Infant male circumcision is Horrible!
In the news today is a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine that claims "significant reduction" in risk for HIV, HPV, and Herpes for *African* men who are circumcised over those who aren't.
65% of male infants are circumcised in the U.S. This strikes me as completely outrageous. It's a cruel, horrible thing to do to an infant. We can do all these studies and show all these "significant" results (and by the way "significant" here is defined in a *totally* arbitrary way). The truth, however, is that we don't take a knife to tiny little baby boys because it's going to help prevent them from getting sexually transmitted infections, nor because it might prevent a urinary tract infection, nor because it's going to cost more to do when they are older, if they choose to do it then. We take a knife to tiny little baby boys because we inherited this practice from a 3000 year old religious rite, a rite first given by a god who also demanded that the person he gave it to *kill* his son in a mountaintop sacrifice.
There's my two cents worth.
15 comments:
Hahaha!
When I was going through childbirthing classes, we had a male doctor come speak to us. The question came up about circumcision. He asked us whether or not we had running water in our houses. The answer was unanimously "Of course!". He then said that circumcision was totally unnecessary for any of us. Circumcision began as a way for men to keep their penises clean in the desert and in areas where access to water was limited. Imagine getting sand under your foreskin and being limited in ways to get and keep it out. If we can teach our boys to brush their teeth and wash their hair, we can teach them to clean under their foreskins. It's as easy as that. There were 4 boys babies in the hospital when I had my son. He was the only one not circumcised and he was the only baby not screaming almost constantly during their hospital stay.
As a fan of penises, I just want to say that the circumcised variety are far, FAR more appetizing than un. Upon polling, 100% of penile enthusiasts (gay and straight) agree with me.
That's because you've been conditioned to prefer uncircumcized. Most men are, so that's what everyone sees and is used to.
If my son decides as an adult to get cut, then he can, but cutting him at birth would have been OUR decision about HIS body. We felt we had no right to cut parts of him off. He was born perfect as he was.
As for your "poll"...HAHA....lame.
Sorry Stephy and Ursula I had to delete a couple comments because they would have brought up huge trauma for people I care about without any forewarning to those people. I value your comments and don't wan't my blog to be a place where stuff is being censored. I just think it's fair to give people a little warning before jumping into super traumatic subject matter. Hope that makes sense. I totally want to actually encourage wise and willing-to-face-the-worst conversations about stuff in each of our stories.
If you wanna talk about why I deleted the comments or anything else, please feel free to email me at Benjamin DOT Ady AT Gmail.com
I wonder if that was Freudian that I used the word "forewarning" rather than just the word "warning" in my previous comment
I would like to apologize for both taking Stephy's bait and responding in kind when I realized she was trolling. My bad. I really was trying to make a serious point and frankly, her flippancy bothered me.
Apology accepted, Ursula. I just don't enjoy a big hunk of extra skin in my mouth and my fellow pollees agree.
Ursula,
I've had a troll here before, and I don't think I would classify Stephy as a troll. I think I'd say she's willing to mock and be sarcastic to a greater extent, if possible, than even I have generally been willing to do. It feels ... Monty Pythonesque to me.
Stephy--would you say that's a fair characterization?
Stephy--I think you took my original post to be more tongue-in cheek than I intended it to be. I was actually being somewhat serious. It *does* strike me as a horrible thing to do.
Maybe we can tone the whole thing down just the tiniest bit? It's easy to write things on the internet that we wouldn't say in person (see my original post). And it's easy to misinterpret here, since we can see if the other is smiling, being sarcastic, being serious, angry, sad, happy, etc. etc., like we could if we were looking at each others' faces.
Just some thoughts.
No problem Benjamin. I do love to take the piss every now and then. :) I just don't think male circumcision is always bad. It's done with anesthesia in many cases these days (my son didn't cry a peep - I don't know if the Jewish bris allows anesthesia these days or not) and it also doesn't affect men sexually later in life whereas female circumcision does.
And Stephy....I don't know whether you saw my reply to your "grandpa" statement, but I was actually being funny back atcha, since I realized you were going the comedy route on this whole thing.
But, like Benjamin said, some find this a serious subject....and some obviously don't. Can't get a foreskin back after the fact.
My late husband always resented his parents for making that decision for him. I would assume more than a few men feel the same way.
Ursula, I'm just not sure why you dismissed my poll as being "lame."
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