In 1834, Sylvester Graham—inventor of the cracker that continues to bear his name—published a book called A Lecture to Young Men, in which he warned that masturbation would transform a boy who practiced it regularly into:
a wretched transgressor [who] sinks into a miserable fatuity, and finally becomes a confirmed and degraded idiot, whose deeply sunken and vacant, glossy eye, and livid shrivelled [sic] countenance, and ulcerous, toothless gums, and fetid breath, and feeble broken voice, and emaciated and dwarfish and crooked body, and almost hairless head—covered perhaps with suppurating blisters and running sores—denote a premature old age, a blighted body—and a ruined soul! (Quoted in Kimmel)
Graham, who was one of the most popular and successful of the non-medical writers on this subject, believed the male body was simply not equipped to handle “the convulsive paroxysms attending venereal indulgence”—read: ejaculation—and so even married men, whose sexual activity with their wives was certainly beyond the moral reproach usually associated with masturbation, had to be very careful not to overindulge–which for Graham meant more than once a month. Otherwise, they risked
Languor, lassitude, muscular relaxation, general debility and heaviness, depression of spirits, loss of appetite, indigestion, faintness and sinking at the pit of the stomach, increased susceptibilities of the skin and lungs to all the atmospheric changes, feebleness of circulation, chilliness, head-ache, melancholy, hypochondria, hysterics, feebleness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weakness of the lungs, nervous cough, pulmonary consumption, disorders of the liver and kidneys, urinary difficulties, disorders of the genital organs, weakness of the brain, loss of memory, epilepsy, insanity, apoplexy—and extreme feebleness and early death of offspring.… (Quoted in Kimmel)
Graham recommended dietary measures, specifically his crackers, to combat men’s temptation to pleasure. J. H. Kellogg, whose flakes were also originally developed and marketed as an anaphrodisiac, didn’t stop with food. In Plain Facts for Old and Young, published in 1888, Kellogg recommended a series of home remedies for masturbation, including bandaging a boy’s penis, covering it with a cage and tying the boy’s hands at night when he went to sleep. For particularly difficult cases, Kellogg recommended circumcision “without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if connected with the idea of punishment” (Quoted in Kimmel). Nor was Kellogg the only expert to suggest that pain was the best countermeasure to male masturbation. Other writers seemed to compete with each other to see who could come up with the cruelest form of intervention. Recommendations included applying leeches, punching a hole in the foreskin and inserting a metal ring, cutting the foreskin with jagged-edge scissors and applying a hot iron to a boy’s genitals.
Clearly male sexual pleasure for its own sake was threatening to nineteenth century US culture. In Manhood in America, from which I have pulled the above quotes from Graham and Kellogg, Michael Kimmel locates this threat in the crisis of masculine identity caused by the rapid industrialization of American society.
[T]o middle-class American men the mid-nineteenth century world often felt like it was spinning out of control, rushing headlong towards an industrial future. For a young man seeking his fortune in such a free and mobile society, identity was no longer fixed, and there was no firm patriarchal lineage to ground a secure sense of himself as a man.… “Sons [here Kimmel is quoting Charles Sellers’ book The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846] had to compete for elusive manhood in the market rather than grow into secure manhood by replicating fathers. Where many could never attain the self-made manhood of success, middle class masculinity pushed egotism to extremes of aggression, calculation, self-control and unremitting effort.”
Sexual pleasure undermined a man’s ability to compete in this marketplace of manhood in two ways: First, as Graham, Kellogg and others made clear, such pleasure constituted unadulterated self-indulgence, a characteristic precisely antithetical to the kind of man a self-made man was supposed to be. Second, the expenditure of sperm—and the thinkers of the nineteenth century saw ejaculation quite explicitly as a form of spending—was a waste of energy that a man could have, and should have, been putting to more productive uses elsewhere.
