As someone who was circumcised for the ‘medical hygiene’ reasons when it was more popular I am sick and tired of seeing all circumcision lumped together as mutilation. Sure it was probably unnecessary as I am not aware of having a condition that made it necessary in my case, but it was well done and everything has been positive for me. Those that get it done for medical reasons being called mutilation would be offensive.
It certainly should end as a practice, especially as a religious practice done by non-medically trained people, but stigmatizing people who had it done as being mutilated is insulting.
I was circumcized as an infant without my consent, and my mutilated dick wants you to stop downplaying the severity of its fate.
A piece of me is literally missing, and you want to say I’m not mutilated because that would offend you? Why, do you have uncomfortable feelings about your own situation that you refuse to examine?
Circumcision is and should only be a medically necessary procedure. I’ve never heard anyone say medically necessary circumcision is mutilation, but I’m from Europe where most men aren’t circumcised, so there’s that. Whoever says it’s mutilation when it’s medically justified is ignorant.
I think the question is: who’s deciding what is medically necessary or justified? Because as far as I am aware there are health benefits associated with a circumcision, from reduced risk of AIDS infection to the reduced risk of infections.
Is that enough to justify it? Some doctors will say yes, and some will say no. Some people will suffer negative consequences and some won’t.
I think most of the negativity around it is because it’s being done on infants, and often for religious reasons. But to the intentions matter, when the action is in line with medicine?
Mastectomy reduces the risk of breast cancer. That’s clearly not a valid medical reason to perform it on everyone. The medical necessity that people are talking about here is obvious–a specific condition like phimosis that is directly harmful to the patient. The “risk of AIDS” bullshit can be totally mitigated by… washing up.
This is true. I was circumcized as an infant, and when I started having sex around 19, I wondered why it didn’t feel as good as it was supposed to. I thought I was doing something wrong.
So I tried harder and harder, inexperienced as I was, and didn’t learn how to make sweet, gentle love until much later. Even then, it was more for my partner’s pleasure, because my dick just isn’t that sensitive.
It caused a lot of problems in my relationships early on. Frustration and feelings of inadequacy on both sides, because I was “hard to satisfy” literally unable to feel satisfactory pleasure…
Without arguing either for or against the practice, losing feeling is an outdated idea. It’s been studied and shown that circumcised men are just as sensitive as uncircumcised
Nerve endings in the foreskin are not that sensitive to sexual stimuli, I would consider that as much loss of sensitivity as amputating a leg is loss of sensitivity.
Even the glans loses sensitivity. On an uncircumcised penis, that whole area is basically a mucus membrane. On a circumcised penis, it becomes dry an rougher, like the skin on your knuckle. It absolutely does reduce sensitivity.
Also,
I would consider that as much loss of sensitivity as amputating a leg is loss of sensitivity.
You wouldn’t say doctors should amputate babies’ legs to reduce risk of gangrene, would you? How is that even an argument? “Oh, those nerve endings don’t matter cause it’s just like losing a leg, nbd.” What the fuck?
On a circumcised penis, it becomes dry an rougher, like the skin on your knuckle. It absolutely does reduce sensitivity.
Anecdotal evidence, I know, but I didn’t notice loss in sensitivity since my circumcision. Healing was a bit of a pain, but other than that I experience just as much pleasure as before.
How is that even an argument? “Oh, those nerve endings don’t matter cause it’s just like losing a leg, nbd.” What the fuck?
The point is: it’s a bit facetious to call nerve loss from removing a part of a body a loss of sensitivity. You got a piece of skin removed, of course it’s not sensitive, it’s gone. As for the skin under the foreskin, it didn’t got removed, why would it lose nerve endings?
From what I experienced, again anecdotal so not a study, I highly doubt loss of sensitivity argument. Just to be clear, I don’t think babies should get circumcised, but I wouldn’t use an argument I feel is weak to argue against it.
