Why can’t the United States stop circumcising boys?
| July 2nd, 2007While looking for something else, I ran into Why can’t the United States stop circumcising boys?, an interesting essay by Robert Darby. Widespread male circumcision is a phenomenon that, in wealthy countries, has happened almost exclusively1 in English-speaking countries, and that has faded in every English-speaking country but the USA, where the majority of boys are still circumcised.
So why the American exceptionalism? Despite the title of Darby’s essay, he doesn’t provide a convincing answer, and some of the possibilities brought up seem unlikely to explain the distinction. (For example, I’m sure that the profit motive is important to circumcision — did you know that hospitals make huge profits selling cut-off foreskins?2 — but I don’t see any reason to expect that to be more the case in the US than in other countries).
Darby does suggest a legislative approach to reducing male circumcision, short of an outright ban, which is to stop having the government pay for it. In California, the circumcision rate plummeted once Medicaid coverage ended.
Two things annoyed me about Darby’s essay. First off, the seemingly obligatory passage3 , in any essay objecting to male circumcision, comparing the practice to female circumcision:
The claims of culture are taken very seriously in this age of globalization, but the problem with this particular claim is that it is applied inconsistently. First, there is discrimination based on gender. No matter how important circumcision of girls may be to the cultural/ethnic/religious groups that practise it, American opinion has determined that girls’ bodies are more important than tradition, and that any cutting of the female genitals is Female Genital Mutilation, now banned by law. Secondly, the cultural argument seems to be a one-way street. When faced by parents from circumcising cultures, doctors say they must respect their traditions and accede to their wishes, at least in relation to boys. But when it comes to non-circumcising cultures (the great majority) the argument is suddenly reversed: instead of enjoying automatic respect for their traditions, parents from non-circumcising cultures are pressured to conform to the American norm and to consent to have their sons circumcised, so that they will be “like other boys”.
A more likely explanation than gender-based discrimination is discrimination based on culture (otherwise known as xenophobia); of course we venerate our own cultural acts of child abuse even while correctly disliking the child abuse practiced by other cultures. It’s also the case that, bad as male circumcision is, FGM is in many ways worse; the implicit assumption that the two circumcisions are equivalent (and therefore there is no reason other than sexism that anyone might find FGM more objectionable) doesn’t hold water.
That said, regardless of what US circumcision practice is based on, the effect is a form of child abuse practiced nearly exclusively on boys, and that’s objectionable from a feminist point of view.
Darby also writes:
No matter how many statistics-laden articles get published in medical journals, circumcision cannot shake off the traces of its Victorian origins. It remains the last surviving example of a once respectable proposition that disease could be prevented by the pre-emptive removal of normal body parts which, though healthy, were thought to be a weak link in the body’s defences. In its heyday this medical breakthrough, described by Ann Dally as “fantasy surgery”, enjoyed wide esteem and included excisions of other supposed foci or portals of infection, such as the adenoids, tonsils, teeth, appendix and large intestine.
But circumcision is not “the last surviving” example of such a widespread practice in the US; weight loss surgery is skyrocketing in popularity, justified by unproven long-term preventative effects.
P.S. Also interesting: Darby’s review of the book Madhouse – about Henry Cotton, administrator of a New Jersey asylum, who for decades forcibly removed teeth and other body parts from unwilling patients “for their own good,” and was much admired for this practice.
Cotton was not just a fanatic applying the physicalist procedures of mainstream medicine to the new field of psychiatry, but the embodiment of a deep-seated trend in the medical profession itself: the assumption that if these wise experts think some sort of treatment or procedure is good for you, it is your duty to submit to it, and even that they are entitled–by virtue of their scientific understanding and promise of benefit–to force it on you, with or without informed consent. Throughout his career, Cotton insisted that he was at the forefront of scientific rationality and that his therapies must be enforced because they flowed inexorably, as a matter of mere logic, from the facts of disease as established by the science of which he was the anointed interpreter. He claimed that his approach was based on “scientific medicine,” the germ theory of disease, and “scientific evidence and proof.” His published articles are peppered with terms like “progressive medical men,” “indisputable facts,” “modern medical knowledge”; it hardly needs to be said that they were totally innocent of any ethical awareness.
- I say “almost exclusively” because I suspect circumcision of boys is widespread in Israel. (back)
- From Darby’s essay: “In the age of biotechnology and tissue engineering, human body parts have a high market value, and baby foreskins are especially prized as the raw material for many biomedical products, from skin grafts to anti-wrinkle cream. The strongest pressure for the continuation of circumcision may not be from doctors at all, but from the hospitals which harvest the foreskins and sell them to commercial partners. This would explain why so many mothers are still pressured to sign consent forms when they arrive for their delivery.” (back)
- Although Amanda points out an exception to this rule. (back)
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:36 am
Oh, well fine. Write this post while I have one in the works called “Male Circumcision is a Bad Idea.” ;)
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:27 am
It’s also funny that he discusses tonsillectomies as “fantasy surgery,” when in fact they can be medically necessary (infection can settle in them and be difficult or impossible to eradicate with antibiotics; plus, if someone is allergic to antibiotics, there may be no other choice). I have never, ever heard of a medically necessary circumcision.
This comment was written by Madeline.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:59 am
As to the comparisons to FGM, I definitely think lots of people make these comparisons without completely thinking through the disparities between the two and of course to equate complete removal of the clitoris or infibulation with the removal of the foreskin is just a completely ludicrous comparison.
At the same time, I do think there might be an instructive comparison between one (probably rare )type of fgm in which just the clitoral hood is removed. As far as I can tell most definitions of “FGM” or “female circumcision” include this type of cutting, as do various international organizations like WHO which condemn FGM. It seems this kind of FGM–removing just the clitoral hood–is analogous to male circumcision, and in fact it seems some of the same arguments in favor of male circumcision can be used in favor of removing the clitoral hood. (For instance, I’m always hearing about smegma in males as a justification for circumcision. But females also have smegma that can accumulate under the clitoral hood; it seems if the hood is very tight or the smegma isn’t washed away, it can harden and cause irritation and pain just like in men.)
I’m actually not sure how most Americans would feel about a practice of removing the clitoral hood, but I’m guessing not good; and perhaps recognizing that might give male circumcision supporters some pause given that the procedures seem to be analogous.
This comment was written by activistgradgal.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:10 am
“the procedures seem to be analogous.”
I totally agree that they’re more analogous than any of the other procedures that have been discussed.
But I have a ghost of a memory of reading about American contexts in which this surgery was done against women’s wills, and it having really bad results. I can’t find them, though, after brief googling. (I’m not sure where I first read it.) Do you have any information?
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:35 am
I have never, ever heard of a medically necessary circumcision.
I actually know several people who were circumcized as teenagers or adults for strictly medical reasons. I don’t know the details, but it has something to do with how the foreskin is attached in some men creating problems for them.
This comment was written by Stentor.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 6:43 am
I have never, ever heard of a medically necessary circumcision.
It can happen. Like any other body part, the foreskin can get chronically infected and sometimes removing it is the only practical way to get rid of the infection. It can also occasionally develop cancerous growth, though I’ve never heard of anyone dying of cancer of the foreskin, perhaps because any abnormal growths are easy to spot before they get out of control. However, just as most tonsillectomies are unnecessary, most circumcisions are unnecessary and, at best, unhelpful.
This comment was written by Dianne.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:13 am
Conversations I’ve had about circumcision have involved a fair number of anecdotes about boys uncircumsized as babies who end up getting circumcized during childhood on medical advice. Now, for at least one of those stories, the medical advice appeared to be “Because it might cause problems later”, which sounds like nonsense to me, but there are certainly doctors out there who look at uncircumcized boys and recommend circumcision.
This comment was written by LizardBreath.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:39 am
When male circumcision involves using a piece of glass to scrape off their penises, then a comparison to FGM is valid, otherwise, no. (Yes, that happens.) We need to be absolutely clear that FGM can cause infection and death, that it makes it impossible for (many) women to enjoy sex and it can make it impossible for them to even have sex without further surgery. It’s often done in unsanitary conditions and CAN CAUSE INFECTIONS AND DEATH.
Did I mention that it can cause infections and death?
Amp, I love you, but you’ve got to come out stronger on this one. I’m not a fan of male circumcision, but it’s been shown in studies to reduce HIV transmission in some circumstances, which points to medically valid reason to keep it around in some places. This is in opposition to FGM which greatly, greatly increses the probability of HIV transmission. Because FGM leaves a mess of scar tissue which can bleed during sex. Not like a hyman breaking, but like ripping and tearing. Which can cause infections and death.
So the reasons not to do MC is that it’s probably not medically necessary in most cases in the US and it’s painful for male infants and can reduce sensation in adulthood. The reason not to FGM is because it’s medically dangerous, unsanitary, can lead to infections and death, removes sensation in adulthood and can be painful for the person’s entire life and may require many repeat surgeries: to allow the woman to have sex, to allow her to give birth and to re-stich up after she gives birth.
Frankly, ANY comparison between the two hurts a case against male circumscision. Because in comparison, who the heck cares about MC? It’s nothing.
This comment was written by Les.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:40 am
Great post, Amp.
I guess one of the things that bugs me the most about this is when there are men who have been circumcised who make a point of talking about how great it is, the sensation is just as good, etc.
This bothers me because it makes the focus of the conversation sexual pleasure rather than child abuse, which is what circumcision is, pretty much.
By way of comparison, I know women personally who have had their inner labia and clitoral hood removed for purposes of sexual pleasure, and they rave about it . . . this DOES NOT make performing the same procedure on an infant an okay thing. Personal bodily autonomy is the key. Do whatever the hell you want to your own body, but lopping off bits of someone else’s should really give all decent people pause.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 7:50 am
Well I have read a few interesting articles lately indicating that circumcision in the US is falling, and circumcision in parts of Africa is increasing.
It’s increasing in parts of Africa because it is being touted as an HIV prevention technique, and studies have noted lower rates of HIV in regions where circumcision is more prevalent. (I’m not supporting this view; I’m just noting that this is the argument some public health people are using these days.)
The article on the US can be found here. In the article, the drop in circumcision in the US is attributed to immigration and changing attitudes toward the body. The drop in the US has been fairly large.
Here is the data source for the US article. What is most striking is the differences between Latinos and Asians (much lower) and the strong state variation, which is correlated with racial/ethnic make-up of a state, but even whites and blacks in those states have lower circumcision rates.
This comment was written by Rachel S..Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:25 am
Frankly, I really can’t get all het up about male circumcision. Particularly when foolish comparisons to FGM are made. Clearly , a lot of people are concerned though. I think Myca makes the most compelling argument. However, I’m not certain that it is wise to have the state superceding the authority of parents in this instance. Considering that any such law would have to have an exemption for religious reasons or run afoul of the establishment clause, it would be inherently discriminatory.
Of course, I’m probably biased by the fact that I feel no personal sense of injury or dimunition. In fact, if I were forced to express a sentiment one way or the other, I’d have to say that I’m rather glad I was circumcised. What little I know would seem to indicate that having a foreskin is a bit of a bother. It ’s also likely that I’m biased by the fact that I first became aware of anti-circumcision activism in the days when I was researching and counter organizing against White supremacist and anti-Semitic groups. This kind of thing had an appeal among them for reasons that should be obvious.
The discussion here has made me curious. I wonder how many folks on the anti side of the debate have actually been circumcised? Obviously the pro side isn’t likely to have too many intact advocates, not for long anyway. What I’m getting at is how many people who oppose circumcision do so because they personally feel abused, injured or mutilated?
This comment was written by W.B. Reeves.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:38 am
I’m circumcised, and although it’s never been much of a hassle for me, I still (golly) don’t think that it’s okay to slice hunks off of baby’s genitals for no medical reason.
Additionally, the sex-radical in me rebels at circumcision because the original reason for widespread US circumcision was to prevent masturbation, and I consider it part and parcel of the whole ’sex is dirty and bad and wrong’ movement.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:56 am
Child abuse is a bit of a stretch. OK, a huge fucking stretch. That’s a big sledgehammer, you know.
It’s correct, BTW, that it’s being recommended as an AIDS prevention tactic. That’s because the “harm” of a physician-performed circumcision is so minimal, while the benefits of AIDS prevention (in countries where AIDS is rampant) are higher.
there are some fairly vocal anti-circumcision zealots out there. No surprise; there are ant-ANYTHING zealots out there. Of course, what has happened is that their view is often held to be “accurate” while the “it’s really not a big deal, and nowhere near child abuse” view is often referred to as “biased.
Alternatively, you can call it child abuse. But much like the expansion of other once-valid terms, this dilutes the term “child abuse” so much that it’s meaningless.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:08 am
I am sympathetic to anti-circumcision position, but as others have said, the comparisons to FGM is ridiculous. It is also ridiculous that online feminist discussions of FGM are almost always derailed by discussions of male circumcision (sort of like every discussion of domestic violence, sexual assault, gender roles, etc). I wonder if individuals who are concerned with male circumcision will actually post on a thread devoted to the topic?
The language of “barbarity” when discussing male circumcision is also off-putting when discussing a Jewish and Muslim religious practice, as they are minority religious groups (in a North American context) who experience discrimination on the basis of their religious beliefs. For the record, I also find it unacceptable when talking about FGM because it has so many colonial connotations (connotations that are often specific to gender-related practices).
I was curious about the rates of infant male circumcision in Canada versus the US (apparently, less than 10% of infant males are being circumcized in Canadian hospitals - down from about 70% in the early 1970s). In the course of my googling, I found that Canadian medical ethicist Margaret Somerville has allowed an anti-circumcision group to post a chapter from her book (The Ethical Canary). I haven’t had a chance to read the chapter carefully, but a quick skim convinced me that it might be of interest to Alas readers despite it’s focus on the Canadian legal context. The chapter can be found here.
This comment was written by debbie.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:11 am
If you ever want to see a parenting site blow up, post the male circumcision debate.
Personally, I’m inclined to agree with Myca. Circumsizing male children is making unnecessary decisions about their bodies without their consent, and I’m not ok with that if it isn’t necessary.
As far as the AIDS thing goes. Well, I’m willing to bet that condom use is much better at AIDS prevention than circumcision and I’d really rather my child practice safe sex than assume that because he is circumsized he’s “safe” and doesn’t have to worry about condoms.
I know the child abuse language is strong… and I’m not certain I’m willing to go that far. I don’t think circumcision is right, but I’m not sure I feel a need to force a ban… but I can certainly understand why people feel it is abusive.
One thing I will say is that I find the arguments like: “well, I want him to look like his Daddy” or “Foreskin is gross” or “that’s what everyone else does” really really disturbing.
This comment was written by Kate L..Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:12 am
Ampersand writes: “… regardless of what US circumcision practice is based on, the effect is a form of child abuse …”
We should reserve phases like “child abuse” for cases where children are really suffering from mental and physical trauma. If you make a list of what would make the cut to be classified as child abuse, male circumcision just wouldn’t make it. Think of all the things that it must be compared against, like child rape, severe beatings, and severe neglect.
How many circumcised men complain about problems due to circumcision or feel that they were abused as a child? I would guess near zero. Certainly the views of people who have actually been circumcised should be considered before something is declared to be child abuse.
If earlobes were trimmed off at birth as a cultural custom, would that be child abuse? People could still hear fine, and some culture might consider this as beautiful. If no physical harm is done, I just don’t see a practice of trimming some skin on an infant’s body part as abuse.
This comment was written by Dan Morgan.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:17 am
“If no physical harm is done”
But that’s not the case, neh? There are studies that link male circumcision to some loss of sexual sensitivity, aren’t there? Or am I mistaken?
And there are also the botched circumcisions (a la the Money case) to consider, in terms of “no harm.”
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:17 am
I would never put male circumcision in the same category as female ‘circumcision’ . . . no way, no how. FGM is fucking barbaric, is designed to destroy female sexual pleasure, and should be rightly considered misogynistic torture.
That’s not to say that male circumcision is no big deal. It’s not FGM, thank god, but especially in the US, it’s incredibly widespread, almost 100% of the time medically unnecessary, and does, in fact, involve cutting a hunk off of an infant’s penis for no good reason.
Frankly, it’s creepy as fuck.
Like I said, I don’t think of it as equivalent to FGM in any way. If you like, we can analogize it to a piercing. As in . . . after your baby boy is born, you call someone in to pierce his penis, attaching a thick metal ring, and permanently soldering the ring in place. It will affect his sexuality for the rest of his life . . . maybe not in a bad way, but in a different way, and he’ll never be able to remove it.
That’s why I find circumcision creepy. Because it really is.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:32 am
I do have some sympathy for this point of view, but when bringing up the specter of religious discrimination, I think it’s important to note that the hugely overwhelming majority of circumcisions performed in the US are not done for religious reasons.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:41 am
Also . . . what’s the pro-circumcision argument?
I mean, the anti (for me, anyway) is that engaging in medically unnecessary genital surgery (which has many possible disadvantages and very very few possible benefits, especially in the USA) on infants is something we Should Not Do.
I hear a lot of complaints that anti-activists are sidetracking from FGM, or that their language is too strong, or that there’s not much loss of sensation, or that it’s sometimes a religious decision . . . but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a good affirmative argument as to why we should circumcise most male children in the US.
Is there one?
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 10:17 am
I don’t think there really is much of a pro-circumcision argument, beyond religious traditions. I keep seeing references to some studies around male circumcision and HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa. I’m not sure how relevant this is for prevention in the US, but it seems that comprehensive sex education, harm reduction (needle exchanges), and addressing HIV transmission in prison are more practical interventions.
This comment was written by debbie.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 10:21 am
Say Myca, can you provide a link on the connection between circumcision advocacy and masturbation? I’d be interested in that.
This comment was written by W.B. Reeves.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 10:31 am
Sure, you can check it out here.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:00 am
Myca,
I don’t know about a specific pro-circumcision script, but the ones I hear are often as follows:
1) religious reasons (which makes sense to me).
2) It’s “cleaner”/ “more sanitary” despite the fact that this is no longer accepted in the medical community, it is a common argument. I also hear a lot of annecdotal, “My mom is a nurse in a nursing home and knows a lot of older men who have to be circumsized in their old age because they are unable to keep everything clean and it’s much more painful to do it then.” blah blah blah.
3) An uncircumcized penis is harder to “keep clean”
4) For aesthetic purposes (i.e. foreskin is “gross” “ugly” etc)
5) So that the kid will not be picked on/made fun of because he would “look different” in the locker room
6) Because that’s what my husband wanted - i.e. the boy should “look like daddy”
Those are the “pro” circumcision arguments I hear a lot.
This comment was written by Kate L..Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:06 am
Um, can we get another reference for the claim about selling foreskins, please? Sounds a whole lot like legend & hear say to me. (And, if CosmetiCo were to go to that much trouble to put something besides mineral oil and stearic acid in their wrinkle cream, wouldn’t they be advertising it as some sort of miracle ingredient, comparable to the “placenta” creams and other niceties?)
In other words, are we sure this guy isn’t nuts? (So to speak.)
Addendum: this site (www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comme…) claims that these folks (www.skinmedica.com/contact) use foreskins to make some high-falutin’ skin stuff. I sent them a message asking what’s up with all the foreskins (there’s no mention of them on their site.)
I’m still smelling a legend, here. (The supposed reselling of “baby parts” by abortion clinics is a hot topic among some especially gullible right-to-lifers right now, for one thing…)
This comment was written by Kell.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:10 pm
“well, I want him to look like his Daddy”
There is a simple answer to that, which I gave to my ex husband when this topic came up - If you were missing an arm, would you want the doctors to remove one of the baby’s too?
My son is *not* circumcised as a result of that discussion - and since he’s about to turn 20, I am sure he’ll be glad I shared that with all of you ;-)
This comment was written by Broce.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:56 pm
It’s interesting to me how much Kate’s reasons 2-4 are echoed in a lot of the misogynist rhetoric around female genitalia as well. “Vaginas are dirty and hard to keep clean and ugly and smelly, etc, etc.”
—Myca
PS. Not that these are actually Kate’s reasons. I just meant the ones she pointed out.
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Actually, I think it’s less about the inherent dirtiness of penises (like female sexual organs) and more about our issues with bodily fluids in general.
That, and the whole “how could you possibly teach a boy/man to properly clean himself? we all know that boys are incapable of cleaning…” I actually hear that kind of crap a LOT. It’s the same kind of “men are incompetent” crap that is both patriarchal and incredibly demeaning to men.
Thanks for the edit :) They are definitely NOT my reasons. I find all but #1 to be completely idiotic and frightening. None of them are good enough reasons to me to lop off a perfectly working part of my child’s body.
This comment was written by Kate L..Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 3:58 pm
The pro-circumcision argument of demonstrated lower incidence of HIV applies in high-prevalence, high-concurrent multiple regular sex partners, low-prevention measures, low-general health situation, ie, typical African high-incidence country. Circumcision has not been reliably shown to be a favorable HIV-reduction practice in the developed world where condoms are easily available and are often used. The US HIV prevalence rate is too low to detect small additional benefits (or detriments) readily in condom-using heterosexual men in the general population.
I have never gotten the impression that Jewish men are unsatisfied sexually due to lack of sensitivity. Surveys indicate that they are as happy or more happy in their sex lives as the general population. A large percentage of mohels (ritual circumcizers) in the US are physicians, and I don’t see any health issues - the main medical problems in (8 day old) infant circumcision are severe clotting deficiencies and infection, and the doc-mohels know about the first and use sterile technique to avoid the latter. So - butt out of the Jews’ business, I say. It’s their covenant, not ours.
Everyone else - why bother? A certain percentage of boys and men will get constriction and inflammation of the foreskin (phimosis), which can be painful. At that point they can be circumcised to deal with the anatomic problem.
