Permanently Deleted
The bigger question for me is why American Protestants and their colonial programs do it :amerikkka: :stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2:
Kellogg (yes, the cereal guy) was a contributing factor. He was also a segregationist https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-dawn/200902/time-boycott-kellogg
It’s easier to perform surgery on an infant than to tell a child they need to clean themselves lest they get an infection.
Also sex is bad and you’ll die if you do it a lot so it has to feel less good than it does.
Kind of like a secret handshake. To let people of the same kind know who each other are so they can show ingroup solidarity towards each other. I’m not saying they whip out their dicks and have a swordfight, but an extreme body modification like that is impossible to fake and unlikely to be done by anyone other than the faithful.
Then at some point it became standard in US hospitals to mutilate newborn boys in this way. It was done to me when I was a few days old and nobody asked for anyone’s consent.
As a Jew who is circumcised, I’ve never understood the fuss. Sex still feels amazing, I like how my dick looks… idk. Like, nothing against people who are uncircumcized or people who are and wish they weren’t… obviously everyone gets to have their own opinions about their own bodies… but I’ve just never understood it personally.
No, no. you misunderstood. I’m merely saying that I understand and respect the validity of the opinion of those who are upset that it was done to them. while expressing that I’m personally quite content with my parents decision to have me circumcised.
No two circumcisions (or penises for that matter) are identical. My cut left me with little sensation in my dick, which makes it difficult for me to orgasm. I also have zero gliding mechanism remaining because I got cut “high and tight” style, so I can’t masturbate for long before it gets tears and bleeds. Even if sex feels amazing you never know what you’re missing out on (NSFW example), like a person born colorblind. I once heard an intact cis-man describe the sensation as “if I could lend you a foreskin for one day you would flee the country and change your identity to keep it forever”. I’m a bisexual man and I love playing with cute men’s foreskins and it makes me sad when I compare theirs to my scar—which disturbs me additionally because I see it as two pieces of dissimilar skin tissue (mucousal and regular) that are fused together in a Frankenstein way. There is also the matter of the trauma from the pain (it’s not possible to sufficiently aenesthetize a newborn as they could for an adult going through the same procedure), which can effect a permanent change in personality even without a conscious memory of the event. It fucks me up to think about how something like that could have changed me psychologically, even if the possibility is small.
The origin is probably multi-faceted, but I’ve read that the practice evolved in part as a more humane replacement for the Pagan practice of ritual sacrifice (which is forbidden in Judaism). Instead of sacrificing a whole human life to show your devotion to god, you’re giving up the most valuable and erogenous part of the male body.
It should be noted that the history of circumcision in the US has remarkably little to do with Judaism (or Islam, for that matter, which is also a circumcising religion), and everything to do with puritanical Protestants, so blaming Jews for the prevalence of circumcision today is extra idiotic. The historical Jewish circumcision also happens to remove a lot less tissue than the more destructive American version (hurray). The Statue of David is actually circumcised in this manner although it appears uncircumcised compared to American penises.
Those arguments from a health and hygiene standpoint have been used for at least a century to justify the circumcision of both sexes, and all of them were created after the practices were already well established and searching for new justifications in the face of changing norms on sex. The health benefits are also weakly supported and irrelevant because it’s fundamentally an issue of bodily autonomy. Cleaning intact penises is not at all difficult. Washing the foreskin in the shower is pleasurable even.