The brain is weird and whacky the way it works. It has a sort of auto-gain. The less nerve stimulus over time leads to a higher sensitivity of remaining nerves. Often when people lose a limb, they still feel pain in it - the lack of nerve signals causes the remaining nerve endings to be amplified so much that despite not even having pain receptors, the noise signals are perceived as pain. So a human growing up with a cut forskin simply adapts and the brain perceives more sensitivity from the other nerves to produce the same levels of sensation.
So a human growing up with a cut foreskin simply adapts and the brain perceives more sensitivity from the other nerves to produce the same levels of sensation.
That is just false. You sound like someone who isn’t circumcised.
Without the foreskin intact, the glans is subject to friction throughout the day as it’s in contact with the inside of one’s clothes. This reduces sensitivity over time and builds thicker, drier, and rougher layers of skin. Whereas the glans of an uncircumcised penis is basically a mucus membrane, on a circumcised penis it’s more like the skin of a knuckle, but thicker.
Yeah that sounds bad. But it’s completely untrue. Like the skin on a knuckle? Haha. If you have to make up stuff why even bother? Conversly, if your dick is really like a knuckle, you should really see a doctor about that.
Oh yeah, I forgot you know more about my dick than I do. The knuckle isn’t a perfect analogy, but that’s no reason to ignore the main point, which is that the glans itself is physically different on circumcised penises because of the friction it’s exposed to throughout the day.
You’re the one peddling misinformation by pretending there’s no difference between circumcised and uncircumcised dicks, and quite frankly with how systemic the problem is, I see no reason to tolerate your bullshit.
That, uhh, sounds nice and all, but I don’t believe it. This doesn’t even make sense on the face of it: Why does removing one body part lead to phantom pain signals, but removing another body part lead to improved sensation? Do people who lose fingers develop better sensation in their remaining fingers to compensate? Wouldn’t it stand to reason then that some men would get phantom foreskin pain?
There’s plenty of signals coming from the nerve bundles in the area. Phantom pain seems to need larger sets of nerve bundles removed/unstimulated. Is s not fully understood, but that seems to be how it works. People who lose fingers often do get increased sensitivity on other fingers and they can also get phantom pain.
Again, I have to express doubt. I understand brain plasticity, and why some people can read Braille, while I cannot. (I haven’t put in the work.) Sensory receptors are specific to certain functions, though, and one type cannot assume the function of another if it’s not present. Nobody can read Braille on their lower back, because it lacks fine-touch receptors.
I did read a study which made a good point about perceived intensity of sensation not correlating with number of sensory receptors. I can understand why circumcision may not affect many men. However, I stand by my statement that you cannot perceive sensation from receptors that are gone. WRT the original comment, there are some men who do experience lowered or absent sexual sensation due to circumcision. Perhaps their brains are attuned to those receptors that are gone. Also, later in life sensory perception of all kinds naturally begins to fade, and the number of missing receptors become more evident.
I think the mechanism in question is more on the brain side. Where certain sets of nerves are processed, if some are missing that area of brain simply adjusts the input strength of others. I suspect adult amputation is different from amputation of a newborn since the brain elasticity is so different. But all we can do it make educated guesses anyway since we can’t do controlled experiments. Studies involving watching brain activity can only go so far to really reflect experience. So we can’t know. I’m just pointing out that the common sense approach you indicated isn’t matched by some clear data. So it’s not cut and dry. It could even be that men circumcised at birth experience more sexual pleasure.
Those that get it done for medical reasons being called mutilation would be offensive.
Right, because they weren’t mutilated, they had to have a procedure done for a medical reason.
Any non-medically necessary surgery to a child’s genitals is mutilation. They have no way to consent, and anything short of a medical necessity is the parent making massive changes to their child’s life based on their preferences. To make the point crystal clear:
If I have a kid and the arm ends up gangrenous, we would remove it as it would be medically necessary for the child’s well-being
If I have a kid and think it’s cool to have one arm, I would be trying to mutilate my child by removing it for no reason
How is performing a medically unnecessary surgery on a child’s genitals not mutilation? Again, you’re changing their body surgically without their consent for no reason aside from ignorant beliefs.
