I’m kinda ashamed to admit I didn’t know Togo existed. Thank you for promoting me to virtually cruise around west Africa a bit and very slightly improve my geography knowledge.
I hate people hating on “the new generation”. Already in school in the last years some people started so say stuff like “oh the new 5th graders are so […]” and I always called them out that that’s such a bullshit and they were exactly the same
That wasn’t the original reason. It was to stop masturbation. The whole cleaning thing was a later rationalization when they realized how fucked up it was.
What’s even funnier to me is how people will full on rage when someone brings up female genital mutilation while in the same breath saying circumcision is fine
The main problem is that people tend to intuitively think of the least invasive form of male circumcision and the most horrific form of female genital mutilation.
the most horrific form of female genital mutilation.
Is there any other kind in regular discussion? When people refer to FGM, they’re not talking about labiaplasty (which would be a more appropriate comparison).
A labiaplasty is not equivalent to removal of the foreskin. It would be like removing the clitoral hood. Educate yourself before sharing your thoughts please.
labiaplasty (which would be a more appropriate comparison).
How are you coming to this conclusion?
The foreskin has more nerve endings than the glans, and double that of the clitoris. The labia in contrast has much fewer nerve endings, which is why sexual stimulation is not easily accomplished with simply stimulating the labia. Possible? Yes. But not nearly to the same degree as clitoral stimulation.
Edit: Given the lack of elaboration, I’ll have to assume the conclusions reached by a gut reaction of “skin is skin” which is not at all how this works.
I refused circumcision for my son (25 years ago, US hospital), and had to remind the staff several times because it was just assumed it would be done. I stopped them 3 times during different shifts when they were about to take him from our room for the procedure.
Then when it came up in conversation when he was an infant, people would say to me ‘you should have done it’, because he would get infections (he never did), or he’d be bullied in gym showers (he never did to my knowledge), or whatever. My take was it should be his decision, not mine.
The pressure was really intense, though. It’s weird how interested people can be in someone else’s infant’s penis. We’ve never talked about it, but reading stories from other men, I assume he’s happy being uncut, and I’m glad I didn’t do it.
e: for anyone reading this days later, I did ask my son for his opinion prompted by this conversation, mostly because of responses I got elsewhere in this thread that made me question my decision:
Me: Hey man, so feel free not to answer this if it’s too personal, but I was having a debate about circumcision and another parent challenged me saying I’d made the wrong decision. So yes/no/I don’t want to talk about it cuz that’s weird, do you regret my decision?
Son: I don’t, and none of my partners have, either. I only get thumbs up and compliments. I hope that wasn’t too personal.
Me: Not at all. Thank you for giving me your and your partners’ review!
So yeah, it’s not just my assumptions. And no regrets.
I actually think about the ignored psychological effects of dealing with that level of physical pain so soon after being born a lot.
Birth is already a traumatic experience for both mother and infant. But to then immediately, with no anesthesia, cut an extremely sensitive part of the infants body off? That has to leave some kind of mental scarring.
I was born with a genetic condition affecting my collagen (Ehlers Danlos), which meant my bones were overly soft and, since I was breach til moments before birth, my legs were bowed pretty severely. This was in 1971, and the treatment at that time was the doctors literally bent my legs into position manually and then braced them for my first few years. That’s not how they deal with it nowadays, because they learnt it was horribly painful.
I don’t remember that initial experience, obviously, but my mother tells me several years later when I was a young child and having problems walking, she took me to the doctor and they finally worked out that I was in excruciating pain all the time. They asked why I hadn’t said anything and I told them it was because everyone was always in excruciating pain, but nobody else was complaining about it, so I shouldn’t either. I’d been in pain since birth, and just figured it was normal.
That experience prevented me from getting proper care and made my early childhood hell. I still have emotional trauma from it. So yeah, early pain is not benign.
It is. You can always cut something off later, but you can’t just put it back once it’s gone.
Based on this conversation, I actually asked him:
Me: Hey man, so feel free not to answer this if it’s too personal, but I was having a debate about circumcision and another parent challenged me saying I’d made the wrong decision. So yes/no/I don’t want to talk about it cuz that’s weird, do you regret my decision?
Son: I don’t, and none of my partners have, either. I only get thumbs up and compliments. I hope that wasn’t too personal.
Me: Not at all. Thank you for giving me your and your partners’ review!
I’m assuming you mean gym showers and not gym shorts. I still don’t get why someone would see someone elses penis in a gym shower. Unless they peeked into the stall or somathing, but that would be sexual harrassment.
