Is Circumcision Right or Wrong?

[Bram Kaandorp]

Not being a guy, I get a little confused by the terms used. I thought the foreskin was a sheath, and the tip of the penis was the bulbous end, the "mushroom head" part. Please explain for my edification how the sheath of skin is considered the tip, because I sincerely do not know. And because I do not know, this terminology sounds a little...excessive. As far as I ever saw when changing their diapers, the tips of my sons' penises were left intact.

I think it is referred to as the tip, since it usually sticks out slightly when it is in flaccid state.

 

[slingblade]

I think it is referred to as the tip, since it usually sticks out slightly when it is in flaccid state.

Thanks for that. Given that, I still think it's a confusing term to use, as another part of the penis is also clearly called the tip, and I don't see how it can have two of them.

Besides, the cutting around the shaft is actually done near the base, isn't it?

 

[PGH]

Not being a guy, I get a little confused by the terms used. I thought the foreskin was a sheath, and the tip of the penis was the bulbous end, the "mushroom head" part. Please explain for my edification how the sheath of skin is considered the tip, because I sincerely do not know. And because I do not know, this terminology sounds a little...excessive. As far as I ever saw when changing their diapers, the tips of my sons' penises were left intact.

Afterthought: I wouldn't have made the equivocation you speak of as a young mother, because back then, I had never heard of female genital mutilation. If I had, it likely would have figured hugely in my decisions. But I can't be held responsible for not accounting for something I didn't know existed.

Oh the confusion is almost certainly my fault. I just referred to it as the tip of the penis because it's at the end. Sheath is a much more accurate term.

And like you my mother almost certainly never gave it any thought, just did what was common for the time. As mothers are doing right now. I would never put any blame on her for it. Not even a little. It's a cultural practice so the culture is to blame. You shouldn't feel bad at all, even if other people are trying to make you. Odds are most of them also found out the truth about circumcision 2 weeks ago and have become these sudden moral crusaders looking to attack women for things they themselves would have done very recently.

 

[slingblade]

Oh the confusion is almost certainly my fault. I just referred to it as the tip of the penis because it's at the end. Sheath is a much more accurate term.

And like you my mother almost certainly never gave it any thought, just did what was common for the time. As mothers are doing right now. I would never put any blame on her for it. Not even a little. It's a cultural practice so the culture is to blame. You shouldn't feel bad at all, even if other people are trying to make you. Odds are most of them also found out the truth about circumcision 2 weeks ago and have become these sudden moral crusaders looking to attack women for things they themselves would have done very recently.

You know what, that actually helps me feel a little better about the discussion. Thank you.

 

[Schrodinger's Cat]

I just don't see how anyone can look down on the genital mutilation of girls in the middle east and at the same time justify cutting the tip of the penis off newborn boys.

My guess is that if FGM was restricted to type I, it wouldn't be anywhere near as controversial, and would be considered analagous to male circumcision.

However, what the media and women's rights groups talk about isn't the "mild" types of female circumcision. It's the most extreme types, the kind where the entire outside of a woman's sexual organ is hacked off and the vagina is sewn shut. Not only does this make sexual pleasure impossible, it makes sex excrutiatingly painful, not to mention even simply urinartion or menstration. The risks of complications and death with these extreme kinds of mutilation are also much more common, and girls die or become very ill or sick pretty frequently from infection, in childbirth, or from complications later in life.

Also, even type II female genital mutilation can involve the removal of the entire clitoris and labia, which can prevent a female from feeling sexual pleasure even if it doesn't necessarily result in constant pain. Obviously, circumcised men can still feel sexual pleasure even though they have had some nerves removed, so that's another reason people may be okay with one and not the other - even though one could argue that that's just a matter of degree.

Before, I myself was against female circumcision and not male circumcision. The reason was that I had read or heard personal narriatives from women who had received circumcisions who said things like "every time my husband had sex with me, I wanted to die the pain was so bad" "even urination is like torture to me," etc. Whereas I never heard anything like this from any man who had been circumcised. That made me be okay with one and not with the other.

I'd never heard about botched circumcisions with males and the horrible effects they can have. I also was ignorant of the fact that male circumcision was a cultural practice and not a normative, medically relevent procedure that was pretty universal - that for instance, circumcision rates in Europe are much much lower and more restricted to religious practitioners. I didn't know that, like female circumcision, male circumcision was a cultural, medically unwarranted, and even dangerous practice.