This view of male sexual pleasure as dangerous and pathological was formally medicalized in 1870 when Dr. Lewis Sayre, the nation’s leading orthopedic surgeon, and a future president of the American Medical Association, was called in to consult in the case of a boy who was “unable to walk without assistance or stand erect, his knees being flexed at about an angle of 45 degrees” (Gollaher). Sayre had been asked to perform a tenotomy, an operation which would sever the child’s hamstring tendons, but, after examining the boy, Sayre concluded that the patient’s legs were paralyzed, not contracted, and so a different form of treatment was called for. Because he could not immediately discern the cause of the paralysis, Sayre decided to test the boy’s reflexes using electrical current as a way of helping him refine his diagnosis. When the boy’s nurse warned him not to apply the current too close to her ward’s genitals, which were very sore, Sayre discovered that the child was suffering from a severe case of phimosis, an overly tight foreskin. When the nurse explained that the condition often caused the boy to have painful erections, Sayre had a flash of insight:
As excessive venery is a fruitful source of physical prostration and nervous exhaustion, sometimes producing paralysis, I was disposed to look upon this case in the same light, and recommended circumcision as a means of relieving the irritated and imprisoned penis. (Quoted in Gollaher)
The operation was performed; the boy experienced a nearly miraculous recovery; and the industry of male circumcision in the United States was born. In the decades that followed, circumcision was touted—at first by Sayre, but then, with the exception of a few dissenters, by the medical profession as a whole—as a cure for everything from asthma to epilepsy, but what is most remarkable about this procedure is that even though every proposed medical justification for it turned out to be either profoundly questionable or completely false, removal of the male foreskin developed nonetheless into the preventive medicine it is still used as today in the routine medical circumcision of infant boys.
What it is precisely that circumcision is supposed to prevent has changed over time. In 1896, a book called All About Baby recommended the procedure for baby boys to prevent masturbation and the medical and moral problems associated with that practice. Other authorities advocated circumcision as a hedge against the possibility of impotence later in life (Gollaher). More properly medical rationales have included the prevention of urinary tract infections, cancer of the penis, cancer of the cervix in women and the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV–this last one is, for now, supported by solid scientific evidence, but no one that I am aware of seriously promotes the procedure as routine preventive health care for all infant boys. Perhaps more to the point, while there are certainly solid medical reasons for performing male circumcisions on adult men, few if any of those reasons apply to newborn boys, meaning that, as David L. Gollaher puts it in his book Circumcision, “the questions about circumcision are about the future: Does it yield longer life, less disease or disability? Does it improve function? Does it alleviate fear or anxiety?And if it does confer benefit, does the benefit outweigh the harm?” The practice of circumcising infant boys, in other words, is more about the kind of body the medical profession believes men ought to have than it is about a direct and immediate threat to the life or well-being of the boys who will grow up to be those men.
Indeed, the routine circumcision of infant males became enshrined in the United States less because there was persuasive evidence of the procedure’s benefits than because powerful voices within the medical profession managed to convince their colleagues and the public at large that the foreskin itself was pathological. Chief among these voices in the late nineteenth century was Peter Charles Remondino’s. A widely published and influential physician and public health official, Remondino published in 1891 a book called History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present: Moral and Physical Reasons for Its Performance. In it he wrote:
The prepuce seems to exercise a malign influence in the most distant and apparently unconnected manner; where, like some of the evil genii or sprites in the Arabian tales, it can reach from afar the object of its malignity, striking him down unawares in the most unaccountable manner; making him a victim to all manner of ills, sufferings, and tribulations; unfitting him for marriage or the cares of business, making him miserable and an object of continual scolding and punishment in childhood, through its worriments and nocturnal enuresis [involuntary urination]; later on, beginning to affect him with all kinds of physical distortions and ailments, nocturnal pollutions, and other conditions calculated to weaken him physically, mentally, and morally; to land him, perchance, in jail or even in a lunatic asylum. Man’s whole life is subject to the capricious dispensations and whims of this Job’s-comforts-dispensing enemy of man. (Quoted in Gollaher)
Note the shift in focus. While people like Graham and Kellogg had seen circumcision as a kind of punishment for masturbation, a view in which the masturbator and not his foreskin was the problem, Remondino saw the foreskin itself as pathological, as if the male body were born diseased; and while no one seriously believes anymore that the foreskin is the root of all evil in men, it’s hard not to see Remondino’s rhetoric as one root of the idea that a healthy foreskin, a normal part of the body with which a boy is born, is not merely disposable, removable, like the flip top on a can, but also so potentially harmful that doctors are willing to perform an operation to save boys from its perceived dangers that would otherwise seem to violate a central tenet of the medical profession: not to do surgery on an otherwise healthy patient. Were the foreskin understood as the organ of sexual sensation that it is, however–not unlike the clitoris, in that, while it may not be necessary for sexual intercourse, it is certainly more than simply desirable for the pleasures it provides–one wonders if we would so easily see its removal as no big deal and celebrate instead the marginal and doubtful health benefits that ostensibly result from its absence. (Please note: I am not suggesting that the foreskin and the clitoris have some kind of one-to-one correspondence, either sexually or physiologically, just that there may be a similarity in function.)