My middle school gym locker room had completely open showers. Like the kind you see in prison scenes on TV. No dividers. No curtains. Just an open room with a bunch of shower heads
Bit of an overreaction. Same-sex facility sharing has been a staple part of human society for thousands of years. We seem to have done okay so I’m not too worried or “horrified”. I guess it’s just not something you’ve come across so it seems unusual to you.
Depends I guess. They’re cheaper to do the open style so in poor schools and sports facilities you tend to get them.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to go to decent schools and not played sports outside of well funded institutions then you probably wouldn’t have come across them.
Not just in poor schools. My area is pretty affluent, but the school was built in the 1940s, and that’s just how it was back then. I went to that high school for a year (I’m 54) and never saw the boys’, but the girls’ was wide open. I assume the boys’ was too.
People will defend the most batshit insane things just because they’re used to it.
But I also think there’s an element of (understandable) insecurity to it.
If they concluded that mutilating the penises of babies is wrong, then that makes their penis “wrong”, and society is really weird and judgemental about penises. There’s a huge amount of pressure applied to men about their genitals.
We constantly talk about big dicks and “big dick” energy. Casually saying someone has a small, soft, or ugly dick is seen as a scathing insult, we constantly mock people for it, both in life and in media. Comments about their penises is something used to build up or knock down men. It’s used to make them feel powerful and manly, or weak and emasculated.
It’s no wonder people rally so hard against those who want to see an end to male genital mutilation. The very victims of it typically don’t want to feel like their dick is “wrong”, because society at large has told them that if their dick is bad, they aren’t real men.
I think it’s important that circumcised people realize that their body isn’t wrong, but rather the procedure is wrong (without a medically necessary reason).
If you never got circumcised, you’d likely be saying “I prefer uncut. Looks a bit weird with a piece missing.”
I’m willing to bet if you surveyed, say, Israel or Saudi Arabia, on what looks better between chopped and natural, they’ll say circumcised. And if you surveyed, say, Australia or Spain, they’ll say uncircumcised looks better.
I’ve seen people lose their shit over babies with pierced ears and young children getting tattoos. There’s all sorts of dental work you go through as a kid that you have functionally no control over.
Even had someone chew me out because a foster kid I was taking care of got a haircut (three years old and she’d literally never had one before).
At some point, it is the parent’s duty to take care of the child, and that extends to medical decisions with profound long-term consequences. I get wanting to change the culture, but the degree to which people exaggerate the harm of circumcision struggles to eclipse the degree to which it is defended.
Cutting off your legs also makes them easier to clean.
There is some substantive utility to legs that doesn’t extend to the bit of flesh around the tip of your dick.
Foster kid is a different situation but in general seriously don’t bring someone else’s kid to their first haircut. Thats an important moment for parents. It’s a major milestone, especially with girls. That original in-utero hair behaves different.
Three years isn’t that weird. I know a girl who was 4 for her first. She had the most gorgeous, long curls. It was really hard for her mom to get rid of those.
Know a couple boys who were each three too. They look like totally different kids once they lost all their baby curls.
Correlating ear-piercing with decapitation, and holding a picket in front of “Forever 21” with a big sign that reads “STOP MURDERING CHILDREN” and a picture of a tunnel drill going through a baby’s forehead.
If this is /s its verry funny and asys somthing interesting, im frustrated that the thread has fallen into a false dichotomy,
Its not ‘not okay’ in the same way its ‘not okay’ to cut off someones leg because thats unamniguiosly being crippled. (Good spoof though!) its amniguiosly immoral.
Yeah a better analogy would probably be female genital mutilation but americans generally aren’t familiar with that.
The real issue is consent. I get that parents consent for their children, but that doesn’t mean the parents are correctly predicting the kid’s preferences.
It’s just a strange practice that we do in america, not due to religion, but due to … reasons? Cleanliness? “I want my son’s cock to look like mine?” it’s weird as hell, but accepted for some stupid reason.
circumcision is a harder to understand, wrapped in the cloak of medical hospitality to be blunt, its a different form of female genital mutilation.
I believe its a remnant from old Christianity (Judaism?), where it would mark and/or purify the child in some way. If I’m not mistaken, the god of Abraham communicated that things like sacrificing lambs and other rituals isn’t useful as a sign of good will.
but yet this literally unholy practice remains to this day.
to be absolutely fair, mom said yes, telling me the doctors said there was some kind of health benefit, somthing about infections.
I mentioned in another comment how circumcision dramatically reduces the rate of spread of STDs. That is, at least from my perspective, the primary (and original) incentive to circumcise. Significantly less of an issue now, because you can just get a condom. But in areas where access to a consumer profilactic isn’t readily available or one in which STD infection is high, it would make a great deal of sense to perform the surgery as a preventative measure.
