A visitor from outer space might be forgiven for concluding that the most important part of the human body is the foreskin. It is, after all, the only part of the body that has multiple organizations devoted to its preservation in the natural state. The visitor might get the impression that the choice of circumcision is a fateful choice with profound implications for the rest of life.
It would probably come as a shock to our visitor to learn that circumcision is just one in a series of issues that allow some parents to feel superior to other parents. In fact, the fetishization of the foreskin is just another example of maintaining that minor, irrelevant decisions are critical to parenting, while major decisions that have an impact on the community at large (such as vaccination) should be left entirely to parental discretion.
The language used by foreskin fetishists might lead the visitor to believe that circumcision is very dangerous. According to circumcision.org: “Based on a review of medical and psychological literature and our own research and experience, we conclude that circumcision causes serious, generally unrecognized harm and is not advisable.” Foreskin fetishists also employ inflammatory language to express their judgmentalism. Circumcision is “mutilation” and parents who choose to circumcise their sons are “mutilators”.
The foreskin fetishists are so obsessed with the foreskin that they actually dare to advance the misogynistic claim that male circumcision is analogous to female genital mutilation, in other words, that the foreskin is the analogue of the clitoris. The male analogue of clitoridectomy is is amputation of the penis. Comparing circumcision to clitoridectomy is like comparing ear piercing to having your ears cut off.
Anti-circ activists like to claim that there only risks and no benefits to circumcision, but that is not true. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics:
“Existing scientific evidence demonstrates potential medical benefits of newborn male circumcision; however, these data arenot sufficient to recommend routine neonatal circumcision. Inthe case of circumcision, in which there are potential benefitsand risks, yet the procedure is not essential to the child’s currentwell-being, parents should determine what is in the best interestof the child. To make an informed choice, parents of all maleinfants should be given accurate and unbiased information andbe provided the opportunity to discuss this decision. It is legitimatefor parents to take into account cultural, religious, and ethnictraditions, in addition to the medical factors, when making thisdecision…”
Circumcision is now known to have additional benefits in preventing the transmission of HIV. In fact, the World Health Organization has begun recommending routine circumcision for adult African males, in order to limit the spread of a disease that has devastated a continent.
Why do anti-circ activists fetishize the foreskin? They do so because it is a convenient way to assert superiority over parents who make different decisions. The anti-circ activists belong to a group of parents who believe that parenting can be reduced to a few decisions (trivial in reality) about birth, circumcision, diapers (cloth or disposable), whether your child sleeps in your bed, and how much and how you carry your baby around. Fortunately, or unfortunately, parenting is far more complicated. There are no fool proof prescriptions for successful parenting, and no simple ways to separate the “good” parents from the “bad”.
Rather than judge parenting by process (the decisions parents make), good parenting can only be judged by outcome. Did the choices that the parents made allow the child to reach his or her potential and become a happy and productive member of society? When parenting is judged by outcome, we are all in the same boat. No one really knows if they are doing the right thing until long after a particular decision is made. Therefore, no parent can feel superior to another parent. However, some parents really, really want to feel superior to everyone else. Hence the elevation of the foreskin to being one of the most important parts of the human body.
Well, you are a circumciser so can we really trust what you say here. Boys are not born with something that you need to cut off for your own profits.
Advocacy of an injurious, harmful, disfiguring, irreversible surgical amputation of a functional body part is profoundly unethical and shameful when a medical doctor, who is pledged to do not harm, is shocking when a medical doctor does it.
This doctor should at least have the decency to withdraw this article.
We know that American OBs make tons of money from doing infant circumcisions, which have no medical indication because the infant boys do not have diseased foreskins and are medically-unnecessary, non-therapeutic surgery performed on a child who cannot grant consent, in violation of his human rights to bodily integrity.
The author apparently does not know what she advocates cutting off, what it does, why it there, or the immense life-long psychological and sexual damage that it does to the individual.
This file may provide some of that missing information:
http://www.i2researchhub.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/GenitalIntegrityStatement.pdf
“Therefore, no parent can feel superior to another parent.”