The foreskin of an adult human male represents 50% to 80% of the penile skin. (Details about the foreskin in this and the following paragraphs are taken from “The Prepuce,” by C. J. Cold and J. R. Taylor and “A Preliminary Poll of Men Circumcised in Infancy of Childhood,” by Tim Hammond.) Unfolded, it would measure between twenty and thirty square inches. The glans penis of an intact man is only a few cell layers thick. The skin is smooth, red, and glistening, just like the inside of the mouth. The glans of a circumcised penis, on the other hand, is up to ten times thicker than its uncircumcised counterpart, the result of a process called keratinization. Keratin, a tough, insoluble protein which the body produces in response to friction or pressure, is the primary material in hair, nails, and the outermost layer of skin. Its formation on the head of a circumcised penis, while necessary to compensate for the loss of the foreskin’s protective covering—imagine what your tongue would feel like if you didn’t have cheeks or your eyes without eyelids—significantly dulls what a man will be able to feel through the head of his penis. In addition, circumcision excises the tremendous sexual sensitivity that is located in the foreskin itself, including:
- The frenar band, a ridge of skin between the inner and outer foreskin, which is the primary erogenous zone on the intact male body
- The frenulum, the highly sensitive piece of skin that anchors the foreskin to the underside of the glans
- Fine touch receptors called Meissner’s corpuscles, of which there are thousands
- Branches of the dorsal nerve
- 10,000 to 20,000 specialized erotogenic nerve endings
All of this and more is lost to a man whose foreskin has been amputated, leaving him only with whatever sensory capacity is left in his circumcision scar—and for some the scar has no such capacity, while for others it becomes a site of pain—and with what he can feel through the nerves in the head of his penis, covered as they are by the layers of keratin mentioned above. These nerves are mostly “protopathic,” meaning they can sense only sensations that are poorly localized, like pressure, pain, certain kinds of physical contact and temperature, and so what one author has called “the subtle pleasures of genital foreplay” exist outside the realm of experience to which a circumcised man has access. Indeed, the only part of the body with less protopathic sensitivity than the glans penis is the heel of the foot. This reduction in sensitivity does not mean that circumcised men have no choice but to lead less satisfying sex lives than uncircumcised men—sexual satisfaction, after all, is a product of far more than physical sensation; and circumcised men are still capable of orgasm and all other kinds of sexual sensation and play—but it does mean that, whatever else it represents as a medical procedure or cultural ritual, the routine circumcision of infant boys, the most common form of surgery performed in the United States, is by definition an expression of indifference at best, if not downright hostility, to male sexual pleasure, rooting the procedure firmly in the nineteenth century beliefs and attitudes of Sylvester Graham and those who thought like him.
