Well. You’ve inspired me to look up my father and ask him how often he recalls showing me his penis. We’ve been estranged for about twenty years, so that should be a nice ice-breaker.
Call him and say, “Hey dad! How’s it hanging?”
I totally agree. Furthermore, no little boy is going to have genitals like an adult. What shall we do, put a merkin on all sons so they match dad? What if dad has a prominent scar or had part of his ear removed due to cancer? Should we make sure Junior has the same modifications? IMHO, this is just a lame rationalization for the gut reaction of “Ew, it’s gross and unfamiliar,” attempting to lend some objective credibility to that emotional reaction.
Likewise with the cleanliness issue - only the ignorant worry about having to clean out their baby’s foreskin area, when in reality the foreskin doesn’t retract, and is self cleaning (do they worry about cleaning out their daughters’ vaginas too?). Wipe the external areas, and all is well.
So for those wondering why this is such a big deal, for me it’s that “Ew, it’s gross and unfamiliar,” coupled with “it’s socially unacceptable”* get dressed up in “scientific” excuses, and then that’s considered to outweigh the real and serious medical risks and questions about bodily integrity and human rights that this primarily decorative mutilation brings up.
Oh, and if SI printed this load of tripe, they’d get a looong letter from me and risk losing my support for the CSI. Perhaps one can honestly argue that a minute reduction in some risks, plus social acceptability, are truly enough to outweigh the risks of the procedure and questions of who gets to control people’s bodies. But the poorly cited, straw-man presentation of the opposition makes this fodder for a loony personal website, not an article for a magazine dedicated to serious skeptical inquiry.
*Both also seem to be the primary underlying objection to gays having rights, women breastfeeding in public, and probably other practices that bring benefits to those involved without harming anyone.
Oh, and I wanted to address the OP’s idea of “if it’s natural, it’s better,” as a fallacy. I agree 100% that this is a fallacy - as my husband likes to point out, arsenic is completely natural!
However, there is also a fallacy that is very strong in our culture that “if it uses technology, it’s better.” This is every bit as untrue as the “naturalistic fallacy,” so it’s necessary to look into matters carefully and try to eliminate bias - ya know, do science.
For instance, it makes perfect sense that continuous monitoring of fetal heart rates during labor would make the whole process safer. So once we had the technology to do so, we did it, and scientific studies only came later. Turns out they showed that continuous monitoring tended to produce poorer outcomes for babies, not better.
Sometimes, it turns out that evolutionary processes did actually provide a better way of doing something, and medical intervention causes more problems than it solves. One can’t assume that because evolution isn’t automatically better that it is automatically worse.
See, this has some of the flavour of the OP, only on the other side as it were.
To my mind “it just ain’t a big deal” is probably my default position - cut has some minor advantages and carries some even more minor risks; either cut or uncut is pretty good. The notion that such a decision creates “serious medical risks and questions about bodily integrity and human rights” and is best described with such emotionally loaded words as “mutilation” is hard, as it were, to swallow.
Isn’t the naturalistic fallacy when someone attempts to to define the good by natural properties?
It seems like the article is really talking about appeals to nature not the naturalistic fallacy.
They can circumcise my penis when they pry it from my cold dead fingers! 
OK, I think I neglected to consider the emotional baggage of “mutilation.” Perhaps “body modification” is better. Lots of human cultures have different ways of permanently altering the human body, and I meant to refer to a whole realm of practices from ear piercing to tattoos to scarification, and so on. The main thing is, it seems to my mind that this is a social, decorative thing. And that is not without weight, but I think we need to address it honestly, not try to add to its gravitas with straw-grasping rationalizations.
Besides a few minor things that put me off (a cite for what bathing “often enough” is would be nice), the one part I didn’t believe was the sensitivity issue. The reason that mature males who get circumcised report an overwhelming sensation afterward is because their protected glans has not been desensitized due to a lifetime of exposure. Circumcision removes a protective hood - if you remove it at infancy, by the time a male is mature his glans has necessarily lost sensitivity. If you were to remove that part (heh) and the bull-dada phrase I’d find the article rather convincing.
What do you suppose the ultimate goals of the “powerful anti-curcumcision lobby” are?
And cricumcision would save “millions” of lives? Seriously? I recognize that the article isn’t necessarily supposed to be a scientific study, but in places it sounds like you’re parodying yourself like a The Onion article.
