I’ve been wondering about the american circumcising for quite some time. Is there some religious explanation to why it’s so common over there? As an atheistic european, I’m uncircumcised, and I can’t really come up with any physical explanation as to why I would want to change that.
So, what are the reasons for the big circumcising-spread? What age does “the big snip” occur in? How is it all generally reflected in the american society?
Thanks in advance. This is my first thread as well as my first post, so go easy on me!
well, you probably know (i hope you know) that jews require circumcision. 8 days after birth. but it’s done here for reasons of hygiene, probably sometime within the first month of life, although i’m not entirely certain. i don’t imagine that there are too many people who get circumcised past infancy.
personally, i think penises are really much more attractive when circumcised. but that’s just me.
I think you’re spot on there Mangetout. Aside from the religious and medical reasons, cultural inertia seems to be the main culprit with many of the other reasons simply being justification to do what has always been done.
Well, I’m more interested in the circumcision of non-jewish children here. Doing it because of judaism or because of a tight foreskin is universal, but apart from that, it just seems to me that circumcised males disproportionally many in the US?
Okay, I’m generally caucasian in genetic background. But, living in Seattle, I see people of every hue, color, race, breed, nationality, and combination of the above. I don’t think society has trained me to perceive whether a particular Philipina woman is beautiful - but what I consider an absolutely stunning Philipina I would not think beautiful if she were a white woman. A beautiful black woman very often looks nothing like a beautiful white woman, and if the white woman had those facial features, she would not look beautiful. But the black woman is gorgeous. So where did I get these very different standards for beauty?
As for whether a circumcised penis is beautiful, I imagine a great many American women have never seen anything else. If you never see anything else, how can you compare one beauty to another? (Or, you could take the Red Dwarf attitude, and think they all look like ‘the last chicken in the shop’.)
So if we’re agreed that it’s largely cultural inertia for gentile American males to be near-uniformly genitally mutilated at birth, why did it become so common in America and not in Europe?
I uniformly warn women if it seems that they’ll be seeing me in the all-together soon. More often than not, they haven’t seen an uncircumcised penis and uniformly they don’t much care, whatever their preconceptions.
I find it amazing that women claim such strong preferences on this issue. If a woman about to have sex with me cared so little for me that the presence of a foreskin could dissuade her, what a trifling, flighty twit she must be.
The foreskin is not an essential part of the penis, and its removal is excision, not mutilation.
In the 1970s, 80 percent of American male infants were circumcised. By 1999, the number had dropped to 60 percent. The international average is 15 percent. Men’s Fitness article about circumcision.
Previous posters have answered this fairly completely, but to sum up:
It became widespread in the USA because it was believed to prevent masturbation. In the 19th century, it was a common belief that masturbation led to criminality and insanity. It was supposed to even be immediately visible in the onanist–they were slack-jawed, drooling, and mentally deficient in every way, at least according to some sources I’ve read.
Why it is done so much in the current day pretty much boils down to cultural inertia. It’s also fed by two bizarre attitudes: Irrational desire for sons to resemble fathers in this. Belief that an uncircumsized boy will suffer all manner of social opprobrium in the locker room for daring to look different “down there”.
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