Drawing, or at least exploring the possibility of, a connection between the contemporary medical practice of routine infant male circumcision and the fears about male sexual pleasure that concerned people in 19th century United States is not to suggest that we are somehow still mired in obsolete ideas about masturbation or some such thing. Rather it is to ask a question about the relationships between and among the male body, our cultural definition(s) of and prescriptions for a healthy (specifically sexually healthy) male body and how those definitions and prescriptions structure what it means for a man to have sexual pleasure. Take, for example, the terms western medicine uses to define the four stages of erection: latent, tumescent, full erection, and rigid erection. The hierarchical progression from one stage to the next suggests that the process of male sexual arousal is primarily the process of building an erection or, perhaps more accurately, of how an erection builds itself; more, the hierarchy embedded in those terms devalues the experience of earlier stages, latency for example, in comparison to later stages, like full or rigid erection. Thinking about male sexual arousal in these hierarchical terms also carries the implication that something is wrong if one does not reach the final stage, rigid erection, and such thinking fits very neatly with the idea that the final and only true evidence and experience of fully realized male sexual pleasure is ejaculation, a value expressed most nakedly (so to speak) in pornography’s cum shot. Finally, since you don’t need a foreskin to ejaculate, this hierarchical, goal-based model of male sexual pleasure makes it very easy to see the foreskin as expendable, which in turn makes it easy to reason that the expendability of the foreskin is the natural state of the male body, despite the fact that the male body in its natural state possesses a foreskin.
Yet latency, tumescence, full-erection and rigid-erection are not the only ways in which male sexual arousal can be described.The Taoists, for example, as Mantak Chia and Douglas Arava explain in The Multi-Orgasmic Man, talked about four levels of “attainment:” firmness, swelling, hardness and heat, terms that are not only not inherently hierarchical, but that also, at least for me, describe the interior experience of sexual arousal much more accurately. I know what firmness feels like, for example, while I can’t say the same for latency; and the qualitative difference between hardness and heat is much truer to what I feel than the quantitative difference between a full and a rigid erection. Moreover, along with these different terms of description comes a very different idea about the nature of male sexual pleasure. Firmness, swelling, hardness and heat are sensations that can be experienced in their own right, and, as stages of male arousal, each one brings with it its own, very specific pleasures, if you are willing to take the time to pay attention and cultivate them. Indeed, for the Taoists, the goal of male sexual pleasure is not ejaculation per se, but rather the cultivation and harnessing of these pleasures, and the recycling of sexual energy throughout the body, leading to a series of whole-body, non-ejaculatory orgasms, an idea which seems at first–at least it did so to me–not merely counterintuitive, but physiologically impossible.
Yet male orgasm and ejaculation are separable phenomena, as Alfred Kinsey showed in the 1940s and as William Hartmann and Marilyn Fithian confirmed in their book, Any Man Can: The Multiple Orgasmic Technique for Every Loving Man. Hartmann and Fithian reported on a study they conducted of thirty three men who claimed they could have two or more orgasms without losing an erection. The men were monitored for pelvic contractions and increased heart rate—two clear indicators of orgasm—and the results showed the average number of orgasms among the men was four. The maximum was sixteen! More to the point, the arousal charts for these men were identical to those of multi-orgasmic women, suggesting that the traditional Western model of male arousal—which builds to the single peak of ejaculation and then falls off into a stage when another erection is impossible—has at least as much to do with how men are socialized to experience sexual pleasure as with the capacity or predisposition of our bodies for a given kind of sensation.
The techniques that make multiple male orgasm possible are based on an understanding of male sexual response that incorporates into a system the erotic possibilities of male physiology that are usually treated as “pleasant detours” along the road to the “main event” and not as either significant sources of pleasure in their own right or necessary contributing factors to a man’s capacity for multiple orgasm. Through these techniques, a man’s nipples, anus, perineum, testicles, scrotal sac, even his breathing all become in their own way as important as his penis in his ability fully to experience his body’s capacity for orgasm. These methods will work for both circumcised and uncircumcised men, and so I am not trying to argue that we ought to stop circumcising boys just so that they can experience multiple orgasms when they become men (though I do think we ought to stop routinely circumcising infant boys); rather, I would like to suggest that a view of male pleasure that does not focus so exclusively on ejaculation, that values all of the erotic possibilities of a man’s body, including those of the foreskin, will make the logic by which we now so blithely amputate the foreskins of healthy infant boys far less compelling than it now can be. Or, to put it another way, when you change someone’s definition, experience and expectations of sexual pleasure and satisfaction, you change, or at least potentially change, the politics of sexuality as well, and when it comes to male sexuality that is a possibility worth exploring further.
Works Cited
Cold CJ, Taylor JR. “The prepuce.” BJU (British Journal of Urology) Int 1999;83 Suppl. 1:34-44.