I dislike the ‘mutilated’ label being applied and take it as an insult because of the negative connotations despite not personally having any downsides. It is like claiming that everyone who is overweight based on BMI is unhealthy despite many athletes having a high BMI due to having a lot of muscle.
Plus the person I was responding to said adults who voluntarily chose to get circumcised are mutilated themselves. With that logic ear piercings and voluntarily removing annoying, but not medically probematic moles is mutilation. My point is that you can’t just ignore the negative connotations and use a broad brush to describe people while claiming it is technically accurate.
No, it should not be done to babies without a medical necessity. That doesn’t mean calling everyone who has been circumcised mutilated won’t come across as insulting.
How do you feel about female infants getting their ears pierced?
Also, removing an arm and removing some skin is really not the same. Specially considering that removing that skin has proven health benefits for the baby.
I am sick and tired of seeing all circumcision lumped together as mutilation
it’s the definition of the word. sure, it carries a lot of negative connotations that may not have affected you the same way, and you may have, personally, appreciated your circumcision, but that doesn’t invalidate the feelings of others. this isn’t some zero-sum situation where other people being upset about it somehow invalidated your experience.
Many people can feel different ways about things. That’s called society. A key part of civilization is our ability to all live together with many different people feeling different ways about things. In fact, a huge advance in civilization - no shit - is that, several thousand years ago, we stop killing each other over this very issue. REALLY.
In a much more contemporary context, it’s just not necessary. Most recently, as recently as the late 1970s and early 1980s, a now-debunked study pushed the idea that it was, at least “more hygienic” to circumcise males, but that was based on shaky and now-debunked studies. In modern medicine, circumcision is no longer recommended at birth except in rare cases of medical necessity of urinary or other birth defects. Exceptions also exist in some religions, Judaism most prominently, not for medical necessity, but as an alignment with a belief based on ancient mythology, not unlike the genital mutilations some women undergo in Islam — also widely/globally denounced.
As someone who was circumcised for the ‘medical hygiene’ reasons when it was more popular I am sick and tired of seeing all circumcision lumped together as mutilation. Sure it was probably unnecessary as I am not aware of having a condition that made it necessary in my case, but it was well done and everything has been positive for me. Those that get it done for medical reasons being called mutilation would be offensive.
It certainly should end as a practice, especially as a religious practice done by non-medically trained people, but stigmatizing people who had it done as being mutilated is insulting.
I was circumcized as an infant without my consent, and my mutilated dick wants you to stop downplaying the severity of its fate.
A piece of me is literally missing, and you want to say I’m not mutilated because that would offend you? Why, do you have uncomfortable feelings about your own situation that you refuse to examine?
Me not wanting to be labeled as mutilated doesn’t invalidate your identification as mutilated.
If you consider yourself mutilated, then yes, you are mutilated. I am not mutilated because we see our personal experiences differently.
Yes but it shouldn’t be done to infants because they did not and cannot consent.
You can’t know whether the infant will come to see it as mutilation. And it is irreversible.
I have already expressed 100% support of banning non-medically necessary circumcisions.
Circumcision is and should only be a medically necessary procedure. I’ve never heard anyone say medically necessary circumcision is mutilation, but I’m from Europe where most men aren’t circumcised, so there’s that. Whoever says it’s mutilation when it’s medically justified is ignorant.
I think the question is: who’s deciding what is medically necessary or justified? Because as far as I am aware there are health benefits associated with a circumcision, from reduced risk of AIDS infection to the reduced risk of infections.
Is that enough to justify it? Some doctors will say yes, and some will say no. Some people will suffer negative consequences and some won’t.
I think most of the negativity around it is because it’s being done on infants, and often for religious reasons. But to the intentions matter, when the action is in line with medicine?
Mastectomy reduces the risk of breast cancer. That’s clearly not a valid medical reason to perform it on everyone. The medical necessity that people are talking about here is obvious–a specific condition like phimosis that is directly harmful to the patient. The “risk of AIDS” bullshit can be totally mitigated by… washing up.
Even if it was ‘well done’, you have literally lost nerves and sensitivity in the region leading to an objectively worse experience.
