Considering getting the frenulum removed and possibly becoming cut

Exactly. I was thinking if this earlier.

Which is my point about how we tend to focus on the facts that support our view point, and ignore the rest. You earlier said you think its better to be circumcised, and then quoted just the part of my post that supports that. But you ignored the part where I said:

Since you also brought up cleanliness as a concern, I’ll point out that’s not the reason circumcision reduces HIV infections. It’s nothing to do with being clean or dirty. Foreskin has a different structure than skin on other parts of your body, and it is more permeable to HIV. Being cut doesn’t make it any easier to be clean, that’s just an assumption circumcised men will often make.

I never told anyone to circumcise their child. I have, from the start, advocated that circumcision is a medically valid choice, that’s it. Female circumcision is vastly different, beginning with the fact that vaginas are anatomically much different and there is no evidence of any health benefits from cutting off the clitoral hood (which I suppose is the corresponding structure to the foreskin?). I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind, just providing evidence that it isn’t even slightly wrong to circumcise your child.

Isn’t even wrong?
It is not the parents choice to make, to alter their child’s body in favor for their own tradition is all kinds of wrong.
To have such an exception to human rights does not belong in a truly democratic society.

A child just like any human being regardless of age has the right to shape its own life after its own beliefs, not being shaped after someone else’s.

I can’t speak for why others may have circumcision performed but I look at the health aspect. (I hear that uncircumcised people may have more infections and have a higher likelihood of transferring HIV. Regardless of the reason that circumcision reduces HIV transmission, the fact is it does reduce HIV transmission according to your post. Therefore I conclude that circumcision must have some benefit.) I support circumcision for health reasons. I don’t actively support circumcision for “no reason at all” and “to do it just because”. I also don’t support it for the mere purpose of modifying the genitals.
Thanks for the explanation about circumcision not making cleaning easier. I did make an assumption there.
I hope my words are not perceived to offend. That is not my intention.

Having the right to do something doesn’t make it right. No matter how you slice it, the topic here is cutting babies unnecessarily. You may need to read that last sentence again if your deep mental programming blocked it out. In my book, cutting babies for no reason is practically the definition of wrong. To revisit an earlier comment, in Nazi Germany, soldiers had the right to torture and exterminate Jews, and they believed they were doing the right thing because the culture around them accepted and promoted it. That doesn’t make it right.

Welcome to the 21st century. Blind conformity to ancient religious practices is no longer necessary. God no longer cares whether or not you cut off a sexually functional part of your child’s penis. But your child does. They will spend one of the first weeks of their life in mild pain, recovering from a surgery. And their entire life without part of the penis that all mammals on the entire earth have evolved over hundreds of millions of years of natural selection.

@sumbigd - I assume you don’t have kids. Children are shaped by their parents, it’s a natural consequence of the relationship in our species. They don’t have the right of free choice, otherwise they would eat candy and watch tv all day and develop all sorts of ridiculous mental and physical problems.

@beardeddragon - Religion has nothing to do with this, and I’m not sure why you brought it up. Also, Nazi soldiers did not have the right to execute Jews and were criminally charged to the fullest extent of the law. You really are reaching desperately to make your point.

Thank you for your kind welcome to the 21st century. Since I have arrived, I have discovered pubmed which has pointed out several interesting facts:

1)Infant circumcision does not reduce sexual pleasure.
2) Infant circumcision does reduce transmission of HIV.
3) Infant circumcision eliminates penile cancer.

In the interest of balance, I will add this caveat: Each of the things prevented by circumcision are not highly prevalent in developed countries. However, they do exist and therefore cannot be dismissed.

My personal decision (which does not reflect on anyone else’s decision to or not to circumcise) is that in light of the medical benefits, knowing from personal experience that sexual pleasure is still extremely high, I will circumcise my children. Circumcising a fully grown penis is not the same anatomically, therefore waiting to circumcise will not provide the same benefits.

Ps - The penis structure is not conserved across all mammals. Some have bones, some are internal etc. That argument is obviously false, but even more curiously, if every penis should be left as nature intended, why are you here? :)

Holy s*it. Dude, my parents did that to me and it sent me into a depression as a 10year old.
And you are really compairing denying your child candy with denying them a whole dick????!!! It’s illegal for parents to tattoo their child because it is permanent, NOTHing that permanently alters your child’s body is legal except circumcision..

