Repost: Brian Earp – Religious vs. secular ethics and a note about respect

by Lilli Cannon Posted on October 20, 2012

Brian Earp is a research assistant in the philosophy department at the University of Oxford, and he will shortly be publishing this excellent essay.  I encourage you to read and share it, as he makes excellent and irrefutable points.  I pulled some selected quotes below, and there are also excellent comments on the original site.

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/10/religious-vs-secular-ethics-and-a-note-about-respect/

Earp, B. D. (forthcoming, pre-publication draft). Assessing a religious practice from secular-ethical grounds: Competing metaphysics in the circumcision debate, and a note about discursive respect. To appear in G. C. Denniston, F. M. Hodges, & M. F. Milos (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Symposium on Law, Genital Autonomy, and Children’s Rights, published by Springer.* Note, this is not the finished version of this document, and changes may be made before final publication.

“I’ve noticed that there is sometimes a very serious reluctance to address the issue of religious motivation directly… Because religious convictions are a deep, and certainly emotionally-charged, aspect of the lives of so many, attempts to question a religiously-motivated practice—especially by one who is not religious, or differently religious—can lead to outcomes that are very far from productive.”

“Many practices that are now seen as very clearly unethical had been going on for an extremely long time before anyone had the idea to question them. Examples include slavery, footbinding, the cutting of female genitals, and beating disobedient children with sticks. Usually these practices persisted without much alarm for one of two reasons. Either the moral standards that they would eventually be seen as violating had not yet had been developed, or those standards did exist for other cases but just weren’t commonly seen as applying to the practice itself until enough people sat down and made the connection. I think what’s happening right now with circumcision is not so much the first of these, but more the second. In other words, the relevant ethical principles—about bodily integrity, consent, protecting the vulnerable in society, and so on—have been available to us for quite some time now. It’s just that we’re so used to circumcision as a cultural habit, that many people fail to see how blatantly inconsistent this practice is with the rest of their own moral landscape.”

“And so, I think before we can get anywhere in this discussion, we are going to have to just acknowledge that that is a different metaphysic. I think we have to acknowledge that certain religious commitments are based on a meta-ethical view of the universe that is in direct conflict with Western ideas about individuals, human rights adhering to those individuals as individuals, and the notion that children and infants, above all, need special protection because they can’t defend those rights on their own.”

“And it allows us to say that these things are wrong not just arbitrarily, or because God says so, or because we just feel like doing it that way, but because we have reason to say so. They are wrong because individuals have rights. They are wrong because those rights include things like bodily integrity, and they are wrong because the infringement of that integrity requires consent. So the idea I want to leave you with is this. If we think that there is any chance that we should give up these basic concepts—so that we can defer to a worldview that says that things like community identity are more important than individual identity and bodily integrity—then we’ll have to pay the price of that choice and face it honestly. And that means that the very same people who are asking for the religious freedom to perform circumcisions in a secular society, would have to be prepared to give up their own right to complain if someone wanted to cut off a part of their body, or interfere with their genitals, or that of their daughters or sisters or wives. That is, as I say, a logically possible universe. But it isn’t one that I would want to live in, and I don’t think you can have it both ways.”

Posted in Circumcision, Human Rights | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Science, like blogging, is useless without ethics.

by Lilli Cannon Posted on September 18, 2012

by Lillian Dell’Aquila Cannon

I have had the pleasure of having my comments on two other blogs deleted, not because of questionable content, but because the authors had no answers for me.  Both times, it was because I pointed out that science cannot exist outside of our culture and psychology.  What are people so afraid of?

In February, Kirstin, the author of the blog SquintMom, posted two articles on circumcision.  According to her site, she provides “resources for evidence-based parenting.”  I didn’t see the post back then, but I did recently get a hit to my site from her blog, so I followed the URL.  I couldn’t find anywhere on the page where my blog was linked, but I did read the whole article and the comments.  As I read, I became more and more angry.  In her series about circumcision, she examined the studies on circumcision and concluded that there is no compelling scientific evidence either for circumcision or against it.  As you might imagine, she got a lot of dissent from intactivists, much of it well-reasoned.  Any time a commenter brought up other studies, or questioned her inclusion or exclusion of any study, she dismissed his or her arguments, at one point going so far as to say “[M]y scientific background provides me with the ability to tease out the fact from the ideology,” as though only she was qualified to assess the evidence, not her interlocutors.  As Hugh Young pointed out, appeal to authority does not win an argument.  Later, she had to come on to tell the commenters that she actually thinks that circumcision is ethically wrong, but that science does not support that position.

By this point, I was unable to resist and began leaving some pointed comments, questioning her authority and asking for her IQ.  At first, she did respond to me on the blog, asking why I wanted to know her IQ, and telling me it was 184.  I replied in the comments, but you cannot read my reply on her site because she deleted it.  Luckily, I was smart enough to save it in my Gmail, and so can reproduce it here.  I wrote:

[I asked for your IQ] to point out that appeal to authority is not a valid argument.  Your statement of “I am a scientist so I can understand this” just begged to be taken to the ridiculous end.  Maybe I’ll go out and get an IQ test and then whoever wins gets to be right?  Or would you agree that that would be a stupid way to decide it?

I would argue that being so involved in science, making your living off of interpreting studies, would make you less objective because you have chosen to focus on science as a way of knowing, which normalizes and privileges that epistemology over all else.  My major disagreement is that you seem to be treating the whole topic of routine infant circumcision as an intellectual exercise, which is immoral, because we are talking about real people who are being harmed.  I know that the point of your blog is that you think there are objective scientific judgments to be made on parenting hot topics, but that, in itself, is a choice to judge science as a better arbiter of parenting practices than emotions or ethics.  You laid out all the science you liked, claimed the other studies were useless, drew a conclusion, then claimed that your conclusion on your chosen science was more valid because you have more authority on the topic.  Logical flaws abounded and I could not resist pointing them out.

Science is not a valid way to answer the question of whether babies should be circumcised for non-therapeutic reasons.  Apparently you also think it is not ethical, but this only came out after you got attacked for awhile in the comments, and then you wondered why so many people were so angry.  As a scientist, you should be aware of all of the times science failed us, and how science cannot exist without ethics, nor can it ever be severed from its cultural underlay.

For example, in the Korean study of circumcised adults, what you need to understand is that in South Korea, men remain intact until their mid-20s or when they are ready to be married.  This cultural practice surely informs their subjective evaluation of how circumcision impacted their sexuality, and we cannot ignore the fact that circumcision is a ritual marking the entrance to adulthood and thus has strong emotional and social meanings.

Another commenter pointed out that men who were circumcised for health problems also probably simply felt better because of the cessation of the health problems.  This is no small confounding factor, nor is it in American studies showing men who were circumcised as adults felt relief.  Men who are adults today grew up ignorant of the foreskin in an anti-foreskin culture – no wonder they felt better when they could relieve themselves of that shameful and embarrassing foreskin.  Babies born today are growing up in an evenly split culture that is not ignorant of the foreskin; they will not be ashamed and will value their foreskins.

You also ignore all of the case reports and self-reports of men whose penises were so damaged by circumcision that they cannot function normally, and of the babies who died or lost their glandes or whole penises, because you said the risk is low (as currently reported.)  However, there are several cultural and ethical rebuttals to this statement:

-Death and sexual disability from circumcision are not shared socially because parents do not want to share the reason for their baby’s death, likely because it touches on a hidden and unspoken psycho-sexual-cultural practice.

-Deaths from circumcision are usually reported as death from exsanguination or sepsis and thus are hidden from a simple count of death records.  It would take a careful epidemiological survey and study of hospital records of all dead male infants to find this, and this would cost money.  Who do you think wants to pay for this?  Surely not the same industry that earns $500 million a year from circumcision and who has recently made its appeal for continued Medicaid and insurance funding from circumcision.

-Adult men who were damaged by their circumcision also don’t go around trumpeting it because of the shame.  You can find them, though, more and more because of intactivism, and you can see some of their pictures and videos on the Global Survey of Circumcision Harm.  Perhaps this will produce enough numbers and impressive enough p values for you to take it seriously.

