Study confirms male circumcision is genital mutilation

This is not a story to just glance over. I encourage people to read it and to take the time to read the .pdf report. It is not something that should sit idly on your PC's desktop but ough to be attached to emails and sent to anyone you think will take the time to read it. We have a big fight against the "HIV Circumcision Myth" as I call it, and we need all the resources we can get to fight this latest challenge to male genital integrity.

One note: for men who have been circumcised, there is a strong temptation to push this issue aside in your mind because you don't want to have the feelings of rage that come up when you think about what was done to you. I understand this, believe me. Rage however can be a source of energy as well as a deeply draining feeling. The key is do two things with it: one, tap into it for some warrior energy and use it to spread the word to others. They need to know how you are feeling on this issue. But be careful not to let it overwhelm you or get the better of your reasoning self. The second thing is to put what happened to you in perspective. This is not about making excuses or giving society a pass on the matter. It is about acknowledging the context of the era that many of us were born into and the baggage that our caregivers (or so-called caregivers) had themselves about this issue. Also bear in mind that it is a crime against an infant to circumcise, but that there are also worse crimes, and worse fates. People are born daily without limbs, born retarded, born dead. Put it all in persepctive but still, acknowledge it for what it is, use your anger as a tool and not a weapon, but don't deny it. That is bad for you. It's there for a reason.

OK, soapbox speech done.

Sadly, genital mutilation of either boys or girls is often done by parents or other elders seeking to damage them in the same way they themselves were "damaged". Note that it's primarily women who mutilate girls in African cultures (I'm not certain, but I'll bet real money that it's men who are primarily interested in having their sons circumcised in North America). Mutilating children is a way for the mutilated to make themselves feel normal - a release of repressed anger. Nor does it surprise me that many women in our feminist-influenced society are more than happy to arrange for a male's penis to end up cut and bleeding, all while wailing about FGM when it isn't even practiced in our culture.

The only way to put a stop to this cycle of physically and emotionally damaged babies is to get our fellow men (women too in cultures where females are mutilated) to own up to their rage over being "chopped" so they don't do it to their own kids. Spreading information and educating people is the only way we're ever going to do that. Men aren't typically allowed to have feelings or express emotions (that's a huge part of how society has defined masculinity for us), so this exercise actually serves several purposes. I don't think I'll be writing a male equivalent of The Vagina Monologues because there's dealing with one's emotions and then there's the self-obsessed, narcissistic victim complex which I'd rather leave to the feminists, but it's still worthwhile to examine one's feelings about having been mutilated as a baby by the folks who were supposed to be looking out for you. Given how rapidly the human mind is developing at that age, things that would have a relatively minor impact on the adult human psyche are amplified considerably, and being "cut" by your parents without anesthesia has some serious potential for psychological harm.

If you're circumcised, your parents ultimately did it for selfish reasons - i.e. as a way to deal with their own feelings about having been mutilated as infants, or possibly as an expression of misandry if the mother was the primary reason for the procedure. Circumcision was popularized in the West as a way to control male sexuality (i.e. sex drive and masturbation) in the 19th century, so it's no surprise that men and women in a culture which views male sexuality as dirty and evil are still very interested in controlling or repressing it.

I have to admit that I was surprised by the magnitude of my own reactions when I realized that I'd probably been mutilated as a child as a result of my father's rage at having been circumcised as an infant and/or as a result of my mother's hatred of men. I won't be doing it to anyone else.

"that circumcision's result, if perhaps not its intent, is reduced sexual pleasure for men"

Strange choice of words. Of course the intent is to reduce sexual pleasure, Rabbi Maimonides already acknowledged this in his writings. They should have said something it being converted from ritual to science.

For over a century now the Western medical establishment and now the government have not been able to leave little boy's pee pee's alone. Medical science once rationalized that genital mutilation of little boy's private parts prevented them from masturbating later on in life thus helping to prevent them from going insane and probably developing a telescoping spine to boot. Now it is to prevent the spread of AIDS? Have we been down this road before?

An article in today's NY Times explained that while sensitivity decreases with circumcision, most people reported as much or more sexual satisfaction. (I used to work at an adult-type store and a lot of the "prolonging aids" were just numbing creams.)

This is not a decision I see myself making for a kid any time soon, if it ever is I'll research it and probably not do it. Criticizing it for being unneccesary and painful seems OK, but it doesn't seem to be harmful later in life either. (If it happens, use anaesthetic please.)

With a quick skim, the complaints I read about circ. vs. HIV promotion in Africa, were that it would "lead" people to believe that it would prevent HIV, not that it didn't work (education needs to go with it).

"An article in today's NY Times explained that while sensitivity decreases with circumcision, most people reported as much or more sexual satisfaction. (I used to work at an adult-type store and a lot of the "prolonging aids" were just numbing creams.)"

That information can only come from subjective self-reports of men who had circumcisions as adults, and those are usually men who wanted it and had it done for some medical reasons. Such a sample is pre-selected and unreliable. The same types of studies done elsewhere frequently show mixed results.

A man who has an oversensitive penis as an adult can *choose* to get a circumcision (or use the numbing cream you mention), but he can't reverse the damage of a circumcision. That's permanent. And a child cannot consent. It removes an important organ that has a function, and a child cannot consent to that. It's much more than a piece of skin. The exact same procedure done to girls - removal of the clitoral hood - is *illegal* in the U.S. and elsewhere, but for males we don't care.

There are other complaints about the HIV issue. See the Attorneys for the Rights of the Child website. There are challenges to the methodology; there are references to studies showing it also increases the chances of a baby getting HIV from the procedure itself; and there is the fact that studies also show the same thing for female circumcision and yet we are're promoting that to reduce HIV. In my opinion, it's very much an issue of gender bias and male disposability.

People mistakenly want to take the opinion of adult men who get circumcised as a true comparison, which it's not. The head of the penis is incredibly sensitive. If it's protected by a foreskin for 30 years, and then exposed, of course it will be more sensitive, temporarily, the same way if you scraped off a piece of skin, the exposed underlayer of skin might be sensitive until it healed.

But that part of the penis isn't meant to be exposed, and it must thicken itself, increasing the distance between the surface and the nerves. If you circumcise at birth, that boy will on average have 16-20+ years of having that part of his body exposed before it's used for sexual intercourse. Those are the people who suffer the most from it. Someone who has it done at 30 wouldn't experience similar sensitivity loss until ~50, when most men will attribute any loss of sensation to age.

And I would suggest that almost all of the 'reported satisfaction' occurs from the bias our country has against the asthetics of uncircumcised males. I don't believe sense of dissatisfaction is present in countries without routine circumcision.

"That information can only come from subjective self-reports of men who had circumcisions as adults"

No, not at all. It was not comparing "before and after", it was comparing "how are your experiences in bed."

I guess a prime question for the pro-MGM crowd is how come tens of thousands of men have attempted foreskin restoration in the US and why is it that men or boys almost never voluntarily subject themselves to the surgery.

Probably the most important aspect of the mutilation is the removal of the sensitive frenular delta on the dorsal side, which should be equivalent to the connection between the inner labiae and clitoris. It produces a distinct feeling and prolonged, much more satisfying orgasms. Removing the clitoral hood does not damage this spot.

On a sidenote, I think it's a disgrace that laymen have to speculate about all this while society has much more unimportant things thoroughly researched all the time.