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Notes -
Let's talk about infant male circumcision. Common in the United States, considered beastly in most European countries. But they don't spend much time criticizing the United States about it, perhaps due to fear of being called anti-semitic.
Reasons not to do it:
The foreskin has functions
Bad for the infant's brain due to inadequate aenesthesia
Complications ranging from meatal stenosis to more grisly and life-changing outcomes
Etc etc
Anyway, besides just introducing a topic I believe is underdiscussed both on the Motte and in general, my questions are this:
How do you rate the importance of this issue relative to commonly discussed culture war stuff? If it is true that circumcision is a serious violation akin to rape, then it seems very very important.
and
Does anyone on this board support routine infant circumcision, or is this thread just going to be full of a lot of devil's advocate stuff?
Y'know what, fine. I'll bite. I'm cut, my son is cut, it seems pretty simple to me and I don't get why some people make such an enormous deal out of it. In general parents make irreversible decisions about their children all the time. Pros and cons for their future are weighed, their autonomy is not. This is no different.
Cons:
Potential complications
Potential trauma/brain effect
Reduction in sexual pleasure
Pros:
Less work to clean
Reduced odds of STD transmission
Reduced odds of penile cancer
Reduced odds of phimosis/related issues
Women's preference
I throw out potential complications, as I think is generally safe to do for procedures with low rates of complications - this is not isolated. What's that tongue flap clipping procedure called that potentially avoids speech complications, sometimes done very near birth? Lingual frenectomy or something? My son had that done as well. Unless a procedure is noted to be a risky one, it's not worth worrying about. Given the enormous number of men circumcised in the US and the lack of any widespread trauma or brain effect anybody can point to, that is either unrelated or incredibly low odds. Again, throw out. This leaves reduction in sexual pleasure as the sole con, and yeah, it's pretty much impossible to compare directly since very few men have experienced both sides, and arguably going through puberty already cut is different than being cut as an adult. Without a direct comparison or real data to work with, we have to cobble together some kind of reasoning here. Here's what I've got - premature ejaculation is an order of magnitude more common than male anorgasmia. Supposing the effect is significant, it's more likely to be beneficial than a hindrance.
I agree lots of the pros are pretty miniscule. The numbers are not very significant for STD reduction in places like the US, penile cancer is incredibly rare to begin with, women's preference is an ephemeral social fact, not a hard medical one. Then there's what I'll call near-elimination of phimosis/smegma/etc. Sure, they still could happen, but they're essentially non-issues for the circumcised. That's not much given their prevalence/ease of avoidance, but it's not nothing. Lastly there's less work to clean. People talk about how trivial this is, but it's honestly a bigger deal than it's given credit for! If you save yourself thirty seconds a day, that's something like a week added to your life.
I see a number of doctors advocating for it, a number of (small) positives, and only one real proposed downside worth considering (reduced pleasure) - even that may be statistically more likely to help than harm if it's a big enough effect to meaningfully change your experience.
It very much seems like a far, far, FAR overblown issue with very small effects either way (but that I happen to see as weighing slightly more positive than negative).
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I am circumcised, and on the balance wish that I were not. I support routine infant circumcision.
None that preclude a healthy, productive, satisfying life in its absence. "but it would be so much better if they still had it" is not a persuasive argument to me.
I do not believe you can demonstrate a significant difference in population-level outcomes.
These are extremely rare. Many cultural practices involve rare risks, many of them significantly worse than these.
Here's my question for you: There is a religion with deep roots in our society that considers male infant circumcision to be an integral part of their religious practice, a literal command from God. If circumcision were banned, how should these people respond, in your view?
The rate of serious problems is debated. For instance, Intactivists say stuff like this
"Study design has an effect on the estimation of complication rates. Prospective studies, in which complications are tracked going forward from the circumcision via follow-up examinations, theoretically should capture the incidence of complications most accurately.[11] On the other hand, retrospective studies typically rely on a review of patient charts, a form of data that was recorded for a purpose other than research. Inaccuracies in the medical record (e.g. the not uncommon possibility that the complication was not charted in the first place) tend to lead to underestimation of complication incidence.[12] Even less reliable are retrospective database studies which can only capture events that have had an actual diagnostic or procedure code listed upon discharge.[E.g. 13] It has been estimated that database studies may miss up to 90-95% of complications.[14]"
There are some studies showing a significant difference. Here's a list:
https://www.doctorsopposingcircumcision.org/for-professionals/psychological-impact/
Autism is 5 times more prevalent in the United States than in Europe, some people think MGM might have something to do with it.
