Hi,
I am 17 years old. I am not sexually active. I have partial phimosis. I can retract my foreskin while flaccid comfortably but I can only retract it about a quarter of the way down the glans while erect. I am now starting to stretch to solve this.
I am however also worried about my frenulum. It looks short to me but I'm not exactly sure how long its supposed to be. It causes no problems when I retract when flaccid but I don't know if it will be too short while I'm erect.
What length should the frenulum be?
Should I stretch it anyway? Or should I wait till after I've sorted out the phimosis to see if I have frenulum breve before I stretch?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks

There is no pat answer because of all the variables in human penises. The ideal length for you may be different from another guy who has a different idea of how far the foreskin should retract. My opinion is that if the opening is tight, the frenulum is short. It won't hurt anything if you start working on lengthening it now. If your foreskin retracts further back, it will probably please you more.

I have another question though. After I do my stretching and get out the shower my glans is very dry and the foreskin seems to stick to it. When I then retract, its slow and hurts. Is this normal?
Also I was wondering about the cause of my phimosis. When I was younger I stimulated the head of my penis with the water jet in the pool. Could this be the cause?

The skin should freely glide back and forth. Perhaps it would be a good idea to treat for yeast. Any good yeast control product will work and so will Athlete's Foot medicine. Apply twice per day. If you have any issues getting inside the foreskin, squeeze some inside and then roll the foreksin around between your fingers to distribute it.

Have you ever experienced full retraction either flaccid or erect, or has this condition always existed? Almost all boys are born with the foreskin firmly attached to the glans, preventing any retraction whatsoever. This condition may last until puberty. In some, it separates by three or four years of age. All are different and all are normal. Once separation has occurred, some boys can retract without much intervention, while others must work at loosening the opening. This is also just a variation and is pretty much normal.

Nothing you did caused it, but yeast infections can. This is why I suggest treating for yeast. Treatment in the absence of yeast will do no harm. Let me know how it goes.

Your frænulum will always look a little "short" - that is its nature. Look at the pictures on foreskin.org by way of reference. The fact that you can readily retract when flaccid, if you can do so to the extent that there is no "bunching" behind the glans would suggest that you have little or no need to stretch the frænulum.

If you are reasonably confident about this, then you need not be too concerned about frænulum stretching and of course, if it later appears to be a problem, then there is no reason you cannot proceed to do some stretching of it, you will have merely lost a little time.

Unlike other places where you may have received "advice" on stretching, we do not advise you to do so by pulling the foreskin back (over an erection), nor do we advise doing it in the shower, because it requires time and your reasonably full attention and two hands - if you have not yet done so, you need to do the deep reading through many index pages' worth of discussion "threads" here to understand just how to do the stretching. To do this in the shower would be a shocking waste of water and no doubt, annoy your family no end.

You should definitely not be exposing your foreskin or the area under it to soap which will cause dryness and is responsible for almost all of the "problems" people report with foreskins. While yeast is a cause of problems, I diverge from Jim in doubting this would be the cause of your present concern about dryness - soap and too much rinsing is more likely.

On the other hand, I doubt that water flow masturbation in itself (even chlorinated water) would cause any great degree of damage. I do wonder however, whether you were doing this (and presumably with an erection) with your foreskin retracted or what? In the more general sense, we are interested in the history of your problem - when you first retracted, whether you ever could retract while erect, how you learned about what you should expect your foreskin to do and any other detail.

When I retract while flaccid, the foreskin does bunch behind the glans: frenulum breve?

I have read a few of the threads and I am using the 2-finger method suggested. How about doing it in the bath? How about just after a shower/bath?

When I did this (water flow masturbation) I was erect, but not retracted. Just the very tip of the head would be exposed, as it always is when I'm erect.

Here's the story: I was never taught to retract at all. When I was young my glans was permanently covered and this was normal to me. Until the age of about 10, when I saw my brother retract. I decided to try myself. I could but it was difficult and the foreskin was very tight around the shaft and made the top part bulge. The foreskin kinda strangled my penis. This did not happen to my brother. So I was a bit concerned and also wanted to be like him, so I would retract everyday, hoping my foreskin would not "strangle" my penis and be "normal" like my brother's. Eventually it was and I could retract easily while flaccid.
About a year or two ago I realized that not being able to retract while erect could make sex painful. I left it to be though, hoping puberty would solve the problem (I was going through it at the time). Now I have decided to revisit and solve the problem and circumsition is NOT an option.

What is means is that you could stretch the frenulum to give you more range of motion. Here's a picutre of how it's done:



Have you begun stretching the opening?

Are you in the US or Canada?

South Africa actually.

New concern: my glans is a bit red and irritated now. What is this? This just started. I used hair conditioner as lube to help with stretching. Is it because of this? Please help. I'm very worried.

The inner foreskin is composed of a tissue called mucosa. It also lines your mouth, nose, and other orifices. It can easily be irritated by certain ingredients in such products. Stretching doesn't really require a lubricant and may actually make getting a grip harder.

It could also be from the stretching itself. If so, it will subside quickly.

I'm glad to see circumcision isn't univeral in SA.