-Finally, and most importantly, it is unethical to perform circumcisions on infants when there is a chance of death and disability (no matter how small) because the proposed benefits of the circumcision can be had without the surgery.  It is immoral to risk a baby’s life and sexual functioning to give him benefits that he could have without amputative surgery, while pretending that one’s cultural and religious biases don’t exist.  But this is what you get when you do science in a vacuum, and this is why your whole post so incensed me.  Science is useful and can answer a lot of questions with great precision and accuracy, but it is not the only epistemology available to us, and not the best, either.  It always must be accompanied by ethical concern and a holistic understanding of the phenomenology of the issue being studied.  In your haste to squish a very difficult issue into a scientific framework, you have callously disregarded the fact that we are talking about actual human beings who will be affected by the conclusions you or the AAP draws from its chosen science.  If, as you say, you see circumcision as ethically wrong, then you have a duty to also say that the science does not answer the question, not because the scientific evidence is equivocal, but because science cannot answer an ethical question like this.

You must also adopt a stance of humility – if there’s one thing that history teaches us, it is that science is always advancing, and what was obvious and true and safe will often become obviously stupid and wrong and unsafe once we know more.  You seem extremely intelligent, and I applaud your education and attempts to educate people on the misuse of science, but it would do you credit to say that you don’t know for sure.  In the case of routine infant circumcision, we do not know for sure how it will affect any given man, so we do not have the right to impose that decision on him when he cannot resist.  This echoes the principle of medical conservatism, which also goes to show how biased many doctors are – if this were any other body part, they wouldn’t say there were benefits in amputating it, but even those intelligent doctors and scientists with IQs of 180+ can be blinded by their own cultural, psychological, and sexual biases.

 

First, let me point out that I have never deleted any comments on my blog but two: one was a pervert who wrote some really gross stuff (and I have a strong stomach), and one was my sister, who is mentally ill and was trying to upset me.  I have let critical comments go through for two reasons: I believe in what I say here, and I am open to changing my mind and considering new opinions.  I find it rather pathetic when bloggers delete critical comments – if they wanted their opinions to never be challenged, then perhaps they ought not to have a blog devoted to sharing them.  I do not appeal to authority, either.  You do not have to listen to me because I have a Ph.D., because I do not, nor because I am a mother of four, because every child and parent is different, nor because my IQ is 184, because I don’t know what it is and am suspicious of IQ tests anyway.  My position is always a philosophical position: simply by being in this world we have duties to it and the other living creatures in it.  I am not religious, but I know that I have to always try my best to do right by other people, regardless if it makes me uncomfortable.  I go out and inadvertently offend people in my family and online about circumcision because I know it is more important to speak for the powerless than it is for me to feel comfortable.  I have found that those who defend routine infant circumcision are always defending their own feelings or biases – they are themselves circumcised and don’t want to think about what they are missing, or they have circumcised children and don’t want to think that they might have harmed their children, or they are religious and so will not question the dictates of their religion.  I stand by my position on circumcision: it is not the parents’ right to choose to amputate healthy tissue from their child, no matter how pure their motivations.  It is fundamentally unjust.

Anyway, back to SquintMom.

I stand by what I wrote on her blog and am reproducing it here because I believe that even though I believe, as does SquintMom, that it is important that science not be misunderstood, I believe it is more important that it not be misapplied beyond its scope.  Yes, many people do not have the education to understand even the most rudimentary statistics or science, and this ignorance is bad for public discourse on issues like circumcision.  I do think it is valid to try to educate people, but perhaps it would be helpful in this education to include examples of the deliberate misuse of science and math, such as in the case of the African HIV studies that are being used to promote circumcision.  David Gisselquist has written extensively on HIV in Africa and the many problems with the three trials used to promote circumcision, and I encourage you to read his analysis.  On a more basic level, the authors of that study unethically reported the rate of HIV acquisition between circumcised and intact men as a relative risk, not absolute risk.  What do I mean by this?  In the 12 months of the study, 1.6% of the circumcised men contracted HIV, while 3.4% of the intact men did.  This is the absolute risk (and please note, other African studies saw no difference, or an increase in HIV rates among the circumcised.)  The studies’ authors, however, reported it as relative risk: “53% less likely.”  They did this because the absolute numbers make circumcision seem pointless to reduce the spread of HIV, and they banked upon the mathematical ignorance (innumeracy?) of the American public to be seriously impressed by the relative rate.  This is unethical, and it is a misuse of science which should interest SquintMom.

More important, though, is that the premise of the SquintMom blog is flawed.  It is inappropriate and unethical to exclude everything that cannot be assigned a number and lump it all together as “ideology.”  Science exists to serve human beings, not some Platonic ideal of a study that has 100% validity that could never exist in the real world.  Human beings do studies, and we are inseparable from our cultures and emotions.  Pro-circumcision types often claim, as SquintMom did, that there are not studies that prove that circumcised men have less satisfactory sexual experiences.  I disagree, as we have the excellent Sorrells study that concluded “The glans of the circumcised penis is less sensitive to fine touch than the glans of the uncircumcised penis. The transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis. Circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.”  Even so, how exactly would one prove with science that circumcised men and intact men feel the same level of pleasure?  Could we record their sexual experiences like in the movie “Strange Days” and then somehow rate who had the most pleasure?  Of course not – the experience of pleasure is subjective, and since we have men who are happy being circumcised and men who are unhappy being circumcised, we have no right to impose circumcision on them as it might result in unhappiness.

And that’s the problem with trying to scientifically prove a case for or against circumcision.  I do believe that we can and should use science to illuminate the issue, but it cannot be the only way we look at it.  Even if routine infant circumcision had huge benefits that could not be had in any other way (which test it currently fails), it still would remove healthy tissue from an unconsenting patient for future benefits in a non-emergent situation, and thus fails even the most basic of medical ethics: beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, autonomy, and proportionality.  The biases, emotions, and cultural backgrounds of the human beings doing the science will always be there and can never be severed from the conclusions, though many would like to pretend so.

This problem is not limited to circumcision.  As many personality psychologists have pointed out, America has a distinctly positivist, rational bent of thought, valuing science above such “softer, squishier” epistemologies like ethics or emotions.  Whether this is because of the effects of detached parenting practices, as my colleague Dr. Darcia Narvaez suggests, or of the culture, or a combination of both, we have seen a lot of it recently, especially in the AAP’s recent statement on circumcision that ignored the ethical questions fundamental to routine infant circumcision, or Pediatrics‘ endorsement of crying it out as a valid nighttime parenting technique.  For both of these statements, they chose to privilege scientific studies without addressing the ethics of the questions.  I have addressed the ethics of routine infant circumcision repeatedly, but the same argument can be made against leaving a baby to cry it out as a nighttime parenting method: it obviously causes the baby distress (as evidenced by the crying) and is, as we used to say in law school, neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve its goal of sleeping through the night.  It is not necessary because babies can learn to sleep longer without being left to cry (our four children all sleep fine without ever crying it out), and it is not sufficient because crying it out doesn’t work once and for all and has to be employed repeatedly as the baby passes through developmental stages (and can eventually get out of bed on his or her own to protest being left alone to cry.)  More fundamentally, they didn’t even question the goal of having a baby sleep through the night, which is an American ideal that is not universally shared.  Dr. James McKenna of Notre Dame has studied infant sleep and concluded that breastfeeding infants who sleep with their mothers enjoy many benefits.  In Japan, children sleep with their parents well into their childhood.  The Japanese are unlikely to produce studies that endorse leaving an infant to cry in a room as a valid parenting method because it would never occur to them to have that goal, nor that method to achieve it.  Why?  The Japanese see children as needing to be integrated into a collectivist society and co-sleep toward that end.  Americans see children as needing to be separated from dependents into individuals in an individualistic society, and place them in cribs and try to teach them to “self-soothe.”  You see, science is inseparable from culture, and to pretend that there are objective answers to subjective decisions is unethical and cowardly.  Routine infant circumcision is a messy issue that evokes strong emotions on both sides, and it should – caring for our babies is of utmost importance.  Dismissing that reality as not scientifically verifiable is both a stupid tautology and immoral.

[Postscript: I failed to save the comment I wrote on the other blog that deleted me.  This was a valuable lesson to always save my work!  I may try to recreate it here for my next post, though.]

Posted in Circumcision, Cultural Relativism, Science | 43 Comments

Don’t despair, intactivists: we have already won.

by Lilli Cannon Posted on September 9, 2012
Mahatma Gandhi

by Lillian Dell’Aquila Cannon

In the wake of the AAP task force technical report on circumcision seeming to endorse infant circumcision as a valid parental choice, many intactivists have despaired of ever ending circumcision, but all is not lost.  This is actually a sign that we are winning.