The solution is obvious, don’t chop kids genitals for no legitimate reason. Doesn’t matter if you came out okay or whatever nonsense.
This is true. I was circumcized as an infant, and when I started having sex around 19, I wondered why it didn’t feel as good as it was supposed to. I thought I was doing something wrong.
So I tried harder and harder, inexperienced as I was, and didn’t learn how to make sweet, gentle love until much later. Even then, it was more for my partner’s pleasure, because my dick just isn’t that sensitive.
It caused a lot of problems in my relationships early on. Frustration and feelings of inadequacy on both sides, because I was “
hard to satisfy” literally unable to feel satisfactory pleasure…As a man that got circumcised in adulthood, I can’t confirm any loss of sensitivity.
Religion is not an excuse for child abuse
Without arguing either for or against the practice, losing feeling is an outdated idea. It’s been studied and shown that circumcised men are just as sensitive as uncircumcised
Source?
That is non-figuratively impossible. You can’t feel anything with nerve endings that have been removed.
Nerve endings in the foreskin are not that sensitive to sexual stimuli, I would consider that as much loss of sensitivity as amputating a leg is loss of sensitivity.
Even the glans loses sensitivity. On an uncircumcised penis, that whole area is basically a mucus membrane. On a circumcised penis, it becomes dry an rougher, like the skin on your knuckle. It absolutely does reduce sensitivity.
Also,
You wouldn’t say doctors should amputate babies’ legs to reduce risk of gangrene, would you? How is that even an argument? “Oh, those nerve endings don’t matter cause it’s just like losing a leg, nbd.” What the fuck?
Anecdotal evidence, I know, but I didn’t notice loss in sensitivity since my circumcision. Healing was a bit of a pain, but other than that I experience just as much pleasure as before.
The point is: it’s a bit facetious to call nerve loss from removing a part of a body a loss of sensitivity. You got a piece of skin removed, of course it’s not sensitive, it’s gone. As for the skin under the foreskin, it didn’t got removed, why would it lose nerve endings?
From what I experienced, again anecdotal so not a study, I highly doubt loss of sensitivity argument. Just to be clear, I don’t think babies should get circumcised, but I wouldn’t use an argument I feel is weak to argue against it.
The brain is weird and whacky the way it works. It has a sort of auto-gain. The less nerve stimulus over time leads to a higher sensitivity of remaining nerves. Often when people lose a limb, they still feel pain in it - the lack of nerve signals causes the remaining nerve endings to be amplified so much that despite not even having pain receptors, the noise signals are perceived as pain. So a human growing up with a cut forskin simply adapts and the brain perceives more sensitivity from the other nerves to produce the same levels of sensation.
That is just false. You sound like someone who isn’t circumcised.
Without the foreskin intact, the glans is subject to friction throughout the day as it’s in contact with the inside of one’s clothes. This reduces sensitivity over time and builds thicker, drier, and rougher layers of skin. Whereas the glans of an uncircumcised penis is basically a mucus membrane, on a circumcised penis it’s more like the skin of a knuckle, but thicker.
Yeah that sounds bad. But it’s completely untrue. Like the skin on a knuckle? Haha. If you have to make up stuff why even bother? Conversly, if your dick is really like a knuckle, you should really see a doctor about that.
Oh yeah, I forgot you know more about my dick than I do. The knuckle isn’t a perfect analogy, but that’s no reason to ignore the main point, which is that the glans itself is physically different on circumcised penises because of the friction it’s exposed to throughout the day.
You’re the one peddling misinformation by pretending there’s no difference between circumcised and uncircumcised dicks, and quite frankly with how systemic the problem is, I see no reason to tolerate your bullshit.
That, uhh, sounds nice and all, but I don’t believe it. This doesn’t even make sense on the face of it: Why does removing one body part lead to phantom pain signals, but removing another body part lead to improved sensation? Do people who lose fingers develop better sensation in their remaining fingers to compensate? Wouldn’t it stand to reason then that some men would get phantom foreskin pain?
