Circumcision as a Weapon Against HIV

Submitted by Mastodon on Tue, 2012-09-18 22:52

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting the wider use of circumcision its propagation and the World Health Organization is being urged to do the same, with critics arguing that any such campaign carries with it the real danger that societies in Africa, where the AIDS prevention efforts are mostly focused, will result in the large scale circumcising of infants who have no choice in the matter.

It should be noted that female circumcision has nothing to do with health. It is nothing more than the practice of female genital mutilation and is a gross insult to womanhood. It stems from male fears of women’s sexuality and usually involves cutting out the clitoris, which is enormously painful though milder versions which only involve trimming the labia may have no more effect on ability to be aroused than the male counterpart.'

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If there were a basis for using circumcision to avoid disease spread, it'd be this: the less tissue that comes into contact with other tissue, the less likely the chance of spreading a disease from one to another person.

So if removing the foreskin on a male helps this along, removing any amount of tissue on a female's genitalia would have the same result. Logical enough? Yes. The problem: Removing tissue does not stop or even slow HIV from spreading between people who have "unprotected" sex. That is because even if a man has been circumcised, it is very likely he will have as much skin-to-skin contact with his partner when he is inside her as he would without a foreskin, it's just he will not be enjoying it nearly as much as if he had a foreskin.

I think, or, I hope, we are living through the last great hiccough of the age of circumcision. Actually I suspect we are living through the last great hiccough of the age of a number of things. But just as when large empires crumble, they do not go quietly. People hate to give up their "old ways", whether these be circumcision or anything else. They will fight back until eventually, the inevitable happens. It may not happen real soon-- the profoundly idiotic tradition of dueling which lasted for centuries took awhile to eventually die away. And while circumcision has been around longer, it too must finally fall away. After all, how many polytheists are there left in the world, and didn't the world once consist of nothing but polytheists?

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Submitted by Matt on Wed, 2012-09-19 02:03