Mohandas Gandhi was an Indian man who led the struggle for self-rule when India was a British colony.  He is famous for employing non-violent civil disobedience to change his society and became known as Mahatma, which means “Great Soul” in Sanskrit.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. adopted some of his ideas to change American society during the civil rights struggle.  Of course, both of them were assassinated for their revolutionary philosophies of using non-violence and moral force to end injustice.

“First they ignore you…”

Many young intactivists do not remember when our cause was ignored.  In the mid-20th century, circumcision was often automatically performed without asking the parents.  They didn’t even see it as a choice, assuming everyone would want to have their children circumcised.  Even as recently as nine years ago when I started, circumcision was not a topic of widespread debate like it is today.  There were debates in online fora, but many people were unaware that there was an issue.  Certainly I was when I became pregnant with my first child (who was luckily spared due to a debate board on BabyCenter.)

“…then they laugh at you…”

Right now circumcision is all over the media, and many of the articles covering the topic have a similar attitude.  They portray circumcision as the normal thing to do, and then mention “so-called intactivists” using quotation marks to de-legitimize us and make us seem silly.  Some people defending circumcision may ask, “Why do you care so much about penises?” in an attempt to mock and shame you.  Of course, they’re the ones who care so much about penises that they have to mutilate them.  Don’t fall for this line.  They think they can laugh the issue away, but it doesn’t work, because we keep talking about it, and our numbers are growing.

“…then they fight you…”

Oh, and how they are fighting us today!  The whole AAP task force technical statement is an attempt to turn the tide back to circumcision.  Rather than be threatened, we should take this as a sign of how much progress we have made.  The whole report aims to keep circumcision as a legitimate parental choice, but more importantly, to make sure that insurance keeps paying for it.  18 states’ Medicaid programs have stopped paying for circumcision, and when Medicaid won’t pay for a procedure, private insurances often won’t either.  When circumcision is automatically paid for, it can remain out of the parents’ consciousness, allowing it to continue.  Many parents will not spend several hundred dollars for circumcision, or at least will stop to question why it is not covered before they have it done.  When told it is considered a cosmetic procedure and not medically necessary, their eyes are opened.  Some of the more astute pro-circumcision people may have looked to the history of circumcision in Britain and become afraid.  When the National Health Service stopped paying for circumcision in 1950, the circumcision rate plummeted.  They fear a similar crash here, especially since circumcision rates in the U.S. have already fallen from a high of 85% in the mid-20th century to 55% now.  On top of that Medicare and Medicaid have been in the spotlight during this election cycle thanks to the Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s proposed budget.  The writing is on the wall – whoever wins the election, whatever happens, the government will not be able to afford to spend as much on health care, and many formerly covered procedures will be on the chopping block, especially those that are cosmetic and medically unnecessary.  When read in this light, the whole technical statement is clearly an attempt to portray circumcision as medically beneficial and worthy of insurance coverage.  After all, circumcision is a cash cow for those who perform it – several hundred dollars for a few minutes’ work.

If the pro-circumcision forces felt comfortable, they would not have needed to put out such a biased and methodologically unsound statement.  Pediatrics has already published several letters criticizing the statement (and here, and here.)  The statement did not consider the ethical issues of amputating healthy and functional tissue from an unconsenting minor, nor did it address the functions of the foreskin.  Nor could the statement have considered the issues, because the only way you can portray circumcision as beneficial is if you totally ignore the ethical problems with circumcision and if you pretend the foreskin is like a skin tag with no purpose.  They will not debate us on the ethical or functional issues because they know they cannot win.  Note also that the task force never disclosed its own conflicts of interest, despite the fact that several of the members are Jewish and thus have been raised in a religion that considers circumcision to be necessary and commanded by God.  The total ethical failure of this statement was nicely documented by British ethicist Brian Earp, who called for its immediate retraction.

“…then you win.”

The U.S. is one of the last remaining countries to have a relatively high circumcision rate.  The current rate of newborn circumcision has hovered in the mid-50%s for several years, but the amount of attention given to circumcision continues to grow.  When I started arguing against circumcision nine years ago, intactivists were in the minority, and pro-circumcision people cited many proposed medical benefits, plus they had the benefit of the seeming normality of circumcision as thoughtless tradition on their side.  Now intactivists’ well-reasoned and ethically sound arguments dominate any online discussion, leaving only those who circumcised without thinking to make petulant arguments like “Uncircumcised penises are gross,” which are quickly and easily shot down.  They literally have no defense other than an angry barrage of discredited urban legends mixed with lame attempts to define amputative surgery as a valid parental choice.

From a demographic and cultural perspective, we have already won.  85% of the generation of U.S. men who are today’s fathers are circumcised, and yet only 55% of their sons are circumcised.  In some areas of the country like the west coast, only 30% of young adult men are circumcised.  Though middle-aged adults may have never seen or known anyone with a foreskin, the young adults today are not so ignorant.  When they begin reproducing, they won’t have a history of cultural ignorance to push them into circumcision.  They know from experience that having a foreskin is not a bad thing.  Time is on our side.

Furthermore, choosing to circumcise has entered the realm of politically, morally and culturally incorrect, and once this happens, it is very hard to change.  I see this all the time in online discussions of circumcision: intactivists make the ethical case against circumcision which is irrefutable, and so parents who chose to circumcise are left with lame defenses like, “It was my choice!  Who are you to judge me!”  The key word there is “judge.”  They know they are being judged, and no one wants to be the last person to do a wrong thing.

Take heart, intactivists.  The AAP has done nothing but make themselves look stupid and give a bit of comfort to those who would defend a dying and unethical practice for their own emotional or pecuniary motives.  Gandhi also said, “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.”  Truth and justice are on our side, and we have already won.  Not only is our struggle non-violent, we are asking for the violence against baby boys to end.  Now we need to just keep talking about it and, in time, we will look back and see this year as a watershed in turning the tide against circumcision.

Posted in Circumcision, Human Rights | Tagged , , | 26 Comments

From Intact America: Is this what religious freedom looks like?

by Lilli Cannon Posted on August 7, 2012
These little boys were just circumcised because someone said that someone said that someone said (ad infinitum) that Mohammed said that circumcision is a good thing.

I posted this picture and a link to this great blog piece by John Geisheker and Georganne Chapin to shake you up.  Freedom of religion includes little children.  Period.

http://intactamerica.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/is-this-what-religious-freedom-looks-like/

 

Posted in Circumcision, Human Rights | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Man with foreskin shares his experience (and it’s positive)

by Lilli Cannon Posted on July 19, 2012

Please hop on over to Barrels of Oranges and read this great guest post by life-intact.  He describes growing up in the U.S. with a foreskin, demolishing all the old chestnuts like “He’ll get an infection,” “He’ll have to be circumcised later,” “He’ll wish he had been circumcised at birth,” “A foreskin doesn’t matter for sex,” and “He’ll be mocked in the locker room.”  Here’s some selected quotes:

On being teased in the locker room

“[T]he guy who is now my best friend once said to me in a cajoling manner, “Elephants belong in the circus” in regards to my foreskin and penis resembling an elephant trunk.  I simply looked down at my own penis, as if in wonder, and replied with “Wow, thanks! I didn’t think it was that big,” in a feigned, misunderstood reference to penis size.”

Contentment with being circumcised is only possible through ignorance of the foreskin

“At first they teased me about it (lightheartedly) as was par for the course up until this point.  After a while, one of them said that he was kind of jealous that I had foreskin, and that he wished his parents wouldn’t have had him cut at birth.  At this point, the focus was on my foreskin and things I could do with it.  I gave them all a demo of how it works and how fantastically simple it is to take care of (retract, rinse, replace in the shower, taking 5 seconds, pull back to pee, etc.).  They all ended up saying at the end of this that they wished they had their foreskins back.“

On the sensations of orgasm

“When pressed for details, my [circumcised] friends described ejaculation as something that felt good for the penis, and pleasure that lasted for about 5 seconds after a while masturbating with lotion.

For me, this experience was (and still is) vastly different.  My friends described the sensations of orgasm as something limited to the penis.  For me, orgasm was something that not only felt good for my penis, but also felt good for my entire body.  Orgasm for me is not some sudden surprise coming, either, but rather something I can feel coming on from the very moment I begin masturbating (or these days, making love).  And even when the moment comes, orgasm for me is peak to a gradual and fulfilling crescendo of sexual pleasure, where it reaches an apex after I ride waves of pleasure up and down, and slowly wind down enjoy the aftermath of that feeling.

