Originally Posted by Dirty_ (Post 1116965)

I'll have my child circumcised. No real reason other than I am circumcised and enjoy not having the extra skin hanging off my cock.

Originally Posted by Dirty_ (Post 1116965)

I'll have my child circumcised. No real reason other than I am circumcised and enjoy not having the extra skin hanging off my cock.

Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA (Post 1107951)

I agree with you on all these points, Tore.

Why non-therapeutic genital cutting of male children is accepted in the U.S.: I think because people often follow entrenched customs without thinking to question them. They assume there is justification. They assume that medical benefits outweigh the risks and harms caused when people cut off healthy, functional parts of a child's penis.

Also, most people don't seem to know anything about the foreskin and its functions, or think to ask why human males like other mammals have foreskins. I suspect it is probably easier for people to destroy a child's body part when they don't know how the foreskin functions or know of its benefits. They aren't used to the appearance of a boy or man's intact penis and think it is weird or gross.

I am very troubled that people so easily cut off a healthy part of children's genitalia. Circumcision is an obvious human rights violation, in my opinion. When people do this to a girl's foreskin (the clitoral hood), it is called genital mutilation, but when you call male circumcision what it is...genital mutilation...supporters can't handle the reality of what they are doing to children. They come up with all sorts of rationales to avoid the obvious and to dismiss the damage of what they are doing to kids.

As someone whose writing I like very much ;) once said:

*******

"You were my parents and you should have been protecting me.
Instead you had them slice and violate my body.
You shouldn’t torture little children’s sexuality.
You had no right to harm the most private part of me.

"You claim you had some sort of justification
for perpetrating genital mutilation.
You claim that circumcision improves hygiene,
but you don’t cut off children’s body parts to keep them clean!

"You claim you wanted to protect me from HIV,
but how to do that best is teach the rules of ABC:
abstinence, be faithful, and ensure consistent condom use.
You don’t stop STIs by perpetrating child abuse!

"You claim you did it for your culture or religion.
What kind of culture turns abuse into tradition?
You say your god tells you to cut your helpless offspring.
You shouldn’t make a child’s torture be an offering.

"Mutilating genitals of little girls is wrong, you cry,
but when it is a little boy, you turn your blind eye.
You had no right to make your violent incision.
What happens to my body should be my decision!

"You pinned a little child down. You cut his penis by force.
Yet you acknowledge no wrongdoing. You feel no remorse.
You violated my genital integrity.
You had no right to harm the most private part of me.

"Fondle little children and you’ll spend your life in jail.
Why can you cut their foreskin off if they are male?!
There is no rationale, no justification.
You perpetrated genital mutilation."

*******

Originally Posted by Frownland (Post 1145745)

I am anti-lint, hence my voting for circumcision.

Originally Posted by Farfisa (Post 1147558)

What, you don't like cheese?

Originally Posted by tore (Post 1150768)

I (and many others) believe circumcision to mostly be a way to reduce masturbation which is something people were very afraid of in the olden days.

Originally Posted by crukster (Post 1150900)

Well that doesn't work. Jerked myself all day before I was cut and jerk myself all day still afterwards.

If anything it reduces sensitivity so you can jerk for longer.

Originally Posted by The Masturbation Taboo and the Rise of Routine Male Circumcision: A Review of the Historiography

There is increasing scholarly interest in the history of routine male circumcision in Anglophone countries, but much disagreement as to whether prevention of masturbation was an important part of this development. A review of the historiography of both the masturbation phobia and the rise of routine circumcision shows that it has been widely accepted since the 1950s that discouraging masturbation was a major reason why doctors, educationists and childcare experts sought to introduce circumcision of both boys and girls in the later nineteenth century, a campaign which was successful in the former case, unsuccessful in the latter—an outcome which still colours popular concepts about what constitutes genital mutilation. Mainstream pediatric and child care manuals continued to assert the value of circumcision as a disincentive to masturbation right up until the 1950s. The importance of the original link between masturbation and circumcision was rediscovered at the same time, when belief in the harmful effects of the former was declining, and as medical historians began to investigate the origin, course and effects of the onanism scare during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Originally Posted by A Surgical Temptation - The demonization of the foreskin & the rise of circumcision in Britain

More convincing on this point is Ornella Moscucci, who shows that circumcision was increasingly recommended as a cure for male masturbation from the 1850s onward. She points out that part of this process was the demonization of the foreskin as a source of nervous and physical disease and agrees with Hyam that circumcision was central to the late Victorian redefinition of manliness in terms of self-restraint and cleanliness. "Widely blieved to dampen sexual desire, circumcision was seen positively as a means of both promoting chastity and physical health."