We used to perform other surgeries on babies without anesthetic, do you think that had a long term effect on their psychologies? From Wikipedia: "It is now accepted that the neonate responds more extensively to pain than the adult does, and that exposure to severe pain, without adequate treatment, can have long-term consequences." Do you think science is just generally wrong about this? It seems to me like the idea that torturing babies has long term psychological consequences is just obviously what we should predict based on priors. Are you really skeptical?
There are a lot of Jews who do a religious ritual called the Brit Shalom instead. Religions give up stuff all the time; I think the transition would be easier than you imagine. What percentage of Mormons still practice polygamy? Catholics no longer say that people who commit suicide go to hell. Etc etc etc.
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The most contrarian position!
By not doing it anymore -- same as people who believe the same about female circumcision. If they can figure out a way to get out of stoning their rebellious children, I have every faith that their best lawyers will be able to find a way around the commandment to cut off part of their babies' healthy penises.
And if they don't desist?
I guess in that case we should treat people who mutilate their baby boys' genitals the same way we treat the people who mutilate their baby girls' genitals.
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Maybe they would immigrate to a country specifically founded to cater to that religion instead of a secular one.
I'm curious as to how serious you think this issue is. If they do not move and do not desist, what penalties do you think are worth enforcing in an attempt to get them to comply?
...Let me phrase it a different way. We could say "fine them ten bucks". Suppose they shrug, pay the fine, and continue with the practice. So we could say "fine them a hundred bucks". Suppose they shrug and pay the fine, and and continue the practice. We implement a stronger penalty, they continue to ignore, evade or accept the penalty. What penalty is sufficiently strict that further penalties aren't worth it, even if they do not comply?
I guess the same penalties that would be applied if they cut off any other part of their healthy baby's bodies.
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Probably easiest to make it legal to sue for malpractice for performing infant circumcision without a medical abnormality to justify it. For non doctors just cover it with whatever penalties we already use for practicing medicine without a license plus civil liability to the parents or kid. The hardliners will keep going but it will peel off the moderates over time and there won't be enough to resist. Basically the gun control playbook.
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The answer to this is the same as any regulation in the modern state. There is no limit.
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I'll answer: they should suck it up because we shouldn't be making laws based around religious commandments. Their children are not property or slaves for them to make irreversible choices for. What's wrong with a standard, reddit-tier "argument for gay marriage" or bastardized "separation of church and state" argument in this scenario?
I'd like to make that argument as a top-level post, I think.
Suppose they don't want to suck it up, and are unwilling to comply with these laws. What penalties are reasonable for flouting such a law, in your view? How hard should we work to enforce such a ban?
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If trans people are a generous 1% of the population who lose let's say 95% of sexual QoL on average as a result of various medical interventions, and about half of all men lose 5% from circumcision, that's 0,95% harm per capita (done typically well after puberty starts, at an age when people start to be culpable for crimes), compared to 1,25% done at birth. We probably should care about circumcision more than about trans kids.
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The common arguments I have seen for infant male circumcision are tradition and hygiene. My response to the hygiene argument is bewilderment. What if someone said, "hey, let's remove your toenails at birth, it will be more hygienic for you later in life, you won't have to wash them or clip them. You don't need them to have a functional foot." Seems insane to me. It would be cruel to inflict pain and remove a healthy and normal part of the body for such a reason.
As for tradition, I often see value in certain traditions that offer a benefit, whether it be social or cultural. I don't see any value in circumcision as a tradition, even for "fitting in" because no one really sees penises except in a sexual context and I don't think there is a strong preference, in the US at least, for guys being circumcised. Last I heard the circumcision rate for boys born in the US was declining. I believe it is like 55% now when it used to be 65% or so.
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I'm not for circumcising newborns.
And on paper stopping said practice is of concern, that's if you care about "human rights" in the abstract. However, I don't think anyone besides the 3 principled civil libertarians really does, and since new born males can't speak up about it and no interest group will fight for it, I wouldn't hold my breath. It costs too many weirdness points because of the current political climate.
The cultures that got it right might have gotten it right for reasons other than the one you want to get it right for.
What does it mean to care about this issue but not care about human rights? I care about making the world a better place, and ending infant circumcision would do that.
People should get in the habit of solving coordination problems. Yudkowsky, dath ilan, etcetera. The "weirdness points" thing is a coordination problem.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question, but the answer seems obvious to me: someone could care about circumcision but not because of reasons relating to human rights. For example, someone could have an agenda against feminism and so go crusading about issues that affect men, in order to take conversation and public consciousness away from female-centric policy. I'm not saying you're doing that, just that it could be someone's motivation.