Men do get cancer of the glans and foreskin, and they can die of it if it is neglected, but this disease, caused by the same virus that causes cervical cancer, is rare.
This comment was written by NancyP.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:49 pm
I’m shocked at how eager people are to maintain the status quo.
Foreskin absolutely IS SOLD:
http://www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org/f4sale.htm
(with no compensation or even notification to the victim or his family). TNS Recovery Complex face cream was discussed on Oprah Winfrey for crying out loud. This is not some phantom.
The US is the LAST country that still cuts most infants for non-religious reasons. NO MEDICAL SOCIETY on earth (not even the Israel Medical Association) recommends infant circumcision, so those professing “medical reasons” should post some credentials or shut it.
Circumcision IS NOT the appropriate treatment for phimosis:
http://www.norm-uk.org/circumcision_alternative_treatments.html
Female mutilation is now illegal in the US without religious exemption, but females have been cut in the US and Blue Cross paid for it:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1878411047/normuk-20
Religious exemption would not be needed to outlaw male circumcision, since the parent has no right to amputate valuable healthy normal tissue from a non-consenting infant for any reason.
Infants don’t have sex. HIV claims, while wildly overstated, are irrelevant.
Infants don’t get penile cancer. More men get breast cancer than get penile cancer.
More infants die from circumcision than you probably realize, between 1 in 5,000 and 1 in 10,000. The cause is often listed as bleeding, infection, or anesthesia complications, but the circumcision is at fault. http://www.circumstitions.com/death.html
Every circumcision removes over half the sensual nerve endings, denudes the glans, and eliminates the natural frictionless rolling/gliding action. About 20% have unintended results: tightness, asymmetry, skin bridges, bulgy veins, gouges to the glans, skin tags, jagged scars, etc.
http://www.noharmm.org/IDcirc.htm
It’s barbaric mutilation, child abuse, YES. 80% of the world does not circumcise.
HIS body, HIS decision.
This comment was written by Ron Low.Report this comment to the moderators
July 2nd, 2007 at 8:03 pm
It is just me, or is there a faint whiff of anti-semitism (not to mention anti Muslim racism) in all this anti circumcision propaganda?
In the real world, the foreskin is a vestigal organ, dating back to the ancient times when our primate ancestors hadn’t invented pants or underwear yet. In the modern world. we need a foreskin about as much as we do an appendix or tonsils.
For over 5,000 years, the Jews have been removing the foreskin - a tradition that the Muslims adopted 1,700 years ago.
It’s also a common cultural practice in America - most male American babies are circimcized at birth (I was one of those children - my foreskin was removed shortly after my birth 39 years ago).
I’ve never felt “mutilated” or “deformed” by this surgery - nor has the absence of a foreskin prevented me from having sex or masturbating.
I honestly don’t understand what all the frantic anti circimcusion hysteria is about!
Gregory A. Butler
This comment was written by Gregory A. Butler.New York, NY
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July 2nd, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Yes. It’s just you.
Proverbs 13:24 says “He who spareth the rod hateth his son,” and yet I oppose the beating of children. I bet I’m totally an anti-Christian bigot.
Well, as I asked earlier, is there an affirmative case to be made as to why we should circumcise most male children in the US? I’m open to hearing any arguments, it’s just that thus far I haven’t actually heard any.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 2:57 am
I so wish I had the time right now to comment here, since this is a topic I have written about and researched quite a lot. One article that people might find very interesting, given what has been said is David Gollaher’s From Ritual To Science: The Medical Transformation of Circumcision in America. His book Circumcision is also worth reading. Regarding Jewish circumcision, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, in his book God’s Phallus devotes an entire section to examining the ways in which Jewish circumcision is understood in the Talmud (and maybe elsewhere) as feminizing of Jewish men so that they can be, collectively, as the people of Israel referred to constantly in the prophets (since only men were considered part of that “people’), God’s lover and bride—metaphors which recur consistently in the Bible when the relationship between God and the people of Israel is talked about.
Regarding male circumcision and male sexual sensitivity, here are two links:
http://www.noharmm.org/bjusuppl.htm
http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/sorrells_2007/
There are also plenty of articles, if you read through the literature, detailing research that demonstrates the effects of infant male circumcision on boys, everything from changes in sleep patterns to differences in pain threshholds between boys who were circumcised and those who were not. I don’t have time to dig the links out, though.
It’s worth thinking about how the medicalization of infant male circumcision, connected as it was to anti-masturbation theory and practice (and that whole notion is really connected to deep hostility in the 1800s to male sexual pleasure in general - read up on what Kellog and Graham–yes, the founders of the companies that give is breakfast cereal today–and other popular and medical authorities of the time–had to say about what would happen to men who had too much sex, even entirely “legitimate” married sex: it resembles to a striking degree the horrors that supposedly befell those who masturbated)–anyway, it’s worth thinking about how the connection between the medicalization of infant male circumcision in the 19th and early 20th centuries and its connection to anti-masturbation theory and practice is connected to people’s reluctance, until just recently, to acknowledge what should be an obvious fact: that if you amputate a nerve-filled piece of skin from a penis, the person that penis is attached to is not going to feel whatever those nerves were designed to feel. Once you acknowledge this fact, it seems to me, the question becomes not whether the sensation exists, not whether there is some competition between cut and uncut men in this regard— because, certainly, cut men are entirley capable of having entirely satisfactory sex lives—but, rather, what our cultural stance was and is towards that sensation in men and why?
And that is a much, much, much larger question that I don’t have the time right now to go into, though I should add I do not mean to imply that this is an entirely abstract and intellectual question. Obviously, we are talking about a practice that involves the real bodies of real boys and the men those boys grow up to be.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:33 am
“but, rather, what our cultural stance was and is towards that sensation in men and why?”
Well, it’s certainly interesting in the context of mixed messages, in that we spend a lot of time talking about male sexual satisfaction while at teh same time giving the chop to nerve endings.
I’m not totally comfortable with the cultural phenomenon of male circumcision being framed around the idea of sensation though. There are cultural intentions, and cultural byproducts. And while male circ was popularized among gentiles as anti-masturbatory, I don’t think that the appeal was supposed to be reduced sensation so much as reduced need to handle the penis for hygeine, etc. I’m not sure there’s enough here to make the leap to assuming that sensation is the heart of (or even a primary factor in) the American obsession with (male) circumcision.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:38 am
Dan Morgan:
If you saw a parent deliberately punch a small infant hard enough to give the infant a black eye — just the one punch, mind you — would you argue that it wasn’t an act of child abuse, because it’s not as bad as other acts are? (The pain of a black eye is almost certainly less than the pain of circumcision.)
I’d call it abuse. To say that no behavior towards children can be abusive unless it rises to the extremes of child rape et al is far too narrow.
In my opinion, yes. Especially if it were typically done without anesthesia.
Sailerman:
So do you agree with Dan, that to needlessly cut off a infant’s earlobe (presumably without anesthesia, to make the comparison valid) isn’t abusive? How about my example of deliberately giving an infant a black eye?
The only way to define child abuse that lets circumcision off the hook is if you define it based on the motivations of the adult who injures the child. It’s true that circumcision is not done maliciously in our culture, so perhaps from that perspective it’s not child abuse. But from the infant’s perspective, circumcision is identical to any other needless, painful, mutilating attack. I do think that’s a reasonable sense in which circumcision is indeed child abuse.
Nor am I convinced that including “needlessly cutting off body parts” in our understanding of what is abusive is going to dilute the term beyond all meaning. I think the opposite is true; if you refuse to admit that cutting off a body part for no good reason can be abuse, than your definition is far too narrow.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:46 am
A couple of people have suggested that religiously-motivated circumcision is more acceptable.
I disagree. I don’t think that harmful acts are okay if they’re religiously motivated; for example, voting for laws banning abortion and homosexuality is morally wrong in my view even if the voter is motivated by their religious beliefs.
Religions can and do change to accommodate improved understandings of what is moral. Circumcision is, or should be, such a case.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:50 am
Mandolin:
Except that when cricumcision was justified as an anti-masturbatory measure, it was justified largely–and I wish I could find the source for you, but I am not at home–on the basis of the pain it would cause (as an antidote to sexual pleasure) and the assumed reduced sensitivity that would result. I would agree with you that once other, more explicitly medical rationales were proposed–as in Gollaher’s article–reduced sensation sort of went underground as a rationale behind/motivating factor of the procedure (though it’s also true that if you read some of the debates on this that went on 20 or 30 years ago, there are people who actually applaud the reduced sensation since it ostensibly would help men not to ejaculate too quickly), but to me the question of sensation–though I would frame it much more broadly as the question of male physical pleasure in sex and what that pleasure means culturally; and I should add that I only came to this after doing quite a lot of reading; my initial impulse was the kind of framing you suggest–is the subtext running through the other rationales that are proposed.
Also, an interesting conversation related to this on another blog: http://sexinthepublicsquare.wordpress.com/2007/04/06/the-foreskin-dialogues/
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:52 am
WB Reeves writes:
I don’t think anyone’s proposing legislation banning circumcision. Although I’m not against it.
No more than any other law with an exemption is discriminatory. This, in and of itself, seems like a very weak reason to oppose a law.
I don’t feel any personal sense of injury or dimunition, either. Nonetheless, unnecessary amputation of body parts without consent is simply wrong. Just because I myself wasn’t harmed by it is no excuse for continuing to perform it on a new generation of non-consenting boys.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:58 am
“Except that when cricumcision was justified as an anti-masturbatory measure, it was justified largely–and I wish I could find the source for you, but I am not at home–on the basis of the pain it would cause (as an antidote to sexual pleasure) and the assumed reduced sensitivity that would result. ”
That makes sense in the context of the other kinds of anti-masturbatory procedures, like the application of blistering agents….
Hmm.
It’s not that I don’t trust your research. I’ve read about this stuff, but probably not as widely. But I don’t really know how to fit that into Western narratives about sex. I suppose it would slot in with the idea that men have to conserve their semen to avoid losing personal power.
It’s odd to see an emphasis on lessening male sexuality without stricture on female, but as I recall, the Victorians were pretty pleased with the idea of medical clitorodectomy. But also with the idea of therapeutic orgasm. Probably trying to look for a consistent narrative from them about sex would be over-simplifying deep neurosis. Must ponder.
I’ll take a look at the blog link! Thanks.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 6:13 am
“A couple of people have suggested that religiously-motivated circumcision is more acceptable.
“I disagree. I don’t think that harmful acts are okay if they’re religiously motivated; for example, voting for laws banning abortion and homosexuality is morally wrong in my view even if the voter is motivated by their religious beliefs.
“Religions can and do change to accommodate improved understandings of what is moral. Circumcision is, or should be, such a case.”
My beef with this, Amp, is that circumcision isn’t “harmful.” Unnecessary in most cases? Yes. So is ear piercing, but many people do that to infants. Piercing the ear of an infant also makes a permanent change to an erogenous zone. But is it harmful? No. Would I do it to my kids? Never, but it’s not my business if other parents want to do it to theirs.
I would not counsel a non-Jewish friend to circumcise his or her son, because I don’t think it’s necessary if you don’t have a good reason for it. I do have a good reason to plan to do it to my sons - because (and this is goin to sound hokey) it’s a commandment from God. I would rethink that reason in a second if I believed that it would actually be harmful to my children, but until there’s actual proof that it’s actually harmful, I think it’s going way too far to call it child abuse, or to even suggest that we should be okay with banning it.
Parents are charged with their children’s well-being, and also with their raising. To that end, partents have the right to decide their children’s medical care, and also their religious indoctrination. Parents get to choose whether to vaccinate, parents choose whether to pierce, parenst choose how to educate, parents choose whether to baptize, and parents choose whether to circumcize. All of this is done without the consent of the children. It is in our best interests to leave the rights of the parents alone unless there is significant evidence that a practice is absolutely necessary, or unless there is significant evidence that a practice is extremely harmful. I think that sending Jewish girls to substandard religious schools where they are discouraged from studying much beyond the juior high school level is a bad idea, but that’s a parent’s choice, and as long as the schools are meeting the minimal state requirements, I don’t have a right to interfere in that choice. We get, and should get, wide berth in this country when it omes to our religious choices, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
This comment was written by ADS.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 6:32 am
Mandolin:
Another angle, this from Michael Kimmel’s book Manhood in America (or American Manhood? I can’t remember the title): In the 1800s, male sexual pleasure/indulgence was understood to run counter to the work of building the nation that men were supposed to be engaged in.
And you are, of course, absolutely right that the stance against masturbation in men accompanied an even stronger stance against masturbation in women, for which clitordectomy was one recommended “cure.” It is interesting, however, esecpailly since both practices were rationalized in the same way, that the routine circumcision of infant males lived, despite numerous instances in which the medical rationales for its practice were disproven, while clitoidectomy, though it did not entirely disappear as a practice in the States (and I guess I should make clear, if I haven’t, that I am talking about the US here), has certainly fallen over time very far from the favor in which it was once held.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 6:47 am
“It is interesting, however, esecpailly since both practices were rationalized in the same way, that the routine circumcision of infant males lived, despite numerous instances in which the medical rationales for its practice were disproven, while clitoidectomy, though it did not entirely disappear as a practice in the States (and I guess I should make clear, if I haven’t, that I am talking about the US here), has certainly fallen over time very far from the favor in which it was once held.”
Oh, absolutely.
I actually think there’s a lot more productive discussion to be had talking about the parallel evolution of clitoridectomy and male circumcision in the west, then there is talking about FGS (female genital surgeries) and western male circumcision. Sex-phobic Victorians did seem to be viewing the procedures as cures for the same underlying problem, so that even though they aren’t physiologically similar, the ideology behind them is something that can be attacked at the same time.
While there are similarities between the western view of male circumcision and the non-western cultural roots of FGS (damn, I used to have a chart that had great quotes about hygeine, and the goodness of a “thorough” circumcision, and the medical ramifications of circumcision… can’t… find it…), there’s also a lot of unacknowledged difference that stems from ignorance about A) physiology, and B) the manifold variations of FGS and the cultures that surround and underlie it.
I’m actually surprised that western cultures aren’t more accepting of FGS. Why aren’t we seeing it sold in the mainstream as a cure for single motherhood? Of the top of my head, I’d wonder whether part of our self-definition is as the “civilized” half of a “civilized” versus “savages” dichotomy. Africans are “savage”; they practice FGS; we must not. Certainly, we see in Africa that there are places which have not traditionally practiced FGS which have taken up the practice as a way of defining themselves as “traditional” and “not westernized.”
I’m trying to come up with ways to slot male circumcision into any of those dichotomies and utterly failing. I hope I’m not thread drifting.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 6:53 am
Quoting from the blog post that Richard listed in this thread:
This fascinates me, because there are places where the male foreskin is removed because it is the “female” part of the penis, considered analagous to the labia. (Likewise, the clitoris is removed as the “male” part of women because it is considered analogous to the penis.)
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 6:57 am
I believe that piercing an infant’s ear is wrong and immoral too, but let’s be clear.
It’s not permanent - When I take my earrings out, the piercings heal. Plus, I have the option of taking the piercings out.
It doesn’t involve permanent removal of tissue - It involves poking a hole (which, as I said, I consider immoral, since it’s an unnecessary violation of another person’s bodily autonomy), but that’s a far goddamn cry from permanent removal of a body part.
It’s not directly sexual - Yes, the earlobes can be erogenous zones, but come on, they’re not genitals. This is why no one has ever advocated mutilation of earlobes as a way to curb masturbation.
A reasonable biological analogy would be removal of the clitoral hood, but that’s problematic in discussion because it’s so often linked to clitorectomy (which is NOT analogous).
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 7:27 am
But when it comes to non-circumcising cultures (the great majority) the argument is suddenly reversed: instead of enjoying automatic respect for their traditions, parents from non-circumcising cultures are pressured to conform to the American norm and to consent to have their sons circumcised, so that they will be “like other boys”.
I wonder what evidence he has that this actually occurs.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:07 am
RonF–
This was clearly the case in the beginning of the 20th century, when people from non-circumcsing cultures were intensely pressured by the medical establishment and more to circumcise their newborn boys. Check out the article and book I referenced upthread by David Gollaher.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:25 am
And again, while it is permanent, (just like the scars from a healed over piercings are permanent) I’m not getting the “harmful.” It’s different from the way we’re born, but it’s not damaging. It’s a permanent changing of a person’s body, but parents do that to their kids all the time. A vaccination, for example, is a permanent chnging of a kid’s immune system. Should circumcisions be required? No. Should they be encouraged? Again, no. But if you have a (minority) religious tradition of doing so, where’s the rationale for forcing a ban?
This comment was written by ADS.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:31 am
ADS:
How do you define “harm?” (Please forgive me if I missed something that you said earlier.)
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:41 am
It’s hard to define harm. Since I don’t beileve circumcisions are harmful, it’s hard to define it in this context (since it’s almost impossible to define a negative). I have not seen evidence that suggests that circumcision, especially infant circumcision, causes a decline in sexual function or sensitivity. A difference in sexual feeling/sensitivity/experience, probably, but a decline? I haven’t seen that shown. FGM produces clear damage to a woman’s sexual experience - male circumcision does not. Barring evidence of that, discussion of a ban is just more “let me force my choices on you because I know better than you do how to raise your children,” which I think we can all agree is wrong.
This comment was written by ADS.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:46 am
ADS:
Actually, the evidence is there, in many of the articles that have been linked to, and in extensive research on the physiology of the foreskin and of the glans penis pre and post circumcision. You may choose to see that evidence as pointing to difference rather than decline, but that is not the conclusion reached by the researchers themselves. The fact that a circumcised man can still feel sexual sensation and achieve orgasm and ejaculation does not, in and of itself, mean that those men do not experience a reduced sexual sensitivity as compared to men who are not circumcised.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:53 am
“Needless?” Bit of an a priori there, mate.
But you’re digressing. The issue is whether circumcision is child abuse, not what “child abuse” is, generally speaking. All this is going to do is end up going down the road of debating whether circumcision is more similar to ___ than to ___; do we really have to go down the general-child-abuse-what-is-it road?
Bullshit. Here’s a few other ways:
You can:
1) decide that circumcision is simply not all that big a deal, irrespective of its motivations. If you believe that, it’s not child abuse. UNLESS, of course, you categorize “abuse” as including things that aren’t really a big deal.
2) decide that circumcision is more of a big deal, but that it’s justified. Similarly, this justification has nothing to do with parental motivation.
Those are only two examples.
Amp, I’m distressed by your arguments here. This is a blatant straw man (”can be” is quite different from “is always;” not to mention the obvious fact that “no good reason” is under debate.) You’re generally a trustworthy and logical debater, and I”m wondering why you are lowering your standards here.
But OK, OK, we’re going to have to go to generalities, i can see that now..
For child abuse to have any meaningful definition, it has to reflect some objective measure of the actual harm to the child, right? There’s also a motive factor–a big one. Abuse is a subset of “bad;” not all things that are bad, or unpleasant, are abusive.
You know, and I know, that there are about 100,000 things that parents can do to affect the lives of their children. Many of them are legal; many of them are bad; none of them are currently considered child abuse. You can marry the wrong person; spend too much money on booze; start smoking; let your kids smoke as soon as they’re legally allowed to do so; let them get C and D grades in public school, thus probably cutting them out of higher education; give them bad advice on the job hunt; be a “bad parent;” have another sibling you can’t afford; raise them as white supremacists; etc.
Most of the things in that list will have much more of a lasting effect on a child than whether or not he has a foreskin.
Why are they NOT abusive?
I submit it’s because the “abuse” standard is pretty high. It actually is based significantly on intent to hurt someone. So locking my 2 year old in her room because I like to hear her cry is abusive; doing it because she just whacked her brother with a stick is not.
You already seem to think circumcision lacks the intent to harm. How, then do you classify it as child abuse, in comparison to the world of non-abusive greater harms?
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:10 am
Sailorman,
Are you reading Richard Jeffrey Newman’s comments? Because he’s pointed to some objective harms.
It’s a bit off-putting to read you insulting Ampersand’s arguments at the same time as you don’t seem to be responding to the material in the thread. In this instance, you’re the one pulling out the stops like calling his arguments “bullshit.”
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:15 am
The routine medical circumcision of infant boys is a medically unnecessary procedure. There are arguments out there that it has prophylactic value–against cancer of the penis; against HIV infection; against what will happen if a boy is not taught to keep himself clear–but there are plenty of other surgeries that we might perform that would save far more lives than circumcision. We could, for example, remove the breasts of infant girls, just to make sure there is no chance they will develop breast cancer, and far more women die of breast cancer each year than do men from cancer of the penis. Edited to add: Yet I doubt anyone would seriously suggest we ought to institute such surgery, despite the fact that girls whose breasts were removed could, except that they would be unable to breast feed their children, live perfectly normal lives (and there are substitutes for breastfeeding, and if all girls had their breasts removed when they were infants, a generation of girls would eventually be born for whom breastfeeding was nothing by myth); nor would they miss, because they would never have known, the erotic potential of the breasts they did not have. (And I feel I need to say this: I am not suggesting the removing the breasts from infant girls is analogous in its effect to those of the circumcision of infant boys; I am trying to point to the nature of the reasoning by which the routine medical circumcision of infant boys is justified.)
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.So what do you call it when the medical profession promulgates–as it still does in many places in the US, despite a growing trend to the contrary–a procedure that is not only medically unnecessary, but is also deeply and profoundly painful for the person on whom the procedure is performed. I think, in other words, when deciding whether the routine medical circumcision of infant males (I am, for the moment, not talking about religious circumcision) is or is not abuse, that it’s important to remember how deeply institutionalized the practice has been in the United States. Individual parents who chose or will choose to follow what has been until recently the overwhelming medical position in favor of circumcision are certainly not guilty of child abuse as individuals, but, if we call it abusive when a doctor performs unnecessary surgery….no, more to the point, if we can call it abusive that doctors used to perform unnecessary hysterectomies on women, why can we not call it abusive when they perform unnecessary circumcisions. Please note: I am not comparing the nature or severity of hysterectomy and cricumcision as medical procedures. I am talking about the wilfull way in which the medical profession endorsed and promoted the procedures despite the fact that they were unnecessary.
