Circumcision
Female circumcision is a topic I can hardly bring myself to read. So let’s talk male circumcision. This is going to be somewhat disgusting, you’ve been warned.
Circumcision is part of the covenant between Hebrews and Yahweh. Circumcising your boys is a way to show that a Hebrew promised to worship God, and he in turn promised the Hebrew to make his people a large nation and give them land etc.
Circumcision was also used in ancient history as a practical and convenient way to identify yourself or a stranger as a Jew. People wore loose tunics and robes back then. You could simply hike up your skirts and prove once and for all whether you were friend or foe.
My favorite professor in college had an interesting theory for some of the other purposes of circumcision. Some tribal cultures in Africa are very similar in many ways to the kind of society depicted in the Hebrew scriptures. These modern primitive people are a sort of window into what life was probably like in ancient Hebrew society. They are similar in terms of dietary and sexual taboos, inter-tribal warfare, magic rituals and methods of communicating with their gods, pre-war incantations and sympathetic magic, and interestingly in the area of circumcision.
In some cultures in Africa, circumcision is a rite of passage for a man. It’s part of a boy being officially recognized as a man and a warrior. For this reason circumcision often takes place among adults rather than young boys. It’s done without painkillers, the pain being an important part of the process. And apparently it’s one of the most painful things a man can endure. Especially the way some people do it. In some cultures, first they chop off the foreskin with a dull instrument, then sprinkle the wound with the powdered foreskins of previous warriors, and then wrap the mess up real tight with a leaf or a rag. It very quickly becomes infected and festers, often resulting in much more of the tissue sloughing off. It sometimes takes weeks or months to heal. Other justifications include the ever-popular “purity” and “cleanliness” concern, or magic good luck powers it grants the victim, or increased manliness.
Today I read about a fascinating practice called peri’ah metsitsah. Google it if you like. This practice is part of the traditional method of Jewish circumcision. After hacking off the foreskin, the mohel (guy who circumcises people) is supposed to suck the blood and foreskin off the baby’s penis into his mouth, and spit the mess out. Mmmmm. This is an ancient practice and most Jews don’t do this any more. (Oops, except this guy who did it in New York in 2005 and happened to give the babies herpes and killed them. Praise Yahweh.)
Here’s some vocabulary to impress your friends with: epispasm. Epispasm is reverse circumcision, restoring the foreskin of someone who’s already been circumcised. In somewhat-less-ancient Judea, some Jews went about restoring their foreskins because they wanted to participate in Greek culture, where nudity was often required and where exposure of the glans was considered obscene. I’m unsure how this was done, I believe there were surgeries, but I don’t imagine it was pleasant.
Have you ever watched a baby be circumcised in a modern-day medical procedure? I have. It was horrific. They tie the baby’s arms and legs down in a special chair, clamp off the foreskin with a horrid metal torture device, and hack-scrape the foreskin right off in a circle with a scalpel. I’ve read studies indicating that circumcision causes extreme pain to infants. You may say “duh” but there was debate until very recently (as in, the 1980’s) whether babies even feel pain the same way adults do and whether painkillers should be used. Some studies at least indicate that they do indeed feel intense pain, and circumcising a baby without anesthetic can sometimes cause a baby to stop breathing almost to the point of death, not to mention the trauma of living with the wound afterwards. Apparently a good many doctors today still don’t use any painkillers.
Among the “civilized” world, surprise surprise, the US is one of the biggest circumcising nations. Many / most other nations seem to have given up the practice, if they ever embraced it to begin with.
If I needed just one reason to oppose religion or religion-like superstitious ignorance, circumcision would do. I don’t care whether insane adults want to do it to themselves, but the fact that it’s done to children against their will or their consent is barbaric.
Fortunately, this practice seems to be dying out. Drops in male circumcision:
USA: from 90% to 56%
Canada: from 47% to 14%
UK: from 35% to about 3% (less than 1% among non-Muslims)
Australia: 90% to 12.6% (”routine” circumcision has recently been banned in public hospitals in all states except one, so the rate will now be a lot lower)
New Zealand: 95% to below 3% (mostly Samoans and Tongans)
South America and Europe: never above 5%
As of what year are those statistics (beginning and end)? That does seem to be a promising trend.
The first figures are all around 1950, and the more recent figures are from within the last 5 years. Everywhere counts and reports them differently, which makes them difficult to compare, but those figures are as close as anyone seems to be able to get them. The USA figure doesn’t include Jewish circumcisions, since they usually aren’t performed in hospital, or some Muslim circumcisions, since they are often done around puberty. On the other hand, Medicare have stopped covering neonatal circumcision in some US states, so that will bring the rate down. It seems likely that the rate will drop below 50% within the next 5-10 years, which may be a tipping point.
The rate in Africa is even harder to track, and may be going up in light of the push to promote circumcision as protective against AIDS. It is my belief that this whole thing is about promoting circumcision (or sometimes anything-but-condoms) rather than fighting HIV:
http://www.doctorsopposingcircumcision.org/info/HIVStatement.html
I’m happy to hear that circumcision is dying off. I’ve read elsewhere that this is the case also.
Great post, Brian, it’s good to see that more and more people are Getting It. (Or perhaps you don’t live in the US and It was always self-evident?) It’s amazing how prevalent a sort of Through the Looking-Glass view prevails there, whereby a normal penis is “uncircumcised”, the foreskin is “extra”, and the wish to have one’s foreskin back is of psychiatric concern (but not the wish to have one cut off, even as a fetishistic ritual).
There was ancient surgical foreskin restoration - even cruder than the modern kind. But they had something similar to modern non-surgical restoration (many circumcised men - Surprise! - want nothing to do with doctors), involving weights to encourage the skin to grow, very much as today.
I think the biggest problem is simply that so many men are circumcised in the US, and it’s just not a big deal to them. Which I can somewhat understand, since I’m circumcised and yet I don’t really regret it for myself; I don’t remember the pain and am hardly traumatized by it now. There’s even a few examples of this apathy in the thread on the forums about this. For a circumcised male to be against infant circumcision in general, it requires thinking about the practice itself beyond personal experience, which can be difficult to do.
I had nothing against male circumcision until a couple of years ago when someone brought up the issue and I actually thought about it for a bit. It’s easy to not even think about it.
In addition, it should be noted that routinely removing a male babies foreskin is done without the approval of the owner. Parents don’t own their sons bodies. Therefore it will at some point be a legal issue. Internationally, routine male circumcision is considered by many as male genital mutilation.
Parents don’t “own” their sons’ bodies as property, but legally they do have full medical authority to consent to anything that an adult could medically consent for himself when the child is a newborn (I think the only exception in the US would be medical euthanasia, which is legal in only one state I believe). I don’t think there’s much of a legal avenue for men who were circumcised as babies (maybe if he’s otherwise damaged by the procedure). That doesn’t make it any less immoral or horrible, though.
I don’t think parents could consent to any other body modification for a baby - ear-piercing, I know they do, but many people would draw the line at eyebrow-, nose- or lip-piercing. Not tongue-slitting or tattooing, and not of course, even the most minor cutting or pricking of a girls’ genitals - which screams “double standard”.
Men have successfully sued for circumcisions that were (even more) damaging (than usual) and/or without informed parental consent, as when the mother was still recovering from anaesthetic after the birth. At least one attorney is occupied just about full time on botched circumcision cases. When will they ever learn?
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!