Well, people who do think it is unnecessary mutilation (regardless of how right or wrong they are) have, I think, fairly easily understood motives.
It’s the other side I wonder about - by which I mean only those who argue fervently in favour of it. I can see why people actually do circumcision - social inertia, religion, purported health or hygiene benefits - I just can’t quite grasp why some are so strident about it.
You may want to check if you can really do that. You’ve just published the “manuscript” by posting it here. I think Chicago Reader now has copyright to it, and you may not have the right to submit it for publication elsewhere.
I don’t think it works like that - the reader gains a nonexclusive right to re-use it. That doesn’t prevent the author also re-using it.
ETA: in fact it says that explicitly at the bottom of the page:
I meant the journal may not accept material that’s already been published elsewhere.
O…kay… that’s not what you said though.
You’re not supposed to forcibly retract the foreskin of a baby. It will retract on its own when it is ready. Until that point, it’s fairly self cleaning, rather like the inside of the vagina. Boys will figure out the retracting thing all on their own, and when they do, they will have a LOT of fun with it.
The rest of your reasons are, quite frankly, along exactly the same lines as those who justify female circumcision: the mothers have it done to the daughters because it was done to the mothers.
I happen to be of the mind that the permanent surgical removal of a body part, even a small one, should not be done to someone who has no ability to consent without absolute medical necessity.
I also happen to find the uncircumcised ones a lot more fun to play with.
Unfortunately, urology is a surgical speciality. If you were altered as an infant - barring something actually badly botched - there’s not much a surgeon can do but do a revision. Foreskin transplants - using any kind of skin at all - don’t work very well.
The thing that I have never understood is this: If you were left intact, and you’re unhappy and want your body altered, you go to a doctor and everybody pats you on the back. If you were altered, and you grow up and are not happy with what a doctor left you with, and you want to do skin-expansion through stretching (which is very effective, but slow), people treat you like some freak with a fetish and a body-image dysfunction and a problem.
Why are men not permitted to be unhappy with what a doctor left them? Why are they expected to consider it normal and okay? Why don’t people believe them when they say “Well, my circumcision left me with very little sensation, regardless of what yours left you with?” Why must every man be thrilled to pieces with his altered penis, and never ever criticize what was done to him, or his experience inside his own skin?
Not every man is happy with the results. And most of those were never given any choice…yet they must live with it, or find a way to try to get back a little of what they were born with.
I think every parent who chooses to have their son’s body altered should also have to be educated on tissue-expansion techniques…just in case the son grows up and isn’t happy with the body he was modified to have. Because the parents don’t have to live with it. Only the son does.
Oh, I bet it’s not the only thing in that area that’s coming thick and fast.
I’ll never understand why people make such a huge goddamn deal over this. Really, they’re all being a bunch of dickheads. If all the militant anti-circumcision activists were stranded out in the desert with a truck that had broken down from lack of engine lubrication, I wouldn’t give the mohel.
Because it’s very simple. The anti-circ lobby paints the picture of legions of babies being “mutilated” and likens circumcision to the next holocaust. What they fail to realize, what everyone fails to realize, is that the greatest sex organ that human males possess is between their ears. Cut males fully enjoy sex. Uncut males fully enjoy sex. IT DOESN’T MATTER. However, some cut males who are not fully enjoying sex, for whatever reason, chose to blame it on a minor, inconsequential operation that happened years before they were even aware of sex. The fault lies, dear Brutus, not in our circumcision, but in ourselves. That’s the crux of the matter. If you don’t have the fullest possible sexual experience, blame yourself, not some minor surgery done decades ago. Man up. That’s all this is about. Just…man up.
I really don’t see why, barring medical necessity, it should be permissible to remove a part of someone’s body just because he is an infant and can’t say no.
Cutting off your own foreskin is fine. Cutting off someone else’s, not so much.
The crux of the matter is whether or not it’s acceptable to permanently remove part of someone else’s body in the absence of medical necessity without any type of consent from the person whose body is to be altered.
It’s not about sex; it’s about bodily integrity. And when it comes to foreskins, there is just no overwhelming reason to override it on a routine basis. Except in cases of phimosis, it should be left up to the individual to determine whether or not he wants himself altered.