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July 3rd, 2007 at 10:17 am
There’s also a motive factor–a big one.
I have to strongly disagree that motive is a factor in whether or not an action is child abuse. I see this as self evident, but I can expand on it if you need me to do so.
This comment was written by Jake Squid.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:26 am
I have to strongly disagree that motive is a factor in whether or not an action is child abuse.
Denying a child food is considered abuse.
Scenario A: I come home from work and see my 12-year old son about to sit down to the dinner he made for himself. I knock it to the floor and say “the hell you’re getting food, you little shit” and send him to bed. Child abuse? Obviously.
Scenario B: I come home from work and see my 12-year old son has taken all the food from the cabinets and refrigerator, made an enormous pile of it in the backyard, and set it on fire, destroying $1000 worth of groceries. I tell him “since your behavior has resulted in all of us going hungry, it’s going to start with you. You go to bed now, and you’re not getting any supper.” Child abuse? Obviously not.
Same action, different motivation. One is abuse, the other is discipline or natural consequences or whatever you’d like to call it; “parenting” would be my word. Can parenting cross a line into abuse? Certainly - but for many, many actions, the fact that you’re doing it for the child’s own good is paramount.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:28 am
Richard,
Quite a lot of the examples I saw in your links were about what can happen when circumcisions go wrong. I think this is a very good reason to not encourage routine medical circumcision (which, again, I am against) because in those cases, there’s no good reason to circumcize an infant. When the circumcision is being done as part of a religious ritual, there is a good reason, and the equation changes. We stopped giving smallpox vaccines routinely after smallpox was eradicated, because there’s no good reason to expose people to the risk the vaccine poses. If and when smallpox makes a reappearance, that equation will change. (In addition, while I cannot point to a reference right now, I have seen numbers that show that circumcisions performed by mohels - ritual circumcisers in Judaism - are far less likely to be botched than those performed by doctors, for the simple reason that mohels do circumcisions on boys the exact same age all the time, day in and day out, while urologists and plastic surgeons only do them occasionally.)
Small dimishments in fine-touch sensitivity in the glans, that do not prevent sensation, orgasm and ejaculation, seem to be to fall more in line with “difference” in sexual feeling than “decline” in sexual feeling, especially when balanced with needing to have a circumcision performed in adulthood, which, if you’re being raised as Jewish, will be required when you turn 13 if it wasn’t done in infancy.
This comment was written by ADS.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:42 am
ADS:
Unfortunately, I do not have the time to link you to all the studies that have been done relating to circumcision, but I assure you that the ones I am thinking of, and that you could find pretty easily yourself if you wanted to, are not about botched circumcisions, but are, rather about the effects of routine and successful operations.
As to whether circumcision results in a “small” diminishment of sensation: not only is “small” a profoundly subjective measure, but research I have read indicates that the diminishment of sensation can be as much as 30%, using the measure established by the researchers, and it was a fairly objective measure–if I remember correctly–having to do with a correlation between how much tissue, and therefore how much of the nerve network in the foreskin was removed (glans sensitivity is diminished; foreskin sensitivity is removed completely), and circumcised vs. uncircumcised men’s response to stimulii. Again, I don’t have the time to find the link, and I will not swear by my summary here–I will only say for sure that I know there is research that seems to show the difference in sensation between cut and uncut men is anything but uniformly small.
That being said, I do agree that we need to talk about medical and religious circumcision in very different ways, not in terms of the effect it has on the boys who are circumcised, but in terms of the cultural and other assumptions that frame the procedure.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:43 am
Sure.
I come home. I’m drunk and surly, and my child is crying. I run to his room and punch him full in the face, bloodying his nose and splitting his lip. Abuse? Obviously!
I come home. I’m stone sober, but my child has made a mess of the house in my absence. I run to his room and punch him full in the face, bloodying his nose and splitting his lip. Abuse? Heck no, it was for his own good! That’ll learn ‘im.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:57 am
Surely, Myca, you can do better than that. The argument was that there is no difference in defining abuse based on intent of the parent. Several examples were provided showing examples in which the posters argued that the difference in intent was the difference between abuse and not. You countering with an example in which intent does not matter does not advance the argument, it’s just a strawman. Try again.
This comment was written by ADS.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:02 am
No, my argument is that (as Amp pointed out) circumcision is more severe than punching a child in the face, blackening his eye, bloodying his nose, and splitting his lip.
If intent isn’t exculpatory in the case of a punch to the face as a punishment, surely intent is much less exculpatory in the case of circumcision, which is much more permanent and is not intended as a punishment.
I’m not arguing that intent never matters, merely that in this case it doesn’t.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:11 am
Yes, and, once again, since the intent is not punishment, they’re nothing at all alike. Just because one is more severe does not automatically make that the winning argument.
Amputating a child’s leg, for example, is even more severe than blackening an eye. Doing it because you’re pissed at a kid and hit them with an ax is abusive. Doing it because they’ve got gangrene and will otherwise die is not.
When infant circumcision is performed within a religious context, the choice is not “perform this circumcision now without the child’s consent or nothing will happen later,” it is “perform this circumcision now while the child will have fewer lasting effects, when the danger is least, when it can be done without general anaesthesia,” or “wait until the child is a teenager, and then if they wish to remain within the religion in which they were brought up, they will have to choose to undergo a far more serious procedure that will be far more damaging to their sexual function and that carries far higher risks, including that of general anaesthesia.” Making that decision is parenting, not abuse. Might the child decide to leave Judaism rather than become circumcised? Sure. But I know far more adult male Jews who are stuck because their parents didn’t or couldn’t circumcize them in infancy who are furious at their parents for that then I know adult male Jews who feel like thir parents abused them by making that choice.
This comment was written by ADS.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:29 am
ADS wrote:
I don’t think anyone here is advocating a ban. In fact, the only people here who have brought up the subject are people advocating against a ban.
Just because people criticize circumcision doen’t mean they’re calling for a ban.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:35 am
I’m talking specifically about where you said, Amp, that you wouldn’t be against a ban, and I don’t see a difference between not being against a ban and being for a ban.
This comment was written by ADS.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:36 am
Oh, and I would argue that calling male circumcision child abuse is basically the same as saying it should be illegal.
This comment was written by ADS.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:43 am
ADS, it’s simply not true that you have to be circumsized to remain within the Jewish religion. That’s the case in some extremely frum communities, but the vast majority of Jews in the US are not that strictly observant; to talk about the practices of a small minority of Jews as interchangable with “Judaism” as a whole is inaccurate.
It’s fine with me, of course, if an adult man has his foreskin removed for religious reasons. That’s his choice. But it’s something he does because he wants to, or because he believes that it will make him a more observant Jew, not because he will cease to be Jewish if he doesn’t.
My impression is many mohels these days are doctors. My nephew was circumcized by a mohel who is also an anesthegiolist, which was good because it meant that my nephew, unlike the majority of circumcized infants, was numbed for the procedure. My cousin Rachel is not a mohel, but she is a doctor, and she performed her son’s circumcision herself.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:43 am
Mandolin:
Yes, I saw RJN’s posts. Are you aware of the sites on which they reside? They’re about as unbiased as reading about hospital birth on the “Homebirth Today!” website. See my comment below responding to one of his posts directly.
And as for Amp’s arguments: if he’s going to use a straw man, or claim “there’s only one way” to do something, or make constant a priori arguments, i’ll call him on it. It’s not his usual tactic, and I”m disappointed as hell.
That may seem like a logical conclusion, but it’s not. (Mandolin, is this the sort of thing you were talking about?)
What you are arguing here is stated as “this is medically unnecessary because there are other options that would save more lives than circumcision.”
But that isn’t the criteria for medical necessity. It’s not even close (and a good thing, too) On a pure cost/benefit basis that takes into account OTHER issues than the one at hand, there are a lot of things we shouldn’t be doing. And a lot of people we shouldn’t be helping. On a pure cost/benefit basis worldwide, we should probably all shoot our dogs and donate the money we save.
So. You list some positives. Would you mind explaining why they don’t exist? Cancer of the penis and HIV infection are not “nothing.”
Look, what gets so frustrating here is that the anti- crowd seems to be doing two things:
1) Constantly stating the “medically unnecessary” over and over, without really doing a lot to support it. The term properly takes into account BOTH costs and benefits. Here, the benefits are probably fairly small. But so are the costs.
2)Trying to formulate an ad hominem attack: people thought masturbation was bad; masturbation is good, therefore circumcision is bad. This makes no sense. Whether circing is good/bad is unrelated to what people thought then.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:47 am
Myca: I pinned down my child while a third party stuck needles in her.
Abuse?
Or good parenting?
Your definition would make vaccination pretty difficult, you know.
Oh yeah, and on the Jewish thing: It’s the mark of the covenant with God; it’s an utter requirement for Judaism with some rare exceptions. You can’t (generally speaking) be an uncircumcised Jew any more than you can be an unbaptized Catholic, or a Christian who doesn’t believe in ‘that whole Christ thing.’
There’s no law preventing you from CALLING yourself whatever you want, of course. But that doesn’t make it so.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:56 am
Sailorman,
What are the pro circumcision arguments then?
Let’s turn this around a bit. Baby boys are born with foreskin. If you want to remove an otherwise perfectly functioning body part, please tell me WHY.
This comment was written by Kate L..Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Well, Sailorman, you are right that the articles I linked to are on anti-circumcision cites, but the articles were all originally published in refereed medical or academic journals, and I would urge you, if you are really interested, to go straight to the journals themselves and read the literature. It almost unanimously supports the contention that circumcision is not medically necessary.
And regarding this:
Which you wrote in response to this, from me:
You misread me: I am not suggesting that circumcision is medically unnecessary because there are other operations that would save more lives than circumcision. I start from the position that the routine medical circumcision of infant boys (and please note that phrase; I have chosen it very carefully) is medically unnecessary. I am arguing that the prophylactic argument in favor of circumcision could be made for other kinds of surgery as well, and my point is that if you make that argument for other kinds of surgery that no one would advocate despite the fact that they would prevent many more deaths than cricumcision, then the absurdity of making that argument for circumcision becomes clear.
I suppose we need to be clear about what we mean by medically necessary. When I say that the routine circumcision of infant males is medcially unnecessary, I am referring to the fact that–all else being equal–there is nothing wrong with a newborn boy’s body that requires circumcision to save or improve his life. And, in fact, all of the non-religious arguments in favor of circumcision are prophylactic ones; they are about what circucmcision will prevent. So let’s take cancer of the penis: if I remember correctly, 1 in 100,000 men will get cancer of the penis; not only does that statistic hold true whether the population of men is circumcised or not, but it has also been shown that cancer of the penis tends to occur, at least in the US, primarily among populations that are poor and are characterized by poor hygeine. Teaching a boy how to keep himself clean is at least as, if not more effective in preventing cancer of the penis as circumcision.
Regarding HIV infection; it may be true that circumcision, because it creates a callus on the glans, can hinder HIV infection, but no official that I know, medical or otherwise, has advocated it as a primary means of AIDS prevention. Might there be adult men for whom circumcision might be a kind of last resort preventive measure to protect themselves? Sure. But that is very different from advocating the routine medical circumcision of infant boys on the grounds that it helps prevent AIDS.
Regarding the history of circumcision and whether that has any bearing on what we do, think, etc. now: go read the history before you dismiss it. It matters a great deal.
One more thing: When you say that you think the costs of circumcision are probably small, how do you define small and what specifically do you understand the costs to be?
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:38 pm
The reason nobody would advocate them is because (here we go again…) the positive–or negative–aspects are ONLY ONE SIDE of the equation.
You are being repeatedly and continually dishonest in presenting that fact. Your breast removal surgery example fails on that case. “Hey, I can avoid arm cancer by cutting off my arms. But I LIKE my arms… therefore circumcision is a bad idea!” Do you see how ridiculous the slippery slope argument gets here? That you can find surgeries which offer some putatively positive benefits, but whose negatives outweigh the benefits, says nothing about the positive/negative effects of THIS procedure.
This “nothing wrong with the body” is, just FYI, only sort of true. It’s a naturalist standpoint but it’s not really wrong. We have all sorts of things “wrong” with our bodies, insofar as we need to to intervene or change them. (there’s nothing “wrong” with women’s bodies, for example, but birth remains dangerous as all hell, to mother and infant.)
And “save or improve” his life… does that include life EXPECTANCY? There’s certainly little immediate benefit.
No disagreement here.
Sure. And that means?
I’m not sure why you’re suddenly a single-issue person. teaching boys to be clean is good. But (seeing as larger #s are dying, it doesn’t always work, so if circumcising them helps, it will prevent deaths, yes?)
Unless you’re deliberately planning to hide behind the “primary” qualifier: You’re dead wrong on this one.
See above.
Facts are history-proof. It’s the wonder of science.
Either the benefits exceed the risks, or they don’t. I don’t necessarily think that “what we do now” means it’s scientifically correct. But the history is 100%, completely, entirely irrelevant to the answer of whether circumcision is a good idea.
? I define “small” as “minimal” or perhaps “not large” or something equivalent. Don’t you?
The costs? Possibly a minor loss of sensation, though it’s not clear that it’s functionally apparent, since circed men have sex, procreate, masturbate, orgasm, etc, just fine. Some (small) risk of injury or infection. A bit of short term pain.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Sailorman,
Are you Jewish? Just wondering.
Circumcision is not “the” mark of the covenant with God. It’s one of many marks. For example, covering your head is a mark of the covenant with God, but it doesn’t follow that those who do not cover their heads cease to be Jewish. (Whether or not women cover their heads varies from congregation to congregation.)
By Jewish law (for most of Judaism, anyhow), what makes someone a Jew is if they have a Jewish mother; although of course, like everything in Judaism, opinions vary. A Jew who doesn’t follow the covenants isn’t fully observant, but he or she is still a Jew. It may be that some Jews think you can’t be Jewish if you’re male and uncircumcised, but that is not a universal opinion.
For example, this Rabbi writes:
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Kate:
The costs seem to be pretty well known and quantified, since people have been circed for thousands of years.
The benefits so far appear to include reduced risk of certain diseases, and/or reduced transmissions of certain diseases. Unlike the costs, new benefits are quite possibly forthcoming (recent HPV discoveries as an example.)
The transmission/infection thing is a nifty one. For some small subset of diseases–HPV and AIDS so far, it seems–it makes a HUGE difference. There is little reason to believe that those will remain the only two illnesses which are, eventually, discovered to be subject to that effect. As a result it seems likely that the future known benefits of circing will increase, not decrease.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Amp:
yes, i was raised Jewish, went to temple thrice weekly, got barmitzvahed, the whole kebang. I’m firmly atheist now, though.
Circ isn’t the only mark of the covenant, but AFAIK it’s one of the required ones. Here’s a link to Genesis 17:11
http://bible.cc/genesis/17-11.htm
which may make my position more clear.
You realize that’s an interfaith site, dedicated to, um, “expansion” of the Jewish community, right? Positing that as a representation of Judaism is a bit like RJN’s links. Or to analogize from another thread, if that’s judaism then Ann Coulter’s a feminist.
If you’re a Jew, you know that Reform judaism is the most liberal of the three major categories. Here’s a few links from their site:
http://urj.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=8320&pge_prg_id=29839&pge_id=3450
This comment was written by Sailorman.http://rac.org/advocacy/irac/enewsletters/nonorthodox_circumcision/
http://clickonjudaism.org/pages/FAQ_brit.html
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July 3rd, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Sailorman:
I think we will need to agree to disagree. I have neither the time nor the energy to engage you right now. You want to think I am being dishonest and illogical (though I wish you would stop characterizing the articles I linked to by the site where I found them; they are, as I said, from refereed journals, and you can find them in more neutral places as well–the sites I link to happen to be the ones that were easiest to find and free). I think you are consistently and wilfully misreading and, frankly, anti-intellectual in your argument. Facts, for example, are most certainly not history-proof. All kinds of ostensible “facts” surrounding circumcision, not to mention a whole helluva lot of other things, have fallen by the wayside as history has progressed.
I do have to say, though, that you are correct, as far as I know, about circumcision: it is the one, biblically mandated mark of the covenant, and while–again, as far as I know–not being circumcised does not make one not-Jewish, if one’s mother is Jewish, for believers it excludes one from certain aspects of the convenant, though I don’t remember now what they are.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 3:40 pm
There’s a lot of good discussion here.
In my view, it comes down to this:
A physician has a duty to his patient. That includes not performing surgery except when there is (at least) a genuine medical indication. By definition, if the physician is not strongly recommending surgery for his neonatal patient, no such medical indication is present.
The neonate does not need a circumcision. Circumcision is not recommended by any medical association. There is no evidence that potential benefits of the surgery outweigh the risks. Prophylactic interventions in a child require an even higher standard than minimal efficacy. A physician offering to perform such surgery on a neonate violates numerous duties to his patient.
The only possible justification for ablative (tissue removing) surgery in the absence of immediate need is for prophylaxis. Circumcision is not even minimally efficacious (i.e. potential benefit in excess of risk), yet a far higher standard is required for prophylactic amputations such as circumcision.
Circumcision meets non of the standards for an invasive prophylactic intervention. A coherent set of standards can be found in this very thorough analysis:
Prophylactic interventions on children: balancing human rights with public health
That neonatal circumcision violates the physician-neonate relationship is good news to those who are uneasy about an outright ban to protect the genital integrity of males. All that is needed is for physicians to come back into line with the ethical standards of their profession.
Physicians today should understand that their neonatal patients will one day grow to be adults capable of holding them responsible for their actions. Additionally, any parent who signed away their baby’s foreskin but were not fully informed about Sorrells (which found the most sensitive parts are removed by circumcision), and upon reading it realizes they made the wrong decision, should have strong grounds for a lawsuit. May I respectfully recommend to those who do this, please aim for a judgment or settlement not for cash, but for a public promise to never be involved in a non-therapeutic circumcision ever again.
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 4:03 pm
1) For me, the difference between not being against a ban and being for a ban is marked by neutrality. I’m not going to agitate for a legal ban on male circumcision. If one were put before me, I might vote for it.
(I also might not. Should such a ban be put before the public, I do suspect its motivations would be primarily anti-semetic [just because of where power lies in the US], and I’m sure the way the law was written would reflect that.)
2) Reduced nerve endings and loss of sensitivity don’t count as harm? Seriously?
3) I don’t recall the transmission issues actually being “huge.” My memory is that they were relatively small AND that the methodology for the AIDS study was pretty poor.
4) I suppose the question of male circumcision plus religion is a matter of whether male circumcision is more like putting on a headscarf (which one can take off!) or more like enforced seclusion. Something doesn’t become automatically good just because it is a religious practice, which surely we know from criticizing religions other than Judaism.
5) Why don’t babies require general anasthesia for circumcision? They DO feel pain. Circumcision is inflicting a great deal of pain on an unprepared infant who can’t interpret the source. I don’t put a lot of credence in the suggestion (advanced by some who oppose male circumcision) that this post-natal trauma is the cause of many male problems. But still — lots of pain on an infant is not my idea of a good time. We anesthetize adults because they can slap us. But let’s not pretend that giving the surgery to babies is a fantastic good time because they don’t need anasthesia. They still have pain, they just don’t get the painkillers.
6) I note the absence of Nick and Tamen, who wanted to talk about male circumcision when it was an INappropriate subject on my thread. I note, however, the presence of Myca, Ampersand, and Richard Jeffrey Newman, who are opposed to male circumcision but who respect the boundaries of conversation about female genital mutilation. This confirms my impression that the “what about the men!” discourse that shows up on FGM threads is about derailing feminism, NOT about helping men.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Why don’t babies require general anasthesia for circumcision? They DO feel pain.
General anesthesia carries with it a risk of death. That risk is higher for babies. The calculus is that the pain isn’t worth the death risk. As an adult the pain is far greater, and there also aren’t any ethical concerns about risking death on someone else’s behalf.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 4:30 pm
As an English woman with an American boyfriend, I am amazed that the US still circumcises as a matter of routine, or indeed at all. In the UK the practice is still widespread among Jewish and Muslim communities but only exists for medical reasons in the rest of the community. And people still have it done by non-professional medical staff, religious leaders, etc despite the risks (e.g. of death).
This comment was written by Cruella.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:14 pm
RJN:
I apologize for implying that your articles were themselves false. However, the reality is that the site on which they exist is a site with a ‘mission.’ As a matter of course, I strongly distrust sites which present science with a political bias. I apply this distrust evenly to sites whose conclusion I “like” and those I don’t. Perhaps we will have to, as you put it, agree to disagree.
Actual scientific facts are, in fact, history proof. They change, they evolve as we find out new things. But real, honest, scientific knowledge is… what it is. It is unquestionably true that science has been used to bad ends, but that says little about the worth of the underlying science itself. Things don’t fall by the wayside as HISTORY progresses, they fall by the wayside as SCIENCE progresses. there’s a huge difference. I’m happy to debate this with you in another thread if you wish.
Mandolin, apparently the U.N. disagrees with your interpretation of the AIDS study. Care to elaborate a little and/or support your assertion that it’s a bad study?
Robert, as per some L&D nurses I know, the infants get pain meds, simply not general. I don’t know any further details.
brick5, that ethics article takes an unusually extremist view that prophylactic action may only be taken when there is at least a 1:1 chance of actually contracting the disease.
the article also, IMO, presents an inaccurate model. It described breast cancer as carrying a risk of 1:8 in a woman’s life (correct) and then goes on to discuss prophylactic mastectomies as if they would be the logical conclusion to such a statistic.
