You may know Gary Shteyngart from any number of his best-selling books, but he’s also using his platform to tell a typically taboo story about his own botched circumcision at seven years old in the documentary short, “The Guy Who Got Cut Wrong.”
After first tackling the subject in a 2021 New Yorker piece, the Soviet-born author partnered up with “Breastmilk” filmmaker Dana Ben-Ari to share his experience with a wider audience. As he told TheWrap, it’s something he hopes will allow other men to become less private about when it comes to matters of their manhood and/or masculinity.
“If I was a 20-something still wanting to meet someone, I probably would keep this under wraps. But since I’m old and married and with a kid, I don’t need to represent my penis in some great light; it’s been through its trials and tribulations,” Shteyngart shared. “Men are so scared of divulging anything about this, that the number of people who have actually suffered from this is probably in the hundreds of thousands. People are so private, as you would expect given that so much of manhood and masculinity is all tied up with this one organ, so maybe it does take somebody in their early 50s to be able to come out and talk about it so openly.”
According to a 2025 study from Johns Hopkins Medicine, America, for instance, saw its circumcision rates decline from 54.1% of the population to 49.3% in the decade between 2012 and 2022. But according to Shteyngart, the 1% chance of the procedure going wrong should weigh more heavily on parents’ decision-making.
“Obviously this is a tough choice. You have all these doctors telling you that it’s healthy; that this is going to be conducted in a very calm way. Nobody’s going to tell you there’s a 1% or however many percent chance that you’re going to have a child who will be miserably affected for the rest of their life. That’s just not what they say, they don’t give you that caveat for the most part, not that I’ve ever heard it,” he explained. “So this story is an attempt to create that information, to put it out there, so that whatever your circumstances are, you’re able to counterbalance it with a very unspoken truth.”
“America is in a strange position, because it’s one of the few western industrialized countries that still circumcises. But already, recently, the number of boys getting circumcised has been dropping,” Shteyngart continued. “There’s obviously religious reasons, including Jews, to do this, but for most people, what the medical industry has been pushing for a very long time is this idea that this is the healthy thing to do, but it’s not borne out by any kind of medical evidence. In certain countries where sanitation and health care are rudimentary, yes, it could have some effect, but in most developed countries it really does nothing.”
For her part, doc director Ben-Ari revealed why she was drawn to this topic following her prior documentary on breastfeeding: “I am interested in body politics and I am interested in us thinking about who does what to whom … I get so many comments that really just confirm the confusion and the desire to do the right thing, and parents still are not sure what is the right thing. This conversation is very needed.”
“Something about the film makes it a little bit more palatable to men, and they’re more willing to talk about it,” she added. “Men are also implicated in everything that we’ve been discussing about feminism. And I think the #MeToo movement opened it up even more, so it really is the right time.”
“I think men are so messed up around this issue that it would take a woman to tell it,” Shteyngart agreed.
The short film also comes shortly after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suggested there could be a link between circumcision and autism last month (similar to his thoughts on Tylenol).
“I wish he’d just shut up in general, but look, even a broken clock, etc, etc. No, it’s not tied to autism. And I don’t want him to be kind of an ally here, because I think if he has ties to it, it may hurt or it may confuse people who don’t want to circumcise. They could think, ‘Oh, my God, if a crackpot like RFK Jr. says not to circumcise, then I must do the opposite, right?’ Because pretty much you want to do the opposite of whatever RFK Jr. says,” Shteyngart said. “From what I understand, it’s not just circumcision, it’s Tylenol taken. But, I mean, it’s the usual horses–t. When it’s RFK Jr., one just wants to not hear it to begin with.”
“50/50 is better than what happened before, because this is a medical procedure that insurance used to and still does cover, so it makes sense for hospitals to do this,” he further noted. “I think with circumcising, people don’t have the means to know about the effects … I hope the news of this gets out to others.”
“This film is about humor and trauma, and Gary has a unique voice,” Ben-Ari concluded. “Of course, he’s not the only one to use humor to process trauma, but we do need it in our lives.”