But now that I am more informed about male circumcision, I think it is wrong as well.

 

[PGH]

You know what, that actually helps me feel a little better about the discussion. Thank you.

Sling if circumcising your kids is the worst thing you do to them they've had extremely charmed lives.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to resume trying to make my daughter a chubby lesbian so I don't have to worry about her dating boys.

 

[citizenzen]

Sling if circumcising your kids is the worst thing you do to them they've had extremely charmed lives.

Perhaps.

But I'm on the side that says lopping off parts of your child's body simply to conform to a social convention is a shame.

It may not be the worst injury that you inflict upon your child, but it is still an unnecessary one.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Not trying to argue fallaciously, but if it were a horrible, stigmatizing, mutilating thing, men would surely have been up in arms about it long before this, wouldn't they? There should have been a massive hue and cry at some point in at least my past, that somehow I completely missed.

That, in particular, I find strange. Having had the experience of caring for a newborn baby (well four of them, actually!), I know how protective a parent can feel, how determined not to let harm come to the most precious person in their world. I remember feeling utterly, utterly awful when, the first time I cut my daughter's fingernails, I drew a little blood (not actually that uncommon, as the skin of the fingertip often starts off covering the end of the nail). I simply can't imagine how anyone, knowing it would do no good, would want to do something like that, but that would permanently leave a part missing. But stigma are where society chooses to see them, and it appears that, in the USA, foreskins are stigmatised rather than their needless removal.

The history of circumcision in the UK, though, shows just how little this weighs on anybody's mind. In 1949, the newly-formed National Health Service decided that circumcision would not be offered as a free service. In a society where people now simply take it for granted that medical care will be freely given, very few people bother to pay for a service; in our society, if you have to pay for a medical procedure, that pretty much proves that it isn't necessary. (That's as opposed to waiting for it, which is more or less taken as proof that it is necessary.) So, stigma and public opinion be damned; for the most part, we just don't bother. And, as you might expect, the 94% of men in the UK who have foreskins aren't regarded as somehow abnormal; we're regarded as normal, and by any reasonable definition of the word, in this respect we are.

Tom Sharpe once wrote that educational politics features the most bitterly fought battles because the stakes are so low. The same, it seems to me, is often true of discussions of circumcision.

Dave

 

[PGH]

Perhaps.

But I'm on the side that says lopping off parts of your child's body simply to conform to a social convention is a shame.

It may not be the worst injury that you inflict upon your child, but it is still an unnecessary one.

And I'm in agreement with you. But honestly most people simply do not realize. That's the thing about a cultural standard. People do it because everyone does it and no one thinks about it. Why would they do anything else? Without being properly informed it would be odd NOT to circumcize a child (in a culture where circumcision is dominant).

Teaching people is a lot more valuable than judging them. That's been something I've struggled to learn.

 

[IDB87]

Recently there has been talk about the harmful effects of circumcision

 

[Schrodinger's Cat]

That, in particular, I find strange. Having had the experience of caring for a newborn baby (well four of them, actually!), I know how protective a parent can feel, how determined not to let harm come to the most precious person in their world.

To be fair though, plenty of things that aren't controversial can harm your kids, way worse than the pain of a circumcision (assuming there are not complications). I know several kids who received permanent, life long injuries due to playing sports as a kid. My friend's brother almost died when his spleen ruptured after a tackle in junior high football practice.

Heck, I hurt myself a few times in sports, one such injury actually required me to have several painful dental surgeries over the course of my life, including this past year, 18 years after the initial injury. Even aside from my injuries, sometimes playing sports really hurt, just from the strenuous activity involved.

Of course, I'm not saying your kid playing sports is the same as your kid getting circumsized. I'm just saying there are plenty of things parents do that can bring harm to your kid that aren't the least bit controversial.

And if you were one of the parents who thought that there was a medical benefit to your child getting circumsized (as many parents believe, especially in years gone buy), the fact that it "hurts" I don't think is something that automatically makes parents refrain from doing something to their child.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

And I never understood that argument that cutting the foreskin is cleaner. How the hell can it be cleaner when the foreskin is supposed to be there to protect the head of the penis from all the dust and dirt it enters in contact with? Isn't it like saying that cutting off your eyelids is cleaner? Aren't the eyelids protecting the eyeball from dust pretty much in the same way that the foreskin is protecting the penis from dust?