Sexual pleasure? I don’t even feel a blowjob until I’m coming. My glans is thicker and rougher than any other area of skin on my body except my feet and hands. Please tell me about your circumcision as I’m curious to see why your glans would avoid skin thickening and keep pleasure? ?

Eliminate penile cancer? That one sentence show how deluded you are.

HIV is reduced because the skin thickens and lessen the chance for blood contact. Keeping pleasure and reducing infection risk is impossible.

Please tell me your a troll.

As for thread starter q92, stick your tongue outside your mouth for 5min and see what happens with taste and touch. Now imagine cutting of your lips so it always stay dry, and imagine rubbing cloth against it all day all night. That is what your glans will go through.

Never getting my kids cut, I want them to have the same big uncut monster I have lol. And enjoy the full natural feeling of sex.

Nothing wrong with a good discussion, but regardless of facts or lack of, nothing anyone says is going to change another’s mind here. So at least be objective and quote some references, academic or scientific to back up your position. More name calling, insinuations about another members character, whether they are trolls, dickheads, assholes, etc., are going to find their posts deleted and maybe some ban action henceforth.

mizguy,

Obviously nobody is going to change your mind, but the vast majority of people who circumcise their children do so for religious reasons, or for conformity to the religious culture immediately surrounding them. Widepsread circumcision began as a religious practice. Three major religions tout it as a covenant with God. It is one out of thousands of ridiculous religious traditions from thousands of different religious over the ages that has no good reason except to bind the people of the religion into a common experience that is not shared by outsiders to the group. I don’t think all religious traditions are ridiculous, but many are.

Plenty of religious people don’t bat an eyelash about cutting off part of their infant’s penis, for the simple reason that everybody else around them is doing it, so it must be OK. Even if you’re not one of those people (although you did mention that as one of your rationalizations earlier in this thread), you should recognize that the tradition you’re defending here is at its root an ancient religious practice, beginning thousands of years ago, and continuing to be practiced almost exclusively by members of 2 major religious and certain sects of 1 other major religion (dickershwanz already summarized those groups). If religions had not begun this practice thousands of years ago, you would not be doing it now. If I get even one religious person to think twice about what they are actually doing to their child just to conform to their crowd, then my comments are not wasted.

As a tangent to the above paragraph, note immunologists widely agree that HIV originated in the early 20th century, and did not exist before then. If the obvious evidence of circumcision throughout ancient religious texts is not enough to open your eyes on this, then perhaps the idea that circumcision has been practiced by these religious for thousands of years, but HIV did not begin until 100 years ago will be a good clue as to the origins of circumcision.

So yes, religion has everything to do with this.

Next, Nazi Germans were only tried for torture and execution of Jews after the war by international law. Within their own culture and the time period of the war, when they were only judged by their own courts, they were not tried or sentenced for these crimes. I made it abundantly clear in my previous post that these were not considered crimes by their contemporary peers within Germany (not the international community). If you are attempting to deny the Holocaust occurred, then there’s really no point in anyone talking to you. And if you’re not attempting that, then you do understand my point that moral judgment of action exists only in the context of the culture in which the action occurred. And if you do understand that, but are intentionally pretending not to, that would be a very “desperate reach” on your part. The reason that infant circumcision is still allowed, and that you have the right to do it, is that certain very powerful organizations agree with your right. Namely, the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian religions. If they remove their support of the tradition, it would quickly join the same status as female circumcision, more commonly called FGM (female genital mutilation). But if you choose to view the matter from the standpoint of whether or not a parent should cut their child unnecessarily, the choice becomes clear.

I will concede after further research that not all mammals have a penile sheath. But nearly all mammals do, and ALL primates have a penile prepuce (100% look it up) which has evolved over the last 65 million years. There has been a multitude of good information in this thread on the sexual function of the human foreskin in this thread, and I won’t repeat it here since you’ve obviously made up your mind. To anyone else reading this who is willing to think critically, consider that at least 65 million years of evolution and sexual selection have preserved the foreskin in all primates on the entire earth. And the same goes for nearly all other mammal species.

To briefly address another weak argument, penis enlargement, done correctly, does not interfere or alter the functioning of the penis.

