astraeus,
>Jack, you’ve fallen into a very common trap. You believe so strongly that circumcision is bad that you’ve closed your mind to anything said against your point of view. <
It is my personal policy to close my mind to all dogmatic beliefs. I am open-minded to ANY evidence or any conclusions that follow logically from the evidence, though. Do you have any evidence or logical conclusions based upon the evidence?
>I am circumcised. My wife is currently pregnant with our first child, who, according to the ultrasound is a boy, and we intend to have him circumcised. <
When he grows up he will be a freak (won’t be so many circumcised men when he grows up) and he will hate your guts for what you did to him (sorry to be so blunt). And, you will rationalize that it was God’s will that you force your helpless son to have part of his penis amputated. And, the damage done to your relationship with your son will work itself out according to God’s plan. Is it any wonder that such insanity as circumcision has caught on in such a non-intellectual environment?
>There are several reasons for this, among them that I’m Jewish, that it’s easier to clean, and that there are potential health benefits. <
All true. No way in the world does this justify the loss in erotic sensation. No way in the world does this justify the damage that it will do to your son's future relationship with his wife should he turn out to be heterosexual. BTW, do you know that the US has a higher incidence of AIDS and other STD's than any other western industrialized nation? This might be because (I personally have no doubt) the US is circumcised to such a great extent. Do you know that there are many Jewish people who are no longer circumcising their babies? They have a support group. I'm sure that you have rejected almost every other Jewish tradition, why don't you reject this attack on your son for his sake?
>I can speak from very personal experience that my sex life is just peachy, thank you.<
Sorry, based on what I know about how heterosexual coitus takes place with a circumcised man, I doubt if there is anything at all good about your sex life.
>To say that male circumcision is analogous to female genital mutilation is preposterous–women who’ve undergone FGM cannot experience orgasm<
There are several types of FGM. The most heinous kind of circumcision will turn a woman into a sexual zombie capable of no erotic sensation. However, the kindest FGM, which only involves amputating her clitoral hood, will only prevent the woman from experiencing a clitoral orgasm (at the turn of the century, FGM was very common in America and was justified using the same excuses used today to justify MGM).
> I’m circumcised, yet I experience orgasm frequently.<
If you're lucky, you experience a type of orgasm from your frenulum-remnant which is nothing more than an exaggerated tickle (and this doesn't last long at all). An intact man experiences a completely different type of bursting, sensation from the dorsal side of his penis that goes on for a long time (probably just as long as it does in a woman's clitoral hood).
>My wife is pregnant, after all. To say that it decreases the pleasure afforded to the man’s partner is possible in some cases, but there just isn’t evidence to support it being generally true.<
Circumcision decreases pleasure for both the man and the woman and there is published research to support this. True, as I have explain in other posts, there hasn't been any published study into the precise physiology of the penis, but that's by design of the establishment.
>Who do you think you are to judge the mental state of the men who’ve undergone circumcision as adults?<
Well, let’s say that one day you wake up and announce to your wife that you are going to go in and have half of your penis (or arm or whatever body part) amputated even though everything about your penis is working fine. I would have to say that you are behaving irrationally. And, if you say that everybody else is doing it, then I’m still going to say that you are behaving irrationally. You should know better.
>Has it occurred to you that you might just disbelieve them because their statements contradict yours? <
This could very well be true. An irrational person can't know if he is behaving irrationally otherwise he wouldn't behave that way. So, maybe I'm behaving irrationally. In order to protect against irrationality, we need proper studies done on the foreskin by professional researchers, don't you agree?
> http://www.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/AIDS/01/31/aids.circumcision/index.html <
This is such a ridiculous study. And, to think some circumcision-advocates are trying to use this study to justify circumcising the entire continent of Africa.
Others have gone into the incredible flaws of this study, but I’m not going to because I happen to believe that the implication of this study is probably true, namely: circumcision offers some protection to men from acquiring the AIDS virus. I mean, if a legitimate study along these lines was actually carried out, one would probably find that it is true. A thick layer of keritinization forms on a circumcised penis. It’s probably as hard for the AIDS virus to penetrate that keritinization as it is for the circumcised man to feel anything through it !
I have a couple of problems with the implication of this study, though:
(1) babies don’t have sex so they are not exposed to the AIDS virus that way anyway. So, they can decide if they want to be circumcised sometime after they have learned to speak English (right now, the only way they can say “no” is to let out a blood curling scream or go into shock and that language is not acceptable to the medical establishment); and,
(2) intact babies can be taught the importance of condoms as they grow older and they will be more likely to use them since condoms don’t ruin the erotic sensations in intact men the way they do in circumcised men; and,
(3) if a circumcised man does happen to get infected with the AIDS virus, any woman partner that he has is much more likely to become infected as a result of the incredible friction this occurs (American woman get infected with the AIDS virus much more frequently during heterosexual sex than European women).
> He then went through the procedure. I will tell you this: The only time the boy [eight day old baby] cried was when his diaper was removed. He cried for about ten seconds, then quieted a bit. Then the mohel did his job, swabbed it, and bandaged it carefully, while the boy’s crying was very soft . . .<
Well, thank you for your observations. Did you ever stop to wonder what was really going on with that baby when this surgery was being performed on him? We have some information on what the baby was feeling:
(That baby was experiencing the most pain that he will ever experience for the rest of his life.) Here’s a bunch of cites to help you understand the turmoil of that the baby was going through: http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/
>Please, if you’re not going to give any real citations, at least try not to talk about things you just can’t possibly know for sure. And if you truly have all these citations you mention, please just list some of them.<
Here’s a zillion cites for you http://www.cirp.org/library/
I have many more. And, I can guide you to the cite you’re looking for if you let me by telling me what you’re looking for. I won’t hold it against you that you have no credible sites to support anything that you say (if you did, I would know about them already so I know you don’t have any).