They say that’s less likely to happen if one has been circumcised.
I can dig it. But I can explain- I do it on purpose. I am answering several of the links posted here when I say: I myself used to be a counselor. I don’t know if I am unusually introspective
or not, but I have a pretty good idea what is my own deal. When I rant like this it is on purpose because of a theory of mine, namely that whenever you are disturbed by some emotional
disturbance that does not have to do with the matter at hand, or if there is something that seems too embarassing or shameful to speak of- that is the very thing you most need to
confront. Air it out, open it up to criticism, inhabit every nook and cranny of the issue so that it can be resolved once and for all. I don’t know if I have an unusually good memory; if
mine is average then I think average is pretty cool. But once an issue has been fully worked out, mentally it takes on a kind of specific, crystallized form that is memorized effectively
forever, such that if the same issue arises again the resolution is readily accessible and one does not have to cycle through the same thing again and again.
It is certainly mandatory for me.
To be more precise, I thought I was Jewish at the age of 5 or 6 because of my circumcision. The people who corrected me didn’t realize that my circumcision was why I thought so.
Okay, let’s do a thought experiment. Say I said to the doctor, “Leave his penis alone, however, I would like you to chop off his feet.” Do you think the hospital’s response would be:
No? Okay, now here you go: what’s the difference?
This issue arose as a result of something that might be considered ‘counseling’. Early Monday morning I went to the usual yoga class. There was a new teacher I hadn’t seen before, which isn’t
so unusual since I only go so often. She had a spiel about the left brain being focused on the future and the past, planning and logic and some other stuff I didn’t catch, and the right brain being in the moment, sensation and balance and some more stuff I didn’t catch. She is a grad student in nursing/medicine/psych or something, I didn’t quite catch that either, but she has studied ‘neurosculpting’ in a way that involves ‘balancing’ the left and right hemispheres of the brain in a way that is apparently consistent with the accepted practices of Western Psychology. I wasn’t paying attention because she wanted us to start out with some pranayama, which amounts to some basic breathing exercises which I had always considered basically a waste of time that distracts from the exercise part of the program. But I don’t want to be rude, and anyway the breath meditation aspect of yoga is mentioned pretty much constantly even without the annoying practice of pranayama. And her point was that the people who developed yoga were aware of the need to balance the hemispheres of the brain and that is what pranayama is all about, so I humored her and waited for the exercise part of the program.
Turns out the exercise program had the theme of balancing the hemispheres of the brain- the ‘acrobatics’, if you will, were devised to accomplish this effect. Well I started to be bothered by a kind of ‘what is this’ annoyance with myself. Part of me thinks I explored the part of my brain that expects to be attached to a foreskin but is instead only able to generate a kind of ‘phanton limb’ amputee experience. Maybe I was just getting a look at my own state of denial. But this leads back to my response to WhyNot
Whether it is a result of my ‘confronting’ process or the result of participating in a brain hemisphere-balancing practice, I became aware of a Major disconnect in my consciousness, one that has persisted for decades.
My circumcision…ritual genital mutilation
I literally conceived two utterly separate categories. Me and my life was here in America where we have our problems but things are overall pretty good. Ritual genital mutilation is an alien thing that happens in the very crappiest places of the world, like Somalia where ritual genital mutilation is utterly unavoidable, burka-clad rape victims may be forced to marry their victimizers, and brides become effectively slaves. Night and day; black and white. Whoops, looks like the facts say I am a victim of ritual genital mutilation, a fact I have clearly been aware of since the age of 5, the implications of which I have been in denial all my life.
So. Look at all those dots above as a circuit that was disconnected and which now is connected. Before, my thoughts could not flow from the concept of ‘my circumcision’ to the things on the other side; now they can. The combination of these categories is personally devatstaing. It’d be fascinating if it weren’t so overwhelmingly negative. In fact, I can already tell I am headed for a terrible depression…
I was born a Catholic, though I wasn’t raised one. Because of this I think my circumcision must be a Catholic thing at root. Maybe I’m wrong, but the Pope is ultimately responsible.