Gollaher, D. Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery. New York: Basic Books, 2001
Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press 1995
Hey, wasn’t a lot of this due lack of understanding of VDs? I mean, a lot of the above is a description of syphilis’s symptoms… I can see it: the bodies of people who have VD must to be similar to the bodies of people who masturbate. Perfectly sensible.
I just want to say that I’m really enjoying this series of posts.
Thanks, Tess, for the kind words.
… suggesting that those 33 self-selected men have a kind of neurological intersex condition? Or
Really? Finding the existence of a condition in men about as rare as androgen insensitivity syndrome is a reason to conclude that 3*10^9 men just don’t try hard enough to be More Like Women(TM)?
Thanks so much for taking the time to educate about this, Richard. I’ve struggled with my own circumcision for a long time, and feel greatly violated by it. It’s nice to see this topic starting to get some serious coverage in otherwise feminist places.
Cessen:
I’m not a mod or important person on this blog, but in almost every post about feminism here, it is either explicitly stated by the mods or deeply ingrained into the posts that feminism is about the equality of the sexes, not the oppression of men. Insightful posts like Richard’s (which I must say his posts are highly insightful and moving) are more than welcome in a feminist space because it adds to the dialogue. Feminism gains nothing through ignoring the male POV.
That being said, good job Richard on another fantastic post.
BASTA!
Before I respond–because I think I want to, if only to make it clear that multi-orgasmic capability in men is not “a condition”–I am wondering if you would explain your point a little more fully and clearly.
Also Cessen and Simple Truth: Thanks!
I had what I think is the same reaction as BASTA! The post seemed to imply that the existence of some multi-orgasmic men demonstrates that other men’s single-orgasmic-ness is socially constructed. But that data could just as easily be taken to demonstrate that those multi-orgasmic men are in some way neuro-biologically different from the rest of us. What would demonstrate that single-orgasmic-ness is socially constructed would be the existence of a society or subculture in which men routinely had multiple orgasms, or some technique that reliably allowed single-orgasmic men to become multiple-orgasmic.
Stentor:
These are precisely the techniques talked about in the book by Chia and Arava that I refer to towards the end of the post, but don’t describe in detail, since they are not germane to the point of the piece; and I can say from personal experience that the techniques do work.
.
Wait, wouldn’t that demonstrate that the multi-orgasm capability in men is socially constructed by that society or subculture? How would you prove that said society’s or subculture’s ways are really closer to the untampered-with nature of male sexuality?
Humans can reportedly be trained to hold their breath for tens of minutes but would you consider that a natural capability?
Hey, BASTA!, you’ve been banned multiple times. Go away. Thanks!
@Simple Truth:
When I said “otherwise feminist” I didn’t mean that feminism is about oppressing men, or to deride feminism.
My own take on feminism is that it’s about stopping the oppression of women, and male circumcision is only indirectly related to that, if it’s related at all.
I don’t consider male circumcision to be a feminist issue any more than I consider abortion an issue of men’s rights. Both are clearly important issues, but I don’t think of feminism as being so all-encompassing of a movement.
I’ve also seen a lot of hostility to this issue in feminist spaces. See the comments in the recent posts on feministing about circumcision for examples; although clearly there are feminists that do care about it too, otherwise those posts wouldn’t have happened at all. But still, I see a lot hostility, and not just the “don’t derail” kind. So I’m hesitant to call it a feminist issue for that reason as well.
(Btw, I don’t identify as feminist, but I’m certainly not anti-feminism. Aside from displays of racism, transphobia, etc. that can be seen in many mainstream feminist spaces, I largely agree with and support feminist issues.)
Regarding the question of whether male circumcision is a feminist issue: The first time I saw it treated as such was by no less a radical feminist than Robin Morgan. I think it was in The Demon Lover, and it was a brief reference to the procedure that made it clear Morgan took for granted that it was something with which feminism ought to be concerned. Even leaving aside the specifics of the procedure and its effects on the male body, which one might reasonably argue lie outside the boundaries of a concern with the oppression of women, the medical imperative to circumcise inserts/insinuates itself into the relationship between a mother and her newborn son, between father and son too, and so also between mother and father (not to mention the rest of the family and its opinions on the matter). It shapes, in other words, certain aspects of motherhood (and of parenthood: who wins and why, for example, when mother and father are in conflict about whether to circumcise a boy?) and that is very explicitly a feminist issue.