It is like all of the pleasure that comes from my penis when I ejaculate being multiplied by a factor of 5, and having this intense pleasure everywhere in my entire body at once for about a whole minute, leaving me writhing, and convulsing in ecstasy as I climax.  It feels like my entire body is tingling—from my toes, up and down my spine, all over my back, chest, abs, and groin, and all the way to the top of my scalp, leaving my body gently convulsing (sometimes shaking) in pulsing ecstasy.  (During this time, I also happen to ejaculate.)  And afterward, when my penis begins to become flaccid, even the slightest touch on my penis feels really good, and takes my breath away in a really good way.

This was vastly different from what my friends described, which to me sounded like about 10 minutes of work for 5 seconds of sudden pleasure, followed by boredly staring down at the penis, quickly taking the hands away, and waiting for it to go down (because touching the glans right afterward hurts them for some reason).”

Having a foreskin does not ruin a man’s life

On the contrary, despite his parents’ continued obsession with having him circumcised, and being one of only a few intact boys in his school, this man has never wanted to be circumcised and thoroughly enjoys having a foreskin.  The idea that not circumcising one’s son will doom him to a miserable life is ridiculous and exists only to salve the ego of the circumcised father and feelings of the acquiescent mother.

Posted in Circumcision | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Taking religious circumcision seriously

by Lilli Cannon Posted on July 14, 2012

In this very interesting post at Choose Intact, Tony writes in response to the religious objection to the German court decision banning circumcision of minors:

“There are issues offered by proponents of ritual child circumcision that deserve to be taken seriously. Asking people to let go of something they intensely value is asking them to bear costs, even if it should be clear that avoiding objective harm to the child must be stressed more.”

So, let’s take the religious circumcision arguments seriously.  There are only two arguments to be made: it is required by my religion, and/or it is important that my child fit in with his coreligionists.  Do these hold up to scrutiny?

“Is it required by my religion?”

Parents who circumcise for religious reasons often claim that circumcision is required in their religion.  In the case of the German court ruling, the two religions at issue in the population of Germany are Judaism and Islam.  Very briefly: Judaism has male circumcision in its holy book, the Torah, though there are those who argue that it was not in the oldest version of the text, called the book of J.  For more discussion of this, see here.  Islam does not require circumcision in the Quran; instead, it is in the Hadith, the collected sayings attributed to the Prophet.  However, there are many versions of the Hadith, some of which do not mention circumcision at all.  Jewish circumcision has a prescribed ritual performed by a Mohel (ritual circumciser).  Islam has no prescribed ritual and instead circumcision is performed according to the cultural traditions of the community.

Now, this is where discussing religious motivation becomes tricky.  If you are a believer, which version of the Torah do you believe?  Which version of the Hadith do you believe?  Not to get too far into religious scholarship, but the decision to circumcise hinges on what one chooses to believe about one’s religion.

  • Was Abraham real?  He is the putative father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but we cannot prove that he existed or what he did.  If a Jew believes he was real, and believes the later versions of the Torah, then he believes he must have his son circumcised.
  • Did Mohammed really say everything in all the conflicting Hadith?  How can he have given two or three or more conflicting instructions?  There are Muslims who believe that circumcision is not required, and some who do, and it is done differently in each country.

Then there is the problem of how the circumcision is done.  If a Jew believes the version of the Torah that requires circumcision, then there is a prescribed ritual manner of circumcision: the Brit Milah.  Despite this, many Jewish children are circumcised in a hospital by doctors, not on the eighth day, and not by a mohel.  These are not ritual circumcisions.  Such parents often do not follow other of the religious rules like keeping kosher, ritual bathing, etc., but insist that their sons must be circumcised in order to be Jewish.

From an anthropological and historical perspective, circumcision appears to be a pre-existing ritual practiced by ancient Egyptians that spread throughout the neighboring areas of the middle east.  It became incorporated into some of the Abrahamic religions in the same way that Christianity consciously adopted many pre-existing pagan rituals like the Easter celebration.  Of course, to suggest to the devout that their religion did not spring in its eternal form from the mind of god, but rather was the natural product of its time and place like everything else about human culture would be heresy.

All religious arguments for circumcision are an appeal to authority, except the authority appealed to is not universal.  The nature of religion is that it is obviously correct to its adherents, and obviously wrong to those who do not believe.  In modern times, the concepts of tolerance and multiculturalism have made us afraid to criticize anything about religion, and thus religious circumcision goes largely unassailed from outside the religion.  How can we talk about it when believers see any question of it as an affront and an attack?  Professing a religion is a choice – one which many who are born into religious families cannot see, just as they cannot see the culture they swim in – a choice about which imaginary ideas, rules, and myths to believe, and which to reject as untrue.  It cannot be proven, and it does not rest on shared moral understandings, which make it totally unsuitable as the basis for law, but most importantly, religious circumcision of minors does not cohere with the legal principles of self-determination, bodily autonomy, and freedom from harm which do form the basis of Western legal systems.

“Does my child need to be circumcised in order to fit in with his coreligionists?”

Well, will there be a penis check?  What will happen if a child is found to not be circumcised?  Will others know that the child is not circumcised?  Will he be denied anything which denial would be more harmful than the objective harm of the circumcision?  Who is qualified to make such a decision?  Proponents of religious circumcision often resort to threatening that an uncircumcised child or man would not be able to participate in religious rituals, would not be able to find a marriage partner, would be ostracized, etc.  Are these threats real?  I assert that the purported disadvantages are by no means certain: community acceptance and religious practice varies across time and space.  What is unthinkable now may be unimportant 20 years from now; what is taboo in New York may be fine in San Francisco.  In addition, these same objections are made by non-religious proponents of circumcision: “He’ll never get a girlfriend,” “He’ll be made fun of in the locker room,” etc.  Only the devout would assert that imagined religious exclusion would be worse than general social exclusion, and yet no one can put forward an argument that the uneducated prejudice of the ignorant is more important than the universal personal right over one’s own body.  If an adult’s life has been made so miserable by his foreskin, he can choose to be circumcised.  Funny, but there are not a lot of takers.  Why then force it on the child?

Some assert that the parents will bear the costs of not circumcising.  According to this reasoning, the parents are the ones who are required to have the sons circumcised in order to fulfill their religious duty.  Well, that may be their belief, but does the law allow one citizen to harm another because of religious motivations?  The Quran says to kill the infidel.  The Old Testament says to kill disobedient children, gays and adulterers.  Will this hold up as a defense in a murder trial?

There are many Jews who never attend synagogue, do not keep kosher, and who didn’t even have a bris – they had the normal hospital circumcision – but who insist that the circumcision is integral to their Jewish identity.  How can this be so, if the circumcision is performed the same on Jewish and non-Jewish babies?  Or are they asserting that how they view the circumcision is what gives it the importance?  If so, can we not then say that how the circumcision patient sees his circumcision is more important than how his parents see it?  Then we must still outlaw circumcision of minors.

A larger problem for the religious is that the children they circumcise may not choose to follow the religion into which they were born.  To suggest so is terrifying to the devout, and so they brush aside this objection.  Perhaps one of the reasons why the religious are so tense about laws against circumcision of minors is that they know that a substantial portion of adult men would not choose to be circumcised, and another overlapping portion will not choose to remain in the religion.  These are seen as existential threats to the religion, and thus the devout believe they must fight them.

There is another option, though.  The religions can change and adapt to the times.  Judaism has a long history of religious self-examination.  There are Jews who reject circumcision but who remain very much Jewish and religious.  Adults can choose to be circumcised for religious reasons, too.  Would not the adult’s choice to be circumcised for his religion be a sacrifice so much more religiously meaningful?  Unfortunately, Islam closed off all religious self-examination a thousand years ago, but since circumcision is only in some of the conflicting Hadith, it remains primarily a cultural problem, as evidenced by the varying ritual practice and the fact that only some Muslim females are circumcised.

Proponents of religions circumcision cannot expect to have their arguments taken seriously until and unless they become willing to critically examine the history of circumcision in their and other religions.  They cannot expect the rule of law to be subordinate to their beliefs, no matter how dear those beliefs are to them.  Religions are unprovable, and to more and more people, unimportant.  The percentage of atheists continues to grow, and the historical antecedents of religious circumcision are so obviously un-godly as to be un-ignorable.  Religious law as a basis for civil law remains largely confined to Muslim countries which also circumscribe women’s rights, stone rape victims to death, etc., yet even so, Germany is pledging to allow religious exception to anti-circumcision law in order to appease its Jewish and Muslim constituency.  This is a mistake.  Because of their growing unassimilated Muslim populations, European countries are being besieged by demands for tolerance of Muslim practices which are antithetical to Western law and cultural practice: for women to cover their faces even on government IDs, for minor girls to be married against their will, for plural marriage, etc.  Religious leaders, emboldened by the misapplication of cultural open-mindedness, claim special dispensation to practice their rituals in defiance of national law, and cowed German legislators agree to their demands in order to preserve their country’s “image.”  Though allowing religious male circumcision may not bother many Americans, inured as they are to male circumcision, what will we say when African immigrants demand the right to circumcise their daughters?  Oh, that’s right: we made that illegal in 1997, and won’t even draw a drop of blood from a girl’s clitoris to satisfy her parents.

