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This is some sad news about complications, including deaths, resulting from circumcision of boys in South African culture.
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Thanks to J Steven for his stewardship on this issue. Great work.
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Hello,
I have read recently that you are getting ready to take action against doctors who circumcise. If I'd read about this a year ago, I'd have thought you were a loon, that there was nothing wrong with circumcision, that the idea of decreased sensitivity was bunk, and that the idea of PTSD was really overkill. Actually, that WAS my reaction the first time I heard that anyone was actually *against* circumcision. A few years ago, I came upon the idea in a very unlikely place: A raunchy comic strip called Space Moose.
http://www.spacemoose.com/strips/circumcision.gif
When I read this, I thought it was stupid. I had been circumcised, and the crack about a "sad, jealous conspiracy" really got me riled up. Because I thought it was worthless, I forgot about it. Some years later, I encountered this:
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=38438
Again, I reacted negatively. I thought everyone who wrote against circumcision was full of crap. I talked to friends of mine who had also been cut and we swapped information (which I've since learned is either totally incorrect or misleading) about how there was no loss of sensitivity, about the decreased risk of penile cancer, about cleanliness, etc. But what I'd read on everything2.com stayed with me, and about a month ago, I happened across it again while flipping through some other pages on the site. (E2 is heavily crosslinked, you see, and it is very easy to get to one subject from another, totally unrelated subject.)
I started reading http://www.infocirc.org and other sites, and what I read really affected me. I realized that I had been clamped to a "circumstraint", and that someone had made an incision and torn - TORN! - my foreskin off the glans, from which it was not physically separate in my infancy. I learned that roughly half of the infants who are subjected to this scream horribly and turn red in the face, while the rest show signs of withdrawing into shock, or display symptoms of still being under the effects of the anaesthetic administered during childbirth, which an infant can take up to a week to metabolize. The idea that it "doesn't hurt" or is "just a little snip" is absurd. Infants feel pain. Hell, even MONOCELLS react to injury!
I came to realize that healthy tissue had been removed from my body, YEARS before I could understand what was happening, let alone give consent... and that it was WRONG. I say that if circumcision of infants is legal, it stands to reason that piercing the penis from the wall to the urethra and installing a ring ("Prince Albert") should also be legal for infants, but somehow I doubt a reasonable person would want to do such a thing. The hell of it is that it probably wouldn't hurt much more. The foreskin is not a useless shroud, but, indeed, one of the most sensitive, nerve-dense tissues to be found on the male anatomy.
I could not give consent. Other infants who have fallen prey to this "elective surgery" can't give consent either, and that includes the Jewish and Islamic infants whose parents have this done as a part of religious initiation. About that point, I would posit that children are not chattel. They are not owned by their parents. They have a right to select their own religions, and to interpret them for themselves. Therefore, it follows that males of any religion should be allowed to attain the age of majority and decide for THEMSELVES whether or not they wish to undergo circumcision. This makes MUCH more sense, as the foreskin has actually detached from the glans by this time, and the person has attained rationality and can make an informed decision. Furthermore, general anasthesia can be used safely; this is not true for infants. When any anaesthetic is applied to an infant, it is usually a topical cream or something similar, and this DOES NOT totally prevent the sensation of pain. We know this from adults who have been circumcised in this way.
I do not blame my parents, as I simply assumed that one day I would have my son or sons circumcised should I sire any male children, but I do blame the healthcare workers who do this all the time. They can see plainly the effect that circumcision has. The Hippocratic oath states that a doctor shall do no harm, and in that light, this is clearly an abomination. Nobody cared when I was born in the '70s, but we know better now. I support your efforts to bring this outrageous practice to a close, and I hope that, in the near future, no one will even consider mutilating an infant in this way.
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I went through a similar awakening in the period from 1998-1999. Initially I too laughed at the foreskin restoration websites and dismissed them. Little by little though, the feeling that I might have had something taken from me without my consent, finding anecdotal reports on the web of men with experiences similar to mine (never being comfortable in underwear because of an exposed glans, etc), my own philosophical outrage at the prevalent belief that only women, and not men, have a right to their bodies (not even male children have this right), and my reading of the scientific evidence led me to conclude that something had been taken from me unnecessarily. I became angry.
Today, given what we now know, I still (wilfully contentiously, with the express intention to stigmatize the practice) maintain that anyone who condones routine infant circumcision is morally no better than a paedophile. The practice must be condemned in the strongest terms usually reserved for victims of female genital mutilation. The larger issue of circumcision is often dismissed by mens rights advocates as a peripheral concern, a terrible issue to take up, on account of an apparent lack of public support. You should realize, however, that the lack of public support is directly related to the general ignorance surrounding mens issues: the public assumes there aren't any!
However, the issue illustrates certain feminist hypocracies. Take, for example, the notion that women must be more oppressed than men, and that only men are the oppressors. How many mothers consented their sons circumcision and even insisted on it? The usual feminist argument is that this is men doing violence to men, and so women are off the hook. Morally this is nonsense; worse, it's the gender analog of the worst racism: it is unacceptable to dismiss black killing other blacks because we're white and they're black, but somehow it is acceptable to dismiss (if you believe the faulty logic) "men harming men" because gender and not race is involved. In that case, men would have been completely unjustified in supporting legislation against female genital mutilation, since in that case, some feminists have argued, it is a case of women mutilating women. The whole issue of routine infant circumcision is an embarassment to feminists, who feel compelled either to support the practice, or else, if they disagree with it, to explain away the moral accountability of millions of mothers usurping the right of their sons to their own bodies by consenting to the genital mutilation of their sons. Unsupported generalizations must be appealed to: "the father wanted it"; "mothers are just going along"; "mothers are consumers of circumcised babies, not producers"; there is no end to the excuses.
Of course it's important to stop the practice altogether, than to lay blame; I want to point out how many of the most hallowed feminist dogmas, such as the doctrine of competitive feminism, which states that women must be seen to be more oppressed than men in every conceivable circumstance, crumble against the universal example of routine infant circumcision of infant males. Do you think for one minute that if a research finding that women who were genitally altered had some lower health risk would be accepted by women? Absolutely not! Even if medical science found that some form of female genital modification had some medical benefit, trhe suggestion that it should be performed on females without (or even with) their consent would provoke the strongest feminist outrage. In the current climate, only women have the right to their own bodies; not even infant boys have that right.
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Erogenous Tissue Loss after Circumcision contains pictures of normal and circumcised penises from male specimens from early and middle childhood, young adulthood, and old age. Look at figure 1, then look at figure 2. Tell me figure 1 doesn't look like a HATCHET WOUND!
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