@Richard:
I certainly see how male circumcision can affect women. I was not trying to deny that it can and does affect women. But the effect that male circ has on motherhood is far-and-away a secondary concern to the fact that my body was violated. Similarly, abortion rights affect men too, but it is not a men’s rights issue as such.
But let me clarify: I think that male circumcision is absolutely an issue that feminists should be concerned about. But I do not consider it a feminist issue as such. Because the primary motive for ending routine infant circumcision should be to protect boys (and the men they grow into) from bodily violation.
I hope that makes sense.
I think of circumcision as a feminist issue because it’s about the modification of a child’s body to meet a gender norm, and the ways in which gender norms affect us all is a feminist issue.
—Myca
I really appreciate this post. If I didn’t have religious reasons I feel like I would definitely not want to circumcize a son. Being Jewish makes it a tougher issue for me, though I do not consider the religious directive determinative necessarily (I’m not all that observant anyway). I was actually really glad to have a daughter and not have to deal with making that decision. The more I read things like this the more I think I would not circumcize a son. And I think in my mind it does come from a feminist awareness of the importance of bodily autonomy and the complexity and problematic nature of making irreversible decisions for children about their bodies.
Thanks for another great post, Richard.
It may also be, principally or in part, an expression of ignorance. I don’t think many people in the US really know that much about the anatomy of the foreskin, or understand what’s lost when the foreskin is cut. So I’d say it’s a mix of ignorance, indifference and hostility. And ignorance probably has more to do with it than hostility, in my view.
* * *
Another point:
Circumcision has been in decline in the US (thankfully), and if trends continue then someday the majority of American boys will be intact. But interestingly, there are big regional differences.
So is the difference caused by a greater hostility to male sexuality in the Northeast? And is male sexuality much more accepted in the West?
I’m not sure that I find indifference/hostility (or ignorance) to be a very satisfying explanation for why male circumcision is so much higher in some regions than others.
In the end, I think that cultural differences are where the action’s at, and I’m not convinced that cultural differences are caused to any great extent by hostility towards male sexual pleasure. Jews are far more likely to be circumcised than pretty much any Christian group in the US, but I’d be very skeptical of a claim that Jews are generally more hostile to male sexual pleasure than Christians. I’d be similarly skeptical about claims that Poland is culturally much more welcoming of male sexual pleasure compared to the US, or that the South is compared to the NE.
So what does cause these cultural differences to emerge and persist, if not hostility towards male sexual pleasure? I have to admit, I don’t know. I have only questions, no answers.
Amp,
Thanks for the chart. You ask good questions and they make me think that I need to refine what I am saying about hostility towards male sexual pleasure, because I don’t mean that cultures which circumcise are more hostile than cultures that don’t. Rather, what I think I think–and I now have to go back and look at the research I have done, which I have not yet written into a post–is that cultures which circumcise have chosen that method as one way of expressing their hostility towards male sexual pleasure. You find all over Jewish rationales for circumcision that are not explicitly “because God commanded Abraham and it’s the sign of the covenant” the notion that the procedure reduces male pleasure and therefore makes male sexuality easier to manage; and certainly the origins of the procedure in the US have to do with a hostility towards male pleasure. So my initial response to what you’ve written is that while I agree that cultural differences may determine why some cultures/regions circumcise and others don’t, I also think it is true that when they do circumcise–and I am talking here about routine infant male circumcision, not adolescent-male-rite-of-passage circumcision–it is also, whatever else it may be, an expression of hostility towards male sexual pleasure (at least based on the reading I’ve done to date).