Were there a religious exception to laws against circumcision, then we would have to allow them to circumcise their daughters.  This is why the law is supposed to be agnostic to religion: when you allow exceptions to the law based on religious claim, you are privileging one religion over another, which is exactly what our country was founded against.  What does the United States of America stand for?  Freedom.  The rule of law.  Equality.  We are blessed to be founded on the rational and fundamentally fair principles of the Enlightenment, and the right to self-determination and freedom from harm are intrinsic and universal.  As your parents taught you, doing what is right is more important than what others think of you.  Germany never learned this lesson, apparently, but in America, are we afraid to stand for our principles?  Preserving children’s rights to their own bodies is not attacking religion – it is standing up for our foundational principles.  You can practice whatever religion you want, but you cannot force that religion onto others, not even your children.  The unproven and unexamined beliefs that constitute the currently popular religions are not more important than each man and woman’s rights.  That is what our country was founded upon, and that is where we must remain.

 

Posted in Circumcision, Human Rights | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Real Stories: Couple repairs circumcision damage through foreskin restoration.

by Lilli Cannon Posted on May 16, 2012
Jeff & Amy

Many of the negative effects of circumcision are sexual, but these problems are not often recognized as being due to circumcision and are often blamed on the female partner.  Foreskin restoration can repair a lot of this damage (though it will not have all the same structures as the original foreskin.)  Read how circumcision affected this family.

Guest Post by Amy McDonough

Amy’s husband Jeff Sanger blogs at http://shouldicircumcise.blogspot.com/.

I have been with my husband, Jeff Sanger for 16 years. We met when we were young; we were freshmen in college. I remember our first date like it was yesterday. I called my best friend and told her that while I was never the girl that had my wedding planned out from a young age, that I had met the man that I would marry. And we were married. We bought a house and decided to have children. I remember my first pregnancy so clearly. With your first pregnancy you have all this time to reflect and daydream and imagine what life will be like with a baby. (With the second and third pregnancies I barely had time to pee.) Our first child was a wonderful baby girl but I remember having the circumcision conversation with Jeff before we knew her sex. A friend of mine had sent me her birth plan so that I could use it as a model to write my own. On her birth plan it said: We do not want our son circumcised; he will be circumcised at the pediatrician’s office. I then asked my husband, “What if we have a son, how do you feel about circumcision?” I remember my husband’s reaction so clearly because it was somewhat visceral. He said, “I could never do that to anyone, let alone my own son.” I just agreed and didn’t think about it too much after that.

Then came the birth of our second child, a beautiful, perfect little boy, Sullivan. I never knew that having a son would be such a healing experience for my husband. Prior to his birth we didn’t talk very often about circumcision but after he came into this world intact it stirred a lot of emotions in Jeff. I remember the time so clearly and when I look back at pictures I can feel the sadness; it was sad only because my husband’s healing journey had just begun. He went through a lot of depression and he felt so disconnected at times that it broke my heart. He’s had a beard since I can remember and sometimes it gets a little long when we’re busy but eventually he has me trim it. His beard grew so long during this time and once I asked him if I could trim it back for him and he made some kind of comment about not wanting anyone to go near him with razors or scissors. I respected his need for space and time to think but it was hard for me, especially with a new baby who needed so much and our daughter who was a toddler.

Jeff, like most babies in the U.S., was circumcised shortly after he was born, in 1977. We later learned that his type of circumcision is what doctors refer to as a “tight circumcision.” He was left with literally no foreskin. During his months of depression I gently brought up the idea of restoring his foreskin. He was open to the idea. I think he knew he needed to start the healing process and move forward. I ordered him a Tugger from TLC Tugger and when we got it in the mail he completely lost it. It was a bad night and he completely broke down. He didn’t want to put it on and he was having a hard time figuring out how. I tried to help him but he didn’t want me to touch him. I realized more than ever in that moment what an effect circumcision had on him.

Jeff has been restoring now for almost five years. He has come a long way and I am proud of the man that he is. He talks to everyone about circumcision, even pregnant women on the bus. One of the reasons we are both so passionate about this is because of how it affected our sex life. Sex is supposed to be one of the most powerful ways we express ourselves and that was taken from Jeff when he was circumcised. It was taken without his consent and it created a lot of damage, damage that has been repaired over time, but he will never experience sex the way nature intended.

I can remember crying after sex many times and for many years. We literally could not have sex without oral sex first or without using lubrication. Sometimes I would lay in bed with an ice pack between my legs. It never occurred to me that this was from his circumcision; I thought it was my problem. I thought it was a bad combination of a large penis and a smaller vagina. I thought maybe I was too sensitive. Once he started restoring, even after just a couple weeks sex was 1,000 times better. He no longer had to thrust so hard to get feeling. Now after he’s been restoring for almost five years sex is amazing. Jeff wears his Tugger all day at work and even the skin on his glans has changed, it’s more supple and it’s softer just from it being covered all day every day. He now has a lot of pre-cum, something he never had before. That natural lubrication means we no longer need any artificial lubrication. I haven’t had a lot of sexual partners but I have a sneaking suspicion that we are not the only couple to go through this, given the sheer number of lubricants on the market. Not only did sex get better because the feeling is more intense for him, but because we have gone on this healing journey together we can talk about anything. Communication is stronger, we are stronger as a couple and, ummm… well, can I say again that the sex is amazing!

Posted in Circumcision | Tagged | 14 Comments

Debate, motives and rationalization

by Lilli Cannon Posted on May 4, 2012

There is no real debate about infant circumcision.  It’s just wrong.

by Lillian Dell’Aquila Cannon

Today I saw a request on a Facebook page: “I am looking for an unbiased scientific site with arguments against circumcision.”

I suppose the request was made in order to convince a friend who thinks that all sites against circumcision are biased.  I don’t blame that person or his unknown interlocutor.  Experience in politics and matters of taste has taught us that there are always two sides to any debate.  In addition, the human psychological tendency to side with the underdog and the desire to have free choice or just be contrary lead many people to mistrust or dismiss any strong argument.  The thing is, though, that there isn’t really any debate about infant circumcision.  It’s just wrong no matter how you look at it.

No medical association in the world recommends circumcision.  None.  Here is what they have to say about it:

The British Medical Association says:

“[P]arental preference alone is not sufficient justification for performing a surgical procedure on a child.”  (BMA 2006)

The Royal Australasian College of Physicians says:

“After reviewing the currently available evidence, the RACP believes that the frequency of diseases modifiable by circumcision, the level of protection offered by circumcision and the complication rates of circumcision do not warrant routine infant circumcision in Australia and New Zealand.”  (RACP 2010)

The Canadian Paediatric Society says:

“Circumcision of newborns should not be routinely performed.”  (CPS 1996)

The Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG – Netherlands) policy statement is wonderfully clear:

“There is no convincing evidence that circumcision is useful or necessary in terms of prevention or hygiene… circumcision entails the risk of medical and psychological complications… Non-therapeutic circumcision of male minors conflicts with the child’s right to autonomy and physical integrity.”  (KNMG 2010)

The American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement on Circumcision says:

“Existing scientific evidence demonstrates potential medical benefits of newborn male circumcision; however, these data are not sufficient to recommend routine neonatal circumcision.”  (AAP 1999)

Why is the U.S. position slightly different?  Simple: those usual human motivators of money, ego and self-deceptive rationalization.  Here’s a joke for you:

What’s more important: sex or rationalization?

Rationalization, because you don’t need to have sex every day.

In the circumcision “debate,” on the Pro-Circumcision side, we have the following groups of people:

  • Doctors who make money from it.
  • Doctors who think it is wrong but don’t want to offend their colleagues who make money from it, or risk being ostracized from the guild.
  • People who are themselves circumcised and have a strong psychological incentive to believe that the parts of their genitals that were taken from them were unimportant.
  • People who circumcised their children and have a strong psychological incentive to believe that cutting their children’s genitals was important and beneficial, whether that be physically, morally, sexually, or religiously.
  • Religious people who are afraid their religious practice will be banned.  (See the irony: they don’t want their religious practice curtailed, but they see no need to preserve their children’s religious freedom.)
  • Perverts who get off by discussing genital cutting.

