Circumcision: An Expansion (Pt. 2 of 2)

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Chris Hitchens, in his fantastic book God Is Not Great, writes a lengthy treatise on male circumcision, condemning it outright. Elegant, caustic, and well-informed, I encourage the intrigued to read his book. Hitchens speaks out, also, against female circumcision, again at length describing in passages of lucid prose the gory details of female circumcision. In Helen Fisher’s excellent book The Anatomy of Love, written from the perspective of natural anthropology, she describes the tribal hunch regarding the power of female sex-drive that rivals, if not surpasses, that of a man’s:

The custom of the veil [hadjab] evolved in Moslem societies partly because Islamic people firmly believe that women are highly seductive. Clitoridectomy, the excising of the clitoris (and often some of the surrounding genital tissues), is done in several African cultures to curb the high female libido. (93)

It is common knowledge that female circumcision is a ritual of dominance and repression. I wonder if this audience hasn’t already “ruled out” the idea of circumcising their infant daughters as a vile ritual. Make no mistake, male circumcision is no less brutal…or stupid. Besides a scant few studies showing that male circumcision may reduce the transfer of such diseases as HIV and HPV, there is not a deluge of conclusive evidence that supports this. So it seems, a simple soapy wash can rid the bacteria from the uncircumcised penis to help the prevention of disease- prophylaxis also helps. That is, the removal of tissue loaded with thousands of nerve endings is cruel and excessive.

But here is your deluge of evidence to the contrary of these few studies: evolution. Whether you tend to favor the foolish argument of intelligent design, or simple Darwinian selection, there is a deluge of evidence, even if you believe in God, that penises were meant to have foreskins and vaginas were meant to have clitorises. Let’s just allow the idea that that the beginning of the grassland-dwelling man–erectus–evolved around 4 million years ago. Against all odds (predators, illness, the elements, et cetera), we survived and thrived, avec foreskins, for millions of years. And it goes much further back. This is one circumcised man’s opinion: millions of years of selection is enough evidence to show that a foreskin is not the useless impediment that we think it is. That’s right- the human reproductive system is not without it’s flaws, but it has proven astoundingly effective in the long-run.

The foreskin acts, first and foremost, to protect the glans and the urinary tract from the elements during infancy. It increases sensitivity in the glans, creating a greater sensation upon contact with flesh when the glans is exposed. It helps the penis operate, as a woman so eloquently put it in an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!, “like a well-oiled piston,” reducing friction and increasing the fluidity of that well-known coital thrust. It is not the curse of the circumcised to go through life completely lost to the pleasures of sex, as I will attest, but it is the curse of the circumcised to remain irrevocably altered by a non-elective surgery. A surgery decided by couples who don’t want other children to look at their son weirdly in gym shower-rooms. For my part, if the pain and humiliation experienced in gym class remains anywhere near the amount it did during my childhood, a taunt or two more would likely make no difference.

The origins of the secular co-opting of circumcision is debated. From my limited research I find reports dating back no further than 200 years- but it seems that it was in the early 19^th century, the Victorian era, when things spiraled out of control. Many reports were published by doctors of the time, seemingly none of them anything but speculative, that claimed circumcision curbed everything from STD spread, poor hygiene and obsessive masturbation. (Considered resultant of frenzied masturbation: retardation, madness, and other symptoms now attributed to malnutrition, brain dysfunction, and untreated syphilis). This bad science is resultant of one of the most sex-obsessed periods in the West, when Christian dogma was culpable for supressing sins of the flesh and thereby liberating the neuroses of the supposed damned.

One thing seems certain: the secular co-opting of circumcision was certainly meant to diminish pleasure and discourage masturbation. Back to the idea of the Sexual Dominance Ritual: everything from foot-binding, genital mutilation, tying children’s hands to their bedposts, and enemas were meant to suppress us sexually. Sorry, there are no health benefits to disallowing a woman to stand on her own two feet, or to put a straight-jacket on a child so he won’t fondle himself in the night (many of the above tactics can be found in this link, which quotes verbatim some of the horrifying doctrine escaping the clergy’s quills at this time).

This is a blog, not a rule system. But allow me this proposal: we allow our sons to reach an age of reason, where they can consider these things for themselves. If the jibing in the shower room is too much for him, well, when he is old enough to make the decision to undergo the procedure, he can decide to remove the tip of his penis. The other option: before we make a decision we consume the knowledge available on the topic. When doctrine and obeisance to the status quo go out the window, exploration, rationalism and free thought should emerge. If parents are hell-bent on having the procedure, then it is their right (though it probably shouldn’t be) to have it performed. But they should not do it before they have witnessed a circumcision, and not unless they are willing to watch it happen to their child. If a pediatrician asked: “Do you want me to pierce your newborn’s ears?” We would stop to question it, hopefully raise an eyebrow. So should we stop to think about such a matter as circumcision (i.e. “Did you want me to cut the tip of your son’s penis off before I discharge you?”).

I wear the scar of a millennia-old ritual designed in a frenzy of sex-hatred, self-castigation, and a disgust for the human genitalia- a meaningless ritual, to be sure. I do not feel robbed. This is how I grew up. Others have responded with self-disgust, and others with a complicit approbation, a blind acceptance of the here and now: “This is what it is and so it goes.”

No. That is not who we are. We are intelligent. We want to do right by our children. We want to seek new answers to ancient, misguided questions. Finally, we want to challenge the norm. Who are “we?”: People who don’t need to make the mistakes of our forebears just because they were our forebears. They struggled, just as we did, to make the right decisions. But with new evidence, new insight, we can stop mutilating each other for no reason. We can revise tradition to make sense to the 21st century, and stop pretending that what people did 2,000 years ago makes sense to our complicated, unique, and disparate lives.

 

More on circumcision:

Circumcision Pt. 1

Circumcision Pt. 2

Circumcision Debate (With Tony, Josh, Alex)

Circumcision and the Psychosexual Nerve

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Filed under Circumcision, Debate, Ritual