For those readers outside the United States, Thanksgiving is a holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. The typical fare is turkey. But, the neck on the turkey for dinner isn't really what I want to talk about here.

One common side effect of routine infant circumcision is turkey neck or penoscrotal webbing. Turkey neck occurs when the penis shaft skin is so tight that, when erect, some skin from the scrotum is pulled forward on the bottom of the penis. The pulled scrotal skin forms a web under the penis. Penoscrotal webbing sometimes occurs in intact men, but most often in circumcised men with a very tight cut. An aggressive circumcision removes too much skin and scrotal skin is pulled up to accommodate the enlarged penis during an erection.

With an infant, it is impossible to judge the size of his penis when the infant is an adult. So, typically, the doctor removes what he thinks is enough skin. If too much shaft skin is removed during circumcision, then when the adult has an erection, scrotal skin is pulled away from the body. This is typically more pronounced at the ventral side. The scrotal skin forms a web from the bottom of the scrotal sack to the circumcision scar for the most extreme case.

Typically, guys just starting foreskin restoration worry about getting a turkey neck. Most experienced tuggers will tell you that as you grow more shaft skin, your scrotal skin will stay next to and around your nuts. It does this because the skin that is most susceptible to growing from tugging is closer to your glans and the slack skin you are growing keeps the scrotal skin from being pulled up. Typically, the new skin is between where the scrotal skin attaches to the shaft and the corona.

With a bi-directional device like the CAT IIQ, DTR, or TLC-X, the skin that is tensioned most is the skin inside the device. That is the skin between your glans and the clamping part of the device. Depending upon how tight the skin outside the device is when wearing the restoring device, the outer skin, including any scrotal skin, may not be tensioned at all or have very little.

Another factor that tells us that it is difficult to grow a turkey neck is that, if you use a tugging device to tension your skin, the skin closest to the device has the most tension and is the part of your foreskin that is most likely to grow. The skin further away from the device has a larger cross-sectional area and the tension per area is less. With less tension per area, there is less or no growth of skin.

When I first started rstoring my foreskin, I immediately noticed that my scrotal sack was hanging lower. As my shaft skin loosened up from restoring my foreskin, less scrotal skin was needed to cover my shaft. that scrotal skin stayed around my testicles and let them hang lower. The natural tendency is for the scrotal skin to return to the scrotum as more foreskin is restored.

Bottom line, unless you are stretching your scrotal skin so tight that you can strum it like a guitar string, don't worry about creating a turkey neck or making an existing one worse. Foreskin restoration will not create a turkey neck. Nor will it make one worse. One benefit to restoring your foreskin is reducing an existing turkey neck.

The picture below shows a turkey neck just before it is surgically removed. Click the pic to see the full story in a new window/tab.

Picture at Dr. Harold Reed website.

See the following for more info:

• Penoscrotal web and release photographic examples by Dr. Harold Reed
• Matters of Size: Turkey Neck: Penoscrotal Webbing - Eliminate it!
• Dr. Whitehead: Correction of Penoscrotal Webbing (Turkey Neck)

• More information on turkey neck, and foreskin restoration in general, can be found in the member section of Restoring Foreskin.org.