Generally I don’t have any problem with Catholics but rather Evangelicals. Rick Perry et al represents those forces of stupid, which I want to blame and will probably find a way to eventually.
Rick Perry et. al. represents the conservative contribution to the issue via their bizarre opposition to Sharia Law in America. In Somalia, sure, Sharia Law probably demands the removal of women’s clitoral hoods. Not in America. However, America is probably the world champion of ritual genital mutilation, only against men. Why are conservatives against Sharia Law but not the medical quackery that is circumcision?
I’m not pretending to be angry, though I do admit to some degree of detachment. I want to capture my feelings as they arise, record them and confront them ASAP so that I don’t have to go through this again and again. So I’m ranting on here, but in rl I haven’t raised my voice in a decade, never commit crimes, work very hard and so on. I’m kind of a bad person inwardly despite that, but where did I produce a ‘homophobic slur’?
You said so yourself, the Pope.
Well you see, it says don’t tear under penalty of law in big, black, bold letters on the mattress, so that just makes people want to tear it off really badly! It’s just like circumcision. Although apparently now the mattress tags have been changed to say, “This tag may not be removed except by the consumer.”
Hey, cut that out!
As for your most recent post, OP, it all makes sense now… in the middle of a brain-balancing exercise, you realized your pecker wasn’t balanced. I should stop pulling your leg.
P.S. Was the yoga instructor hot?
Actually, thinking about ex-patriating and never having kids as a result. Not the kind of thing to decide in a hurry though…
Whatever. Yes and no.
How is he responsible for your mistake? (Besides you were not born a Catholic, if anything you were born into a Catholic family and baptized a Catholic, but still, that does not mean you were cut* because *dad was Catholic) Again, the RCC does NOT mandate or advocate infant circumcision, your cut and that of a majority of circumcised American males born in the 20th Century is an artifact of American culture.
OK, so Obama is responsible then, right?
Ah, gotcha. So basically it means ‘look dodgy’, translated into Dr Phil blurge.
Circumcision has nothing to do with Catholicism. I’m in a country that until the last fifteen years or so was one of the most fervently Catholic ones around, and circumcision has always been very much the exception here, not the norm. I’ve never seen a circumcised penis.
Ah, here we have it. It isn’t about circumcision at all, but about finding out that blind patriotism is stupid and childish. That bad things happen and there are violent people here, in the good ol’ USofA. That there’s no “us” and “them”, only people, everywhere, who sometimes to horrible things even to their children and worse, are willfully denying that those things are horrible, often in the name of religion. Not just brown-people religions in Africa and the Middle East, but white-people religions right here at home.
I can dig it. Seriously. That’s a hell of a thing to realize, and I wish you luck in your journey.
I’d wager that the vast majority of Catholics in the world are uncircumcised. It’s a cultural thing in the US (and, I think, Australia). Also, I don’t think FGM is mandated in sharia anywhere. Cultural too.
Without wanting to get toooo into it, I’ve always had a tight foreskin. I was together with a lady for a long time with whom we basically gave up on condoms early in the relationship as I found them too uncomfortable due to the tightness. We split up a couple of years ago and it became obvious that if I want any sort of sane sexual relationship in the modern world ever again I would need to be able to use the things.
So I got cut about four months ago.
Here’s a very timely and apposite article from a hugely respected journal: They haven’t seen it all: Playboy twins bewildered by CBB housemates’ assertion that most UK men aren’t circumcised
Asked and answered:
emphasis mine
OT: Why is it that you’re comfortable using the word “penis”, but can’t use your big girl words to describe your vulva?
[Anthropology major mode]
FYI, FGM is culturally an African tradition and is not tied to Islamic belief. It is, however, a cultural practice that is common among North African Muslims because the cultures that existed there before the transition to Islam from indigenous belief dictated that FGM was an appropriate way to modify women in that community.
