My foreskin is too tight,” a friend once shared to the group in the pub. “And every time I try to have sex it’s just extremely awkward.”
On the face of it, there is nothing funny about this – but people laughed anyway. Perhaps because it’s a curveball to hear something so vulnerable – tragicomic, even – and far beyond the humdrum register of normal pub conversation. The laughter wasn’t a dismissal; our friend was heard sympathetically. But the problem had to be treated with levity first. For some reason, it would have been far worse if nobody had acknowledged that.