That is hogwash. We DO, RIGHT NOW, perform all sorts of prophylactic actions on women to reduce their chances of dying from breast cancer. Mammograms are an excellent example: they are neither entirely risk-free, nor are they cost-free (especially when opportunity cost is considered.) Because cancer can (when caught early) be treated and eliminated, it is vastly more effective to catch it than to treat all women.
And then you get dreck like this:
Really? You think they’d coerce young girls to cut their breast off instead of, say, starting frequent mammograms, ultrasounds, or MRIs at a young age? I mean, does this actually make sense to anyone? It seems like pretty obvious scaremongering to me. (note the telltale “some____,” which gets used a lot here.)
This is, BTW, the sort of presentation bias I’m talking about. What sort of person could present that argument with a straight face?
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Sailorman,
You are making the same point as the authors of the paper, which is that prophylactic mastectomy of children is not ethical, despite the potential for disease reduction. That’s precisely why it is an instructive example.
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 7:26 pm
“Foreskin absolutely IS SOLD…(with no compensation or even notification to the victim or his family). TNS Recovery Complex face cream was discussed on Oprah Winfrey for crying out loud. This is not some phantom. ”
OPRAH GIVE-ME-AN-EVER-LOVIN’-BREAK WINFREY? That amoral, moronic, very-strange woman who thinks that diets work and will exploit whole towns just for a photo op and who thinks that Schwarzenegger never beat up anybody and who will say or do anything so long as it helps her ratings? PLEASE! You’ve just PROVED that this whole idea’s a joke! Next you’ll be expecting me to accept a Wikipedia reference as proof!
It’s a legend, folks. (The alligators in the sewers live on the leftover foreskins that nobody buys.) The site cited is also hysteria with no legitimate references. There’s talk of “neonatal growth factors,” as if foreskins were somehow the equivalent of stem cells, instead of just regular old skin. Once again, we see magical thinking associated with male naughty bits. If foreskins could be used for “therapy” or to grow “acres” of replacement skin, so could any skin cell from anyone’s body (even women’s!)
Show me the data, folks. And, by “data” I mean articles that are not from 1984, or which can be found readily without my having to go to a university library. (Just because a citation deals with skin grafts doesn’t mean the word “foreskin” even appears in it anywhere.)
Please resume your more important conversation.
This comment was written by Kell.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Kell,
Would you be more convinced that infant foreskins are procured for use by biotechnology companies (do you think hospitals don’t get a cut, financially, that is?) when you read it in their annual reports?
Here’s one:
Has anyone ever heard of this potential use being disclosed to parents when they give consent to remove this part of their child’s body?
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Let me just also point out, on a note related to the “business” of circumcision, that circumcision is big business in a whole variety of ways.
One of those is treatment of the pain and potential for infection after circumcision:
Painful infant circumcision wounds create business opportunity
Ouch.
Um, wouldn’t a much better way to handle the “overwhelming pain” and need for “Protecting Against Infection” be, oh, I don’t know, not genitally mutilating the boy’s penis???
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 8:56 pm
.
Let me just also point out, on a note related to the “business” of circumcision, that circumcision is big business in a whole variety of ways.
One of those is treatment of the pain and potential for infection after circumcision:
Painful infant circumcision wounds create business opportunity
Ouch.
Um, wouldn’t a much better way to handle the “overwhelming pain” and need for “Protecting Against Infection” be, oh, I don’t know, not genitally mutilating the boy’s penis???
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Mandolin:
Do they? Sure, they kick their legs and cry, but it’s not clear whether this reflects subjective experience of pain, or is simply reflex. I’m not convinced that infants subjectively experience pain (or anything else, for that matter). And even if they do, does pain matter if you can’t remember it? I can’t see how I’m any worse off for having been circumcised without general anesthesia.
This comment was written by Brandon Berg.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 1:08 am
Not absent, just hadn’t gotten around to this one yet.
On your post, I was not wanting to talk about it. I was pointing out that a term (circumcision) was being used for a practice (FGM) that does not adequately describe the horrors of FGM to most men. Its a euphemism.
Most men in America have been circumcised and most think nothing of it. It happened when they are young. It doesn’t seem to affect them much. Course they can’t compare to what it might be like with that bit of skin back because they have never known it.
As for me, I could sign up for the operation and give you a before and after view — but I am not. I have no plans on letting a doctor with a sharp knife getting close to me anytime in the immediate future. That is the next eighty or so years.
FGM is much more akin to the horrific castrations that used to be done to men by the slave trade. Although perhaps the castrations were worse because allegedly the death rates were close to 90%.
As in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade
I fall into the ‘anti-circumcision’ camp. I had a daughter, not a son, but if I had had a son, he would not have been circumcised.
I have never heard of any good reason to get circumcised. Y’all hit all the high points. The ‘cleanliness’ issue was raised. The ‘look like the other boys’ is another. Other than those two absurd points, there are not any reasons to do it.
I think the practice is barbaric, but less so than some of the other issue that have higher priority. We can only tilt at one windmill at a time. I’ll let others wet their lances on this one.
[Extremely long, extremely off-topic discussion of a law relating to child abduction snipped by Amp.]
This comment was written by Nick.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 7:46 am
Re circumcision and pain:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9057731&dopt=Abstract
This is only an abstract, though. You can view the full article here:
http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/taddio2/
I am trying to make no particular point here except that the pain of circumcision is real and that there are studies indicating that it has, relatively speaking, long lasting and substantive effects.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 8:46 am
1) Unlike some of the other “anti-circumcision” folks here, I think the evidence is strong (although not ironclad) that widespread circumcision in Africa would reduce transmission of AIDS. There have been three randomized clinical studies showing that men who get circumcised as adults are less likely to become HIV-positive. Although there are still some doubters, I think the evidence is strong enough — and the need desperate enough — so a reasonable case can be made for circumcision in the African context. (But a reasonable case can also be made against; see this article by Howe).
However, it doesn’t follow that widespread circumcision is the right idea for the U.S.. Widespread prophylactic surgery only makes sense if what you’re preventing is widespread and commonplace (such as AIDS in Africa); it doesn’t make sense if what you’re preventing is relatively rare (such as AIDS in the US). Quoting from Howe’s essay:
2) It’s also not clear to me that removal of the foreskin actually leads to a less satisfying sex life in any way (see this study, for example). It may be that the subjective amount of sensation and pleasure one feels is based more on responses that take place within our brains than on the particular nerve endings lost in circumcision.
* * *
Sailorman, if you respond to me as you’ve responded to Richard, you’ll probably point out that the link to Howe’s article is on the CIRP site. However, that doesn’t mean that you can logically dismiss the article. It was originally published in The International Journal of STD and AIDS, a legitimate peer-reviewed publication. It might make sense to dismiss an article because of where it was originally published (although even that is a bit dicey, except in extreme cases), but it’s irrational to dismiss an article because of which websites reprint it (most likely without permission).
Your wholesale dismissal of the other peer-reviewed articles Richard has linked to was also irrational, for exactly the same reason.
[Edited substantially by Amp at 9:20am.]
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Sailorman:
Step one: Study is originally published in JAMA.
Given JAMA’s peer-review process and academic prominence, being published in JAMA lends the article some credibility. (Almost no one would say “well, if it’s been published in JAMA it must be junk.”)
Step two: Several years later, a biased advocacy website reprints the JAMA article word-for-word, probably without permission.
Suddenly, in the world according to Sailorman, the exact same article has lost all credibility and can be dismissed based only on where it was reprinted. On Monday, it’s a credible scientific article. On Tuesday, biasedwebsite.com reprints it, and suddenly it’s junk. Does that make any sense?
Sailorman, I agree that an article’s credibility can be reduced by the venue it was originally published in; knowing a news article was written for The Onion suggests that the article isn’t true, for example. But what you’re doing here is making ridiculous excuses for dismissing legitimate peer-reviewed articles. Are you really incapable of telling the difference between an article written for an advocacy website, and one written and published in a peer-reviewed journal but later reprinted on the web?
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 9:39 am
“On your post, I was not wanting to talk about it. I was pointing out that a term (circumcision) was being used for a practice (FGM) that does not adequately describe the horrors of FGM to most men. Its a euphemism. ”
You’re right, Nick. I realized this morning that you weren’t engaging in the behavior I was talking about. I apologize.
Sailor,
Amp’s provided links about the HIV studies which represent the anti-view. If you skim thorugh Pandagon threads on the subject, you can also find links provided by Ms. Kate, who I’m pretty sure is a sociologist.
There may be an argument for using male circumcision as a preventative measure in regions where condoms are difficult to come by. I just went and checked transmission rates among one of the cultures in Africa that routinely practices male circumcision, and it looks like there is data that the Kikuyu have a lower AIDS transmission rate than other groups that don’t practice male circumcision. I suppose circumcision could be a stop-gap in that situation. However, there are often factors that affect African contexts which westerners aren’t aware of, and I’m not comfortable making an assumption about what the effects would be of circumcizing groups that haven’t historically practiced circumcision.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 9:42 am
“I don’t like the website that was published on, therefore I can dismiss it” is an ad hom argument (and one that you’re overly fond of).
I never claimed that the website I linked to was representative of Judaism, so your argument is a strawman; I said it was an example of a rabbi arguing that being uncircumcised doesn’t make a Jew suddenly non-Jewish. Which it is.
It’s true that in the US, most Jews agree that getting a circumcision is extremely important. It’s not true that there’s universal agreement that you can’t be Jewish if you’re male and uncircumcised. [*] (Not even the links you provided make that claim.) There are some rabbis who won’t allow a bar mitzvah ceremony for uncircumcised boys, but there are also some rabbis who will allow it.
In European Jewish communities, incidentally, this question is barely an issue at all; not being circumcised is generally considered the equivalent of eating ham, in terms of how “unjewish” it is. (Or so I’ve been told by a couple of European Jews). The belief that circumcision is an absolute requirement of Judaism is a belief held by many American Jews (and others), but it’s not one held universally by all Jews.
As for Genesis 17:11, surely you’re not claiming that we have to follow everything demanded of us in the Torah or else we’re no longer Jewish.
[*] I’m referring here to born Jews, not converts.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Thanks for the education on the issue Amp. Those are very interesting articles.
I AM OUTRAGED !!! I just read how they were doing those ’studies’.
from New York times link
Talk about using live human guinea pigs. This is just sick. Instead of providing help for this community, they are conducting some bogus study to fit some sick doctors idea of a ‘fix’.
At least they stopped the trial on ethical grounds. Their excuse was that it was not ethical for the uncircumcised group to continue. Geez. 22 of the 1,393 circumcised men were infected. They should have stopped the test just on those grounds.
This comment was written by Nick.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 9:49 am
I really liked the discussion between Mandolin and Richard of the link between anti-sexuality (and anti-masturbation) ideology and male circumcision.
This is total speculation, but I wonder if the high prevalence of, well, prudishness in the USA could be a factor that explains our unusually strong devotion to circumcision?
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Here’s one example of the links Ms. Kate recommended on Pandagon - http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/HIV/cochrane2003/
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 9:54 am
Nick, I’m not sure I understand what your objection to the study is. It’s not as if they deliberately infected the men with HIV; they just gave half of them a treatment, and the other half no treatment[*], in order to determine if the treatment worked. If they hadn’t run the study, then none of the men would have gotten the treatment at all.
What other means of testing if a treatment works is available, that’s as reliable as a random clinical study? None that I know of. And to recommend a treatment as extreme as universal male circumcision (not just of infants) without first doing very high-quality studies to test if the treatment works or not would be extremely irresponsible and could potentially harm millions of people.
[*]Edited to add: Actually, they gave all the men treatment, in the form of safe sex counseling, and they also gave all the men who wanted them circumcisions — but the control group was only given circumcisions after they decided to end the study.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 9:57 am
“Talk about using live human guinea pigs. This is just sick…”
Yeah.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Heh, being in the unusual position of agreeing with Nick…
Among other things, if you look at the objections in both Cochrane and Howe, it appears that the researchers did a poor job of controling for their own cultural biases when they went in to do the research. They don’t seem to have understood the places or peoples they were investigating.
Howe: “Other cultural factors, such as age at first coitus, chastity and monogamy, that could otherwise explain the differences were not considered by the authors.”
Cochrane: “A potential confounder that has not been measured in any study to date, to our knowledge, is the use of vaginal drying agents in female partners of the men. This practice is reportedly common in parts of Africa (Brown 93; Runganga 95; Kun 98) and may result in increased vaginal abrasions and micro-lacerations, possibly facilitating HIV transmission to both men and women.”
There’s a paternalistic flavor here, and an ethnocentric flavor here, and a lot of other things that make me uncomfortable.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Mandolin, the Cochrane analysis (which is excellent, thank you for providing the link) and the Howe article were both written before the Random Clinical Trials that the Times article Nick linked to describes.
Because men are assigned at random into the control and treatment groups in an RCT, it’s unlikely that any of the confounding factors you mention would make a difference, because it’s unlikely that a random trial — let alone three separate random trials — would by random chance assign all the men who had (say) early first coitus to one group but not the other.
Edited to add: But I can think of other potential problems with the RCTs. For example, it’s possible that patients who have had surgery (even minor surgery, such as having their foreskins cut off) are more likely to take doctors’ instructions seriously than those who did not have surgery. If so, then perhaps the men who got circumcised were more likely to follow safe sex advice than those who were not circumcised.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Ampersand,
You’re exactly right, that the African RCTs introduced many uncontrolled confounds by not performing a maximally similar surgery on the control group. They could have done a surgery which didn’t remove any tissue, but they didn’t.
John Talbott actually himself makes this point in commentary on his recent research which found that female sex worker populations were able to explain the high rates of HIV found in some countries.
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Amp:
I think it is crucially important to distinguish between having a satisfactory sex life, which is about far more than whether or not one possesses a foreskin, and the fact that circumcision removes sexual sensitivity from the penis (and when I say “removes,” I am talking about the foreskin, not the glans).
Regarding the abstract you linked to: I am stretching pretty far back into memory here, but if I remember correctly, the nerves in the glans penis resemble most strongly the kinds of nerve endings that you find, for example, in the heel, which respond mostly to pressure. The nerves that are removed when the foreskin is cut off are of a very different sort, and are quite a bit more sensitive. IN men who are circumcised, what remains of the foreskin is usually a little bit of the frenum (frenulum?), which is on the underside of the penis right beneath the glans. That is often, in circumcised men, the most sensitive part of their penis (as is, often, the circular area just beneath the glans). Part of what you have to imagine, if you want to imagine what is missing, is that kind of sensitivity spread out over the entire area of the foreskin and, as importantly, that kind of sensitivity spread out over skin that is similarly smooth and moist to, say, the inside of your mouth. I have read accounts from uncircumcised men who could make themselves come just by manipulating their frenum. In other words, assuming that the study you link to is authoritative, it may be that the sensitivity they are talking about is very different from what one would experience with a foreskin.
Again, though, and I can’t emphasize this enough: I am not arguing that possession of a foreskin is the determining factor in the degree of satisfaction one finds in one’s sex life. I am simply trying to point out that there is a very real loss, that men who were circumcised as infants can not know we suffered in anything other than a theoretical way. It would be interesting to hear from any men reading this blog who were circumcised as adults, say, or after puberty.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 11:30 am
The question of circumcision influencing sexual satisfaction is, of course, a challenging one to study.
It is (or should be) well known that Sorrells found circumcision to remove the most sensitive parts of the sex organ. But critics (apologists?) sometimes argue that less sensation does not affect pleasure.
My guess (having experienced only a mutila..er..circumcised sex organ) is there is pleasure degradation akin to a grainier, more pixelized image of a picture, coupled with the discomfort of exposed parts that nature “intended” to not be exposed.
There is a study, though, which found a way to measure the effect on pleasure. In South Korea, Americans introduced circumcision just a few decades ago (they never had that habit before). For reasons particular to their culture, they do it as adults.
The study by Kim/Pang, entitled “The effect of male circumcision on sexuality”, was published just this year, and is summarized here. It’s available in full as a pdf here.
The researchers concluded:
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Hugo has written about being circumcized at 37.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 11:45 am
GRIN. Now that’s a first.
I suspect advocacy science. They went in wanting to prove a specific result and either intentionally or unintentionally designed their experiments so that they could ‘prove’ their claim.
Halperin is the key person advocating the circumcision of men.
1
This paper cites his reasoning on why it is a good idea.
2
Now why would the doctor make all of these non-medical claims a major part of his argument? 1) Women like it; 2) The sex is better; 3) The elite have already done it so why don’t you?
The also clearly overstates his only medical reason (prevents S.T.D.’s). Circumcision has no chance of preventing S.T.D.’s. It may reduce the rate of spread of S.T.D.’s, but to claim ‘prevention’ is unethical on his part.
This comment was written by Nick.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 11:50 am
I like what Talbot had to say, I just don’t know if I can trust his study either.
3
He does seem to have a good head on his shoulders and he has single handedly dealt the proponents a serious blow to their (absurd) claim that male circumcisions are the key to controlling AIDS in Africa.
This comment was written by Nick.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Another boy dies… today… from a botched circumcision.
But you know, that’s in Africa, done under poor conditions, so it’s nothing like here in the United States, right? If boys died from totally unnecessary surgery in the USA, there would be an outcry sufficient to end the practice once and for all, right?
Nope. Boys die from circumcision complications in the USA every year, and not only that, but there are more than we know because true cause is often not reported! Child died of excessive blood loss. Child died of an infection.
There is no requirement in the USA that the precipitating cause, circumcision, be identified.
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
A pro circumcision site recommended by the top proponent of male circumcision.
In the first article, Dr. John Smith outlines the reasons for circumcisions. Lets deconstruct it at bit. LISTED REASONS:
1. CIRCUMCISION IS ESSENTIAL
a. Religion.
b. Parental request.
c. Desire to be circumcised.
d. Tight foreskin. - cannot be retracted (phimosis) - jammed (paraphimosis).
e. Inflammation - balanitis.
f. Torn or tight frenulum.
“Phimosis and persistent balanitis are the most common medical reasons for circumcision in this country. ”
2. CIRCUMCISION IS ADVISABLE
a. Climate or occupation. warm climate. Merchant seamen,
b. Redundant foreskin.
c. Very loose foreskin.
d. Physical or mental handicap.
3. CIRCUMCISION IS OPTIONAL
a. Prevention of cancer of the penis.
b. Prevention of cancer of the neck of the womb.
c. Prevention of cancer of the prostate gland.
d. Hygiene.
e. Aesthetic considerations.
f. Delays orgasm.
g. Improved stimulation during intercourse.
h. Increases the efficiency of a small penis.
i. Reduces the risk of V.D.
j. Circumcised brothers.
k. Unsatisfactory circumcision.
So the reasons to do it are SOCIAL and RELIGIOUS not MEDICAL. The medical reasons for the most part are preventative and for the most part only prevent the excised part from becoming infected. Since the infected part can be removed at that time, why do it sooner?
Here are some of the more juicy quotes from his whole article.
ROFLOL. Boy is that a load of crock. It prevents cancer in your wife but it only works if she is jewish.
Neater, tidier and a ‘turn on’. Hmmm. Not very convincing. Not very convincing at all.
Ah, so the truth comes out. It actually makes it harder for a man to climax.
Hmmm, do this to your kid or he will start wetting the bed?
This comment was written by Nick.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
“This is total speculation, but I wonder if the high prevalence of, well, prudishness in the USA could be a factor that explains our unusually strong devotion to circumcision?”
Possibly. If that’s the heart of the link, though, the question (which I believe RJN mentioned above) is why Americans have become attached to this particular procedure and not any of the others which were used for similar purposes in the Victorian era.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Brick,
I fished a couple of your comments out of the SPAM. If you submit a comment, and it just disappears (neither posts nor pops up text reading “awaiting moderation”) then the spam filter has nabbed you. Go ahead and say something in the thread, and I or one of the other moderators will fetch it out for you.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Mandolin,
Thanks, I was wondering why that single post (resubmitted a few times) seemed to disappear. I assumed it was because I posted a second one while a previous one was still awaiting moderation. Now I know why.
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
IME, people really don’t think about it much–unless there’s a specific religious reason, it’s just ‘what’s done’, in their minds. I also find that men, not women, are the most hung-up about this, and want their sons to Look Like Dad.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Amp,
Science is a flexible process. Peer reviewed papers often disagree, for example: peer review is no guarantee of correctness. Peer reviewed papers are also often bised (as the Merck scandal reminded many of us.) And peer reviewed papers are, surprisingly often, actually pretty bad. As a result, a single paper, or even two, are often not accurate indications of scientific consensus (if there is a consensus at all.)
In that world, the existence of a paper on a political website like circ doesn’t mean that it is necessarily incorrect. However, it is likely that the collection of papers was done with a goal–it’s a political website, after all. The collection almost certainly reflects only a single side of the issue; this is essentially the library equivalent of data-mining (I call it “library mining.”)
Here’s a better example: There is probably a website out there that shows papers listing the costs of abortion, without listing the benefits. (I’m assuming those papers exist somewhere.) Would you consider that website to be honest? Would you consider those papers to be representative? Would you trust the scientific conclusions of those papers, or would you trust a neutral?
Good science is about conceding what you don’t know, what you may be wrong about, etc. Websites which present an unusually one sided report of purportedly scientific data lose a shitload of credibility in my eyes. Sorry, but that’s unlikely to change.
And FWIW, it’s not an ad hom, because it’s relevant to the general worthiness of the data presented. Just FYI.