Here’s my citation:
Walley, Christine J. “Searching for “Voices”: Feminism, Anthropology and the Global Debate Over Female Genital Operations”. Cultural Anthropology, 12.3 (Aug. 1997): 405-438. JSTOR. Web. 27 Jan. 2012.
[/AMM]
I am not opposed to circumcision, but would not leap to choose it for any male children I would theoretically have. It’s a personal decision with far fewer risks than FGM that is becoming less common in the US, which I don’t think is a bad thing. Other folks upthread have mentioned some of the reasons that people use when deciding to circumcise their sons, and most of them are going to be pretty banal, as it’s primarily an aesthetic issue. A lot of choices made for children and infants are made based on the parents’ cultural and familial preferences and a consideration for what’s “normal” in their peer group, and this is among them; all of these decisions are made under the assumption of it being in the child’s best interest to do things in that manner.
As for your other issues re: circumcision and yoga, you really should go seek a therapist to resolve some of them, as you’re making unhealthy and unrealistic associations with separate things that bother you. (How does a five year old think the state of his penis determines his religion? Did your parents or parents’ friends frequently tell the European “how do you tell an American…” foreskin joke in front of you? I know children are capable of odd logic, but this one is missing a piece to connect the two.)
Ah, well, I don’t mean ‘pansies’ in a homophobic-slur kind of way. That’s a relief. I’m being rude because I guess there is a form of abuse very fresh in my mind. Two sides of everything, if you will.
My further responses would probably take the form of a rude kind of art. I am reluctant to post further. Shall I? I’ll take votes for 24 hours after the time stamp, then it is yes or no time.
That you claim not to have meant it that way doesn’t make it OK. There are plenty of other words you could have chosen that don’t have that connotation. There are no two sides to it - you deliberately chose a word which has for some time been used as a pejorative towards gay men.
As for being rude to us because of alleged “abuse”, that doesn’t follow either. I am not your parent or paediatrician, and had nothing to do with anything that may or may not have happened in your life. The people of Britain generally don’t even circumcise their own children, let alone bear the responsibility for decisions about what may have happened to you in your infancy. Therefore desist from throwing insults around.
I’m assuming this whole thread is a troll, based just on this.
As an adult, you either learn to get over things you can’t control, or you let what happened to you umpteen years ago, that you don’t remember happening, that really doesn’t affect your life now except that YOU LET IT…make you insane.
So, insane or troll or both.
Good luck with that.
Nah, you don’t get it.
But I do have to stop this. If I am not breaking the ‘don’t be a jerk’ rule, what comes next probably does. I am just going to be depressed this time, and there is no way to mad my way out of it. I’m going to turn the board into a bunch of jjimms.
jjimm: The confronting thing didn’t work on the BP spill because it is too big to fully understand. I tried and wound up starting so many threads it was pissing people off. The confronting thing did work on the Brit bias. It isn’t like Tony Hayward was the first time I noticed what nincompoops Brits can be- I don’t think I’ve let on that I’m part English (though not at all British, egad!). You obviously got pissed off by my airing it out, but I do realize one can’t make such generalizations. Maybe you aren’t going to get over it, we’ll see. I still don’t really like Britain very much, but let’s try to look at it as more of a New England vs. Manchester kind of thing.
Well I am sorry but it doesn’t have anything to do with homosexuality. I have never in my life referred to a gay person as a ‘pansy’, or hardly anyone else either. Sorry you don’t like it, but I simply did not ‘deliberately choose a word which has been for some time been used as a pejorative towards gay men.’ It means ‘lacking courage’. Like, ooo, you’re too scared to click a link (because really I will tell you if it is NSFW, but you don’t trust me), which is a dumb statement but really doesn’t have to do with gays except for your associations with the word ‘pansy’.
Sorry, I’ll pick another word next time.