Same as giving your kid vaccine shots or putting them in the NICU for the first few weeks of their life or demanding that they wash their hands regularly.
Circumcised men compared with uncircumcised men have also been shown in clinical trials to be less likely to acquire new infections with syphilis (by 42%), genital ulcer disease (by 48%), genital herpes (by 28% to 45%), and high-risk strains of human papillomavirus associated with cancer (by 24% to 47% percent)
By all means, you should still wrap that shit. But if you’re living in a rural community or one that has a strong stigma against contraception, or you’re just in a place where the disease is rampant and you need a secondary precautionary policy, this will have a meaningful impact on disease spread.
The majority of US citizens do not fall into those categories, and for that reason I see it as an unnecessary procedure that is more cultural than scientific.
As far as I am aware there is only one study done in Africa that showed that there is a correlation between circumcision and a reduced chance to get HIV.
But that is the only study and only HIV, not all STIs.
Also this is moot in most of the world where you have access to condoms.
Circumcised men compared with uncircumcised men have also been shown in clinical trials to be less likely to acquire new infections with syphilis (by 42%), genital ulcer disease (by 48%), genital herpes (by 28% to 45%), and high-risk strains of human papillomavirus associated with cancer (by 24% to 47% percent)
By all means, you should still wrap that shit. But if you’re living in a rural community or one that has a strong stigma against contraception, or you’re just in a place where the disease is rampant and you need a secondary precautionary policy, this will have a meaningful impact on disease spread.
I don’t think this is the original reason, but it has been found to happen. Also, your risk of penile cancer goes to almost zero, as well as fewer and less serious complications related to the foreskin (or its absence). Going fully nude while circumcised is a dangerous game, though.
Here’s what the CDC had to say about their original statements and a rebuttal to criticisms about circumcision. It only obliquely mentions genital cancer, but this article specifically discusses that.
circumcision dramatically reduces the rate of spread of STDs
Source? Most of the world doesn’t circumcise, and they don’t have a higher prevalence of STDs than places that do. As long as you practice good hygiene, there should be no issues.
That is, at least from my perspective, the primary (and original) incentive to circumcise
No it wasn’t. It originated thousands of years ago as a Jewish religious ritual, that had no biological or scientific basis. It was popularised in the US about 100 years ago as a way to reduce sensation in the penis in order to stop teenage boys from masturbating – by Dr Kellogg, for the same reason he invented cornflakes. He was hyper-religious and fixated on stopping boys corrupting themselves by masturbating. The hygiene myths came later and have been debunked.
It’s an outdated practice based on bad science and beliefs that should stop. That’s not to say anyone should feel bad for having done it when we didn’t really know better, but there’s no reason to continue doing it now.
I agree with all that except for one thing. Kellogg did not invent corn flakes to stop people from masturbating. He did mention once that a bland diet could be used to deter masturbation, but there is no coorelation to corn flakes.
He did, though. I currently live less than an hour from his museum in Battle Creek, Michigan, and there are lots of things about him that aren’t widely shared on the internet.
Did you know that one of his biggest accomplishments was a foster home for orphans that was destroyed by fire? Running that foster home was what inspired his obsession with a bland diet and with circumcision. He was very strict with their diet, believing certain grains would purify the soul (first oatmeal) – the original, unadulterated grains that were mentioned in the bible. The boys in his home weren’t accepting of his extreme version of Christianity, and he thought that was mostly because they were corrupting themselves bodily. He thought all boys weren’t receptive to Christianity because they were too into their own desires, and he could fix that. First by diet, and when that didn’t work, by cutting off the part of their penis that distracted them by making them feel good, thus tempting them from god’s word. He was a doctor, so people listened.
This is all Wikipedia dedicates to that part of the story:
Kellogg was outspoken about his views on race and his belief in racial segregation, regardless of the fact that he himself raised several black foster children.
So it’s understandable people are downplaying that part of his life. If you live near here, you know the details the internet has mostly forgotten.
We really need to stop chopping up infant boys based on the ideas of a bigoted religious fundamentalist.
If you go back to the beginning of this procedure, how(/if) people cleaned themselves looks very different from. Our modern world.
Because of that it seems it being a health issue is a lot more likely for the origin of circumscision as a regular societal practice. Even if that was not the main reason but one of the supporting reasons people allowed it to become normalized. The history of hygiene(or the lack there of) is horrifying.
I mean Lysol was developed as a feminine hygiene product… We have done some very questionable things because of snakeoil practices even in relatively modern times (which i think religion is one of the OG snakeoils)
What are we doing today that will look as crazy to the people of the future as circumcision does to many of us right now I wonder?
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