Eliminating penile cancer from circumcision? From my knowledge of medical and biological processes, this is inherently ridiculous. From briefly looking into the topic online, it looks like it is an outdated claim from early circumcision debates that has little to no real basis in science. However, I will comment that I consider the short list of medical benefits you (as well as all pro-circ people online) have presented, looks to me like a list of justifications. In other words they are the medical community pointing at a few tenuous benefits as an attempt to rationalize what is nothing more than a very old religious tradition. It’s OK. Lots of people did lots of crazy shit before we had science and knew that it was ridiculous. This is one of those things. And now (Muslim and Jewish and Christian) doctors and scientists who are not immune to their own cultural conditioning, have found a few weak reasons in defense of their actions on their own children, and their own community. It’s like they’re saying “Yes, we’re cutting off part of our children’s penises just because an ancient book said so, BUT LOOK, one to three medical reasons too! It’s OK! We’re not being pointlessly harmful.” And they relentlessly point at these 3 medical reasons they found while ignoring the mountain of evidence in favor of the counter choice. I will lump your HIV argument (with 2 strikes against it now for anybody who doesn’t live in sub-Saharan Africa) and your penile cancer argument, all into the category of “rationalizations by the religious medical community” and counter it all with “65 million years of mammalian sexual selection”. Not to mention wibble’s excellent commentary on these subjects already.

Finally, the sexual pleasure argument. How do you know you have the same pleasure? There is no control group, and there never can be. I’m willing to partially ignore the group of men who are circumcised as adults, and at least from all I’ve read, unanimously preferred uncut sex unless they had some structural defect with their foreskin and removing it also removed pain. However, we cannot ignore cut men who have restored their foreskin and also almost unanimously report an improvement in sexual function (gliding action) and preference for sex with theire restoreskin. Next, what about her pleasure? And finally, what about reproductive benefits besides sexual pleasure? After all, this is obviously a beneficial trait or evolution would have selected against it.

The entire debate about medical benefits of circumcision and no sexual detriments screams to me the adage “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”. It’s throwing out this obviously sexually functional and relevant part of the penis in order to lower the chances of already extremely rare medical conditions. Meanwhile harming an infant’s genitalia during their first experiences of life on Earth.

Anyway, I know I won’t change your mind because you’ve already circumcised your own children and need to feel justified, and that’s OK. We’re all human, and we all need to rationalize our actions in our own minds to keep on living and feeling good about ourselves. Especially when the action is irreversible. It’s good that you’ve stated several times that you’re not prescribing circumcision to anyone despite defending your own decision. In my opinion that has been your only valid argument in this entire discussion. Every parent has the right and obligation to do what they think is best for their child during the first years of their life when they are incapable of deciding for themselves. There are many valid surgeries and medical procedures that infants undergo. And many harmless choices that parents make for their children in order to help them conform to their culture. It’s good for a child to fit in with their culture. Unfortunately, circumcision is not harmless or helpful (except potentially in AIDS ridden areas). You were misinformed when you made your decision. You grossly overvalued a few medical studies, and undervalued millions of years of evolution.

BD

I don’t know how to make that thumbs up emoticon BD, but I would if I could.

Great post

:thumbsup:

^ Ha, I thought I did, but neither do I.

Thanks Sumbigd

I’m sorry but this just makes you sound angry. I mentioned that I was part of a western, Christian culture because I was sick of people insinuating (and downright using slurs) that I was Jewish. I assume by this post you are atheist, but guess what, that doesn’t matter. All humans have their ridiculous traditions, I’d even care to venture that people might think that pulling a vacuum on your dick or spending hundreds of hours analyzing what some anonymous person wrote about enlarging their dick is a ridiculous tradition. While I agree that circumcision was begun as a religious practice, it is most certainly not done exclusively by religious persons. What you and dicker fail to ever address is the huge number of physicians and groups of physicians who endorse the practice. Furthermore, why has this tradition continued for thousands of years if it is so detrimental. There are a lot very old practices that are not continued today because they did not stand up to changing times, but this one did. Why? And why would any medical doctor risk their reputation supporting it?

That’s funny, first I was a Jew, now I’m a holocaust denier. Come on BD, the Nazi thing looks more ridiculous now that you have doubled down on it. First of all there were many people within Germany who did not support the Nazis, but they were afraid for their life. Read Anne Frank or visit the holocaust museum to see all of the people who tried to help the Jews in secret. No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to make them get circumcised. Hell, just earlier n your post you said many religious people don’t even think twice about it, and now you say that they only do it because of some community pressure. Which is it? Oh and once again with the omnipresent, all-powerful religious group that is able to control laws across the globe. Get real, if you suggested banning circumcision in the US, you would get laughed out of court. Female Genital Mutilation isn’t the same, the anatomy isn’t the same. Sure there are similar parts that of course arise from common embryonic origins, but a penis goes out and a vagina goes in for Pete’s sake.