On the Anti-Circumcision side, we have these people:

  • Parents who circumcised one or more children and came to regret it.
  • People who are circumcised and have suffered negative consequences from it.
  • People who have investigated the claims of benefit and found them lacking and/or achievable without cutting an infant’s genitals.

I think this is why the pro-circumcision camp thinks intactivists are mean: the pro-circumcision claims are so easily dismissed, and so patently stupid or immoral and based on ignorance, that it is nearly impossible to “debate” them or discuss the topic without quickly refuting every statement they make.  This is too much for the average person, who takes the anti-circumcision facts as a personal attack, and they often need to blame the intactivist in order to rationalize some way to not feel bad.  Such conversations often go like this:

Pro: I circumcised my children because it’s cleaner.

Anti: Actually, the foreskin requires no special cleaning and you cannot even retract the skin anyway.  Just wipe it off like a finger.

Pro: Well, you have less chance of getting a disease.

Anti: Or, you could wear a condom, and those studies were flawed.

Pro: Boys need to match their daddies!

Anti: They won’t match either way, because daddy’s penis is larger and surrounded by hair.  Intact sons of circumcised fathers never want to be circumcised to match daddy.  It’s actually daddy who needs the baby to be circumcised to match him.

Pro: My husband insisted we circumcise our son.

Anti: Your husband cannot be rational about it because he is himself circumcised.  It is your job as mom to protect the baby.

Pro: My religion requires it.

Anti: Christianity and Islam do not require circumcision.  Only Judaism has it in its holy book, and many Jews reject circumcision and have alternative, non-cutting ceremonies.

Pro: He’ll be made fun of in the locker room.

Anti: The rate in the U.S. is now about 50/50 or even lower, 32%, depending on which data you see, so half of boys will not be mocked, and anyway, what other cosmetic surgeries will you perform on your child to avoid him being teased?

Pro: Foreskins are so gross that he’ll never get a date/blowjob/etc.

Anti: 70-80% of the men in the world are intact, and the foreskin is the most sensitive part of the penis and very important for satisfying sex.

Pro: I’m/My husband is circumcised and sex is great!

Anti: Well, logically, there is no way to know what you are missing since you’ve never experienced it, but this is how the intact penis functions in sex…

Pro: Well, I’ve never heard of any man who was angry he was circumcised!

Anti: Actually, there are a lot of them.  You can hear their stories here, here, here and here.  Also, men aren’t going to run around telling their acquaintances, “I have a hard time reaching orgasm because my penis goes numb during sex.  Oh, and how ’bout those Mets?”

Pro: Why do you care so much about my son’s penis?

Anti: I care about your son’s rights to his whole body.  Why do you care so much to cut your son’s penis?

Pro: My son is perfectly healthy and happy!  He’s fine!

Anti: Most of the negative results of circumcision are not apparent until middle or late adulthood when the inherent desensitization of circumcision causes sex problems that many people erroneously blame on normal aging, female frigidity, etc.  You don’t know how it will turn out for your son.

Pro: It’s my choice!  It’s a free country!

Anti: You do not own his body or his penis or his sexuality.  You have no authority to mutilate him.

That’s it.  That’s why you rarely see a “balanced” site about circumcision – there is no balanced view of it.  People are for circumcision because they have unquestioningly accepted cultural myths, or are making money from circumcision, or don’t want to disturb their colleagues’ making money from it, or are perverts who fetishize circumcision.  Other people are against circumcision because they are fully informed on the ethical, moral, physical, psychological and sexual reasons why infant circumcision is wrong.  See which group you fit in, and then check your motives.  If your reasons fit into the Pro-Circumcision group, face reality with honesty and maturity.  Are you rationalizing and defending a decision you made in ignorance so that you don’t have to feel bad about yourself, your spouse, or what you did to your child?  Then it’s not that circumcision is good – it’s that you don’t want to feel bad.  Those who are against circumcision are not trying to offend or hurt your feelings, but the facts don’t lie.  There is no reason good enough to cut off part of an infant’s healthy penis.

Posted in Circumcision | Tagged , | 13 Comments

The purpose of circumcision is to ruin male sexuality

by Lilli Cannon Posted on April 29, 2012
Yellow areas are least sensitive and red areas are most sensitive. Note that the circumcised penis has almost no red areas.

 

The point of circumcision is to dull male sexuality, and it has been a huge success.

by Lillian Dell’Aquila Cannon, borrowing heavily from A Surgical Temptation by Robert Darby.  For more, please see his excellent site History of Circumcision.

Until the late 1800s, circumcision was only practiced by Jews and Muslims and was abhorred by westerners.  Men knew that their foreskins were the best part of their penises.  Read what two medical textbooks from the 1700s had to say about the foreskin:

“The glans cover’d with its prepuce, which is at one of its extremities, has such tender and sensible [sensitive] flesh, that nature hath there established the throne of sensitivity and pleasure in women’s embraces.”  [Venette, The mysteries of conjugal love reveal'd, 1712.]

“The glans, which is at the end of the penis, [is] covered with a very thin membrane, by reason of which it is of a most exquisite feeling. It is covered with a preputium or foreskin, which in some covers the top of the yard [slang for penis] quite close, in others not so, and by its moving up and down in the act of copulation brings pleasure to both the man and woman.”  [Aristotle's complete masterpiece, in three parts, 1749.]

In the 1800s, Christian moralists and doctors began to promote the idea that ejaculation weakened men and that masturbation caused all sorts of diseases and health problems. They did not understand most of human physiology and they thought that humans had a limited amount of “vital nerve force” and that if you spent it on masturbation, you would become weak.  They tried to stop boys from masturbating by writing moralizing pamphlets, but this had limited success as masturbation is a normal and healthy activity very common in adolescence.

To understand why they targeted the foreskin to curb masturbation, you need to learn how the intact penis functions in sex and masturbation.  Intact men can masturbate without lubrication by moving their foreskins up and down over the glans (head of the penis.)  This gives immense pleasure in several ways:

  • The nerves and muscles of the ridged band at the end of the foreskin stretch and relax as they pass over the head of the penis.  This stretching is very pleasurable in much the same way as it feels good for a woman to have her vagina stretched by a penis or fingers.
  • The foreskin alternately covers and uncovers the coronal ridge (the edge of the “mushroom cap” head of the penis.  This controls how close the man is to orgasm as it switches up the sensation and gives the nerves time to rest in between sensation.
  • The frenulum (the “string” that attaches the foreskin to the underside of the penis) stretches and then “snaps back” as the foreskin moves up and down.
  • The fine-touch nerves in the inner foreskin give a fine type of sensation that you can feel in the palms, fingertips and lips.

For several animations and photos showing the gliding action of the foreskin, please see this site: http://www.circumstitions.com/completeman/  WARNING: These are videos and photos of adult penises.

The reason why the foreskin had to go was because the foreskin was the best part of the penis that provided most of the pleasure.

Don’t believe me?  Hear the doctors in their own words (taken from the site Circumcision Quotes):

“I refer to masturbation as one of the effects of a long prepuce; not that this vice is entirely absent in those who have undergone circumcision, though I never saw an instance in a Jewish child of very tender years, except as the result of association with children whose covered glans have naturally impelled them to the habit.”  [M. J. Moses, The Value of Circumcision as a Hygienic and Theraputic Measure, NY Medical Journal, vol.14 (1871): pp.368-374.]

“A remedy for masturbation which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision. The operation should be performed without administering anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutory effect upon the mind, especially, if it is connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases.”  [John Harvey Kellog, creator of the Corn Flake, Treatment for Self-Abuse and Its Effects, Plain Facts for Old and Young, Burlington, Iowa: P. Segner & Co. 1888, p. 295.]

“Measures more radical than circumcision would, if public opinion permitted their adoption, be a true kindness to patients of both sexes.”  [Jonathan Hutchinson, On Circumcision as Preventative of Masturbation, Archives of Surgery, vol. 2 (1891): pp. 267-268.]  Note that he is actually suggesting that castration would be good!

“Clarence B. was addicted to the secret vise practiced among boys. I performed an orificial operation, consisting of circumcision… He needed the rightful punishment of cutting pains after his illicit pleasures.”  [N. Bergman, Report of a Few Cases of Circumcision, Journal of Orificial Surgery, vol. 7 (1898): pp.249-251.]