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Re: regional differences in the US the idea of “cleanliness” comes to mind. There are a lot of cultural “cleanliness” issues that don’t necessarily actually have to do with being clean (such as removing body hair and, I think, male circumcision) but that provoke an “ew, yuck, unclean” response in a lot of people in the US. I think of that, for whatever reason, as a response that is less prevalent in the West (I have not lived in the West, it’s just an idea I’ve picked up in the East of the West as a sort of rugged, outdoorsy place where people are less concerned with getting a little dirt under their fingernails – and by extension less concerned with abstract notions of what is “clean”). Just a thought that occurred to me in response to Amp. Not a well thought through hypothesis.
@ Emily,
Re: Circumcision and Judaism,
I don’t know if you’re particularly interested/if you care, but for whatever it’s worth, many Jewish feminist theologians also push against genital circumcisions. As I understand it, the main argument is that Israel’s covenant with G-d is not male-exclusive and should not be signified as such. Instead, the movement is towards the “circumcision of the heart” that is mentioned several times throughout the Tanakh.
P.S. I agree with everyone else–this is a really fantastic series of posts! Thanks!
I consider circumcision absolutely to be a feminist issue. Bodily autonomy and integrity are core principles of my feminism. Would I restrict them to women? Should I care less about them for my sons than for myself?
Also, reclaiming female sexual pleasure can only be truly successful in a culture that’s less hostile to sexual pleasure in general. Men and women of good will have a lot of common ground here – as I think Richard’s whole series of posts has shown.
Richard, I didn’t read this post as claiming circumcision was somehow the apotheosis of hostility to male sexual pleasure. Instead, I thought you showed – vividly, in both phenomenological and ideological terms – how “experts” in the U.S. used circumcision to advance their anti-pleasure agenda.
As far as male sexual response is concerned, it’s a red herring to ask what it would be like, were it free of cultural interference. Humans swim in culture; our sexuality is soaked in it. We cannot separate out some imagined biological essence of sexuality. (Yes, people get off together, and some of them make babies in the process, but that is very far from the sum total of our sexuality.)
In addition to the practices you hint at, Richard, I know that prostate cancer survivors who’ve undergone prostatectomy often report their sexual response being more like women’s. It’s harder to sustain arousal; orgasms can occur without erection; and a few of them report becoming multiorgasmic. That last point is highly anecdotal and I’d love to see some real data on it.
(I’m loving this series, too! Your student’s fuck-her-to-death fantasy got me wondering how I’d respond as a teacher – and I’m still not sure.)
Not all circumcisions are alike.
Traditional Jewish practice leaves intact the sensitive inner skin and the frenulum, and often most of the frenar band. Only the outer layer of skin is removed. The inner skin bunches up behind or around the rim of the glans. In contrast, hospital circumcisions removes both inner and outer layers of the foreskin.
Here in Israel a significant minority of men have partial glans coverage – an American mohel living here told me that people in the States used to ask him to “fix” perfectly kosher circumcisions to look like the more extreme hospital version.
Assimilated Jews who think they are getting a better job in hospital should reconsider.
Here in Israel, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jewish men have been circumcised in adulthood in the past decades. Several followup surveys returned roughly the same results: one third say now it’s better, one third say no change, one third say now it’s worse.
When one researcher went back and correlated satisfaction with the motivation for circumcision, it emerged that most of the “now it’s worse” camp were coerced by romantic partners and/or peers. Which shows that the nerves between the ears are at least as important as those between the legs.
The only major classical thinker who puts this “sexual curtailment” theory forward is Maimonides, and only in his “Guide for the Perplexed” – an apologia for Judaism directed at Muslim intellectual circles. So the Jewish physician echoed the opinion of contemporary Islamic medical texts to a Muslim audience.
In his 14-volume code of Jewish law, this rationale is not mentioned – because there Maimonides was restricted to previous Jewish precedent, which overwhelmingly emphasizes the covenantal nature of circumcision. Indeed, the birth of Isaac is linked to the virility enhancing power of Abraham’s circumcision.
Ben David:
I know this to be the case, but I also have a memory of reading about a rabbinic ruling–I don’t remember from what time period–that mohels should start taking the entire foreskin so that Jewish men could not draw their foreskins up over the heads of their penises and so hide their Jewishness. I may be misremembering entirely, though.
I was not thinking only of classical thinkers. Even among contemporary writers explaining Jewish circumcision I have read rationales which state quite explicitly that a benefit of brit milah is its symbolic, if not actual, “sexual curtailment.”
