering of the clitoris is also called the prepuce. We should therefore mention the female prepuce on this page too -- Tarquin 18:10 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

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Why Prepuce shouldn't be the main article
Ok folks. People have shuffled this article every which way. Currently Prepuce is a disambig article that points to Foreskin and Clitoral hood.

You may not feel that this is an ideal solution. However, after several attempts to build an article that dealt with the fact that "prepuce" refers to two wildly different pieces of anatomy that happen to share a name and some basic anatomical origins, I gave up. To a doctor they may essentially be the same thing, but in the eyes of yours truly they are not. Furthermore, given the voluminous amounts of info people have gathered on the male prepuce alone, I think that any attempt to ram these together would be detrimental to both subjects.

I realize that currently there isn't much material at Clitoral hood. There will be, sooner or later, I imagine, so let's keep things organized on the assumption that someone, somewhere has lots to say about Clitoral hoods. Feel free to try and construct an article at Prepuce that combines the two subjects, but don't just paste in the material from Foreskin as people have been doing; that's not an accurate definition. -Dachshund


 * Amen. Tannin

¿Why do some people want to remove all facts about normal anatamy and function of the præpuce from the Encyclopædia? ¿Why do people divide præpuce, clitoral hood, foreskin, prepuce, and praepuce into separate articles when all of these words are just synomyms for the same thing? We need not fear the truth:

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.." -- (John 8:32)

If anyone wishes to write, this is my email-address:

"?alabio" 

?alabio 07:28 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)


 * Nobody was removing anything, Alabio. There was a detailed article on the male foreskin at foreskin, a short stub of the female equivalent at clitoral hood, and a short, generalised entry at prepuce which disabiguated between the two.


 * Then someone came along and started copying all the same information that was already here and already easy to find and already in its proper place all over the place, so that we had duplicates everywhere, even under impossible-to-type archaic names that no-one uses, and deleting text and adding it back in, and generally making vast confusion out of what had been simple, clear and effective in the first place.


 * Now, finally, we seem to have achieved a sensible arrangement again, which is more-or-less exactly ot was before whoever it was started messing everything up.


 * If, in amongst all that chaos, you added something that doesn't now appear in its proper place - i.e., under "foreskin" for males. "clitoral hood" for females, or "prepuce" for things that pertain equally to both - please feel very welcome to add it back in again. (Just be sure to add it to the correct entry - there is no need to put stuff in "prepuce" that is already covered in "foreskin", for example.)


 * Or, if you are aware of any other information that got lost during the stupidities of the last day or two, then please add that too, or else just note it here in talk and someone will take care of it. Tannin 08:33 Feb 25, 2003 (UTC)

I contemplated the stupidites. I come to the conclusion that it is stupid to have five separate articles for clitoral hood, foreskin, prepuce, praepuce, and præpuce when all of these are the same thing. The stupid ones were the ones breaking the redirects to the consolidated article. It is all the same thing. I have a theory:

Everyone knows that it is wrong to mutilate the genitals of girls. Some believe fore religious or cultural resons that it is okay to mutilate the genitals of boys. The last thing these boy mutilators want to admit is that the præpuce exists on both boys and girls. They want to call the præpuce one thing on boys and another thing on girls. Let me use an example:

It becomes fashionable to depilate all of the hair on girls beneath the hairline of tha scalp at birth. We justify this by stating that hair beneath hairline of the scalp of men is a normal secondary sexual characteristic while such hair on women is redundant. We just sexistly split the vocabulary for suiting our purposes.

The separation of foreskin and clitoral hood is a sexist separation. Since the foreskin and clitoral hood are separate things (¡Anatomy be damned!), it is okay to mutilate boys because it is nothing like mutilating girls.

Since clitoral hood and foreskin are the same thing, I shall redirect all entries to the same article --  but not right away:

I do not want to start an edit war. I wish to be civil. I shall give any and all until the end of the month to post anatomical reasons why I should not merge the articles. If someone finds an anatomical reason not to merge the articles, I shall not do so. I shall not listen to sexist arguments such as, "Foreskins and clitoral hoods are different because we cut forestins off of boy while we leave the clitoral hoods of girls intact."

?alabio 06:45 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)


 * By all means let's add to the prepuce article: we can say how it is anatomically the same thing, how cultures view its removal (and why bl**dy stupid humans seem to have a barbaric fixation for its removal all over the dang planet). But any attempt to merge will be, for now at least, unbalanced, with far more on the male foreskin. Feminists wouldn't like that...
 * Testicles and ovaries are technically the same, but we wouldn't merge those. I expect we have a general overview at gonad however. and on the subject of body hair on women... there's an article on that somewhere, can't rememebr the name, which last time I saw it was stubbish. go check it out -- Tarquin 11:40 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)


 * Please do not start an edit war, especially as this seems to be more of an issue of politics than encyclopedic clarity. I am not for separating the clitoral hood and the foreskin because I'm trying to be sexist or promote genital mutilation.  If you have issues with circumcision, take them up in the circumcision article, and its sub-categories.  Tarquin is absolutely right with his gonad example.  The primary goal of a Wiki article should be to convey information clearly to the readers; as long as all three articles (prepuce, foreskin and clitoral hood) indicate a linkage, we're doing it better with three specific articles than with one kitchen-sink mess jammed together by an abstruse anatomical notion.