Or consider this, there hasn’t been a strong selection pressure against it either. I mean, us men have nipples but I don’t think we’re feeding any babies with them. ;)

Neither does male circumcision. The function of the penis is to transfer sperm to a woman. There are of course finer nuances to this, but I want to keep this brief since the argument is weak.

Well I guess your knowledge of medical and biological processes is rather limited. Here are a few articles on the subject:
Male circumcision and penile cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Carcinoma of the penis and the anti-circumcision crusade - PubMed
Cancer of the penis in Denmark 1942 to 1962 (511 cases) - PubMed
Male circumcision: assessment of health benefits and risks - PubMed
The relationship between circumcision and cancer of the penis - PubMed
Benefits of newborn circumcision: is Europe ignoring medical evidence? - PubMed
Next time try looking into the subject a little longer before making such bold claims.

Again, why would an entire community of health professionals try to protect an ancient ritual? How does this giant organization of completely different religions solely aligned to defend circumcision secretly communicate their plan to create fake data supporting circumcision? Here’s an alternative school of thought. Maybe these well trained and experienced individuals intellectually chose circumcision due to the facts they have directly and indirectly observed. And then maybe they used those original observations as a hypothesis to test whether their assumptions are true. Sound familiar? It’s called the scientific method. You can’t rationalize away the fact that penile cancer doesn’t exist in circumcised men, or that HIV and some types of HPV are reduced. These are just facts. I’ve addressed your "it survived evolution so therefore its good" argument, but I’ll bet you someone will say, why don’t we cut off our nipples then.

There is a control group, its uncircumcised men. The hypothesis being circumcision does not reduce sexual pleasure. And this study conducted with 40,000 men supports that there is no difference. http://onlineli brary.wiley.com … enticated=false
Infant and adult circumcision are not the same, and anyone who puts in the hours to restore their foreskin probably has a self-selecting bias to say it feels better. The study I linked shows no reduction in partners pleasure, and the study dicker linked shows that circumcised men get laid more. What reproductive benefits are there for uncircumcised men? We aren’t corn plants or bugs, we reproduce based on a very complicated set of factors, almost of none with regards to our penis.

There is nothing sexually relevant about a foreskin, and it has no function, as my glans still exists and is less prone to infection without it. Infant circumcision doesn’t even require anesthetic, they gave my son a sugar pacifier and he didn’t even flinch. And I made that choice based on my personal experience, conversations with two urologists who are friends of mine, my wife who is a nurse and our pediatrician.

A million years of evolution and we still have those damn nipples, must be good for something!

Thank you for your preemptive apology, your assumption was indeed unfounded and irrelevant.

I’m not an atheist. Clearly there is more going on here than a bunch of chemical reactions. Neither do I follow any religion.

PE is a ridiculous tradition unless you start out very small, but it does no harm to anyone unlike circumcision.

I addressed the physicans in my last post.

The tradition continued for thousands of years because until about 100 years ago, very few people had access to soap and a regular shower. One of the few benefits of circumcision was cleanliness, which obviously still wasn’t enough to outweigh the benefits of foreskin. Now that clean water and soap is prevalent, even that benefit is no longer relevant and the list of pros shrinks while the list of cons still towers.

Religions are made up of people joining together in common practices and beliefs. As more people get more complete information on this subject due to the proliferation of science through the internet, less people will continue the practice. Eventually at some critical level within each of the religions, the crowd conformity pressure will reverse.

I’m not doubling down on anything. I haven’t cut off anybody’s private parts. I have nothing at stake here, and the fact that you interpret otherwise suggests that you do. Specifically I suspect you need to justify your decision as I mentioned above, and will either misinterpret or ignore any information that goes against your choice, in order for you to feel good about yourself and live your life. Which is fine, although since your decision is irreversible and complete, there’s no reason to hang on to it so tightly. I’m trying to discuss the morality of circumcision with you by making the point that things that are deeply wrong can be considered normal in abnormal cultural contexts. I’ve made that clear twice now, and still no response. Only dodging, deflecting, and distorting. Morality exists in context. I happen to think the context of parenting a child comes with the responsibility to do no unnecessary harm. Children everywhere agree with me.