The poster you're replying to, I think, is saying that of all the human rights violations, circumcision just seems like such a silly hill to die on. Why spend much for little return value, instead of allocating effort to more fruitful violations? Hopefully in the future, circumcision won't cost so much to fix, or maybe once all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, then reach for circumcision.
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Well I know of a few who are very vocal about it, and also even a few women. I think it's going to change over time, especially as the idea that it only started to prevent masturbation gets more widespread.
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In my recollection it's been discussed on the Motte before but not nearly as much as I've seen in it in /r/all. Literally any post with a penis or even mentioning foreskin would devolve into male circumcision debate and I remember it at least ten separate times in random threads. The people invested in caring about it care about it is so much that I would never want my kid to be circumcised. I remember watching a Penn and Teller Bullshit episode about circumcision and there was this guy who was so obsessed with getting his lost foreskin back that he attached weights around his penis to create new foreskin. If it is affecting people that much from the trauma or loss of potential sensation or just becoming obsessed with wanting that part of their body back I'd never do it to my kid because I would not want him on Reddit going into a /r/funny post showing two different mushrooms and comparing them to uncircumcised/circumcised penises and feeling the need to lay out seven paragraphs with ten citations about how evil circumcision is. Whatever health benefits the WHO gives or even the prevention of a future mentioned below is not worth my kid growing up to make a post like that on /r/funny.
But the best argument in favor that I have is this: I used to listen to Loveline and the amounts of calls they would get from men who had Phimosis or tearing during sex of their foreskin and had to have an adult circumcision were at least biweekly. I also remember the kid in Nip/Tuck who was uncircumcised and girls made fun of him and his parents wouldn't let him get circumcised, so he tried to circumcise himself in the bathroom with his dad's scalpel. Though that one probably is vanishingly rare in real life.
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So that's why Jews are commonly known for their exceptionally low IQ and general ineptness.
Aren't Jews known for higher than average levels of neurosis?
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Do they do it with anaesthesia ?
Traditional method, when performed on eighths day from birth, doesn't involve anaesthesia. Some do it non-traditionally and then anaesthesia may be involved. If done on adults, it's always under anaesthesia as far as I know.
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Saliva is an anaesthetic.
Well, I meant things that are commonly seen as anesthetics. I think traditionally the infant is also given a drop of wine, but I have no idea if it produces actually any effect at all. The only possible way to know would be maybe to hook enough infants to MRI or something like that at the moment of doing the mila, to establish a good study group, but I would not expect enough parents or mohalim be willing to cooperate with that. It is considered in some circles a sign of good mohel when the infant does not cry a lot, but at this age the infant can cry for a thousand reasons, so that is not a good proxy for the amount of pain.
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What, seriously?
Saliva contains a compound called opiorphin that is a painkiller.
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Conversely, costly signalling: look how smart we are even with these drawbacks!
That's an interesting thought. Jews were made to handicap themselves by God, because otherwise there would be no stopping them.
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Well there are other ways to hurt a brain besides lowering IQ. Neuroticism, Autism, etcetera.
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I am strongly opposed to all cosmetic surgical alterations of a child's genitalia. At least with gender reassignment surgery there's an argument to be made that by modifying a teenager's genitalia you're alleviating their emotional distress. We can debate the efficacy of the method for attenuating distress until the cows come home, but at least the method itself is actually defended on utilitarian grounds.
The same cannot be said of circumcision (male or female), which is justified on the basis of tradition and religious ritual alone. (Or occasionally with the explicit aim of attenuating sexual sensitivity and thereby reducing an individual's quality of life).
Untrue. Again efficacy debatable, but the argument is made that circumcision reduces rates of penile cancer and STD transmission.
This is the first time I've heard the argument that circumcision reduces rates of penile cancer.
It's kind of reductive. Every ounce of flesh has some risk of turning cancerous. Less flesh means less risk of cancer. Shorter people have lower cancer rates than taller people, for example.
So... you could use the "less risk of cancer" argument in any circumstance where you're proposing to remove healthy tissue.
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Should we remove infant females' breast tissue to reduce their odds of breast cancer?
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I think it's more that they used the miniscule risks of cancer and STDs to argue for something we were already doing for other reasons anyway. We stuff our kids full of corn syrup and sit them in front of screens for 16 hours a day, it's an isolated demand for healthiness to do that but act like a 1/10,000 chance of cancer is worth mutilating an infant.
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The same can, and often is, said of circumcision though: if circumcision is traditional in your culture, then not getting circumcised will make you different. Being different often causes emotional distress, both due to internal feelings of not fitting in and external harassment.