So you have no issue with me circumcising my daughter? After all, it’s simply parental choice, right?
By the way, I was circumcised for a tight foreskin when I was 14. NEither my parents nor I provided informed consent as we were not told what it was, what the consequences would be, or that it wasn’t necessary.
Removal of my foreskin destroyed my sexual pleasure for life because all the erogenous sensation is in the foreskin. Your’e under the misconception that the glans is the primary erogenous tissue and the foreskin is useless. This is untrue. The foreskin has all the erogenous nerves and is essential for orgasm, hence why circumcised men can’t orgasm, only ejaculate after rubbing scar tissue. If you were correct, you would be able to provide neurological evidence the foreskin is non-erogenous. But you can’t, because every histological analysis in existence shows the glans to have barely any erogenous nerves and the foreskin to contain virtually all the fine-touch reception, ie. the erogenous nerves.
When you dismiss the foreskin as useless, you are calling intact men liars when they say foreskin feels amazing. That’s like me saying to women, you are lying when you say you need your vulva.
You should be struck off as you’re not qualified to be a doctor, neither in terms of ethics nor in terms of knowledge.
Noun1.fetishist – one who engages in fetishism (especially of a sexual nature)
degenerate, deviant, deviate, pervert – a person whose behavior deviates from what is acceptable especially in sexualbehavior
Actually, the fetishists are the people wanting to mutilate babies by excising their primary erogenous organs for no medical reason but simply because they like mutilated penises. 70% of the world’s men are intact. Ergo circumcision is abnormal. Circumcision-supporters are the fetishists. Intactivists are simply defending the human rights of babies. Calling them foreskin fetishists is like calling people who oppose cutting off women’s breasts for no reason, boob fetishists.
Idiot.
“The foreskin fetishists are so obsessed with the foreskin that they actually dare to advance the misogynistic claim that male circumcision is analogous to female genital mutilation, in other words, that the foreskin is the analogue of the clitoris. The male analogue of clitoridectomy is is amputation of the penis. Comparing circumcision to clitoridectomy is like comparing ear piercing to having your ears cut off.”
Rubbish. There is no hard scientific evidence that FGM is worse in terms of sensory loss than MGM. In fact, given that histological analysis has proven virtually all erogenous nerves to be in the foreskin and virtually none in the glans penis, it’s clear that male circumcision is actually far worse than FGM in terms of sensory loss.
All you’re doing is parroting a folk theory. Even the claim the glans clitoris is the most erogenous part of the female genitalia has no neurological evidence to back it up.
You are so ignorant.
As for HIV risk, if this was true then epidemiological data would support the claim, but it doesn’t. The studies you refer to were methodologically absurd, and even if they were correct it would only lower HIV risk by 1.3%. It’s madness to mutilate babies, who don’t have sex, to hypothetically lower HIV risk by 1.3%. You are insane.
You’ve just called all anti-female circumcision activists vulval fetishists. Congratulations.
“It is, after all, the only part of the body that has multiple organizations devoted to its preservation in the natural state”
That’s because the foreskin is the only part of either sex that’s demonised and removed at birth for no medical reason.
The intactinuts prove time and again (and especially with the Chase Hironomus case) that they care more about foreskin and penis than the people the penis is attached to
“Comparing circumcision to clitoridectomy is like comparing ear piercing to having your ears cut off.”
Comparing circumcision to ear piercing:
“Ear-piercing removes no tissue, does not threaten any bodily function, can be tolerated without anesthesia, and is reversible: the hole will close up over time if the child decides later on that she would like to have her earlobes hole-free. By contrast, male circumcision removes up to half of the skin system of the penis, eliminates the motile and protective functions of the foreskin, cannot be tolerated without anesthesia, and is irreversible” -Brian Earp
The two practices aren’t remotely similar.
“A visitor from outer space might be forgiven for concluding that…” The shrieking newborn is in pain? These beings are insane! That’s just a normal, healthy part of this other being’s body, its not a pathology but they’re going to peal it away and cut it off. Maybe something like that.
Exactly and what irks me its females like her that do them.
