Actually, in our son’s case it was the only thing that finally stopped the repeated kidney and bladder infections. Yeah, it sucked when it was done, but it was no where near as bad as further hospital trips and catheters and IVs and such would have been.
Crackpot, indeed. I’ve seen at least one Jewish uncircumcised penis and one Muslim circumcised one. My understanding is that, interestingly enough, Muslims for the most part also circumcise baby boys.
my foreskin was special becaus it was MINE
I arrived that way, after careful evolutionary operations over millions of years.
Lots of things fell by the wayside, but dammit, not that little bit of skin.
Kind of makes you wonder why god put it there (what, just so you could
cut it off you motherfucker??)
but I digress.
we are talking of mutilatioin–“circumscision” merely describes the direction of the dotted line…
The fackt that it is sexual mutilation ought to raise a prima facie inference of
PATHOLOGY IN ITS INCEPTION
This is true. Circumcision is a sunnah, and Muslims consider themselves to stand alongside Jews as being one of the circumsized peoples.
it persists because this is a profoundly sex negative culture. The elephant in the room surely is the particular anatomy that is mutilated, is it not?
particularly when the various rationales are revealed as the vaporware they are.
That’s an interesting way to describe a path of random mutations and happenstance. It all happened to make a little bit of skin on your dick? I don’t buy it.
It doesn’t make me wonder about that, no. I do wonder if you should take a few deep breaths here. 
We end up cutting off and removing a number of bits of our anatomy over the course of our lives.
If you’re going to define all surgery as mutilation, this has already become pointless. It also makes a conversation about it, but oh well…
after pausing for a moment to remark on the contrast between the fiance who became ex and the current squeeze, I have a friend who, when last we spoke, was entering the hospital at age thirty or so for this particular thereapeutic intervention which had been rendered necessary in his case. I am going to seek him out in the interest of science, since I don’t know what I’m missing and there is (I think) a bias towards denial which skews the response when we hear how nobody but us nuts is appalled at having our tiny dicks cut on, even if we cannot articulate a specific lack of sexual response. 'I myself have little in the way of bad reviews, but what of that? No girl gets repeat phone calls if she points and laughs…
:shrug:
I’m not mutilated. Cut, but not mutilated.
Just sayin’.
I guess I kind of understand your angle, but I honestly think there are worse things to be upset about. And as I tell my (uncut) son regularly, screaming doesn’t usually get you what you want.
I did mention that I had issues, did I not?
may we agree that surgery occurs in hospitals, and has a therapeutic indication?
mutilation, I would submit, occurs when otherwise healthy tissue is scarred or removed for purposes of adornment, ritual, or superstition.
No, that doesn’t make sense. “In a hospital” is too narrow, but that’s a quibble. Most circumcision surely does take place in hospitals. It’s only some Jewish people who do it in the home on the table. Most people, you may note, are not Jewish. I think an earlier poster said that roughly half of the men in America are circumcized; do the math.
Except that a number of people have already posted that there IS what you call a therapeutic indication.
I don’t think they do. You’re intentionally excluding most of the people with objections, which is not what I’d call a valid arguing tactic. I’ve never owned a slave or been a slave, do I have no basis to form an opinion on that practice either? Doesn’t work, sorry. And I’ve got no problem with circumcision.
My guess is you never missed it since you never knew what it was like to have it. Grass is always greener and all that.
Assuming for a moment there is a god (I’m dubious), s/he also gave us an appendix…and I’m not thinking I’m missing out by not having that either. 
If you are going to base everything on what god gave us then I suppose all surgery is out, ehe?
Sure…except that it also improves your odds on not getting penile cancer…sure, only 1000 cases per year (in the US), which is, what…1 chance in 75,000 aproximately if you are uncircumsized? Still, its not ALL about ‘adornment, ritual, or superstition’ it seems. There is also the whole maintenence free tool thing. I notice you didn’t address any of these (or other health related issues, slight though they are) things when you decided to wade into this debate.
I’ll let you in on a little secret…for all intents and purposes I’m an atheists. I had both of my son’s snipped because when I took a long hard look at the issue it seems marginally better to have it done because of the health/maintenence issues. It had nothing to do with ‘ritual, or superstition’…and only a bit to do with ‘adornment’ or at least looks.
As to your rant about mutilation, I’ll just say that I’m not seeing it. Its not like your cock is disfigured. It still works the same for all its intended uses. You get the same sexual pleasure, you can still propagate the species, you can still piss the same, etc. And afaik the majority of women don’t have a strong preference one way or the other…not to the point they won’t allow you access to them sexually. That being the case, I ask again…what difference does it really make?
-XT
Oh, I missed the whole evolutionary angle too…gods, that’s pretty funny.
Um…you know the difference between acute and chronic disease, right? To put it a different way, what were the odds of H. Habilis (or later H. versions) of dieing of something like penile cancer…as opposed to, say, getting eaten by a tiger (or some other gruesome fate)? Assuming you agree that odds were our hapless Hominid would most like die of something OTHER than penile cancer, there really was no need for them to even consider taking that sharp rock and having that bit of skin off.
I’m unsure if having said foreskin on provided some advantage to our distant ancestors (or if it was a slight negative like the appendix, or simply neutral, evolutionarily speaking…like having 5 fingers and toes)…certainly today, having or not having provides no advantage in passing on your genes. Were it REALLY mutilation and were it distasteful to females to look at a circumcised penis then I’d say the practice would long since have been discontinued…slight health benefit or no. That doesn’t seem to be the case though…least I’ve never been shunned by a female because of some missing foreskin.
But thanks for the laugh there…made my night.
-XT
says who?
perhaps i rushed too quickly past the phenomology of the circumcisee.
you are to be congratulated for (I hope) forbearing from the festive version, and having your son’s “fixed” at some medical facility where they may have received analgesia beyond a fucking pinky’s worth of wine…
but I digress.
consider if you will, a seven day old consciousness surrounded by the people he has come to recognize and rely upon for protection and sustenance, and then out of the blue, we are going to cut him WHERE???
at the very least, a lesson in how Reality Bites, if you take my meaning.
The preposterous argument that this monstrous trauma goes unremarked, and “you don’t remember” is laughable.
not evolutionary; cultural.
habilis was just trying to get a little more than his share. I was probing the etiology of the practice, not it’s perpetuation, which becomes conflated with sectarian religiousity.
I was wondering who the first circumcisor was, and what he had in mind.
I ws pretty sure it was an auto circumcision, because you wouldn’t let someone else do that to you if it had never been done before, ya feel me?
Try a google search of, say, “mohel lidocaine.” You might find something you didn’t know, such as the fact that topical anesthetics are, indeed used. One thing I learned in the 20 seconds I spent researching this is that, 1. there are risks associated with anesthetics That I wasn’t aware of, and 2. sugar water (and presumably, sweet wine), has analgesic effects.
from
here
Learn something new every day, non?
I was unable to have sex for about twelve years after being circumcized, and didn’t until about sixteen years afterward.
Where are MY reparations?
Jeez, you really have been screwed up. True, it took me till I was ten to show to girls my age how I had been mutilated, (Playing Doctor, that is. 
) which is six fewer years then you, but still pretty bad. However, no one here is talking about “reparations” Where the hell did you pull that out from?
No, wait. I don’t want to know.
But that definition would also include tatooing, ear piercing, and, for that matter, shaving. Are you sure you want to use the term “mutilation” to describe it?
Sixteen?!?
I demand more reparations than that precocious HSHP fucker! At least an additional twe–er, ten years worth. Er, maybe five.
I mean, um . . . yeah! I was sixteen too!!