This is something that puzzles me. My uncut friends never expressed that they felt any angst or emotional distress about being uncircumcised growing up. One of them even went to a school district where a lot of the student body was Jewish, and he was never harassed about the state of his genitalia. All of them had healthy dating lives and most are now married with the intention of keeping their kids uncut. At my school I also remember this being a non-issue. No one's really scrutinizing dicks in the locker room.
Is it really so common for people to be harassed over whether or not they're circumcised?
Between feelings of not fitting in and harassment, I'd personally say the former is more common. On the harassment front, the majority of the women I've had sexual experiences with commented negatively on the fact that I was uncut, viewing it as unclean. On the not fitting in front, the biggest challenge isn't so much the circumcision itself as the cognitive dissonance with other issues. For instance, seeing friends take seriously feminist arguments that men expressing preferences for shaved genital hair is wrong while knowing they see no issue with women expressing preferences for circumcised penises.
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What about penis inspection days?
Speak plainly and with effort, please.
It's a joke/meme.
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For an adult, yes. If you are full-grown and compos mentis and you positively insist on having bits of you chopped off, well, it's your body and your life. But I don't think you have the religious freedom to do it to someone else, especially if that someone else is a helpless child.
I don't think it's an urgent issue. Comparisons with rape and the worse forms of FGM are excessive. But I do think it's wrong.
I believe it is urgent, and I don't believe these comparisons are excessive. It seems to me that if the procedure were invented today, those precise comparisons would stop it dead in its tracks. A portion of society has been mutilating children for millennia for nonsense reasons, and all of the modern reasoning around cleanliness and STDs are epicycles tacked on well after the fact.
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I think of all the decisions a parent has over their child's life, circumcision is a relatively small one. Parents have the power to completely fuck over their children without it remotely qualifying as anything illegal or even justifiable to have the child taken away. The only way for the world to function is for society to assume parents have their biological children's best interests at heart, which they do 99% of the time. If parents think, "I predict my child would want to be circumcised as an adult", I think they should be allowed to go through with it, because the evidence is strong that adult circumcision greatly reduces sexually pleasure, where as the evidence that circumcision as a baby reduces sexual pleasure is weak.
There are other benefits to foreskin removal as well, like hygiene and having effects on preventing STD spread. Enough that I don't think not being circumcised is overwhelmingly better, even if on net it's probably better.
In conclusion, I think hospitals should tell parents "Are you sure you want circumcision? Here are a lot of the negative effects", and if the parents say yes anyways, it happens.
Isn't it immediately suspicious to you that the group most emphatic that circumcision reduces sexual pleasure is the only group that has tried it both ways?
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I don't think society functions any less well when we admit that parents can get it wrong out of stupidity, laziness, pressure to conformity, or more serious issues. Parents have their kids' best interest at heart.. and yet there are a lot of fat kids.
That's why I suggested we have hospitals educate parents on the negative effects, because parents are dumb sometimes. But going any further than that would be too far. We don't take children from their parents because their parents let them get fat either.
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There are also a lot of fat government health officials.
Sure, and I think governments would tend to do a lot worse. But I won't refrain from criticising people out of fear that it could give ammo to the wrong people.
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I'm sorry, this doesn't make any sense. You acknowledge that circumcision reduces sexual pleasure in adults, which makes intuitive sense being that it removes a portion of the penis that contains a huge proportion of the total nerve endings, provides lubrication, and protects the glans from keratinization. Why would you need special evidence that this also applies to people who are circumcised as babies, and what evidence would possibly satisfy you? How would you possibly distinguish between "this has no effect on pleasure" and "they couldn't possibly know the difference, because they grew up without their foreskin"?
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Not that circumcision is that important, but - say we took this approach with 'lead paint', or unregulated medicine for serious medical conditions, or, when polio was widespread, polio vaccines. It doesn't really make sense.
I'm circumcised. On balance, I would rather not have been, so let's say I was "harmed" by the practice. In what way was that harm analogous to the harm inflicted by lead paint or unregulated medicine for serious medical conditions, or polio?
I appreciate that the term "harm" can be applied to both. Why is doing so useful?
I'm disagreeing with the principle OP stated, while agreeing with circumcision being bad, and also agreeing it's low priority for legislation or banning relative to things like lead paint or unregulated medicine.
Society functions in places where homeschooling is illegal i.e. some form of regulated schooling is mandatory, and mandatory schooling seems to be not assuming that parents have their childrens' best interests at heart. Now, this is bad in particular, in large part because schooling is bad, but it shows that the world can 'function' despite that - and, even if most parents did have their childrens' "best interests" at heart, they may disagree on what those interests are (cheap, but "it's in my child's interests to transition!") or be too incompetent to promote said interests effectively.