Re: circumcision is a feminist issue
Maybe this is just a problem of definition. Insofar as any human rights issue is a feminist issue, yes, absolutely, male circumcision is a feminist issue. It is hypocritical to be both feminist and not anti-circumcision, IMO.
But I have a big problem with making male circumcision a feminist issue if the reason for doing so is because it indirectly affects women. A really big problem. Male circumcision is only very secondarily about women. It is first and foremost about me and other direct male victims. Feminists should absolutely care about this issue. But the reasons given for caring are important. And I don’t think that something needs to be a feminist issue for feminists to be allowed (or even obligated) to care about it.
(EDIT: I realize the above can be construed as an erasure of trans people, and that was not my intention. Of course trans women can be affected by circumcision of the penis. But I still hold that it is not, and should not, be considered primarily a feminist issue as such, as that holds the implication to me that this issue is mostly about women. Which it is not.)
Cessen,
I think you’re right. It seems to me that both Myca and Sungold have explained how male circumcision is a feminist issue in a way that focuses precisely on men, though in the context of thinking about gender as something that effects both men and women. (I agree with them; I have kind of regretted my own comment above about how circumcision shapes motherhood, etc. because I realized afterwards that it sounded like I was indeed suggesting that circumcision’s secondary effect on women is what makes it a feminist issue, which is not what I believe.) Anyway, given the comments by Myca and Sungold, I would appreciate it if this thread did not devolve into an argument about the proper “-ism” categorization of routine infant male circumcision, especially since no one seems to disagree that the practice harms the boys who are subjected to it men and the men they grow up to be.
So I am asking, please, that you stop responding in this vein unless someone actually makes the explicit argument that the issues surrounding routine infant male circumcision are not primarily about men, or unless someone claims that what is really important in this discussion is the effect that the procedure has on women. Thanks.
What is now called “foreskin restoration” was common in the Hellen0-Roman period. One theory put forward by modern anti-circ folks – hanging on speculative reinterpretation of a Mishna text – is that the current Jewish practice was instituted at that time to make restoration more difficult. According to these folks original Jewish circumcision was even less intrusive, and did not involve peeling the foreskin off the glans.
Considering that modern American gentiles are successfully stretching themselves new foreskins with even less residual skin than Jews have, I doubt a lot of this speculative history.
Yet Judaism is not just the sum total of what Jews say. There is pre-existing content, to which most Jews give greater respect if not authority.
And mainstream Rabbinical Judaism – whose discourse is often unflinchingly, grittily realistic – treats circumcision as primarily covenantal and spiritual. Midrashic literature repeatedly connects it to the other major covenants – of Sinai and the land of Israel.
In particular, as I’ve said, the Abraham-Land of Israel connection is expressed in terms of fecundity and carnal/material blessing resulting from circumcision. (Jacob’s blessing to Joseph at the end of Genesis is an incredibly sensual – and explicitly sexual – expression of that Abrahamic blessing. And yes, it goes to Joseph who withstood the sexual immorality of Egypt. So there is a connection there, but one of moral character, not mutilation.)
One clever fellow once cited this record to me as evidence that pre-Roman Jewish circumcision was, in fact, just a symbolic nick – otherwise the Rabbis would have mentioned its sexual impact.
The only classical Rabbinic citation I ever saw that implied a sexual advantage for uncircumcised men was a Midrash on why Queen Esther did not separate from her gentile consort. And like most Midrash it can only be dated back to the Roman era.
@Richard:
I did not read (and still do not read) Myca’s and Sungold’s comments as you seem to, partly because they seem to be in response to what I had already said. But then again circumcision is a very sensitive/triggering topic for me, so perhaps I’m am misreading due to that.
In any case, I don’t want to hijack the thread, so I will stop commenting. Again, thank you very much for the OP.
Just to tie up a potential loose end and not to reopen this avenue of discussion: Richard absolutely read my position correctly. Being a feminist helps me see how people’s bodily autonomy and integrity are often compromised in specifically gendered ways. But I oppose circumcision first and foremost for men’s own sake.