“Finally, circumcision probably tends to increase the power of sexual control. The only physiological advantage which the prepuce can be supposed to confer is that of maintaining the penis in a condition susceptible to more acute sensation than would otherwise exist. It [the foreskin] may increase the pleasure of intercourse and the impulse to it: but these are advantages which in the present state of society can well be spared. If in their loss increase in sexual control should result, one should be thankful.”  [Editor, Medical News. Our London Letter. Medical World,(1900).vol.77:pp.707-8]  (Note that by “sexual control,” he means having less sex, not control by the man of his sexual response during sex.)

“It has been urged as an argument against the universal adoption of circumcision that the removal of the protective covering of the glans tends to dull the sensitivity of that exquisitely sensitive structure and thereby diminishes sexual appetite and the pleasurable effects of coitus. Granted that this be true, my answer is that, whatever may have been the case in days gone by, sensuality in our time needs neither whip nor spur, but would be all the better for a little more judicious use of curb and bearing-rein.”  [E. Harding Freeland, Circumcision as a Preventative of Syphilis and Other Disorders, The Lancet, vol. 2 (29 Dec. 1900): pp.1869-1871.]

“Another advantage of circumcision… is the lessened liability to masturbation. A long foreskin is irritating per se, as it necessitates more manipulation of the parts in bathing… This leads the child to handle the parts, and as a rule, pleasurable sensations are elicited from the extreamly sensitive mucous membrane, with resultant manipulation and masturbation. The exposure of the glans penis following circumcision … lessens the sensitiveness of the organ… It therefore lies with the physician, the family adviser in affairs of hygiene and medical, to urge its acceptance.”  [Ernest G. Mark, Circumcision, American Practitioner and News, vol. 31 (1901): p. 231.]

“Circumcision not only reduces the irritability of the child’s penis, but also the so-called passion of which so many married men are so extreamly proud, to the detriment of their wives and their married life. Many youthful rapes could be prevented, many separations, and divorces also, and many an unhappy marriage improved if this unnatural passion was cut down by a timely circumcision.”  [L.W. Wuesthoff, MD. Benefits of Circumcision. Medical World, (1915) Vol.33. p.434.]

“I suggest that all male children should be circumcised. This is “against nature”, but that is exactly the reason why it should be done. Nature intends that the adolescent male shall copulate as often and as promiscuously as possible, and to that end covers the sensitive glans so that it shall be ever ready to receive stimuli. Civilization, on the contrary, requires chastity, and the glans of the circumcised rapidly assumes a leathery texture less sensitive than skin. Thus the adolescent has his attention drawn to his penis much less often. I am convinced that masturbation is much less common in the circumcised. With these considerations in view it does not seem apt to argue that ‘God knows best how to make little boys.’”  [R.W. Cockshut. Circumcision. British Medical Journal, Vol.2 (1935): p.764.]

The purpose of circumcision was to destroy the man’s sexual pleasure.  So why, 150 years later, do so many people think that circumcision does not change a man’s sexuality at all?  Circumcision became a “tradition” separate from the anti-masturbation motivation, one passed down from father to son in a sort of sad and ignorant repetition compulsion.  This was from a confluence of psychological and cultural factors which I have explained in greater detail in this post.  Then, in the 1960s, the sexual revolution happened and sex stopped being a bad thing.  It was no longer taboo to discuss sex, and sexual enjoyment became a legitimate goal.  No one thought anymore that masturbation and ejaculation weakened a man’s vital essence, so that motive was forgotten.  Around the same time, Masters and Johnson published their landmark 1966 book Human Sexual Response in which they claimed that there was no difference in sensitivity between circumcised and intact penises.  This claim was very influential but was completely wrong, as explained here.  In a 2007 study, scientists tested circumcised and intact penises at several points all over the penis and concluded:

“The glans of the circumcised penis is less sensitive to fine touch than the glans of the uncircumcised penis. The transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce [ridged band, removed in all circumcisions] is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis. Circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.“  [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17378847]

The foreskin contains a type of nerves called Meissner’s corpuscles that give the same type of fine-touch sensation which is found only in the foreskin, lips and fingertips and palms. They are not in the head of the penis, and they provide all of the “flavor and color” of sex for the man. Sure, most circumcised men can still orgasm, but they are missing all of the pleasurable buildup that as a woman, you take for granted. Some men, however, are unable to orgasm at all because they have so few nerves left.  Here are some quotes from men whose sexuality was destroyed or lessened by circumcision:

“ive had painful erections, frequently torn tissue, and can count the number of partner induced ejaculations on one hand, and have lost every girl ive been with because of sex problems.”  [http://www.moralogous.com/2012/04/10/loving-and-gentle-intactivism-is-the-most-effective/#comment-892]

“i had an average (tight if anything) circumcision. i feel like most other guys who are circumcised have no problems having sex. i have a long term relationship with my girlfriend and even though we have sex without condoms (birth control pills) i still cant have consistent successful sex with her. i get inside her and im thrusting and it gets to the point where im basically feeling nothing. my circumcision is seriously limiting my sex life and putting a disconnect in our relationship. it takes an unusually large amount of effort to orgasm when she is giving me blowjobs/handjobs. circumcision gets me depressed every day.”  [http://www.reddit.com/r/Intactivists/comments/rz19l/so_who_else_has_had_their_sex_life_ruined_by/]

“My circumcision is a very bad example, too much skin taken away resulting in erections that can sometimes be uncomfortable, scrotum skin almost half way up my shaft, very bad scarring, skin bridges, some lumpiness and the most uneven cut I’ve ever seen. WHY? did this have to be me. It’s pretty hard being at university with a botched circumcision in a society that doesn’t cut. Also I had some sex the other day and ohh… what do you know I cant feel shit.”  [http://foreskin-restoration.net/forum/showthread.php?t=9739]

“Whenever I was fortunate enough to get a blow job, my penis would go limp after about a minute. I never felt enough stimulation to stay hard, let alone to orgasm or even ejaculate. I never understood the fascination with blow jobs. I attributed all the blow jobs in porn to acting and being just another facet of erotic fantasy.”  [http://www.restoringtally.com/blog/2011/05/what-big-deal-about-oral-sex]

“I remember in my twenties when I ejaculated I could not bear to have my glans touched because it was hypersensitive at that time. As I reached my late thirties and early forties, I noticed that my glans did not have the hypersensitivity after ejaculation. As my forties flew by I noticed it became more and more difficult to ejaculate during sex. My glans was turning dry and leathery. I had much less sensitivity in my glans and penis. There was only one small spot on my corona where there was any sensitivity. The rest of my glans was less sensitive than a finger.  During sex I would pump and pump and, finally, I would ejaculate. Sex took a long time. My wife confessed that I took too long during sex. That did not help at all. I had no trouble masturbating because I could easily stimulate myself with my hand. But, when I was inside my wife, there just was not enough stimulation. Sex became a lot less pleasurable than it was 20 years earlier, even 10 years earlier.  As I approached my 50s, I started having trouble keeping an erection during sex.”  [http://www.restoringtally.com/blog/2010/01/i-am-circumcised-man-hates-his-circumcision]

“By age 43 I had lost all glans sensitivity. It became difficult, at times even when I was alone, to reach orgasm and ejaculation. This is the big secret here. But of course most cut men don’t even know why they have difficulty with, or lose interest in, intercourse or masturbation with age.  Due to the awful damage to my penis, there is just no more physical sensory input to achieve or produce much or any pleasure, and the neurological triggers that lead to orgasm and ejaculation are severely damaged or not even present.”  [http://www.drmomma.org/2009/12/circumcision-secret.html]

The vast majority of Americans are ignorant of the purpose of circumcision, and when confronted with it for the first time, often feel angry.  That is understandable, but the only rational thing to do is to realize that you should be angry at the doctors for not telling you or your husband’s parents the truth.  You can even be angry at fate for being born in the one time and place that circumcision was popular for non-religious reasons.  The one thing you cannot do is to get angry at the bearer of the facts, because whether or not you like it, whether or not you blame me or whoever told you the truth about circumcision, the fact remains that the purpose of circumcision has always been to curb male sexuality, and it has been enormously successful.  Do not circumcise your sons – give them the gift of complete and normal sexuality.