200 generations isn’t long enough to tell whether there is a selection bias against circumcision. It would be nice if science turned its efforts on to that question. Even if there is a bias, it’s not genetic so it’s not passable to offspring, so it’s a moot point. But we do know for sure that 65 million years of primate evolution and a couple hundred million years more of general mammal evolution have shown that there is no selection against foreskin. My guess is that the seal provides a sexual advantage in sperm delivery, especially when the sperm of two competing males is present.

Penile cancer is more prevalent in men who are uncircumcised because its main risk factor is phimosis - tight, unretractable foreskin. The treatment for phimosis is circumcision or loosening of the foreskin. Confirming my intuition that foreskin in itself cannot cause cancer. Only a rare disorder of the foreskin causes it. So your argument is valid in that very small sample of men. But I already said that I agree to your list of health benefits in the very low percentage of people who are exposed to the risk factors that circumcision treats. The problem is not with those few % of men, so you can stop going back to those same arguments.

Pointing at the scientific method doesn’t prove a scientists claims. Scientists can have an agenda just as easily as anyone else. Tobacco companies “proved” the safety of smoking for decades before cultural tendencies shifted and objective science prevailed. From what I’ve read, the scientific community is not in consensus on this matter. So I could quote back 10 studies that I didn’t read with counter arguments. But I prefer to think for myself when the scienctific community is divided due to religious pressures.

Not cutting off our nipples sounds like a very reasonable course of action. Just like not cutting off part of our penises. While a useless trait can stick around as long as there is no selection against it, a detrimental trait would have a selection against it. Apparently all the risks you’re protecting yourself against are not enough of a risk for evolution to select against circumcision. So your best case scenario when attempting to recruit evolution to your argument is that foreskin is a useless trait, in which case you have no reason to cut it off, just like male nipples. Basic sexual mechanics and common sense show that it is not useless however.

There is no control group. No circumcised man can directly compare sex with and without foreskin since they have never had foreskin, and if they do restore their foreskin it does not fully replace the structures lost in circumcision. No uncut man can compare sex with and without foreskin, because as you’ve said, if they are cut as adults, the nerve mapping does not fully represent the mappings of someone circumcised at birth. Every anecdotal account I have read, both from restorers, and adult circers all point to pro foreskin. These are the only men who have anything close to a control group to make a judgment on the difference, so I will take their experiences over a study with no control group. It wasn’t even a study, but a review of selected studies. Reviews are subject to the reviewer’s bias.

If you don’t think circumcision is painful, try cutting off a 1”x2” section of your skin and report back. Make it 3”x5” for an adult. Then imagine that it’s skin from your penis which is more sensitive than average skin. View some pictures online of a circumcision and you will see it is a legitimate surgery, comparable to any moderate to major skin trauma. The pain is comparable to any minor surgery.

Not cutting off a healthy baby’s body parts at birth is common sense, and while a few of your arguments are reasonable, they don’t justify your end conclusion. They justify circumcision in a very small percentage of men who are born with a defect in their foreskin or at high risk for infection. When cutting off a body part, there needs to be a damn good reason. For all the other men in the world, the argument that “we may have reason to believe that cutting off your foreskin is at least as good as not cutting it off” is not a good enough reason to do it.

Several people have already listed the sexual functions of the foreskin in this thread, which you no doubt know about since you’ve read so many articles about this subject. Anyone can easily look up these functions by typing “foreskin” into a google search. Naturally one of the first descriptors of it is a list of its functions. Nobody has denied your list of benefits of circumcision, only discounted their importance relative to the value of the foreskin itself. Yet you completely ignore the sealing, lubricating, and gliding functions of the foreskin. It’s one thing to weigh valid information and discount it for a reason. But for you to deny that these functions even exist despite your assured knowledge of them makes the continuance of this discussion impossible. To anyone silly enough to still be reading this debate, that should speak volumes to your motives and validity of your arguments. It’s like there are two sides of a scale, and you’re weighing the decision, and you just completely ignore everything on one side of the scale. It’s one thing to weigh the pros and cons and decide. It’s another thing to deny the cons completely, and being in denial means something else is going on here for you besides a rational debate. Something that you will need to hash out on your own from here on out.

The only reason I re-entered this thread was to challenge your moral position in post 93, but you would never engage that discussion, speaking volumes in silence of omission. Instead you relentlessly diverted the conversation back to the same parroted benefits for some tiny fraction of the population. Cutting babies’ skin off is wrong (within the context of basic parental instincts) unless there is a very good reason to do so. And for the vast majority of infant males, there is no good reason. I felt that was missing from the conversation, that’s all.