Thank you for insulting actual rape victims everywhere.
Fuck, it’s a shame Jack Dean Tyler isn’t here anymore – he’d be having orgasms.
That’s a absurdly ridiculous argument. Who is going to talk about this sort of thing openly in normal conversation? Of course you are going to see more open discussion on the Internet.
You’re welcome. Look, it’s a deeply personal sexually related violation. It’s both physical and psychological, but it isn’t typically remembered. It’s similar to women who are raped during a coma. Some women can brush it off if they don’t remember the experience. Some are scarred emotionally by the idea. In some ways they have it easier because there is no lasting physical mutilation.
Physically speaking, some guys can ignore what they lost because they don’t have anything to compare it to. Some are more aware and have trouble letting go. Some haven’t lost anything but can’t imagine the idea of someone else chopping off a sensitive personal area of their body, without a really fucking good reason.
And rape is a good metaphor, because no matter how horrible it is, and how deserving it is of punishment, every one has a different reaction to it. How would you feel about the woman who has been raped but isn’t deeply affected by it telling the woman who is devasted to “just get over it”?
Also there are a ton of cultural taboos surrounding men showing vulnerability, and admitting to being traumatized by something is seen as weakness.
Is it a surprise circumcised men always feel the need to boast about how great their penis is, and how it doesn’t bother them a bit. To be any less defiant would be seen as unmasculine.
Well I’m sorry. That was not my intent. People amputated a part of my sexual anatomy when I was an infant. I don’t quite know how else to characterize it.
That’s a fair point, but I’m still pretty sure that the great majority of snipped guys have normal sexual functioning and don’t actually feel traumatized, even if there are a minority who do. Certainly the cut dicks I’ve run across have not been a problem.
People bitch about all sorts of things.
Moreover, people, particularly in college love to hitch about being victims.
However, I never hear people bitching about this IRL. It’s only on the Internet.
You think circumcised men lie when they claim they enjoy sex?:dubious:
I’m reminded of how tons of men on the Internet claim they’ve been falsely accused of rape or are terrified of women falsely accusing them of rape.
If they haven’t had a problem with you running across their dicks, maybe they really have lost some sensation!
No I don’t, not that someone circumcised at a few days old as anything to compare to. Just that it is likely many men who wish they had not been, or are bothered by it, won’t publically admit that.
Well, mine is bigger than yours, so there!
The way I figure it is this:
The anger and sense of violation are basically misplaced for the simple plain fact that no one was circumcised in a first world nation because their parents wished them harm or wanted to hurt them. You were circumcised because they either were going along with a social convention they were told was harmless, or because they made a conscious decision to make you a part of a community they care about, or because they made a conscious decision evaluating the minor but extant health benefits of circumcision. It was not because they wanted to hurt you and take away your sexual functioning, and it was not because it gave them pleasure and so they disregarded your autonomy.
That naturally doesn’t mean I’m pro-circumcision (as I said upthread, I certainly understand annoyance or disappointment), it just means I think certain comparisons (like the rape one) are vastly overblown.
Look at your quote above and imagine yourself saying it to a woman in the third world whose parents had her genitals mutilated. Just change a few words mutatis mutandis.
Sorry it took so long for me to get back here - my Internet time on weekends is limited, and I can’t always read through a ton of posts as accumulated here over late Friday - Saturday. Anyway…
In modern times, when we have no Temple sacrifices, there aren’t any actual commandments that the child can’t fulfill. Still, having the sign of the covenant on his body is good for him, in at least two concrete ways that I can find support for in Jewish rabbinic literature: 1) it serves as an ever-present reminder that he should be following the laws of the Torah (to the level that a minor of his age does), and 2) it brings the favor of G-d upon the nation as whole, and this minor benefits from such as part of the nation.
As I understand it, the state needs to show a “compelling state interest” in order to place some form of burden on any religious practice. For example, not allowing certain rituals which involve drugs that are otherwise illegal is constitutional because there is a compelling state interest in preventing the trafficking of illegal drugs. Given that circumcised males do not seem to place any sort of burden on the state more so than uncircumcised males, I think that the American government or one of the states would be hard-pressed to find a compelling state interest in prohibiting the ritual of infant circumcision.
The principle of religious freedom means that no one gets to decide for you, or for the people for whom you are the decision-maker (or one of them) by proxy, whether or not a procedure is “necessary” for reasons that are outside the realm of the scientifically knowable.
Guinastasia:
If the child’s life will be endangered by the circumcision, then he is exempt from that commandment. Nonetheless, should the condition of its being life-threatening ever change, the child (or perhaps by that time an adult) has an obligation to get it done then.
For example, I’m rather certain that in this day and age, there are ways to prevent hemophiliacs from bleeding to death if they get cut. A properly prepared hemophiliac can probably undergo circumcision without serious danger to his life. Perhaps this can’t be done for an infant, but the religious obligation can in such cases be fulfilled later.
Novelty Bobble:
Not quite. It means that there are many technicalities in halacha that would render a defendant not capitally guilty, and the Rabbis in question are expressing their confidence that should a capital case come before them, they’d care enough about the defendant to find a way that he could get off. This confidence does NOT mean that if in fact a defendant unquestionably met all capital punishment requirements that they would disregard halacha and refuse to kill him.
Guinastasia:
Well, if there’s some indication of medical danger before the kid is circumcised, you hold off no matter what, without waiting for anyone to die. That particular law is, that is a baby is from all normal indications healthy enough for circumcision, but family history has indicated that there is some reason to worry that death-from-circumcision runs in the family, then the new kid is exempt.
I would say such a thing, if there were such a thing as “female circumcision” that had demonstrated minor health benefits and insignificant trauma, with no apparent loss of sexual function to the woman.
Since there aren’t so far as I know any such procedures, all analogies with male circumcision are basically bullshit.
I’m circumcised. It’s entirely possible I’ve lost some fractional percentage of my ability to feel sexual pleasure because of it. There is no universe in which that procedure is any way comparable to removing all or part of the clitoris, or sewing most of the vaginal opening shut, and frankly it just makes the anti-circumcision side of the debate look somewhere between ridiculous and blindly selfish to compare the two (or compare it with “rape”, as was also done upthread).
Let’s just get the typical well poisoning over with: Holocaust, Jews, Germany, Hitler, WW2, final solution, genocide, Himmler, Waffen SS, etc. etc.
For fucks sake. If you think modern German courts are tainted by what happened 70 years ago any more than modern American courts are tainted by Jim Crow laws there’s something wrong with you. I see no reason why Jews nor Muslims should be treated by German courts with kid gloves because of what happened in WW2.
Well, there is the crack vs powered cocaine thing.
Not to mention whenever Civil Rights cases or cases determining whether or schools or school systems are set up in a way that discriminates America’s previous policies are brought up and that’s especially true in the South.
And yet if I decided to use a hole punch to remove the outer edges of my infant son’s ears (to protect from a common cause of skin cancer you understand) I’d be branded some kind of monster!
I mean, I’d use a local anaesthetic. I’m not a barbarian.
That’s a great set up, but I’d probably have the Moderators all over me.