That was pretty clearly your implication. If you weren’t intending to call on the “jewishness” of the rabbi as representative of judaism, then your anecdote is essentially meaningless. Why else would you post it?
No, it’s not an ad hom at all. pointing out that a position is fringe (and therefore not representative) was what I was saying, so that comment was right on target.
Similarly, pointing out that your link was biased was not an ad hom. Posting a link is not deceptive (since the viewer can see what’s there on their own;) posting a quote with proper attribution is not deceptive. But posting that quote (where few people clink the link) without making it clear what the source was, was a deceptive act.
Want an ad hom? Implying that something is scientifically (objectively) incorrect because other idiots believe (subjectively) that it is linked to masturbation. Now, THAT’S an ad hom–great example, huh?
No debate, but so what? Universality is a pretty high bar. I cannot think of almost anything that is universally true in the political or religious field. Prolifers are not universally anti-woman, for example.
The degree of “some” on both sides is pretty relevant I think. Don’t you?
I have no knowledge either way about Europe. I agree with your universal comment, for the same reasons as above. I wonder, too, the degree to which European circumcision choices may have been influenced by the desire to be able to hide from the Nazis without an immediate physical indicator exposing one to risk
If I make that claim, you’ll know. You seemed to question that circumcision was considered to be a mark of the covenant; that cite (along with the accompanying other links) was simply a bit of explanation.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Now, that Pang study is interesting. Hard to evaluate, though (as with a lot of older–male studies) because of the “used to body” effect. E.g. my mom has astigmatism. But she’s never worn glasses. So when she recently got some which “fixed” her astigmatism (and made her see “better”) she couldn’t see worth a damn; she had to get a new pair that were “worse” glasses and didn’t fix it (they fixed only other aspects of her vision.)
Similarly, given the general fickleness of male genitals, it wouldn’t surprise me that any post-masturbatory change would mess things up one way or another.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
But why is the infant’s pain so easily dismissed here? Do we really think it hurts less to be cut as an infant…can someone provide me with cites (if that can even be proven)? Because, all statistics on disease aside, an un-anesthetized genital surgery on a child incapable of consent or even comprehension seems to fall squarely into torture territory.
So, those of you who think infant circumcision is not important, tell me why that isn’t so, instead of debating HIV stats. Tell me why pain is such a HUGE concern for later circumcisions on boys and men, but not for infants.
My suspicion is that you don’t care because the infant is unable to either communicate how much pain it’s in, or to remember and hold it against us later. Which would suggest you would also be ok with torturing anyone so long as we wiped their memory afterwards. Is that your position?
If so, if such a procedure was developed, I’d like to see you hop up on the table and let someone take a swipe at your genitals. After all, you wouldn’t remember it later. No harm no foul.
This comment was written by emjaybee.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
^^ I don’t think anyone here is advocating a ban ^^
Think again.
MGMBill.org has submitted a draft bill to every federal legislator and most state legislators several years now. Go to the site to see if they need a citizen in your state to officially submit to your legislators next time (February).
The bill simply demands equal protection under the law. Cutting girls’ genitals - even a ceremonial pin-prick with no tissue removed - was outlawed in the US in 1996 with no religious exception.
And Kell, I can’t imagine what you expect as proof about foreskin being sold. Did you look at the links? Several companies - including the one whose rep was on Oprah - admit buying them, dufus.
-Ron
This comment was written by Ron Low.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Yep. The equal protection insistence is where I part ways with the MGM folks. There are MGM activists who’ve attepmted to get the FGM bills either braodened or wiped, which indicates an appalling lack of understanding of the difference between infibulation and clitorodectomy and circumcision. The willingness to throw away the welfare of girls and women is shocking.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
“Several companies - including the one whose rep was on Oprah - admit buying them, dufus. ”
Ron, don’t call other commenters “dufus.”
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Mandolin wrote:
Mandolin,
That might be the case, if the FGM law made the distinction which you are making, but it does not. As Ron Low noted in #114, the anti-FGM law prohibits even a mere ceremonial pin-prick, or other procedures which are less severe and less damaging than male circumcision, such as that considered at Harborview.
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Yeah, and there are probably good reasons for doing that. These laws are usually framed so that you can’t go after the parents after FGM is done, so permitting nicking might make it impossible for the law to have its intended effect. (Absent that: no, I would not make nicking illegal. Although I should note that cultures that practice nicking often shade into removing the top quarter inch or so of the clitoris, which I would definitely argue is more damaging than male circumcision. Further, procedures that involve nicking, removing the tip of the clitoris, and so on, make up less than 5% of procedures; most FGM is much, much more invasive.)
It is possible, right now, in this country, to protect some girls legally from the great harm of FGM. It is not possible to legally protect men from the much lesser harm of male circumcision. If accomplishing the latter means risking taking away protection from the former, I can’t get behind that. Sorry.
Let’s work toward a positive means of reducing male circumcision, not chance putting high-risk groups in greater danger.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Mandolin,
mgmbill supporters don’t want to undo the protections for females, they want to extend it to males. Why do you say that this is not possible? Do you mean that right now, it’s not politically possible?
I would argue, in any case, that physicians have no business performing non-therapeutic circumcisions by proxy-consent. It violates their duty to their patient. Yes, their patient, despite being an infant, has the right to expect competent medical care, and that includes avoiding ablative surgery when possible.
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
I have a logical quibble. I think we need two words here, quantitative and qualitative.
Male circumcision and female circumcision (and yes, I’m using these words rather than go on a futile quest for a word that’s sufficiently descriptive without being badly charged — I would say that “mutilation” specifically implies lack of consent, which is not necessarily required for these procedures, although the way they are culturally practiced on young children is nonconsensual.) share many qualities:
- There is no moral quality attached to either procedure if done on a consenting adult.
- They are often performed at parents’ will on unconsenting children.
- They have serious risks including loss of sensation, infection and death.
The risk of ill effect, however, involved in these surgeries on women is quantitatively higher.
If you’ve ever heard of the case of David Reimer (looking up a reference, I just found that he recently committed suicide, which makes me sad — having read the biography, As Nature Made Him, by John Colapinto — you really can’t say that the sort of thing that happens with non-consensual surgery on the genitals of baby girls does NOT happen with non-consensual surgery on the genitals of baby boys. It’s like saying that driving a motorcycle out in a field is perfectly safe. Sure, it’s harder to kill yourself than in driving a motorcycle on the highway… but I wouldn’t recommend letting your children do it. :P
One procedure is worse than the other and achieves disastrous results far more often (sometimes intentionally — which is the main qualitative difference I can think of.) Neither is free of disastrous results.
This comment was written by A.J. Luxton.Report this comment to the moderators
July 5th, 2007 at 12:03 am
Great. Then try to make male circumcision illegal. Don’t lobby against laws preventing female circumcision because they don’t go far enough, in your opinion.
Once again, we’re being misled by the term “circumcision.” The two kind of procedures are not equivalent. It may be possible to analyze them simultaneously in some contexts (such as looking at the evolution of anti-masturbatory sentiment in Victorian medicine), but treating them as legally equivalent is vastly problematic.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 5th, 2007 at 4:44 am
There is one very big difference between FGM and male circumcision that, as far as I can see, has not been mentioned in this thread and that, for me, is the frame through which all the other differences that have been mentioned need to be seen–not because I think it is more important per se, but because it helps to put the differences that have been discussed, quantitative and qualitative, in a more meaningful context: FGM, as far as I know, always has as central to its purpose the function of making women’s bodies reflect, concretely and specifically, their sexual subordination in the cultures where as it is practiced. Male circumcision, on the other hand, always has as central to its purpose the function of making men’s bodies reflect, concretely and specifically, their dominance as appropriately initiated men in the cultures where it is practiced. (And I would argue that this description holds true even for the routine medical circumcision of boys, since a properly configured penis–whether for purposes of hygeine or appearance is part of what makes a man a man no matter what culture he comes from.) Whatever the similarities in the two procedures, in other words, whatever cultural symmetries one might be able to identify–i.e., removing the male foreskin removes that which is sexually feminine from the male body, while removing the clitoris removes that which is sexually masculine from the female body–there is a profound asymmetry in the cultural consequences the two procedures have for those upon whom they are performed.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 5th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
In European Jewish communities, incidentally, this question is barely an issue at all; not being circumcised is generally considered the equivalent of eating ham, in terms of how “unjewish” it is. (Or so I’ve been told by a couple of European Jews). The belief that circumcision is an absolute requirement of Judaism is a belief held by many American Jews (and others), but it’s not one held universally by all Jews.
Uh, it’s a belief pretty much universally held by all Jews. To pretend that it’s just a crazy American obsession is, well, crazy. The fact that a couple of European Jews think it’s silly would be very surprising to most Jews, especially those who came to America. You know, from Europe?
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
July 5th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Mythago, this digression began when I was responding to ADS’s claim in comment #61 that an uncircumcised Jewish man (I’m talking about someone with a Jewish mother, born into the religion, not about converts) has no choice but to get circumcised if he wants to remain Jewish.
It’s simply not true that such a belief is “universally held by all Jews in America.” I don’t believe it, and I’m Jewish. I have many American Jewish friends, and not all of them believe it. It takes about ten seconds of internet searching to find American Jews arguing against circumcision. Claiming that all of us don’t exist isn’t a very good argument, in my opinion.
Updated to add: There’s a world of difference between feeling very strongly that all Jewish men should be circumcised, and feeling that an otherwise Jewish man who is not circumcised is not Jewish at all. I really think that many Jews — especially reform Jews, who are a majority in the US — are a lot more likely to fall on the relatively tolorant side of that difference than you, ADS and Sailorman seem to believe. However, unless someone’s done a good survey on this specific question, I don’t see any way of resolving our disagreement.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 5th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
But - and I don’t mean this in a derogatory fashion - the American Jews that argue against circumcision seem to be a rather liberal and casual branch of the faith. It doesn’t mean they aren’t Jews, but it does mean they would need to be a pretty fair chunk of the demographic for some outside, fair-minded observer (say, me) to think of their opinion as being normative.
Put it another way, there are some Jews who would walk a mile over broken glass in their bare feet to, for example, make sure their kid was enrolled in Hebrew school, or hit the appropriate milestone sacraments. I kinda get the impression that most of the no-snippy-for-mr-bippy Jews would walk maybe ten feet over carpet to the phone. Maybe I’m way off base and there’s a legion of orthodox rabbis advocating for an overturning of this most ancient of legislations, but I don’t see that.
To put it in yet another way, the successful revolutionaries of one generation become the orthodox of the next, and the hidebound reactionaries of generation X. Anti-circumcision was a cause of liberal Jews 200 years ago (if not more), and 100 years ago, and today - but it hasn’t ever made the jump into orthodoxy. Not that it never can, but surely its failure to do so to date, six millennia into the game, signifies.
I would contrast all this to the American branch of the Catholic Church, and the teachings on birth control. Are you supposed to believe no-artificial-contraception if you’re a Catholic? Yes, and there’s no question of it - but something like 50 or 60 percent of the practicing members of the faith don’t believe the teaching. That raises a serious flag to that fair-minded outside observer (it can be you this time) about whether that teaching is really all that fundamental or genuinely necessary, if so many people can blow it off. I don’t see that flag getting raised for anti-circ American Jews; you guys don’t seem to have a plurality, let alone a majority.
Not that it’s a majority-rule question, but you see my point I’m sure. So yeah, it’s not an absolute truth that all Jews believe in the teaching - but I can find you some Protestants who think sex outside of marriage is OK, too. Doesn’t mean the Christian faith isn’t broadly and effectively anti-premarital-sex.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
July 5th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
There’s an ethnic question with Judaism that you dont’ get with Catholocism, Robert. If it were solely a question of religious in-group membership, your idea that liberal and casual branches have less impact than others might have more traction, but it’s not solely that.
Anyway, why are liberal or casual practicitioners of a religion less representative than conservative and obsessed ones? It seems like circular logic, to me. Liberal opiniosn are to be discounted, not because of a fair evaluatoin of their numerical significance, but because they’re… liberal.
I broadly agree with you on one level, though. There’s certainly a pervasive idea that Jewishness and circumcision are linked. Even if it were found that 20% of American Jews don’t think the two have to be linked, most people wouldn’t know that. The idea that they were linked would continue to be dominant.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 5th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Since the topic of Jewish circumcision seems to be at the forefront presently in this thread, this may be of interest:
http://digg.com/world_news/Rabbi_Philosopher_and_Author_oppose_Jewish_circumcision_in_Azure_Journal
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 5th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
The ethnicity question would be relevant if we were talking about a broad assessment of “what is a Jew”; I’m making a narrow conceptual point about what constitutes a mainstream.
Anyway, why are liberal or casual practicitioners of a religion less representative than conservative and obsessed ones? It seems like circular logic, to me.
Not less representative (that’s down to demographics) but less fundamental. Liberal in this context means experimental and new; much of what is liberal in one generation will be discarded as crazy talk by the next. (And the stuff that proves to have been a good idea will win out and become the orthodoxy.)
It isn’t the liberalness per se - it’s the presumptively temporary nature of the positions that the liberal wing always holds. Transient experiments are not the bedrock (unless you have a transiently experimental church, of course) - and sometimes when the liberal ideas win, they do so in a way that creates something new rather than changing what’s old. You can make a darn good case that this argument was first settled about 1,970 years ago - and the anti-circ liberal Jews, who we today call “Christians”, ended up leaving and starting their own church. Although anti-circ wasn’t the main point of the movement, it was certainly in there. (And I should acknowledge that this does weaken the point I made earlier about it “never happening”; it did happen, just in the context of a much larger change.)
The word “liberal” might not be helping here. It would be equally accurate to say “experimental” or “minority”. It’s just that the experimental minorities generally are liberal; not always (for example, Tridentine Catholics who want to bring back the Latin Mass, God love them for it) but usually.
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July 5th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
I read Amp as talking about ethnicity, at least a bit — since he’s talking about Jewishness being passed through the mother, and being born a Jew.
I hear your point about experimentalism. Thanks for clarifying.
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July 5th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Yes, but the question I was discussing was (brought up by ADS in comment #61) “what is a Jew?”
There is no question that the opinion of the overwhelming majority of Jews is that, as Mandolin put it, “circumcision and Jewishness are linked.” I haven’t argued otherwise.
I have no idea whether it’s the more extreme opinion ADS advocated (that an otherwise Jewish male cannot remain Jewish unless he is circumcised) is also held by the large majority of Jews; but the claim that this is a nearly-universal Jewish opinion seems implausible. (IMO). Likewise, it would be very surprising if Jews in the US — where we are far more pro-circumcision than the rest of the first world (apart from Israel) — were not more devoted to the importance of circumcision than Jews in other countries.
The implicit conception of Judaism in ADS’s opinion is at odds with my understanding of Judaism; because Judaism is an ethnicity as well as a religion, Judaism doesn’t have a strong tradition of excommunication for dissenters (that’s more a Christian thing).
Your opinion here mainly makes sense if we ignore the fact that Reform Judaism — a recent “liberal wing” — has flourished, and now represents the majority of Jews.
I’m not at all certain this is true of modern-day Judaism. There are multiple tiny Hasidic sects, for example.
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July 5th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Your opinion here mainly makes sense if we ignore the fact that Reform Judaism — a recent “liberal wing” — has flourished, and now represents the majority of Jews.
True. It is still an open question whether Reform Judaism is a hothouse flower, though. I hope not to find out in my lifetime, or ever if we can manage that trick.
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July 5th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
Brick5, thanks for that link. There’s some interesting stuff there.
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July 6th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Amp Said:
Robert Said:
I think sort of the problem with your standard, Robert, is at what point we decide that a ‘radical’ or reformist movement has become mainstream. Reform Judaism has existed since the mid 19th century (so, 150+ years so far) and it’s the largest Judaic denomination in the US.
Would we, in 1700, have considered Protestant opinions on Christianity invalid? Would they have been invalid?
—Myca
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July 6th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
It’s simply not true that such a belief is “universally held by all Jews in America.”
Then it’s a good thing I didn’t say that. If you’re going to quote me inaccurately, do it more artfully, hm?
The idea that circumcision is very much a part of being Jewish is, indeed, pretty universally held by Jews; of course that doesn’t mean every single Jew believes circumcision is important to religious and/or cultural identity, but it’s flat-out false to pretend that the silly religious Americans are the only ones who feel that way, or that it’s about as well-observed as prohibitions on bacon bits.
Maybe I’m way off base
Yes, and well into “you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about” territory.
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July 6th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
And to clarify, Amp, the belief I’m referring to is “Jewish men should be circumcised as infants,” not “a Jewish man who is uncircumcised is not really a Jew”.
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July 6th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
[UPDATE: I wrote this response to Mythago's comment #134 before reading her comment #135. Having read comment #135, Mythago, I'm bewildered as to why you think I disagree that the belief that "Jewish men should should be circumcised..." is "pretty universally held by Jews." I don't disagree with that.
Also, edited to desnark a tad, and to fix confusing wording.]
Mythago,
Sorry, I have no idea where the “in America” came from — I had some sort of brain fart. And if you consider the “nearly” hedging essential, than I apologize for cutting it out. That said, none of that makes any important difference to my argument.
Your complaint about being misrepresented is ironic, since you spend the rest of your comment misrepresenting my arguments.
Yes, it is. I agree; that idea is pretty universally held by Jews. If you really think I disagree with that claim,
then you haven’t been bothering to read what I’m actually writingyou’re mistaken.What I disagree with is ADS’s claim in comment #61 that an uncircumcised Jewish man has no choice but to get circumcised if he wants to remain Jewish; I also disagree with the implication that the vast majority of Jews would agree with ADS’s claim.
I’m not sure if you agree with ADS’s claim, or not; perhaps you could clarify your view?
In context, “feel that way” seems to mean “feel that circumcision is very much a part of being Jewish.” Of course, I’ve never said only Americans feel that way; it’s “flat-out false to pretend” I said any such thing.
As I’ve said, I’ve been told by a couple of European (French) Jews that circumcision is seen as a commandment that observant Jews follow, but not as a commandment that’s enormously more important than other commandments. Obviously, that’s anecdotal, so it’s not useful for this discussion. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all.
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July 7th, 2007 at 2:48 am
So…
The one thing we know from the excellent FGS article and thread is that meddling in other cultures can be problematic, and not achieve the intended effect.
One might even argue that Americans, in particular, have little standing to insist that others curtail their traditional genital cutting practices, when we have yet to address our own genital mutilating ways (since it’s my culture, and I’ve experienced MGM myself, I feel entitled to use that emotionally charged word).
One might also argue that the most effective way to move past humanity’s involuntary genital cutting phase is for each society, each person, to clean up the mess in their own back-yard before criticizing the neighbors for theirs.
An important feature of this, of course, is that each of us can more effectively deal with the problems in our own society, going on all around us, than we can those going on half-way around the world.
This leads to an obvious question (particularly for the Americans out there)…
[First let me just say again, the level of discourse here is fantastic. Mandolin, don't worry that Ampersand posted this article before you posted one about male circumcision; There's ample material for another!]
So with regards to the involuntary genital mutilation in our own midst, in our own back-yards, just WHAT are we going to do about it?
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July 7th, 2007 at 4:47 am
Well, I don’t agree with that exactly, brick. We shouldn’t wander over and tell other people what to do. But it’s vital to give money and support to activists who are trying to get African women health care, education, and economic opportunities.
Americans are, after all, complicit in the explotiation and oppression of African women since we benefitted enormously from the colonialist practices which have impoverished those nations. Women enjoy greater freedom when they are educated and when they have their own economic opportunities. When women have these freedoms, they tend to stop circumcizing, or to circumcize less often.
Economic oppportunities and education for women would also solve a host of other African problems that don’t have to do with genitals, since it would go some way toward alleviating poverty. Alas and other feminist blogs have posted articles from the UN documenting the ways that family life improve when women have access to education and money. These things would help everyone.
Among other things, it’s a matter of treating a cause, instead of a symptom. You don’t get rid of burkhas by dropping bombs on middle eastern countries until they outlaw them (and incidentally killing women along the way). You don’t get rid of FGM by bullying.
Sorry about the ramble, I’m gearing up to a post and having trouble getting my ideas to cohere in essay form.
–
However, you asked about male circumcision! Personally, I plan not to circumcize sons if I have any. I also talk about the issue with my acquaintances. I’ve changed a couple people’s minds.
In my experience, women are much less likely to be interested in circumcizing their sons than men are. Most liberal women I know are aware of the issue, and the majority have decided against circumcizing their children.
This is not true among the practicing Jews of my acquaintance, even the ones who are casual about their religion. Jews like myself who are ethnically Jewish, but who don’t believe in God, seem especially likely to be uninterested in the practice of male circumcision. Again, in my experience.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2007 at 6:16 am
Mandolin;
I just tonight returned from my vacation and am currently reading through the comments on this article when I came upon your comment(#76) noting my absence from this discussion. Again I ask you to not attribute to me unsavory motives I haven’t stated.
This comment was written by Tamen.I think it’s great that it’s being discussed and I give kudos to Ampersand for writing and posting this article. I am not circumcised and where I live it’s mostly done by the Musleem and Jewish minorities. Male circumcision hasn’t been a part of the public discourse here, but female circumcision (I use that term here instead of FGM as that is the direct translation of the term used in the public discourse where I live) is a very hot topic at the moment as there are discussion on whether one should have mandatory medical examination of young girls (from the ethnic part of population which have female circumcision as a part of their cultural heritage from their original homecountry) to look for and report signs of female circumcision. It is already illegal to perform female circumcision and to send the cild abroad to perform the procedure, but it is hard to get evidence of this crime, hence the current public discourse.
