While 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 exclusively ((I say “almost exclusively” because I suspect circumcision of boys is widespread in Israel.)) 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? ((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.”)) — 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 passage ((Although Amanda points out an exception to this rule.)) , 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.
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:
Hugo has written about being circumcized at 37.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
^^ 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
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.
“Several companies – including the one whose rep was on Oprah – admit buying them, dufus. ”
Ron, don’t call other commenters “dufus.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brick5, thanks for that link. There’s some interesting stuff there.
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
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.
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”.
[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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Found an interesting organization:
http://www.farreach.org/en/
They’ve even got a sense of humor:
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.
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).
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?
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.”
Mythago wrote:
That’s been my understanding, as well. I don’t think you and I really have any disagreement here.
They are.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Brick,
Thanks for all your suggestions. It’s good stuff to start thinking about.
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?
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.
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.
“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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
“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.
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.
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.
“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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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
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.)
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
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.
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
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.
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.)
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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?
Sounds like we’re just disagreeing on how to phrase cultural differences. Fair enough. :)
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!
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
“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.
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
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.