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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36198 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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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?

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.

circumcision reduces rates of penile cancer

Should we remove infant females' breast tissue to reduce their odds of breast cancer?

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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