As for my interest in male circumcision that stems from a few years back when an American girlfriend commented on the difference on circumcised and un-circumcised penises. She was slightly weirded out by the foreskin. I started to wonder why there in the US was so many male circumcision not based on religion and did some research online. What I quickly found out was that the argument that the child should look like his father and that he shouldn’t stand out (avoid ridicule) in the locker-room was very often stated. The last argument has also been used as an argument against gay adoption (”the child will be ridiculed by his peers for having two dads so for the best of the child we shouldn’t allow that”). Another common argument was the one on cleanliness. For people living under primitive conditions in arid areas (such as in the middle east and Sahara) I can understand this argument and it may well be the historical reason that such a thing as male circumcision first started. But in the current US this argument is clearly moot. If your kid can’t be learned/trusted/bothered to wash his own genitalia regularly he/you got more pressing problems. AS other have pointed out the rate of penile cancer are very low - the risk is about 1 in 100,000 and this risk is about the same in countried where circumcision is uncommon as in the US. For circumcision the risk of the child losing the penis from complication is about 1 to 1,000,000, the complication rate (from bleeding/blod loss to more severe complications) are stated from 0.2 - 0.6% by the American Medical Association.
Secondly I discovered the industry based on the raw-material which the foreskin are. Not only is it used in cosmetich products, but it is also bought from hospitals by biomedical companies which amongst other things sees it as a potential source for stem-cells and use it to grow artifical skin used for burn victims. Things to keep in mind when your doctor recommends circumcision for yur newborn son.
It also seems to be a recognized fact that the foreskin contains a lot of nerve-endings (as any un-circumcised male can attest the foreskin is sensitive and even moreso is the glans when the foreskin is retracted/pulled back). But this has proven to be a very tricky argument indeed as such a large population of american men are circumcised. They get defensive as they read the argument as an argument that there is something wrong with their sex-lives which they may be perfectly happy with. But as has been pointed out in an earluer comment this argument (about loss of sensation) was a few years back used a a pro-argument. A circumcised man wasn’t as prone to premature ejaculation and could thus continue longer (and give the woman her orgasm). Now with a more nuanced view of both male and female sexuality this argument is no longer of any use and it’s premise (lowered sensitivity) is denied.
Again we see that the “victims” are to a large degree partaking in the continuation of the “status quo”. The same goes for FGM where the practicioner almost always is a woman.
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July 7th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Regarding circumcision’s ostensible value in helping men not to ejaculate too quickly, it’s interesting to note there was a time when Jews believed quite the opposite (the point of which is simply to indicate the degree to which our attitudes about male circumcision have a lot to do with culture and perspective). This is from an unpublished essay of mine:
The material quoted is from David Biale’s book Eros and the Jews.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Mandolin,
I favor your ideas for empowering women all over the world. Aside from just being the right thing to do for fellow humans, disempowered women have a lot to contribute to humanity, and we all need those contributions.
My argument that we (particularly Americans) need to look in the mirror and end our own non-therapeutic genital cutting before criticizing others for theirs is meant to make the point that we could be seen as hypocritical, and that our efforts could suffer for that. It also makes the point that we have greater access, better tools, and stronger standing for fixing what’s immediately around us and what we ourselves are a part of, than for fixing what other cultures do elsewhere.
In reality, we need to walk and chew gum at the same time on this one.
But I have no idea how, with any credibility, we can go into some culture that practices genital cutting on both males and females, and expect them to modify their traditional practices for one sex but not the other. It really gives the message an air of bullshit so transparent that it transcends culture, which is terribly unfortunate because (as far as it goes, halfway) it’s an important message for the betterment of the human condition.
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July 7th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Richard,
Fascinating.
Brick,
I think I’ve mentioned that I think it’s unproductive to talk about genital surgeries as a monolith, in terms of action. Infibulation is a different priority, and requires different response, than clitorodectomy, and in turn both are different than nicking the clitoris. All three are different from male circumcision.
The reason that we tend to talk about them in one lump, I think, is that they are A) salacious, and B) because we’re thinking about the sexual pleasure aspects. But the physiological and medical effects of clitorodectomy and infibulation are really pretty different. If we’re talking about reproduction and childbirth, infibulation is the clearer, sharper danger, although clitorodectomy also carries some risk. Male circumsion is NOT risky in this ongoing way.
Whether or not it’s useful to talk about male and female circumcision simulatneously is going to depend on the situation. It might be useful when you’re talking to the Kikuyu. I would guess it’s unlikely to be useful when you’re talking to Somalians, although I’m not sure they practice male circumcision anyway.
I also resist your formulation that activism against FGS is somehow “halfway.” FGS, in the form 95% of it takes, is just way more medically detrimental and detrimental to women’s sexual response, than male circumcision is to men. I agree that male circumcision is bad, but I really wish that people like yourself — who I do agree with in many ways — would stop trying to use FGS as a kind of measuring stick, and looking at gains toward helping women as a zero sum game in which men have been disadvantaged.
That stuff aside, I agree that walking and chewing gum is a good plan. What direct action do you suggest in the United States?
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July 7th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Mandolin,
Once again I appreciate your nuance, and I can’t detect any underlying disparity in our views on these subjects. Rest assured I do not view this as a zero-sum game, rather, I view it as a zero-cutting goal.
As you explained, there is such a wide spectrum of FGS that it cannot be treated as a monolith, and by the same principle, all GS is not a monolith.
That said, I share some of the same concerns about banning circumcision in the USA as you note about banning FGS in Egypt. I applaud the work of MGMbill.org, but I’m not sure that’s how we’ll solve this.
I see these as some important paths forward:
1) Keep up the pressure. Drive home the point that things are different now. The studies which have come out in just the last 6 months make this a more clear issue that ever before.
2) Don’t tolerate solicitations for unnecessary surgery. A physician/hospital is doing something unethical if they ask you about circumcising your boy. There are even laws against solicitating for unnecessary surgery in the hospital, IIRC. Any health professional asking you about this when you didn’t bring it up deserves to get (at least) an earful that they won’t soon forget.
3) If you signed away your son’s foreskin but were not fully informed of the consequences, consider a legal remedy. For example, once Sorrells was released (3/19/2007), it became essential knowledge for giving informed consent. If you weren’t told it about and were thus deprived of making a fully informed decision, then you didn’t give informed consent.
4) If you yourself were circumcised, you might still consider holding the circumciser accountable. You were the patient, and the physicians duty was to you exclusively.
I guess you could say I favor a free-market solution. Nullify the profit motive.
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Found an interesting organization:
http://www.farreach.org/en/
They’ve even got a sense of humor:
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Excellent post and discussion thread, Amp. (Also great comments from myca and brick5.)
Most of the important points have been discussed, but I had a couple of rejoinders to some points made upthread.
Brandon Berg at #85 questions whether the baby boys feel it:
I suppose it’s impossible to know for sure if anyone other than ourselves is feeling something, but these Canadian doctors came to a different conclusion. Also, other studies have shown that babies subjected to painful procedures produce stress hormones consistent with having been traumatized.
I suspect the phenomenon of trauma during male circumcision is much more significant than is generally recognized. In circumcision books I’ve read, nurses report anecdotally that circumcised infants have more trouble with their initial bonding with their mothers.
There is also evidence that the impact may be long lasting. As I commented over at Feministe, in largely-uncircumcised France, the ratio of autistic boys to autistic girls is three to one according to one report. In the highly-circumcised U.S., the ratio is four to one. While far from definitive, I find that difference extremely intriguing, as it is not something that can be readily explained away by many factors that might account for cross-cultural epidemiological differences (genetics, pollutants, diagnostic sensitivity, etc.), as one would not typically expect those factors to be so markedly gender-dependent in their impact. It seems plausible to me that a baby’s reaction to the trauma of having his genitals sliced (terror, anger, pain, fear, shut down, withdraw) might leave a permanent psychological scar that would interfere with his ability to connect with people and thus make him more vulnerable to a disorder like autism.
It is only because we’ve never rigorously explored the short- and long-term impact of male circumcision that Sailorman (#72) can make the false claim that “The costs seem to be pretty well known and quantified…” (In the ‘not generally known category’ I would add the fact that the foreskin doesn’t simply get cut off, it must be literally torn away from the glans as most foreskins do not separate from the glans until the boy is considerably older.)
Also — though most commenters here probably are already aware of this — there is the reality that the highly-circumcised U.S. has much higher rates of AIDS and STDs than the rest of the minimally-circumcised First World. This should give pause to anyone trying to translate the recent African studies of the prophylactic impact of circumcision in adults to what happens when you circumcise infants.
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July 7th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
Amp, that strikes me as something for a rabbinical debate: what if the man can’t be circumcised for medical reasons? Is it his obligation to be circumcised if his father did not have him circumcised? Is he actually “non-Jewish” or is he some kind of apostate Jew?
Regarding ADS’s claim, the only way I’m aware of that Jews recognize somebody becoming “no longer a Jew” is if that person formally converts to another faith, and even then it’s not something that you can make go away forever; presumably a Jew who converted to Christianity and then later changed his mind could pick right up where he left off, and nobody would suggest that he lost the right to be a Jew, or must formally convert. (c.f., the Brother Daniel case of Israeli citizenship).
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July 8th, 2007 at 5:00 am
mythago, afaik there exist circumcision exceptions though I don’t recall the details.
I’m assuming we’re talking about reform judaism here (the most liberal branch); I suspect Orthodox jews would be less accommodating thoughI am sure there are still medical exceptions allowed.
ballgame, is your autism comment meant to be a joke, or are you serious?
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July 8th, 2007 at 5:47 am
We’re clearly coming from very different perspectives, Sailorman. If I lived in a culture where circumcision was unknown, and someone were to suggest, “Let’s take a razor and cut and tear off part of the flesh of the sex organ of a newborn infant … without anaesthesia. We can safely assume that such a procedure will have no significant lasting psychological impact.” … then I would be thinking, “Is this guy serious? He can’t possibly be serious.”
This comment was written by ballgame.Report this comment to the moderators
July 8th, 2007 at 6:09 am
Mythago wrote:
That’s been my understanding, as well. I don’t think you and I really have any disagreement here.
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July 8th, 2007 at 8:11 am
They are.
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July 8th, 2007 at 8:27 am
We’re clearly coming from very different perspectives, Sailorman.
I hope that your perspective is not one where you undermine arguments against circumcision with ridiculous and exaggerated claims, for example the suggestion that circumcision causes autism.
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July 8th, 2007 at 10:04 am
ballgame, what perspective do you think i’m coming from?
I’m not “pro” circumcision, insofar as i don’t think everyone should necessarily automatically be circumcised, irrespective of their wishes or those of their parents.
I’m not a fan of circing without pain relief in any case, which I think is generally not a great idea since it’s easy enough to avoid. But then again I think we do a generally bad job with pain management in infants; this is merely a part of a larger problem.
The questions for me are simple:
1) whether it’s such a horrible procedure (like, say, FGM) that it should be conclusively banned. For me, that’s a clear “no.” There are some things (FGM) for which no rational justification really exists. But while circing clearly has costs, the costs are not so high that the issue of benefits or preference becomes moot.
2) Whether the medical benefits exceed the medical risks (I’m currently somewhat in the “yes” camp, but my opinions on this sort of thing change all the time with the appearance of new data.)
3) Whether, if it’s more in the “gray area” where it is neither obviously positive or obviously negative, it should be made illegal. I tend to think not, mostly because I generally dislike government interference in these sorts of decisions; I think it’s more of a parental issue.
Where do you think we differ most? I suspect–though I’m curious to clarify–that you and I differ on #1.
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July 8th, 2007 at 10:10 am
You mean the same way some critics say that Democrats ‘undermine’ their cause by being anti-war or raising vulgar topics like impeachment, mythago?
I made it very clear that my linking infantile circumcision and autism is speculation. But if you believe, as I do, that unanaesthetized circumcision is a traumatic experience at an exquisitely vulnerable point in the person’s life (could there possibly be a more vulnerable point?), then I think such a link is highly plausible. The rudimentary numbers I was able to come up with are consistent with such a link — though to be absolutely clear they by no means prove that such a link exists. They are intriguing enough to point to the need to study such a possibility, however.
Until such studies are conducted, claims that the costs of circumcision are ‘known’ and that the procedure has no long term psychological impact are groundless.
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July 8th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Sailorman, I agree that your#1 is where our perspectives differ the most, although you included a ‘poison pill’ in your clause by adding the phrase “like, say, FGM” which will be inflammatory to many anti-FGM critics. (FTR, I’ve made it repeatedly and unambiguously clear in my comments at various blogs that I think that most forms of FGM are far more dire than male circumcision.)
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July 8th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I don’t think any anti-FGM folks will be bothered by what i said, unless they misread i. I just said that no rational justification for FGM exists; how much more anti-FGM was I supposed to be?
And I don’t think it’s a poison pill. Just because you think circing is in the same class as FGM (’never justifiable’) doesn’t mean you think it’s as BAD; it just means you think it’s on the same side of the line. The ‘never justifiable’ class is full of things which vary hugely in how bad they are. (It’s never justifiable to ritually drown a female baby, for example.)
About the autism thing.. well, hmm. Don’t want to derail. But there’s a lot of stuff about autism out there; lots of groups with their own ideas. There’s the mercury folks, and the chelation folks, and the diet folks, and the vaccination folks, and the “epidemic” folks, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I suppose there’s room for circumcision-causes-autism folks as well. But it’s not especially good company to be in as they’re all mostly woo folks.
It is possible that autism is, somehow, linked to circumcision? Sure: almost anything is possible; see my note to Amp regarding universal statements. But there’s really nothing to suggest that it is, in fact linked to circumcision. And unless such evidence exists, there seems no reason to conclude, or even believe, such a link.
Mind you, IMO it seems quite possible that circing infants could have long term effects.
I just think it’s likely such effects would get “lost in the noise of life.” E.g. missing third grade for a week, one time, is “bad” for my daughter’s education, but probably has absolutely no noticeable effect on her collegiate success, interest, etc. It’s simply lost in the noise of her education.
It seems simple to imagine a world or a situation where circing infants would have long term effects that could be detected. But it’s also simple to imagine that the effects of circing would be lost in the noise of socialization and gender roles and aging and, other physical stuff and, well, life, so that the long term effects would be zero.
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July 8th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Brick,
Thanks for all your suggestions. It’s good stuff to start thinking about.
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July 8th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
You mean the same way some critics say that Democrats ‘undermine’ their cause by being anti-war or raising vulgar topics like impeachment, mythago?
You’re going to have to do better than “but other people *I* disagree with make stupid arguments too, so there!” Either you’re trying to present the best possible case for your position, or you’re not. And please don’t pretend that oh-it’s-just-speculation is some kind of magic takeback if the weakness of your argument is noted. If you can’t back up an argument then don’t make it.
By the way, if we’re going to pretend that circumcision has any kind of “plausible” link to autism, then you’d be wanting to present evidence for why girls not subject to FGM have autism at all, whether autism is more prevalent in communities where FGM is practiced, whether boys who are circumcised are actually more likely to be autistic than boys who are not, and so on.
All you accomplish with this sort of cowardly nudge-nudge pseudo-rhetoric is to make anti-circ arguments look weak and paranoid. That’s not really your goal, is it?
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
July 8th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
I don’t think it’s a crazy thing to examine whether or not early childhood trauma leads to increased autism rates, and I don’t think it’s a crazy thing to consider circumcision traumatic.
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 8th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
In my comment #143 I referred to the shameless way in which American health-care providers guide parents towards circumcising their boys. Just offering a procedure is itself an endorsement (plus, solicitation for elective surgery is unethical, maybe illegal), but they go further, and they profit from it.
Case in point, Amanda Mann.
http://digg.com/health/Mother_regrets_circumcision_wasn_t_informed_it_s_surgical_amputation
Amanda explains in the video that she was led to believe that circumcision was as routine and ordinary as bathing and clothing her son, and given papers to sign which permitted the amputation of part of her child’s body, even though she really didn’t understand what happened in a circumcision. She says she wasn’t sufficiently well informed to give informed consent.
Once again, were it any other non-therapeutic unnecessary surgery, this behavior would never be tolerated.
Parents who are solicited for non-therapeutic circumcision of their son should not just politely decline, they should find a creative response that gives the solicitor pause before repeating such unethical behavior.
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 8th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
“I don’t think it’s a crazy thing to examine whether or not early childhood trauma leads to increased autism rates, and I don’t think it’s a crazy thing to consider circumcision traumatic.”
Hmm. Actually, it does seem — okay, not crazy — but pretty off to me. If it’s infant trauma that’s producing autism, why aren’t we seeing a higher incidence of it in places with more major infant trauma? If circumcision is supposed to be the factor that reveals why it appears more often in men than women, then why don’t we see parity, or even more autistic girls, in places that practice infant surgeries on female infants?
I get that autism isn’t 100% understood, but this doesn’t fit in with what I know about it. There’ve been a bunch of attempts to explain it via trauma, and as Sailorman says, they seem mostly woo.
I expect, however, that this is a derail.
So in an attempt to move back to the original topic — I acknowledge that male circumcision, when done without proper pain care, is a traumatic event. I further acknowledge that we don’t really know what the consequences are of trauamatizing a newborn or an extremely young infant. While it may be true that circumcision gets lost in the background noise of childhood, that doesn’t make the fact that it’s traumatic go away. I have a friend who would say the same about having been raped by a neighbor when she was two; she doesn’t remember it. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t traumatic, or that it hasn’t affected her. I mean, we’re talking about severe, undefined pain at the genitals, and while I doubt the infant has enough bodily awareness to get that something’s been cut off — we are cutting off part of his body without tellin him why. This is fairly scary stuff, really.
And BB, did I see upthread that you were arguing that we don’t “know” for sure that infants feel pain? Yikes. Why are we going so solipsistic all of a sudden?
I’d like to point out that people who argue that male circ is okay because infants don’t feel pain (which btw, is in some places one of the justifications for female genital surgeries, either that infants/young children don’t feel pain if they’re doing it young, or that girls have such a higher pain threshhold than men that it’s nothing) don’t actually act that way in other circumstances. Would they say it’s okay to smack infants around, as long as you don’t leave marks? Ha.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 8th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
I see the topic of potential trauma from circumcision has come up, and on that topic, this paper is fascinating:
A Proposed Relationship Between
Circumcision and Neural Reorganization
Imagine, the most common surgery in the country, performed without medical indication on over a million American boys each year, and never, ever, have the effects on the brain been studied with brain visualization technology and published:
That paper was published nearly Nine YEARS ago. I don’t think wild speculation on the potential harms of circumcision is helpful, but a little basic research is obviously needed here!
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 8th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
Oh, I’m not convinced of the link, certainly, but I don’t think that looking into it is unreasonable.
It’s the same way that I didn’t think looking into the autism/vaccination link was unreasonable, but now that we have, it seems clear that there’s no connection.
I’m just saying that, although it may turn out that there’s no connection, the idea of a connection is not one I find preposterous.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 1:22 am
When circumcision first became medicalized in the US, it was touted as a cure for everything from paralysis to asthma to epilepsy to a host of other ills. The problem with trying to find the long-term consequences of routne male infant circumcision in things like autism–which, as I understand it, is unlikely to have a single, isolatable cause—is that it risks becoming the mirror image of the rush to see circumcision as an absolute medical and cultural good. I do not mean that if there is evidence pointing towards a connection, that such a possible connection should not be investigated, but it ought to be, as Mandolin has suggested, enough to call the routine circumcision of infant boys into question that cirucmcision is traumatic in and of itself, that this trauma has been measured concretely in terms of changes in circumcised boys’ serum cortisol levels, sleep patterns, pain threshhold (which might be suggestive of the kind of neural reorganization talked about in the article that brick5 linked to) and more. (I am not going to bother to re-cite the articles, most of which have been linked to somewhere in this thread.)
It also ought to be enough that the amputation of a boy’s foreskin removes from his body forever a complex network of nerves the sole purpose of which is sexual pleasure. (One thing that fascinated me when I was doing research on this topic was how ignorant I was, and how until fairly recently the medical community was equally ignorant, of the physiology of the foreskin. Again, I am not going to re-cite the articles. They are in this thread somewhere.) That is a real, concrete, quantifiable loss that should not be negatable by the fact that the overwhelming majorityof circumcised men can still have orgasms, ejaculate, reproduce, etc. without any problem. (And, again, I am not suggesting that this loss means that circumcised men cannot have full and rich and deeply satisfying sex lives; the question of what makes a sex life satisfying is about much more than whether one possesses a foreskin.) The fact that people are willing to allow the fact that most circumcised men are sexually functional to negate or ameliorate or otherwise minimize the loss that circumcision represents says something, I think, about the relative, negative value placed in this culture on male sexual pleasure in and of itself.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 2:46 am
Though I’m against male infant circumcision in general, I have to protest the assertion that there’s a “negative value placed in this culture on male sexual pleasure in and of itself”. Then how do you explain the fact that a massive part of popular culture exists for the sole purpose of supporting male masturbation (e.g. porn, strip clubs) and sexual pleasure (e.g. lap dances)? Come on, I’ll support your desire to outlaw circumcision or at least massively restrict it to only religious purposes, but I’m not going to support the frankly nonsensical idea that male sexual pleasure is somehow repressed.
And also, if circumcision can contribute to autism, surely it’d be much more prevalent in those populations that circumcise. As far as I’ve heard, autism is being diagnosed with ever-growing frequency pretty much everywhere, even in Europrean countries that don’t circumcise.
This comment was written by crys t.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 3:36 am
crys t:
I did not and would not argue that male sexual pleasure in this country is repressed; nor do I disagree with what you say about the popular culture that you mention. I would argue, however, that the pleasure that culture supports has a lot more to do with the pleasures of the male gaze and with the pleasures of exercising patriarchal power than with the cultivation and support of physical sexual pleasure per se, which is what I would say is devalued in men in this country. (I also would not argue that placing an emphasis on physical sexual pleasure per se is somehow in and of itself a feminist move; as far as I know, eastern cultures that do have this emphasis are not, as a result, any less patriarchal than our own.)