 

[slingblade]

The doctors tell us they don't think it causes that much pain. Bear in mind, they don't let us watch them do it, and see our babies screaming! Maybe in Jewish circles, everyone gets to see it, but we Gentiles aren't permitted to watch. And in my youth, it was emphasized repeatedly that it was beneficial to their health. We do or allow things all the time that hurt our kids, but that are beneficial to them. Like the damned dentist, okay?

Abstractualize that and ask yourself how any loving parent can force their children to sit still while a stranger shoves needles and drills and picks into their tender, tiny mouths, hmmmm? Or force them to allow wires to be inserted, banded around their teeth, and then tightened every couple of weeks, causing sometimes excruciating pain, all for the sake of a cosmetically correct smile. Should that be stopped too, or does the good that proper dental care does far outweigh the pain involved, which is sometimes considerable pain?

 

[slingblade]

And I never understood that argument that cutting the foreskin is cleaner. How the hell can it be cleaner when the foreskin is supposed to be there to protect the head of the penis from all the dust and dirt it enters in contact with? Isn't it like saying that cutting off your eyelids is cleaner? Aren't the eyelids protecting the eyeball from dust pretty much in the same way that the foreskin is protecting the penis from dust?

Um....my first husband never had a dusty dick.

"Cleaner" only means that without the foreskin to hold it there, smegma rarely builds up on a cut penis. My father, according to my mother, was so filthy his penis stank. It got to where she wouldn't let him touch her anymore without a bath, and so they rarely had sex, because he would rarely bathe.

Is is more clear to you now?

 

[AvalonXQ]

The doctors tell us they don't think it causes that much pain. Bear in mind, they don't let us watch them do it, and see our babies screaming! Maybe in Jewish circles, everyone gets to see it, but we Gentiles aren't permitted to watch.

There was not a single procedure they performed on my son in the hospital where I was not present.

I watched the circumcision; any parent was allowed to accompany the child to watch.

Fun fact -- there is no non-emergency procedure in the hospital for which the parents can't be in the same room.

I asked that ahead of time. I also researched our rights under state law to make sure we didn't get the run-around at the hospital.

 

[slingblade]

Well, all I know is that in 1978 and 1980, they didn't let me watch.

 

[AvalonXQ]

Well, all I know is that in 1978 and 1980, they didn't let me watch.

Yes, things have changed for the better.

Not too many decades before that, they wouldn't even let the father in to watch the birth.

Nowadays, nurseries are more and more only for special needs babies. Your healthy baby sleeps in your room from Night 1, never leaves your room except for certain tests and procedures.

 

[slingblade]

With my first son, Avalon, he was kept in the nursery except for feedings.

By the time my second son was born, more room time was being allowed, but I couldn't really do it, as I'd also been sterilized, and was feeling too bad from the surgery to have him with me much. I took advantage of the care they offered so I could recover faster. In addition, my younger son was a bit premature, and jaundiced. He stayed in hospital 19 days. I only stayed four, and then they made me go home, without him.

It is better now, I will definitely agree with you.

 

[Daald]

And I never understood that argument that cutting the foreskin is cleaner. How the hell can it be cleaner when the foreskin is supposed to be there to protect the head of the penis from all the dust and dirt it enters in contact with? Isn't it like saying that cutting off your eyelids is cleaner? Aren't the eyelids protecting the eyeball from dust pretty much in the same way that the foreskin is protecting the penis from dust?

It's a cleaning issue that has to be taught to you. Normally you have to learn from a young age to pull the foreskin back and wash thoroughly. If you don't do this from a young age it gets harder to pull the entire foreskin back without the head burning so you don't get it completely clean. (This was one of the reasons people would push for circumcision in my country of birth) Stuff can stay there for some time and it could cause infections.

With eye balls the story is different because nothing can really stay below your eye lid for long and it would come out at the side of your eye pretty quickly.

 

[Ryokan]

No one ever taught me to clean my dick. Ever. I've still never seen any smegma, even at times when I've gone days and weeks without showering. I know it exists, as I've heard stories and seen pictures, but never on my own equipment.