If you or your partner is circumcised and this makes you very sad, what can you do?  You can restore your foreskin.  You do this by yourself by slowly stretching the remaining inner foreskin until it can cover the head of your penis.  There are several devices you can buy and use in privacy to stretch the skin.  It is completely safe and no one has to know but you.  Once your restored skin can cover your glans when flaccid, the inner skin will get softer, thinner and smoother, which will provide more sensation, and you will have restored the gliding action that provides so much pleasure to both partners during sex.  You will never get back the ridged band at the tip or the frenulum, but men who have restored say that it is completely worth it, and that they could not have imagined ahead of time the increase in pleasure a restored foreskin provides.  For more information, see these sites:

http://www.restoringtally.com/

http://foreskin-restoration.net/forum/

http://www.norm.org/

http://tlctugger.com/

http://www.restoringforeskin.org/

http://www.foreskinrestore.com/

http://www.foregen.org/

Posted in Circumcision, Medical Anthropology | Tagged , , , | 73 Comments

Loving and gentle intactivism is the most effective

by Lilli Cannon Posted on April 10, 2012
Source: http://xkcd.com/386/

by Lillian Dell’Aquila Cannon

The question I pose to all intactivists is this: Do you want to be righteously angry, or do you want to save babies?

When I first started learning about choosing to keep my son intact nine years ago, intactivism was not very strong or well-formed, and there was much more actual online debate of circumcision.  It was common for there to be one intactivist against a sea of pro-circumcision debaters.  Now, the situation seems to have reversed: I often see one pro-circumcision parent being attacked by a sea of intactivists.  Though it may seem like progress for us and it may feel nice to be part of a group instead of being alone, we need to reign this in if we want to actually end circumcision.

It may sound heretical, but I can assure you that parents who had their sons circumcised are not actually bad people.  We live in a culture where circumcision was normalized for nearly 80 years, and the intact penis was vilified as dirty, disgusting, unappealing to women, and associated with the lower class.  Though we know these are all untrue, the many people in the U.S. still believe these myths.  There is plenty of (mis)information to support them in this belief, and it is quite possible that an expectant parent could go the entire pregnancy and never hear anyone advocate for keeping their baby intact.  Even if they do hear any intactivist arguments, they are likely to see the decision as a matter of taste, and thus will decide based on their perception of their child “fitting in” to some desirable group, whether that be his father’s family, or social group, or (God forbid) country club.  You see, parents want to do what’s best for their child, and a lot of them think that circumcision is what’s best.  To them, it’s a slam dunk: they believe that circumcised penises are cleaner, prettier and normal.  They have never heard of a man being unhappy to be circumcised, or of a baby dying from it.  Why would they NOT circumcise their child?

Parenting is terrifying, and we are often making it up as we go along.  On top of that, we have our entire society scrutinizing mothers for evidence to pronounce them “good” or “bad” depending on the decisions they have made and their child’s behavior, even if much of the outcome is due to dumb luck.  This is a tremendous amount of pressure to put on a new parent, given that she is hormonally-challenged, perhaps sleep-deprived, and pretty lost and confused.  Some of these mothers even worried about the circumcision causing their babies pain, and felt terrible about it, though they also felt that it was necessary.  Because of our cultural idea that men should be strong and not complain about pain, circumcision neatly fits into this cultural mold as the first in a string or painful experiences a man will have and during which is expected to remain “tough.”

We intactivists have our own difficult emotional journey.  Once you know all the facts about circumcision, it is easy to become very angry.  New intactivists often wonder how can people willfully and unnecessarily hurt their babies, damage their sexual response, and risk their lives for a pack of myths?  If they chose to keep their child intact, they are often mocked and challenged by their friends and family.  This makes new intactivists feel very alone, as though they are living in a crazy society, and they think that everyone is against them.  If the intactivist is a circumcised man who has just learned about all he has lost, his anger is especially intense, and rightly so.  The most sensitive part of his penis was torn from him when he was one day old, and he cannot get it back, and on top of that, he feels that no one cares.  He cannot share his grief, because our culture promotes the idea that to do so would be unmanly, whiny and ridiculous.  His isolation and grief is so intense that it can consume him for a long time.

What happens, then, when a parent who chose circumcision meets an angry intactivist?  Often, nothing good.  I have seen some horribly cruel online attacks on circumcising parents, and this disgusts me.  For the parents who chose circumcision, the new information, if true, means that they inadvertently hurt their children.  This is a very tough pill to swallow.  They were trying to do the right thing, they likely worried about it, and now they are told that they did the wrong thing.  These factors all combine to give the parent a very strong incentive to deny the harm of circumcision and continue to assert that circumcision is not harmful.  This is because it causes cognitive dissonance in their brains, and the human mind always works to resolve cognitive dissonance.  It works like this:

I would never hurt my child.

But they are saying that circumcision did hurt my child. 

I cannot be a person who would hurt my child.

Therefore, circumcision did not hurt my child. 

There is another alternative to resolve the dissonance, and that is to say, “I did not know that circumcision was bad, and had I know that, I would not have chosen it, but I did what I thought was right then, and I regret that, and I would not do that again.”  However, this is a very emotionally and spiritually sophisticated piece of reasoning, and it is the rare circumcising parent who quickly resolves her cognitive dissonance in this honest and difficult way.  We are all human beings, doing our best to cope with life, and we should have empathy for each other in our struggles.

If the intactivist carrying the message doesn’t just give facts about circumcision, but also calls the parent closed-minded or stupid, or calls circumcision child abuse, mutilation or torture, though these words may technically be true, he only makes the circumcising parent’s emotional process harder, and decreases the chances of changing his or her mind.  Lading circumcision with such strong emotional judgments only increases the psychological pressure to resolve the cognitive dissonance in favor of circumcision not being wrong.  Think of it: this parent is now being pressured to admit, “I am a child abusing, close-minded idiot who mutilated and tortured my child.”  How likely do you think it will be for her to accept this?  If it is the father who is himself circumcised, do you think he wants to say, “I am mutilated and sexually deficient and I cannot change it and I did it to my son?”  Absolutely not.

The same process is at work when intactivists angrily confront doctors and religious leaders who perform circumcisions.  Attacking them as serial mutilators who profit from deception and sex crimes only lets them marginalize intactivism as a crazy fringe element.  On top of that, if we expect them to swallow such a statement, they fear being subject to potential lawsuits and ostracism by their colleagues who continue to perform circumcisions.  After all, they have made money from circumcision, but not because they are evil liars.  They, too, are part of our culture, and they think they are helping the children, or at least not harming them terribly.  Doctors are socialized in their training to cut off their empathy for patients lest they become paralyzed and unable to function in emotionally-charged cases.  Their medical training makes them this way – they are not naturally cold and uncaring people.

It is normal to go through a stage of furious anger in one’s journey through intactivism.  I have yet to meet an intactivist who has not.  I had to take a year-long break from intactivism because whenever I tried to advocate for babies’ human rights, I became so angry and bitter that I turned people off.  Bill Moyer, creator of the Movement Action Plan for changing society, says that activists have to continually work on their personal growth in order to be effective in their advocacy.  I have certainly found this to be true, and all the most effective intactivists I know have moved through their anger to a place of loving care for everyone, circumcising parents included.  People will hear our tone before they hear our message, and if our tone is angry, they will ignore the message.

Intactivists, our view is not yet the mainstream view, and if we expect society to adopt our viewpoint, we cannot continually set roadblocks to this process.  Rather, we should do everything we can to make it easy for the mainstream to accept our view.  Expecting them to go instantly and easily from seeing circumcision as positive and normal to seeing it as sexual abuse and mutilation is foolish and naive.  Some of you may have clearly and quickly seen circumcision for what it is, but you are in the minority.  Many of the most dedicated among us took years to see circumcision as fundamentally wrong, and we need to allow others the same time to make this difficult journey.

The most effective intactivism meets people where they are, and if their child and spouse are circumcised, where they are is believing circumcision to be normal and beneficial.  Educate them calmly and with facts.  Teach them that circumcision is not painless, is not cleaner, does not prevent disease, and does not make sex better.  Teach them about the babies and men who were harmed by circumcision.  Teach them that most of the rest of the world rejects circumcision.  Show them real people who reject circumcision.  Expect them to get angry with you and even to attack you personally, but realize that they are not actually angry at you.  Though their struggle is all internal, you can either aid or hinder it with your attitude.  If you attack them, they will likely shut down, and you will have created a fervent pro-circumcision parent.  If you support them in their confusion and impending grief, they are more likely to come around.  Let them see how choosing intact is becoming normal, and forgive them for circumcising their children.  No mother sets out to harm her child, and when she learns about circumcision, she will punish herself enough.  Adding to it via shame and ridicule will only keep intactivism on the fringe.

 

Posted in Circumcision | Tagged | 56 Comments