There’s plenty of signals coming from the nerve bundles in the area. Phantom pain seems to need larger sets of nerve bundles removed/unstimulated. Is s not fully understood, but that seems to be how it works. People who lose fingers often do get increased sensitivity on other fingers and they can also get phantom pain.
Again, I have to express doubt. I understand brain plasticity, and why some people can read Braille, while I cannot. (I haven’t put in the work.) Sensory receptors are specific to certain functions, though, and one type cannot assume the function of another if it’s not present. Nobody can read Braille on their lower back, because it lacks fine-touch receptors.
I did read a study which made a good point about perceived intensity of sensation not correlating with number of sensory receptors. I can understand why circumcision may not affect many men. However, I stand by my statement that you cannot perceive sensation from receptors that are gone. WRT the original comment, there are some men who do experience lowered or absent sexual sensation due to circumcision. Perhaps their brains are attuned to those receptors that are gone. Also, later in life sensory perception of all kinds naturally begins to fade, and the number of missing receptors become more evident.
I think the mechanism in question is more on the brain side. Where certain sets of nerves are processed, if some are missing that area of brain simply adjusts the input strength of others. I suspect adult amputation is different from amputation of a newborn since the brain elasticity is so different. But all we can do it make educated guesses anyway since we can’t do controlled experiments. Studies involving watching brain activity can only go so far to really reflect experience. So we can’t know. I’m just pointing out that the common sense approach you indicated isn’t matched by some clear data. So it’s not cut and dry. It could even be that men circumcised at birth experience more sexual pleasure.
How does that even make sense?
Right, because they weren’t mutilated, they had to have a procedure done for a medical reason.
Any non-medically necessary surgery to a child’s genitals is mutilation. They have no way to consent, and anything short of a medical necessity is the parent making massive changes to their child’s life based on their preferences. To make the point crystal clear:
How is performing a medically unnecessary surgery on a child’s genitals not mutilation? Again, you’re changing their body surgically without their consent for no reason aside from ignorant beliefs.
I dislike the ‘mutilated’ label being applied and take it as an insult because of the negative connotations despite not personally having any downsides. It is like claiming that everyone who is overweight based on BMI is unhealthy despite many athletes having a high BMI due to having a lot of muscle.
Plus the person I was responding to said adults who voluntarily chose to get circumcised are mutilated themselves. With that logic ear piercings and voluntarily removing annoying, but not medically probematic moles is mutilation. My point is that you can’t just ignore the negative connotations and use a broad brush to describe people while claiming it is technically accurate.
No, it should not be done to babies without a medical necessity. That doesn’t mean calling everyone who has been circumcised mutilated won’t come across as insulting.
The negitive connotations are justified in this case
How do you feel about female infants getting their ears pierced?
Also, removing an arm and removing some skin is really not the same. Specially considering that removing that skin has proven health benefits for the baby.
it’s the definition of the word. sure, it carries a lot of negative connotations that may not have affected you the same way, and you may have, personally, appreciated your circumcision, but that doesn’t invalidate the feelings of others. this isn’t some zero-sum situation where other people being upset about it somehow invalidated your experience.
Many people can feel different ways about things. That’s called society. A key part of civilization is our ability to all live together with many different people feeling different ways about things. In fact, a huge advance in civilization - no shit - is that, several thousand years ago, we stop killing each other over this very issue. REALLY.
In a much more contemporary context, it’s just not necessary. Most recently, as recently as the late 1970s and early 1980s, a now-debunked study pushed the idea that it was, at least “more hygienic” to circumcise males, but that was based on shaky and now-debunked studies. In modern medicine, circumcision is no longer recommended at birth except in rare cases of medical necessity of urinary or other birth defects. Exceptions also exist in some religions, Judaism most prominently, not for medical necessity, but as an alignment with a belief based on ancient mythology, not unlike the genital mutilations some women undergo in Islam — also widely/globally denounced.
Uh, no kidding dude.
I get a mutilated finger lopped off its a procedure to save my life / improve its quality.
But cutting off a healthy one because religion / aesthetics is just fucking bananas