Look at the men and women who perform in the lion’s share of mainstream porn, for example. To my eyes, the men inevitably look more bored than anything else, and even when they come–again, to me–they look more like they are lifting heavy boxes than experiencing orgasm. By way of comparison, the women moan and gyrate and in many other ways perform the physical nature of the (admittedly male defined) sexual pleasure they are ostensibly experiencing. I am not suggesting that the performances of those women are accurate; but I think they do suggest the ways in which women’s sexuality is defined within patriarchy as inhering in the physical sensations they feel in sex, while male heterosexuality–since we are talking here about mainstream porn–is defined as inhering more in what men do with our bodies rather than in the sensations we experience.
What I think is gained by pointing out the rather large loss of sensation that the loss of the foreskin represents in men—and the fact that we, as a culture, have been and, in many ways still are, willing to overlook this loss because circumcised men remain, overwhelmingly, sexually functional—is a highlighting of the ways in which male heterosexual pleasure is defined patriarchally as having more to do with what men do than with what we physically experience. (God that sentence is a mouthful! Sorry.) And one reason I think it is important to highlight this aspect of patriarchal male heterosexuality through the lens of the loss of sensation that circumcision represents is that it can become a way of asking questions about the nature of male physical sexual pleasure that begin to define male heterosexual boundaries (and perhaps male sexual boundaries in general; I am sticking here with heterosexuality only because I started talking about heterosexual porn) as something that men have because we have bodies through which we experience the world in a particular way and not as something that is set for us by whether or not women give us access to their bodies (which is how male heterosexual boundaries are generally defined within patriarchy: we don’t have them; women set them for us, and we decide whether or not to respect the boundaries women set).
These are, obviously, ideas I would need to unpack quite a bit more in order to write about them persuasively, and that’s something I don’t really have the time to do right now. I hope, though, assuming that what I have written here is clear enough, that it does show that what I meant when I said that US culture devalues male sexual pleasure—and I think my phrasing was not as precise as it could have been—was not what you took it to mean in your response to me.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 4:17 am
It doesn’t go away, but it becomes irrelevant. After all, one of the three basic arguments here seems to be that circing has a lot of LONG term effect, on adults. And if the ‘noise’ is such that there is no discernible effect of the childhood trauma, then the claims of long term effect become moot.
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 4:23 am
Richard,
I really don’t think that’s how women’s sexuality is defined… the point isn’t that she’s experiencing realistic sensations, IMO, because realistic women’s orgasms don’t look like porn women’s orgasms. The point is that she’s constantly performing her sexuality for the male gaze.
There seems to me to be incredible pressure on women to ignore what they’re actually feeling during sex in order to provide a pleasant performance for men. It’s taken me years to even acknowledge when I’m having pain during intercourse, rather than doing breathing exercises to try to minimize it while smiling and making myself an available object.
There’s something really weird about male circumcision, yes. And something deplorable in the way that we channel men’s sexuality into a chase after acts that are supposed to be fulfilling, rather than fulfillment itself. But I guess I agree with chrys in that it seems to me that the idea that we treat male sexuality as a negative seems not to flow with the rest of our culture.
Frankly (and with total respect for your contrary opinion) male circumcision seems to be a vestigial effect of Victorian skepticism about male pleasure, in my opinion. Yes, there are still a few of those ideas wandering around; I mean, it’s not impossible to find people who’ll say bizarre things like men’s spirit is depleted by ejaculation. And we do seem to think that the penis is gross and that sperm is gross.
But by and large, and acknowledging that there are contradictions in the way any culture as large as ours is going to think about a topic, I think our culture has moved to a different model of male sexuality. The Victorian zest for circumcision just seems to have been one of those weird things that stuck, even after the culture shifted.
I mean, that’s my reading of it, which is quite possibly wrong. But, like chrys, I’m just not convinced that our culture is negative on male pleasure. A lot of the systems of oppression on women appear to be designed to trade female pain for male pleasure.
I’m willing to bet there’s something missing in all of this analysis, though… circumcision may well be filling some odd cultural need we don’t even know we have. Do we know when exactly it became normative among gentiles? Victorian era saw its rise, but when did it become dominant? Was it around WWII?
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 4:47 am
“And if the ‘noise’ is such that there is no discernible effect of the childhood trauma, then the claims of long term effect become moot.”
No, not necessarily.
OK, most modern psych theory about how people develop disorders is (if I understand things correctly) based on the diathesis/stress model.
Diathesis is the amount of natural tendency your brain has toward altering in a particular way. Let’s take a disease that’s got a strong genetic component like schizophrenia. You get a really high incidence of schizophrenia in twins, for instance. But “really high” in these terms turns out to be something like 50% (I think it’s actually less than 50%; I’m pretty sure 50% is the figure for infants that are born to schizophrenic mothers who are in the middle of an episode, although I could be wrong on that stat. too).
My brain, for instance, is unlikely to alter in the way that it will become schizophrenic. I have no schizophrenia in the family, and no particular risk factors for schizophrenia. I don’t take drugs that mimic the symptoms of schizophrenia. Check.
But my brain would be fairly likely to alter in the way that it would become bipolar. One of my brothers is bipolar, and while we don’t have diagnoses for anyone else in the family, from collected anecdotes it appears that others of my (deceased) relatives have had the disorder. Bipolar is not as strongly genetic as schizophrenia, but it appears to have a stronger hereditary factor than most other kinds of mental illnesses.
So, let’s assume I’m being born. My diathesis for schizophrenia is low. My diathesis for bipolar disorder is high. However, that’s not in any way a guarantee of what’s going to happen to me. Even with a bipolar sibling and strong family history of it, I’ve got a chance of skating through unscathed, if my stress levels are light. Or, depending on what happens to me in my life, I could end up with a totally different disorder. If I were badly beaten three days a week and raped once a month by my father from the time I was one to the time I was five, then it would be very possible that I would have a personality disorder such as Borderline, which appear to often be triggered by abuse suffered as a very young child. (Women tend to develop Borderline, which involves a fractured sense of self, severe relational disturbance, and violence against one’s own body; men tend to develop Antisocial Personality Disorder, which involves a fractured sense of self, severe relational disturbance, and violence against others.)
Real life stress is what determines whether the potential of diathesis will be expressed in disorder.
So, when you’re saying that trauma is blanked out by the noise of childhood, you’re mostly talking — it seems to me — about conscious reactions. I agree. Consciously, the male child is unlikely to remember his circumcision. Other shit happens; that becomes more important.
However, there’s a lot more going on in the brain than the conscious level. Trauma — ESPECIALLY trauma at a young age — alters brain chemistry, and determines the ways in which the brain will develop. That’s why an adult who endures the kinds of abuse that can trigger Borderline Personality Disoder will never get a personality disorder. Adults don’t contract them. They have to do with the formation of personality. Once you have a formed personality, you’re immune. Do the same thing to an infant, a one year old, a two year old, and even though the child is unlikely to remember the events because their permanent memories haven’t set yet, you are likely to alter the landscape of their brain. And depending on a multitude of other factors, you may end up with a kid who has a personality disorder.
Richard has been talking about effects on the sheerly chemical level. Brains are strange things, and incredibly plastic in infancy. For instance, to take an example we all know, infants are born with the ability to make a gigantic range of human noises. Within six weeks (I think it’s six weeks; forgive me for being fuzzy on stats), they can detect the difference between Germanic languages and romance languages. Within (I think) six months, they can tell the difference between German and English. And very early on, most children lose the ability to make the noises that they don’t hear adults around them mimicking, which is why most of us can’t make the ! noise that’s common to the Khoi San.
Richard is pointing to data that suggests pain levels, cortisol levels, and sleep patterns shift. We don’t know what all this means for the formation of personality. We do know that sleep patterns and pain levels (and I imagine cortisol levels) are things that shift in some psychiatric disorders, so we do know that these kinds of brain functions are linked to perosnality and psychiatric expressions. Changes wouldn’t have to reach the level of disorder in order to be alterations from the baseline that the infant would otherwise have enjoyed.
Which brings me back to the example of unremembered trauma which I provided, and which you snipped out of your quote. My friend who was raped when she was two years old does not remember the rape; she learned about it when she was twenty-seven from her estranged mother. In terms of remembered trauma, she’s much more upset about the rape she suffered when she was fourteen. In terms of unconscious alterations to her personality, it may well be that the rape she doesn’t remember, which was drowned out by the noise of her childhood, may have been much more traumatic for her. She has a psychiatric disorder. Was the rape a cause? It seems, at the very least, possible — even though it doesn’t affect her conscious life.
I mention her not to equate rape and circumcision, but to illustrate that it is possible for the effects of trauma to be long-lasting even when they are not writ large on the landscape of memory, and even when they appear to be drowned out by other events.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 4:51 am
Mandolin
Very quickly:
That was precisely my point: it was why I used the term “male defined” when I talked about it. I was not suggesting that real women’s sexuality looks anything like what you see in porn, which is why I wrote:
(emphasis added here.)
And again, I want to be clear that I am not talking about “treating male sexuality” (your words) as a negative, nor that I am suggesting male sexual pleasure is devalued in its entirely by the culture at large. I am talking about a specific stance towards the male body and the fact that we think it’s okay as a culture to remove an organ of sexual pleasure from that body. And I am suggesting we think it’s okay because we just don’t think the sexual pleasure that organ would otherwise provide is either necessary or all that important, and that the reasons we don’t think it’s all that important are very much tied up with how male sexuality is defined within a patriarchal system.
Ok, my son is calling me and I have to stop. I will try to say more later.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 4:52 am
Mandolin:
End of the 19th beginning of the 20th century. Read the Gollaher article I linked to somewhere upthread; it’s fascinating. So is his book.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 4:58 am
“End of the 19th beginning of the 20th century.”
Well, that shoots down my “trying to cling to hero status via identification with rescued Jews” theory.
“Read the Gollaher article I linked to somewhere upthread; it’s fascinating.”
Will do!
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 6:20 am
Plus, antisemitism being what it is (and was, even immediately postwar), I don’t think that public perception of the rescued Jews as heroic was necessarily strong enough to account for the shift, even if the timing had been right.
—Myca
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July 9th, 2007 at 6:25 am
I’m just saying that, although it may turn out that there’s no connection, the idea of a connection is not one I find preposterous.
Did you catch the part where ballgame suggested the evidence of a link is that France has lower rates of autism as well as circumcision?
Studying the effects of circumcision is a good thing. Hinting darkly that there MAY be SOME connection to, gasp, autism, and well you know it could be POSSIBLE! is just pseudoscientific, alarmist crap.
Which makes the anti-circ position look bad, by the way. I guess if you’re in favor of circumcision you’d be in favor of that too.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 7:31 am
Some things I have found connected to this discussion:
1. Re the study showing circumcision is an effective preventive measure against HIV transmission: a study showing that Langerlin, excreted by the Langerhans cells (which are in the foreskin and are part of the immune system), acts as a natural barrier against HIV transmission through the Langerhans cells (which is one of the sites where the first study I mentioned suggested HIV infection takes place in uncircumcised men): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=17334373&query_hl=4&itool=pubmed_docsum.
2. This article provides a detailed account of the anatomy and physiology of the foreskin. It is worth reading. The only place I have found the article available for free online is on the CIRP site, which as an anti-circumcision site, but the article was originally published in the British Journal of Urology: http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/cold-taylor/. For anyone who wants to read it in its original context, the article can be found in the British Journal of Urology, Volume 83, Suppl. 1: Pages 34-44.
3. Mandolin: One of the original justifications for the medicalization of circumcision in the US was the lower frequency of STD’s among Jews and, according to Jewish doctors–the citation is in the Gollaher article; I can’t find it now–the fact that circumcision was responsible for the fact that Jewish boys did not masturbate, unless they learned about it from their non-Jewish friends. This was in the early 20th century (or maybe the late 19th). Edited to add: The bit about lower STD rates was later found to be the result of hygeine and other practices relating to sexual activity, not circumcision.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 8:19 am
Richard: I’m not ignoring your reply to me, I just haven’t got time right now to give you a proper response. Just quickly: I do in some ways agree with the idea that men’s actual physical sensation/pleasure in sexual contact is dowplayed or ignored, but I still don’t think that the word “negative” could be used in describing attitudes towards it.
I’ll try to give a more thorough reply later if time allows.
This comment was written by crys t.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 8:48 am
I think that some of the ‘male sexuality is bad’ narrative (especially around circumcision) comes from a particular belief, which does have its roots in Victorian sexual morality, but which is unfortunately common even today:
“Men are dirty brutes who just want sex.”
It sums up so much, doesn’t it?
* Men aren’t responsible for their actions, because their urges are just so strong.
* Male sexuality must be controlled, because it’s so dirty/strong/dangerous
* Being aggressively sexual is essential to being a man.
* Men who aren’t aggressively sexual are wussy.
* It absolves men of all personal responsibility, making them little more than animals
Of course, it also implies the converse:
* “Good girls don’t.”
* Female sexuality is negligible and unimportant.
* Being virginal and nonsexual is essential to being a woman.
* Women who are aggressively sexual are dirty sluts.
* It puts all responsibility and maturity onto women
How does this fit into the FGM situation? Actually, pretty easily.
In the US, (I believe) FGM has never been as prevalent as it has been (and is) elsewhere . . . and in many of those places, the narrative situates women as the aggressive ones sexually. This is where I see the link between Male Circumcision and Female Genital Surgeries . . . I believe that they both have their roots in a fear of sexuality and an attempt to control sexuality.
—Myca
This comment was written by Myca.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 9:31 am
FGM exists in both cultures that view women as the sexual aggressors, and societies that view women as having negligible/no sexuality.
Just as you get rules that restrict women’s dress to “modest” attire in both types of situations, you also get FGM is both types of situations. The rationales are just slightly different.
(I more or less mean that I don’t think the explanation that we are a male circumcising culture because we believe in a narration of male aggressors is entirely satisfactory. There are cultures with that narrative who use it as a justification to cut women, after all.)
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Hm. That’s true, but I still have a hard time entirely discounting the link. I know that, as a man, this is a narrative that I’ve hard an awful lot, and a role that I’ve felt pushed onto me . . . and the fact that they nonconsensually sliced off part of my sex organ when I was an infant (and that there are so many people here who find that nonconsensual surgery perfectly fine) sure seems connected, especially considering the history (less masturbation, less sexual pleasure) of the practice.
—Myca
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July 9th, 2007 at 10:13 am
Yeah, it’s probably connected.
I just don’t think the relationship is as simple as “whoever we see as the aggressor gets their genitals modified”, since that doesn’t hold internationally.
(I doubt we really disagree.)
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2007 at 10:31 am
Oh yeah, I agree totally, in large part because both a male-aggressor system and a female-aggressor system are part and parcel of the patriarchy . . . thus modifications to a man’s genitals (while still unacceptable) are MUCH MUCH MUCH less severe than modifications to a woman’s genitals.
—Myca
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July 9th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
its all very well as an academic debate but what about the fact that its an irreversible procedure ? Given that so many men have no choice, they’re either underaged when it happens or the religious/cultural traditions are too powerful to overturn over night, the best way to deal with it is to highlight the advantages of each options - like STD protection for the circumsized and a lower sensation threshold for the uncircumcised.
This comment was written by Athena.There’s a good article I recently saw on the Dinah Project on sensation and circumcision
http://dinahproject.com/articles_view_details.asp?id=131
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July 10th, 2007 at 11:45 am
crys, I think you’re overestimating the extent to which male sexuality is viewed as positive. Sure, centerfolds and spank mags make millions, but so do junk food, TV, and hard liquor, and we assign some significant negative baggage to those as well. Perfusion of popular culture isn’t a sign of acceptance, let alone veneration or anything of the sort.
Here in the West, we go by the relatively recent Victorian paradigm of bestial male transgressors and innocent female virgins. This creates a set of roles consistent with those Myca has listed; being held against the standard of ‘innocent virgin’ is simply a backhanded method of control, sure, but it isn’t all fun and games being considered a ‘bestial transgressor’. It isn’t an innocent virgin that will draw stares if she mentions that she likes to play with little children.
I don’t think there are any cultures where women are viewed as out and out sexual aggressors - anatomy may limit the flexibility of ideas in this regard - or where women are viewed as having no sexuality - at least in those areas of the population that haven’t achieved parthenogenesis. But cultures where the medieval view of the female being inherently more carnal are common in countries elsewhere. (In Korea, for instance, it is the daughter-in-law, not the son-in-law, who *takes* mummy and daddy’s innocent child away from them in marriage.) Both this paradigm and the Western one are at their base patriarchal, but one is overt whereas the other is covert. That’s perhaps the reason one practices FGH and the other does not - though ‘covert’ countries with a lot of hangups will cling to antiquated practices on the easy belief that the penis is unclean, metaphorically or otherwise.
richard, you raise an interesing point. Try this. When talking about your bedroom life with your buddies, talk about the orgasms you have. In my experience, they’ll fall into two camps:
1. The kind that’s dumbfounded because ‘men don’t have orgasms’ - or else they think you’re talking about ejaculation.
2. The more enlightened ones who are only confused because you don’t talk about it with the prefix ‘male’, the way we do for male nurses, male models, male prostitutes, etc. An orgasm is a fundamentally female thing, after all, because to be affected is feminine. We’re just the empty, mechanical affectors, whose main pleasure comes from the privilege of getting to mechanically affect a woman.
This comment was written by sylphhead.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2007 at 11:59 am
It’s a common belief in parts of the middle east that women have to be secluded bceause they have ravenous sex drives, and if they were not secluded, they would jump on every guy they saw.
Likewise, it is a belief in parts of Africa that women have to have their clitorises cut out because they have ravenous sex drives, and if they had their external genitals, they would force themselves on every man they saw.
Now, you claim that neither of these things is true –where are you getting that information? {Edited for rephrase.)
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Re the sensitivity thing: Do y’all agree that it’s only relevant practically, not in the abstract?
Any studies showing, for example, that circumcised men* have worse sex lives? Or have more trouble masturbating, or worse ______, or?
If we’re talking clinical significance, then it’s all about the practical issues. I’m not sure how much clinical significance the fine-touch thing has. Maybe it makes quite a bit of difference to have a foreskin, on average. Or, maybe men who are circumcised naturally go down alternate paths of sexual satisfaction (of which there are many) when they’re growing up, and have just as much fun. But without the practical studies (hmm, just thought of the Kinsey report, wonder if that would have the data?) it seems hard to make conclusions that go to the practical effects.
*who were circumcized as infants
This comment was written by Sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
sylphhead–
I have, with few exceptions (and that usually–not always, but usually, happens when I am talking to gay men), had precisely the experience you describe trying to talk to men about sexual pleasure and orgasm.
Sailorman–
I am not sure precisely what you are asking or how you’re using the terms practical and abstract. But the point of talking about loss of what you call “the fine touch thing” is not, or at least should not be to imply that uncircumcised men have inherently better or more satisfying sex lives than circumcised men, because–as I have said repeatedly–one thing does not necessarily have anything to do with the other. (Though it is important not to leave out the fact that there are men whose circumcisions were botched when they were infants, and they do in fact often have less satisfactory sex lives. I do not have handy the list of conditions they suffer from, but you can find them if you look for them. They make up, however, a minority of cases, though the significance you attach to that minority will depend on whether you think the surgery ought to be performed in the first place.)
There is at least one study that I remember reading–I will try to dig up the reference when I get a chance–which does suggest that circumcision does make a difference in sexual practice and that circumcised men do require more friction not simply to achieve orgasm and ejaculation, but also, simply, to feel at all.
The question of what routine infant male circumcision removes, it seems to me, is less a question about the sex lives of individual or groups of men and more a question of what it means that we have for many, many years been practicing the wholesale sexual alteration of the male body–and remember, there was a period of time when the rate of infant male circumcision was almost 100%–and we have been doing it without even acknowledging that it is a sexual alteration. It is, in other words, a question about our culture, about what we value and why we value it. My own experience when I started to read about what circumcision actually does to a boy’s body, did to my body, was anger. Medically and/or religiously justified or not, the procedure is a profound violation that one cannot be made whole from, ever. Circumcision is a surgery with, in at least one sense, a remarkable history: every time a medical rationale/justification for it has been debunked, another one has taken its place. Consistently. Over and over again. In the early part of the 20th century, the foreskin was in and of itself understood to be malignant; in other words, boys were believed to be born with a malignancy on their bodies. Think about what that means culturally in terms of how they understood what it meant to be a man.
We don’t hold those views now, but what does it mean, now, when people want to justify this procedure, with all its pain and invasiveness and violation, on the grounds that it might help some, random–because we can’t know which men it will help and which it won’t, right?–relatively small percentage of the male population avoid disease later in their lives. (Please note: I am not saying that the HIV study you talked about earlier might not legitimately justify adult male circumcision in some populations and in some circumstances; I am not 100% convinced, but I am willing to allow that it is possible.) Seriously, in what other circumstances would we perform surgery–and I am talking about surgery, not vaccination or something else, but surgery–on 100 otherwise perfectly healthy human beings because that surgery might save as many as 27 of those people, except we don’t know which ones?
My point, again, is not to suggest that the HIV-study is invalid; my point is that it is a question of what we value and why, and to the degree that we are willing to circumcise 100 boys to potentially save one from cancer of the penis later in his life, or 27 or so men from HIV infection (I think 27% was the figure given in the HIV study; but even if it was 50%, I think my question would still be a valid one), then it is clear that we do not as a culture value the intact male body. I think it is an important question to ask why.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Richard,
I hope these thoughts are welcome; they may be a distraction from where you’re trying to go. The questions that come up for me from what you’ve said are, Do we value intact bodies at all? and What does “intact” mean, exactly?