 * PS to Tarquin: lack of balance is actually the least of my concerns. I'm more concerned with what a merged article would look like if we had lots of information on both types of prepuce.  Not too easy to read, I imagine. Dachshund 14:29 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)


 * I think the balance is pretty good - or it was last time I checked the entries. Two other points to make: (a) it ain't an "abstruse notion", it's a simple, basic fact of anatomy. And (b), that notwithstanding, it's much more practical to deal with this single subject in two (or possibly three) separate entries. Alabio, what is there in the articles as they stand (apart from the fact that there are three of them, I mean) that you feel needs to be changed? Tannin 15:04 Mar 5, 2003 (UTC)


 * Just because something is anatomically simple, does not mean it's intuitive to the average, non-medically educated reader. Examples of this being the ovaries and the male testicles (medically similar, physically very different), or to a greater extent, the penis and the clitors (anatomically formed from the same process, but developmentally different.)

Dachshund

I have analyzed the arguments. My analysis indicates that separating the articles by gender makes as much sense as having a stub for eyelid linking to two larger articles, one for female eyelids, one for male eyelids. An eyelid is an eyelid, whether it belongs to a man or woman. A præpuce is a præpuce whether it belongs to a man or woman. We should remove the stubs and redirect prepuce, præpuce, foreskin, and clitoral hood to one article. The information at foreskin applies equally to all. Unless I find a reason not to do so, I shall redirect all of the articles for the purpose of conslidation at the end of the month.

?alabio 15:42 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not a doctor, so if alabio has more medical knowledge than the other people who disagree with him, perhaps he can explain the following points BEFORE such a move. I've quickly read the foreskin article. Could you tell us, alabio, do the following points apply to both types of prepuce:


 * frenulum
 * attaches at the crested end of the glans at the suculas
 * reduces friction, abrasion and loss of lubricating fluid during intercourse
 * specialised nerve endings called the "Ridged Band"
 * highly innervated tissue contains about 20,000 Messier corpuscles and Van Der Patter bodies
 * The ridged band contains about 80% of the erogenous tissue
 * smooth muscle, called Dartos muscle?, of the ridged band and frenulum return the prepuce over the glans when the penis is flaccid
 * The muscle fibres are intertwined like a tiny rope to close off the preputal opening to keep out contamination
 * phimosis

If all the above are present in the clitoral hood, then let's merge. Please give references. -- Tarquin 17:48 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)


 * yes - frenulum
 * yes - attaches at the crested end of the glans at the suculas
 * yes - reduces friction, abrasion and loss of lubricating fluid during intercourse (but the mechanics are, of course, a little different
 * yes - specialised nerve endings called the "Ridged Band" - at least the nerve endings are coded long before the hormone balance decides on the amount and type of growth the organ will have, though I doubt that anyone has bothered researching them too much yet - we only got to the bigger, easier to investigate male foresin in the last few years. The term "Ridged Band", of course, is not used, and it's doubtful that it would be appropriate.
 * yes - highly innervated tissue contains about 20,000 Messier corpuscles and Van Der Patter bodies
 * depends on definitions - The ridged band contains about 80% of the erogenous tissue - the tissue is there, but the description of it will no doubt vary.
 * Not sure = probably not - smooth muscle, called Dartos muscle?, of the ridged band and frenulum return the prepuce over the glans when the penis is flaccid
 * Not sure - The muscle fibres are intertwined like a tiny rope to close off the preputal opening to keep out contamination
 * YES - phimosis - at least I've heard of it, but it's not common, AFAIK.


 * It still doesn't mean that the articles should be merged, of course. Tannin

My understanding is that the male foreskin is the anatomical equivalent of the clitoral hood plus the labia minors. Also, the labia majors are the sexually differentiated version of the scrotum. We don't plan on integrating those two articles, do we? Dachshund

Maybe, given Tannin's list, we should mention similarities here, and equivalences. But keep two separate hood / foreskin articles too. -- Tarquin 10:26 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)


 * Sounds like a good idea to me. Dachshund's equivalalences sound pretty much as I remember it, though the penile shaft skin has to fit in there somewhere too. I forget where. My memory ain't what it used to be. :( Tannin

Excised material
The following text was amputated (get it?) from the article:

Note: For historical and cultural reasons, there are two articles on the male and female human prepuce, respectively. Please see the talk page for a discussion of this topic.

This article should only contain material about the prepuce which is common to both sexes.

When I clicked on the female prepuce article, there was only the vestige of a stub there. Ironic, eh? --Uncle Ed 19:14, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Merge in Preputial sheath
Agree with this Oct 2014 suggestion. Klbrain (talk) 14:58, 9 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Klbrain, I agree as well. I don't think there is a need to ask for input from WP:Anatomy in this case, but you can. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 15:02, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Great. I have also modified the Prepuce descriptions slightly to distinguish Foreskin and Penile sheath, based on the header sections of each page. Klbrain (talk) 15:06, 9 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Klbrain, okay. And I removed the merge tag. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 15:46, 9 March 2016 (UTC)