Anthony Losquadro is passionate about his penis.
“I think about it all the time,’’ the 50-year-old Long Island bodybuilder, real estate manager and married dad of a boy and a girl told me.
Losquadro is one of a small but growing breed of “intactivists” — men who believe they were mauled by the circumcisions they underwent as babies, and women who try to persuade the public to abandon a practice they consider excruciatingly painful, barbaric and unnecessary.
Intactivists claim that uncut penises deliver enhanced sexual pleasure to their owners and users, and liken male circumcision to female genital mutilation — even sexual assault and child abuse.
Losquadro won’t have his 6-month-old son snipped.
I asked if this obsession with foreskin is healthy, much less worthy of a movement modeled on the struggle for human rights.
“Do you think Martin Luther King was obsessed about civil rights?” Losquadro shot back. “Betty Friedan with women’s rights?”
Clearly, some men harbor deep-seated issues regarding their members.
Circumcision — the removal of the foreskin from the penis — has long been performed as a religious rite by Jews, Muslims and several ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa. In the 19th century, prudish Victorians believed it would prevent men from masturbating. (How’d that work out?) These days, it’s overwhelmingly an American thing.
But buoyed by recent declines in the practice in the United States, intactivists have created websites applauding uncut celebrities, including Charlie Sheen (yikes!) and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Photographs of Leo skinny-dipping reportedly were leaked online, which must have been awkward when he dated Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli.
Bernhard Goetz, the squirrel- and allegedly pot-loving “Subway Vigilante,” made quixotic runs for New York City mayor and public advocate on a pro-vegetarian, anti-circumcision platform.
Former Congressman Anthony “Carlos Danger’’ Weiner became an unwitting poster boy for circumcision, sexting pics of his excited and apparently cut junk to a variety of babes — penis pics I wish I could unsee.
About 81 percent of US males ages 14 to 59 have had their genitals snipped, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the percentage of newborns circumcised in American hospitals dipped from 83 percent in the 1960s to 77 percent in 2010, according to data published last year in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Another estimate put the US infant circumcision rate at 58 percent in 2010 — but the number could be higher, because procedures performed outside hospitals by, for example, mohels in Jewish bris ceremonies are not counted. The worldwide circumcision rate is a bit less than one-third; in some countries, the practice is practically nonexistent.
“I’ve actually thought that it [circumcision] was a wacky thing to do, that half the population needs surgical correction, ’’ said Georganne Chapin, 64, executive director of Intact America, who has tried, and failed, to persuade lawmakers to ban the procedure.
But mohels and doctors recently told The Post that an increasing number of grown men in America are now making the cut for religious, medical or aesthetic reasons.
Losquadro founded the organization Intaction and drives around the metropolitan area in a 30-foot van, handing out literature aimed at persuading parents to retain boys’ “genital integrity.”
He told me that in 2010, he confronted the then-88-year-old retired obstetrician who altered his manhood back in 1965.
“I asked him, ‘Did that make you feel like more of a man to do that to me when I was 8 pounds?’ ” Losquadro said. “He had nothing to say.”
Losquadro has concluded that restoring himself through skin grafts or by stretching the remaining skin would not make him whole.
Clinical research has found that circumcision can safeguard males from certain cancers, urinary-tract infections that might cause kidney damage, human papillomavirus and genital herpes, and can reduce the cervical-cancer risk in sex partners.
The World Health Organization revealed data showing circumcision reduces heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men by about 60 percent.
Intactivists counter that health risks are overblown, and contend that some 100 males die each year from circumcision-caused ailments including blood loss and infections.
I can’t help but agree with the babe characters on the TV show “Sex and the City” who, with the exception of slutty Samantha, enthused that shafts devoid of hoods were more pleasant to gaze upon and touch than intact ones.
I just hope that guys who spend their lives feeling wounded by circumcision, and the women who enable them, find new hobbies.
I like Mike in 2016
Run, Bloomy, run! Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, 73, is considering, again, running as an independent candidate for the presidency in 2016, The New York Times reported.
This time, he should do it.
I’d enjoy seeing him go mano a mano with his fellow New York billionaire, Republican Donald Trump. He’s more likeable than GOP contender Ted Cruz, and would scare the stuffing out of Democrat Hillary Clinton, that phony women’s-rights crusader. If elected, he’d be unlikely to destroy the economy, as tax-crazy Dem Bernie Sanders would.
If Bloomberg can just refrain from trying to ban large sodas nationally, I feel good about his chances. There are worse people to choose from.
Times Square snow angel
The symbol of selflessness in Winter Storm Jonas, which dumped more than two feet of snow and paralyzed New York City, is a nearly-naked desnuda.
Featured in a Page 1 photograph in Sunday’s Post, Amanda Roman, 23, who earns tips from picture-taking tourists, kept onlookers warm in the blizzard Saturday by making snow angels in Times Square. She did her part shoveling the white stuff while wearing only body paint on her boobs, a feathered headdress, undies, boots and thigh-high hose. Normally, I’d say kick this cutie from the public square. Not this time.
City Department of Transportation workers and other first responders labored tirelessly to dig out. It was nice they had help from Roman, the jiggly calm amid the killer storm.
Off-color Oscar snubs
The decision not to nominate a single person of color this year or last for an acting Academy Award is a travesty. (The 2015 flick “Straight Outta Compton’’ alone is packed with deserving black actors.)
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors last week attempted to fix things by vowing to double the number of women and minority academy members by 2020.
Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith and filmmaker Spike Lee announced that they’ll boycott next month’s Oscar awards ceremony to fight for what’s right. Good.
Next, someone should fight against blatant Oscar prejudice aimed at patriotic movies, their directors and stars.