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Well this seems like a good time to do the standard rationalist technique "what evidence could convince you otherwise".
What evidence could convince you that infant circumcision reduces sexual pleasure?
Because it seems to me like once you understand what the foreskin does and how sex is different without it, how could it not?
It's been a while since I've last done reading on it, but I've been given to understand that there have been studies done where comparing how circumcised at birth and non-circumcised males rate how much they enjoy sex, they give similar results. This is in contrast to female circumcision, where circumcised females rate it lower. If you have some studies, preferably that have been endorsed by professionals as non-BS since I can't determine if studies are BS myself very well, that suggest circumcised males do enjoy sex less, it would change my mind.
My theory is that the brain is flexible, especially in babies, and can adapt pleasure centers to make up for lack of foreskin so sex is just as good.
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I always hear hygiene and STDs trotted out in these arguments, but I'm somewhat skeptical that it actually matters. Are these really significant in the day and age of regular bathing, and ubiquitous condoms? Like, sure, in Africa, I'm sure it makes a big difference, where HIV ravages something like 1/3 of the population. But in the USA? If there is a small to medium chance that circumcision actually does reduce male sensation, then hygiene and STDs are not enough to make me think circumcision is worth it, at least in the USA and other modernized countries.
It's also worth noting that proponents of female circumcision claim that there are significant health benefits that outweigh the downsides of that, too. But no one outside the countries where it's practiced thinks that that should matter at all to the question of the ethics of FGM.
I'm not going to discuss any specific studies because I don't want to google them. However, I'll echo my memory of the STD transmission rate in Africa being affected by circumcision.
I understand and sympathize with the anti-circumcision argument. I've just found that there's a big disconnect between the people I know in real life vs. internet advocates and the fringe-case traumatized victims. My buddies who are uncut, overall, wish they had been. None of my friends who are regret it or feel less whole. From a practical perspective cleaning your penis is a hell of a lot easier without folds. Sex becomes more complicated with potential rips etc. Oral isn't as straightforward for someone to perform. Once again this is anecdotal but a collection of minor inconveniences.
And then there's the final nail in the coffin for me which is female preference. Life isn't fair. What women want is what men give. There are entire illogical swaths of our society built around it. The accumulation of currency and power is, in my view, largely driven by concerns around sexual access. A significant percentage of American women prefer uncut cock and wishing / hoping they'll change their minds about it if we just stop circumcision is a pipe dream.
Nobody I know remembers being circumcised, but uncut buddies have an uphill battle getting laid. The risk of a botched procedure etc. seems low to me compared to the certainty of reduced sexual opportunities.
It's not that hard either way.
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How many of your friends have a basis for comparison? There may be a certain "ignorance is bliss" thing for most men. My attention first got turned to the subject when I heard from gay circumcised friends who had slept with uncircumcised guys, and said that there is a major difference in sexual function and perceived pleasure.
I'm sure women would adapt. I also think that most women probably don't even think about penises enough to have a preference once way or the other.
... No appreciable number of people have this experience. Of course there's an "ignorance is bliss" component, I have no idea what it's like to have foreskin beyond when I was younger and had different skin/head ratios. I can tell you I didn't like the feeling but that doesn't mean anything.
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I seriously doubt this, given how easy it is to get this done as an adult. Maybe they’re just trying to spare the feelings of their cut friends who have no recourse. Cognitive dissonance does strange things and once you realize you have zero ability to get something it suddenly makes you okay with having a chunk of your genitals missing.
Speaking as an uncut guy with >40 partners in their history, el oh el.
Why would anyone go through circumcision as an adult? There's no fucking way I'm having elective penis surgery, even if there were a couple of women who wouldn't go down on me for it.
It's obvious this is a sensitive subject for a lot of people here. If you don't want to hear other opinions you should probably be on a different forum. I took researching this and discussing it with a variety of people pretty seriously since I actually had to make the call for my kid. Anyone saying it's clear-cut or obvious doesn't get it.
So you’d rather force it on unconsenting babies? Seems kind of a strange contradiction. At least with adults you can get anesthesia, unlike infants.
It’s not a sensitive subject for me personally I just had to point out how skewed your perspective is.
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I don't have strong feelings about it one way or the other, but poisoning the well right from the start doesn't exactly signal good faith.
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Support as in actually care about advancing it? No. But I do find the arguments against infant circumcision to be unpersuasive, and I think it's not at all a big deal if parents choose to circumcise their child for whatever their reasons may be.
What arguments do you speak of? What about them do you find unpersuasive?
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