Bodies are culturally mediated. How one conceives of the body is culturally mediated. For instance, what body parts are considered to be secret or errogenous vary from culture to culture, as does what body parts are supposed to be attractive to the opposite sex (we’re peculiarly fixated on breasts, for instance). The boundaries and meanings of the body are always fraught. Does male circumcision have a special role within the kinds of meanings westerners assign to the body? Does it flow with those meanings, or against the tide?
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July 10th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Mandolin–
You ask a good question, and you are of course correct that if we were to take a larger, cross-cultural view of this issue, “intact” would be, when it comes to the body, a highly problematized, if not problematic and contested term. The point I was trying to make was not, at least I don’t think, an essentialist one, i.e., that there is something called “intact” that can exist separately from a cultural definition of intact. Rather, I was using the term in a much less precise way, to mean, simply, containing all its original parts. We practice routine infant male circumcision in the US because we don’t value the foreskin as a part of male anatomy–and in that sens, we do not value the intact male body–or at the very least, we value it much less than we value the thinking behind circumcision as a preventive surgery that I outlined above. The difficulty people have in getting even to the point of allowing that the question is a valid one suggests to me that it is a far more important question, that there is something very deep at work in circumcision, than it might at first appear.
I am typing quickly and need to get back to other things. Hope that made sense.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
You’re very right. By the American definition of intact, we don’t value an intact male body.
Do we value an intact female body? Do we value intact bodies at all? I would say we have a really unsettled relationship with it, since the idea that women would own their bodies sufficiently not to have to endure pregnancy when they don’t want to is –taken as a blanket statement — something most Americans seem to have trouble wholeheartedly agreeing with.
Very strange.
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July 10th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
You know, as I’ve been reading through the thread, I’ve been becoming more and more angry myself. Since some of the value of my POV here comes from having a penis, I’m going to talk about it a little.
I am circumcised, and, as RJN says, my frenum is the most sensitive part of my penis. Usually in order to have an orgasm, I do require some sort of contact with or direct manipulation of the frenum.
I haven’t had horrible sexual dysfunctions because of this or anything . . . but yeah, I do generally require quite a bit of friction, and especially when I was a teenager, there were times I became chafed.
I don’t know what it would be like to have the kind of sensation I have in my frenum over much more of the surface and head of my penis, but it sure sounds nice to me. I think the point is, actually, that not only don’t I know, I can’t know.
I can’t know because that part of me was sliced off against my will when I was an infant. It was sliced off because of bullshit anti-sex ‘medical science’.
There are those here who don’t think it’s a big deal that this happened to me, and that it’s not a big deal that it happened (when I was born) to almost 100% of male children born in the US.
Personally, I don’t understand why these people think they get to have a fucking opinion. It’s not their body.
—Myca
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July 10th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Where am I getting it? Largely from history and anthro - I know of no culture that doesn’t expressly see the physical act of sex as something a man initiates. For the most part, the entire courtship process is similar - oh sure, there are a few cute customs here and there, like a girl giving a flower to a boy, but the female-driven, female-led courtship and consummation ritual is as elusive as the matriarchal amazon civilization.
I guess you and I have different interpretations of what it means to be a sexual ‘aggressor’. I did mention societies that are largely medieval in their outlook in that they saw women as more carnal - in which sex is more a female need than a male need, in which women ‘want it’ more - in contrast to us, who are more likely to jokingly quip that sex is a chore that a wife gives because her hubby needs it.
And I certainly don’t think anyone anywhere thinks women have negligible sexuality. Why would they bother to try and repress what is negligible?
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July 10th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Sounds like we’re just disagreeing on how to phrase cultural differences. Fair enough. :)
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July 10th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Sadly, the fight again HIV/AIDS is being used by some people/organizations to push a male circumcision campaign. Although the evidence for adult circumcision is flawed and incomplete, at least the patient can be informed, and can give consent.
But some go further, seeking to implement mass circumcision of infants. Any evidence that circumcision reduces female-to-male HIV transmission obviously has no applicability to infants, who will not be sexually active for a long time (by which time there may be new preventative treatments), and who might prefer condoms over surgery. Furthermore, an infant can’t give informed consent. Clearly, there is reason to suspect other motives besides HIV prevention behind a campaign for mass infant circumcision.
Here’s a perfect, contemporary, and contemptible example. Stephen Lewis has founded an organization called “Aids-Free World,” and he favors a campaign of mass infant circumcision. He was on the July 9, 2007 NPR’s Worldview with Jerome McDonnell (listen to the episode here).
This is what he said:
His organization is holding a $100/head fundraiser, and Intactivists are planning a protest:
Stephen Lewis is using the fight against HIV/AIDS to promote mass infant circumcision. If you’re going to donate money to fight HIV/AIDS, skip his organization in favor of one that would not taint their reputation with such nonsense.
And of course, for those who can, join the protest!
This comment was written by brick5.Report this comment to the moderators
July 11th, 2007 at 6:36 am
Mandolin:
I’ve been mulling this over since yesterday, and it’s worth thinking through some more. So: where is the conceptual site of non-intactness in your question about women’s bodies and reproductive rights? (Obviously, the physical site is a woman’s body itself.) What I mean, I think, is this: Mandatory/coerced pregnancy and mandatory/coerced abortion are equivalent in the sense that they each deprive women of control over their own bodies. (I don’t think there is currently anywhere a move to legally institutionalize mandatory abortion, but there are places where cultural and other factors lead women to abort when they might otherwise choose not to: I am thinking of China’s policies on number of children, or the social/cultural/family pressures brought to bear on women in cultures where having male children is high priority.) Yet neither coercion becomes manifest, kicks into concrete and specific action, so to speak, until a woman becomes pregnant, until something has been added to her body that wasn’t there before. The issue of intactness here, in other words, has to do, I think, less with a woman’s body being “wrong”–in the way that the male foreskin is construed of as “wrong” in both medical and religious justifications for circumcision (and I know “wrong” is an imprecise term)–than with her body’s provenance, existentially speaking. Though even that feels less than accurate to me. It’s not just that she doesn’t own her own body, but that her body is not understood, as I think the male body generally is, as being concomitant with her self, with a self that ought to be, as men’s selves are presumed under patriarchy to be, inviolate.
I wish I had more time, but what I was thinking to start teasing out by talking about this is: On the one hand, what I have just described–assuming it is at all accurate–feels to me different in kind from what I was talking about when I was talking about the intact male body. On the other hand, though, there is a part of me that wonders: Is there a way that what I have outlined above and what we were talking about in terms of the intact male body exist under the same umbrella, along the same continuum, choose-your-metaphor of how we conceptualize/theorize intactness in US culture?
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 11th, 2007 at 6:50 am
I think there ar ea lot of ways in which the famel body is considered inherently wrong. Women are supposed to diet to make themsleves eternally smaller, for instance. To make our faces acceptable, we must veil ourselves in makeup as well as engage in time-consuming and expensive beauty rituals.
You’re right, though, that all of this is about body as not-self. Instead, it’s about body-as-performance.
There are a lot of links between woman and the monstrous (as was the subject of a recent blogwar). Woman’s body is Other; it is not-male; it is Wrong.
Amanda Marcotte on the other hand has talked about the male body being conceived in some frameworks as disgusting and contaminating (as women’s bodies are also). The penis contaminates; that’s part of its ability to own. Women who have been touched by the penis are contaminated by it. Homophobic men fear the contamination of the penis.
And all this *despite* the “civilizing” of the penis, via circumcision?
My anthropological brain wants to say that male circumcision, then, is a way of taking the contaminating carnality of the penis and modifying it, ritually, so that it can be used toward “civilized” aims. Women would not need to be modified in this way, because their external genitals are not conceived (in the west) as having that kind of power. Male circumcision is a transformation from primal “savage” to civilized man.
This would flow with the narratives of eliminatng hygeine and disease — we are purifying away the “savage” taint, to make the penis cleaner and healthier. It would also flow with the Victorian narrative of needing to modify men so that they concentrate on nation-building.
I’m still just brainstorming ideas, here, not making any claims I’d necessarily stand by as true. I hope that’s okay.
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July 11th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Mandolin:
True, but even these “wrongs” (and I still want to come up with a more precise term, or at least a more precise working definition of what that word means in the context of this discussion) do not emege as realities in a woman’s life until some years after birth, not in terms of her hearing the messages about her body, but in terms of her having to do something to her body to follow those messages. We don’t, in other words, routinely, medically, cosmetically alter the female body immediately after birth the way we do the male body (I don’t think), and your point about male circumcision as “civilizing” may in fact cover this. Clearly, according to our version of masculinity and manhood, men need civilizing. (This is also, interestingly, the function that many on the right believe fatherhood is supposed to play in men’s lives; it civilizes us, directs us outwards, away from selfish pursuit of our own desires, gives us purpose by harnessing our energies for the good, first, of the family and, then, of the community.) And, clearly, the foreskin, being primarily an organ of pleasure (though it also has immunological functions, scientists have found), is connected (pardon the pun) to that part of us that is the least easily civilized, that is most obviously and most readily undermining of everything “civilization” (in a male dominant context) is supposed to stand for.
Which says what about how the male self is situated in relation to the male body in US culture? And how does that compare to how the female self is situated in relation to the female body? (which are less precise questions than I would like to ask, but it’s back to work for me)
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 12th, 2007 at 1:25 am
Well, I don’t see the significance of the age in which it takes place - so society thinks you’re a-ok when you’re 7. Not so much when you’re 12 and over. What does that do for you, for 80% of your life that you’re a functioning, participating member of society?
But I don’t think the makeup and weight loss examples really compare, for the simple reason that those kinds of annoying, repetitive prods to correct our preternaturally faulty selves are something everyone everywhere deals with - though no doubt women deal with it more than men concerning sexual matters. (Then again, what isn’t a sexual matter? Even the pressure on men to have a loud, commanding voice is in a way a sexual matter.)
Circumcision, by contrast, is an irreversible procedure, that invades bodily autonomy not just in a metaphorical sense, that is not just socially pressured but forcibly coerced. I don’t mean by this that male circumcision by definition is worse than any of the *mere* things that are reversible, leaves bodily autonomy, or are not forcibly coerced, but that from the whole anthro analytical position we’re angling at, it does stand out.
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July 12th, 2007 at 2:51 am
sylphhead:
In terms of your question, I think you’re probably right, it makes not much difference at all. But I do think the age at which something takes place says something about how the relationship between self, society and body is culturally defined.
This comment was written by Richard Jeffrey Newman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 12th, 2007 at 3:17 am
“But I don’t think the makeup and weight loss examples really compare, for the simple reason that those kinds of annoying, repetitive prods to correct our preternaturally faulty selves are something everyone everywhere deals with - though no doubt women deal with it more than men concerning sexual matters.”
No, it’s something women have to deal with more all the time in every sphere of life, and to a much greater degree than men.
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July 12th, 2007 at 6:22 am
And yet you can choose not to wear make up.
I have no choice. None whatsoever. I am not pressured socially, I am forced physically, and I have been my entire life.
EDIT: Ah, sorry, I read this as you saying that makeup was worse than circumcision. On a reread, I see that’s not what you’re saying.
—Myca
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July 18th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
This has just got to stop already.
It was reported today that a boy lost his glans in a hospital circumcision.
America, land of the mutilated.
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September 1st, 2007 at 11:01 am
I checked out of this thread while it was still in progress because I wanted more solid evidence for my discussion about the implications of the gender ratio of autism in France. It turned out to be much more difficult to find than I imagined, but yesterday I was finally able to put my hands on it. I have a post up at Feminist Critics discussing what I found.
Did you catch the part where ballgame suggested the evidence of a link is that France has lower rates of autism as well as circumcision?
That’s a somewhat inaccurate rendering of what I said, mythago, but I guess it’s close. I’d be very interested to know why you think the male-to-female ratio of autism is 4 to 1 in the US, but only 2.3 to 1* in France, or at least why you think the circumcision connection is inherently ridiculous given the highly plausible mechanisms for such a connection outlined by mandolin above.
(*That’s right, 2.3 to 1, not 3 to 1 as I suggested initially. Please read my FC post for an explanation.)
This comment was written by ballgame.Report this comment to the moderators
September 3rd, 2007 at 4:38 pm
because I wanted more solid evidence for my discussion about the implications of the gender ratio of autism in France
Dude. You never posted any “evidence”. You posted correlation-is-causation musing about how the French do X less than we do, and reported autism rates are lower, therefore clearly X is a factor that is causative of autism. To turn around and insist it’s my job to disprove a theory with no evidence is inherently ridiculous, even by Internet standards.
Oh, and co-musing by Mandolin isn’t “evidence’. Neither is what you posted at FC: you cited a five-year-old American report and a 1996 French report as ‘evidence’. If you thought about autism much more than “ooo! can use in argument vs. circumciscion!”, the inherently ridiculous nature of waving this around as ‘evidence’ ought to be apparent to you. (For example, you might have a clue about how the understanding, and reporting, of autism-spectrum disorders has changed since 1996.)
I’m opposed to routine infant circumcision, actually. But I don’t rest that opposition on scare-tactic stupidity.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
September 4th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
You posted correlation-is-causation musing about how the French do X less than we do, and reported autism rates are lower, therefore clearly X is a factor that is causative of autism.
No, mythago, I said that X is a plausible causative factor in autism. With all the vehemence with which you deny saying that ‘circumcision couldn’t possibly be related to developmental disorders like autism’, you imply that you agree, but then you also claim that it’s inherently ridiculous, so I find your stance here to be a real puzzler.
And yes, the differential gender ratios I point out ARE evidence for circumcision being a contributing factor … not conclusive evidence as other explanations are possible as well, but evidence nonetheless. The way to rebut the idea is to either produce better evidence or a better interpretation of the evidence at hand. Merely making dark allusions to arguments which might exist does not rebut my contention that circumcision is a plausible factor here.
‘The studies were done in different years.’ So? ‘We know so much more about autism now.’ What, exactly, and how does this new knowledge bear on the argument at hand? This Atlantic Monthly article from 2003 provides some indirect support to the idea that more sensitive infants may be prone to ’shut down’ in response to powerful stimuli. Now, if you have more recent studies that compellingly demonstrate this is not the case, by all means, do share!
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September 5th, 2007 at 11:31 am
I said that X is a plausible causative factor in autism
Yes, based on correlation. By your logic, lack of prenatal wine consumption and speaking English rather than French are equally plausible causative factors in autism.
What, exactly, and how does this new knowledge bear on the argument at hand?
Because there is an entire classification of autism-spectrum disorder that was not really known in the English-speaking world until 1995, and not really understood as it manifests in females until a few years ago. If you don’t see cases of autism, they don’t factor into your statistics, which are therefore not very helpful.
The way to rebut the idea is to either produce better evidence or a better interpretation of the evidence at hand.
Heh. We’ve been over this before. “I’m right unless you rebut me” is not a valid argument. You need to offer evidence other than “a correlation exists”.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
September 6th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
By your logic, lack of prenatal wine consumption and speaking English rather than French are equally plausible causative factors in autism.
Not at all. It is your logic which is implying that the circumcision theory is just as implausible as the ’speaking English’ or ‘not drinking wine’ theories. Mandolin’s quote helpfully explained why trauma may have a lasting impact on the brain. The last I checked, ’speaking English’ and ‘having an alcohol-free fetal existence’ were not considered to be traumatic. But, perhaps, in mythago’s world…?
[T]here is an entire classification of autism-spectrum disorder that was not really known in the English-speaking world until 1995, and not really understood as it manifests in females until a few years ago.
Thanks for finally advancing a genuine counter argument here instead of rhetorical sneers. Now, I hate to be ungrateful, but sadly I have to punch a couple holes in it. You’re implying that the reason the French boy/girl autism ratio was 2.3 to 1 while the US ratio was 4 to 1 is because — up until “a few years ago” — US doctors were failing to diagnose an entire class of autism disorder that girls suffered from. Now that would only be relevant if the French doctors were aware of this feminine form of autism and diagnosing it … almost a decade and a half before those in the English-speaking world were.
Unfortunately, this does not seem to be case. The French study I cite used two different criteria, a narrow one and a broader one. The narrow one used criteria most similar to DSM-III. That is the one that generated the 2.3 to 1 boy/girl ratio. (The broader criteria, which basically doubled the number of diagnoses of autism, generated a 2.1 to 1 boy/girl ratio.) For your rebuttal to hold water, the French would somehow have to be picking up on nearly twice as many cases of female autism using DSM-III-like criteria than Americans were detecting over a decade later using DSM-IV criteria. Or, the French would need to have missed nearly half the extant boy cases of autism using both the DSM-III criteria and a broader set of criteria which doubled the overall number of French autism cases discovered. I suppose that’s not impossible but it strains credulity. I certainly think the circumcision theory is a hell of a lot more plausible.
By the way, more evidence that trauma may contribute to autism can be found in a recent Danish study that linked autism with “breech births, premature births and problems immediately after delivery.”
This comment was written by ballgame.Report this comment to the moderators
October 31st, 2007 at 2:23 pm
[...] while back, in one of our discussions of Male Circumcision, I made the point that I consider nonconsensual and elective alteration of another person’s [...]
This comment was written by Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Woman recieves no punishment for nonconsensually piercing her 13-year-old daughter’s genitals.Report this comment to the moderators
November 1st, 2007 at 4:50 pm
My brother-in-law had to hold down his infant’s son while they circumcised him. I’m sure it was awesome for both of them.
This comment was written by Halfmad.Report this comment to the moderators
November 1st, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Sorry, his infant son, typo.
This comment was written by Halfmad.Report this comment to the moderators
November 1st, 2007 at 10:33 pm
You’re implying that the reason the French boy/girl autism ratio was 2.3 to 1 while the US ratio was 4 to 1 is because — up until “a few years ago” — US doctors were failing to diagnose an entire class of autism disorder that girls suffered from.
No, I’m pointing out that you are using two different data sets that do not compare well, and you are using them to pretend that correlation equals causation: The French have less disparity in autism rates; the French have a lower circumcision rate; therefore, circumcision causes autism.
You also don’t seem to believe that Asperger’s as a disorder was diagnosed only recently in the US, or that it has been (and still is) underdiagnosed in girls. Is this because you have a reflexive aversion to anything that suggests girls might ever have a disadvantage, or are you really that uninformed?
The last I checked, ’speaking English’ and ‘having an alcohol-free fetal existence’ were not considered to be traumatic.
Really? Then you are deliberately overlooking all sorts of studies that show the beneficial effects of moderate amounts of alcohol, especially in the form of red wine. Perhaps all this Puritan absention is to blame?
Setting your rhetorical sneering aside, again: it boils down to your advancing a correlation-equals-causation theory and declaring that anyone who disagrees with you is a Luddite who supports circumcision. You don’t give a rat’s ass about autism, or people with autism, except as talking points to go after your pet issue, and your utter ignorance on the subject of autism couldn’t be plainer.
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November 2nd, 2007 at 3:11 am
“You don’t give a rat’s ass about autism, or people with autism, except as talking points to go after your pet issue, and your utter ignorance on the subject of autism couldn’t be plainer.”
I agree with what you say about ASD. However, I have known people who are autistic or have autism in the family who don’t necessarily have a lot of knowledge about the theory of biology behind it. We don’t know Ballgame’s history, and it might be better to assume he does have a personal stake.
I noted on another blog that someone was using my description of unremembered trauma to suggest that we should expect boys to manifest a number of problems we don’t see in girls because of infant circumcision. That’s not necessarily true, for a variety of reasons. First, you have to assume that there are no parallel disadvantages affecting female babies. Second, you have to remember that psychiatry functions from a male default, so those traits which occur more in women are more likely to be marked while those that occur in men are defaulted — potentially even if they are results of trauma.
I admit that a lot of my knowledge of autism is based on the research of Sascha Baron Cohen, who is justly criticized by feminists. Nevertheless, last I was paying a great deal of attention, it seemed that autism was caused by certain atypical physiological brain formations (some symptoms of which could be mimicked in neurotypical individuals with specific brain injuries).
I think Ballgame would have better luck tying male infant circumcision to other gendered psychological manifestations, although the problems with correlation and causation will remain.
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December 2nd, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Male circumcision is definitely something I’ve known little about, except that I had trouble with uncircumcised men before I grew up and started thinking about these things, largely because all of the men in my family are circumcised and I’ve been told my entire life that it’s gross and unclean not to be.
I just thought I’d through a few of my cents so trolls on FGM threads would stop moaning that this discussion is dead. I’m open to responses.
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December 2nd, 2007 at 5:08 pm
“largely because all of the men in my family are circumcised and I’ve been told my entire life that it’s gross and unclean not to be. ”
Yeah, I hear that. All my partners have been circumcised. My father is; my brothers are. It’s totally normalized in a lot of sectors of American society, I think.
I absolutely didn’t start thinking about it until I took anthropology classes, and started to wonder, “Sup with that?” And then a friend of mine went to Australia and had a few partners with intact foreskins — something about an incident as pedestrian as that was frame-breaking for me, made me start to wonder why I viewed these altered bodies as so deeply normal.
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December 2nd, 2007 at 6:54 pm
“largely because all of the men in my family are circumcised and I’ve been told my entire life that it’s gross and unclean not to be.”
And here is where FGM and IMC are similar. The above sounds like the rationale mutilated women give for promoting/perpetuating the practice. All the women in their families are cut, and they’ve internalized the message that cut = good while uncut = bad. Is that any reason to continue a practice that has no *real* benefit to boys’ bodies?
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December 2nd, 2007 at 11:53 pm
“Is that any reason to continue a practice that has no *real* benefit to boys’ bodies?”
Not in the least. You make a great point.
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