“It is, after all, the only part of the body that has multiple organizations devoted to its preservation in the natural state.”
It is, after all, the only part in all of human anatomy that has humans devoted to its *removal* upon birth. So that only makes sense.
Funny thing isn’t it? How the *American* male foreskin is particularly flawed compared to the 80% of intact men…and every male human which lived and survived *before* circumcision and hygiene and medicine were ever invented. So easy, cavemen did it.
Dr Amy, I agree with your other views but this is just wrong. It’s about basic human rights, not mommy wars. No one should have the right to remove healthy and functional parts of someone else’s body for no immediate medical need. Foreskin is not a birth defect. Circumcision goes beyond mommy wars. I am insulted that you think that my speaking up for the rights of boys means I have a foreskin fetish. That is disgusting.
“Brian Morris has been attempting to keep the information on this page from staying available to the public. On March 7th 2011, Morris attempted to remove this page; more on that here(http://www.circleaks.org/index.php?title=Brian_J._Morris#Circleaks_Incident). On April 26th 2012, Morris removed information from his website and pamphlets due to information published on this page, information published about the Gilgal Society, and due to an arrest of Vernon Quaintance as a result of information on Quaintance’s page. You can review this page, and the related pages, to see what Brian Morris doesn’t want you to know.”
Links accessible from Brian Morris’ website CircInfo that show him to be a circumfetishist.
http://www.croydonadvertiser.co.uk/Croydon-circumcision-campaigner-caught-child-porn/story-15866127-detail/story.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20100707102631/http://www.circinfo.net/pdfs/GFW-EN.pdf
http://www.circinfo.net/circumcision_websites_online_discussion_groups.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20080122133016/http://www.circinfo.net/circumcision_websites_online_discussion_groups.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20050204073808/http://groups.yahoo.com/group/circumcisionfetish/
http://web.archive.org/web/20031228165612/http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eroticmalecircumcision/
Brian Morris refuted
“Breaking unwritten confidentiality and courtesy rules of the peer-review process, Morris distributed his slandering criticism of our study to people working for the same cause. Rather than resorting to such selective distribution among friends, Morris should make both reviews freely available on the internet by posting them in their entirety on his pro circumcision homepage”.
http://m.ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/41/1/312.full?sid=f4ce1933-b4fc-494c-8082-48862bb43aa3
You obviously have no clue about the function of the foreskin. Or that the most common form of FGM is the surgical (as in performed in a hospital setting) removal of the clitoral hood. Which is EXACTLY analogous to male circumcision in terms of anatomy, but much less damaging. You also ignore the fact that cultures that perform the more brutal forms of FGM also perform more brutal forms of male genital mutilation, such as subincision.
I see you also fail to mention that not one medical organization in the world recommends performing circumcision on infants, though you do quote the AAP flat out saying they don’t recommend it. Perhaps you’d like to quote the rebuttal by over a dozen other doctors from around the world calling their statement out for its cultural bias. You can find that on the AAP’s site as well.
Also, note the WHO says “adult African males”, not first world infants. They also still recommend condoms. The recommendation is absurd anyway as the risk of female to male transmission (the only transmission vector to show any reduction from circumcision) is 0.4%. When condoms provide 99.9% effectiveness, what good does a claimed 60% reduction of a 0.4% risk mean? Not much.
Dude, you are a homosexual with a foreskin fetish! I feel sorry for your kid……uncut because his father’s fetish! You are a disgusting uncut sub-human! This has nothing to do with you being gay!
Dude, you are a gay foreskin fetishist! No one cares that you like chewing on foreskins….I pity you poor uncut kid!
in
other countries, this is a non issue since circumcision is usually
done in the 8-17 year old range with the consent of the patient + the
parents. And there is a large social stigma associated with uncircumcised males
If you dont do it in infancy then a lot of the objections about consent go away
I’m sorry, but no. Forcing genital cutting on a baby is not right. It’s not needed and it really should be the choice of the person who owns the penis. The child when they’re old enough. There’s nothing unreasonable about this at all!
Thank you!! I love this!! This is on point, very accurate and this needs to stop