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I wonder if the whole trans kids issue might be a good way to get more people to turn against non-consensual circumcision. After all, if a person is horrified by the idea of their kid deciding to do a life-altering and probably unnecessary medical procedure because the kid wants to get it done, logically the person should also probably be horrified by the idea of the kid being completely non-consensually forced into a life-altering and unnecessary medical procedure. It adds to the parallels that in both cases it is primarily the sexual aspects of the anatomy that are affected.
The problem here is that you have a large chunk of the population who's experienced circumcision first-hand, and consider the anti-circumcision arguments vastly overblown. If you don't like the practice, don't practice it with your kids. There's no need for laws, you can just let people make the decision for their own children as they see fit.
If on the other hand circumcision were being mandated, or secretly being encouraged for children to get themselves while hiding this fact from parents, that would be a rather different matter.
Don't you see how that seems rather like saying "If you don't like the practice of double mastectomies, don't practice it with your kids"? Obviously double mastectomies are vastly more destructive than circumcision, but I don't see any principled difference. The foreskin exists for a reason and I suspect most guys who have one will testify to the anguish they'd feel if they learned they'd henceforth be deprived of it. For example, see the responses to the relevant question in the ACX survey.
I implore you to let your psychological guard down for a moment and sincerely examine whether your attitude towards circumcision is simply a result of having been circumcised (which I'm assuming with 95 percent confidence that you have been) and the distress you'd experience if you were no longer able to avoid truly reckoning with what was inflicted on you.
The fact that it's vastly less destructive is a principled difference.
Literally anything can be labeled "abusive" or "harmful" if one engages in sufficiently enthusiastic linguistic masturbation. If one is to retain one's sanity, it is necessary to understand that the application of a label does not automatically shift reality. Yes, I understand that circumcision impacts the mechanics of sexual pleasure. The thing is, they do not seem to impact it all that strongly, given that orgasms still fuckin' rock even with one, and sexual pleasure is not remotely the sum of human existence. The simple fact is that I and a lot of other men have had one, and it does not appear to us to be that big a deal. This is in fact born out by the survey you linked: those with their foreskin intact very much want to keep it. Those who've lost it mostly don't care.
This is quite absurd. What, exactly, was "inflicted" on me? I take it for granted that uncut men experience more intense sexual pleasure, but having experienced a goodly amount of sexual pleasure in my life, I do not find myself mourning the lack of additional intensity. What I have is good enough to be frankly dangerous; Having more would be nice, but why should its absence be some terrible crushing tragedy? Do you approach all pleasures this way, mourning that your car isn't a lambo and your house isn't a mansion, and that you didn't buy bitcoin for .001 cents a coin when you should have? How would it benefit me to obsessively mourn the things I theoretically might have had, rather than enjoying the good I do have in a spirit of contentment?
Why is it not good enough for me to freely decide that I won't continue the practice with my own children? Why is more than that needed?
I don't see why. You admit that foreskins provide more pleasure, and I assume you agree that's better than the alternative, so why would you support people allowing others to forever deprive someone else of that experience?
But it's not just the label you find objectionable. You find it objectionable to forbid parents from doing this to their children, unless I misunderstand you.
How would they know what they're missing? And if we have good reason to suppose that people who possess a foreskin very much enjoy it, why would you support the ability for people to deprive others of it for no good reason? Is inflicting blindness acceptable if the blind don't understand what they're missing? The fact that sight is thousands of times more valuable than a foreskin is not a principled reason to support the ability for people to deprive someone else of the latter.
The removal of your foreskin without your consent, and thus the permanent inability for you to ever experience the pleasure it provides.
You're right that in the grand scheme of things it's not a terrible crushing tragedy that should haunt someone and require therapy, etc. But, look, let me be brutally honest and introspective: I think the reason that strident opponents of circumcision like myself seem so disproportionately and militantly invested in it, often veering well into histrionics, is because of the astronomical ratio of harm to benefit. It's just so utterly inexcusable it blows my fucking mind that this is even a thing. There are few problems, practices, and quandaries in life that don't involve tough tradeoffs, the balancing of which reasonable people can disagree about. But the question of whether to cut off foreskins - like the question of whether to bind feet or sharpen teeth, and other such cultural practices - is one of the easiest questions we've ever had to answer. And still the majority of our society gets the answer wrong.
We are simply in the presence of a bizarre and pointlessly (mildly) harmful cultural practice that persists only because those subjected to it are used to it and would feel bad if they admitted how stupid and pointlessly (mildly) harmful it is.
I'm certainly glad to hear that you wouldn't continue this practice with your own children. But the fact that you believe it's acceptable for other parents to do this to their children is a problem, I think. Of course, you're only one person with one vote, but routine natal circumcision continues to be permitted by law because of millions of people who, like you, don't think it should be unlawful.
Something being "better" does not automatically make it "enough better to be worth the tradeoffs", and there are absolutely significant tradeoffs here. Our established norms of religious/cultural toleration are extremely valuable, and banning circumcision would destroy them.
If they still find sex enormously satisfying, as the overwhelming majority do, why should they care to any great extent? It's not as though subjective sexual pleasure can be meaningfully, granularly quantified, to the extent that one sees that their "pleasure gauge" is low. In any case, I've never had a female orgasm, and I can nevertheless infer similarities and differences to the male orgasms I have experienced. Nothing I've seen or heard from uncut men indicates to me that I'm missing anything terribly significant.
The good reason is genuine religious belief in the specific case, and protecting deference to parents' judgement in how to raise their children in the general case. Both of these are vastly more important to me than sex merely being extremely, absurdly, stupendously pleasurable, when it could have been extremely, absurdly, stupendously, ridiculously pleasurable. You are aware of the hedonic treadmill, right? How confident are you that the extra superlative there has any actual effect on someone's subjective sexual satisfaction, much less their overall lifetime happiness?
I object to redefining max-negative labels to cover people we've heretofore coexisted with, based on a tenuous and highly questionable chain of logical inferences. I really don't want this to be done to me, and I am willing to extend a great deal of tolerance to others, even if I find their practices abhorrent, if it means increasing the strength of the norm against this sort of aggressive redefinition.
I object to the label games because they're the primary mechanism by which aggressive redefinition is carried out, and I believe it is preferable to destroy the shared definitions entirely than to allow them to be used this way. That is to say, I would rather there be no accepted definition of child-abuse, and indeed no protections against child abuse at all, than to have that definition transformed into a partisan weapon in the culture war.
Anything can have an astronomical ratio of harm to benefit, if one arbitrarily exaggerates the harms and ignores all the benefits. Sure, we need to say that some practices are unacceptable. Circumcision doesn't meet that threshold, as evidenced by every example you've drawn of such obviously objectionable practices being obviously and severely harmful, while circumcision simply is not.
I get that you find the idea of circumcision repugnant, but you cannot demonstrate serious, concrete harms, because there pretty clearly aren't any. If you can secure the power to ban it anyway, you have created the power to arbitrarily ban any social or religious practice, and that is not a power that a highly values-diverse society can long survive. It will be used as a weapon, and the escalations it leads to will not be survivable.
How do we pick whose values get enforced at gunpoint? What happens when people who lose that competition decide they'd rather fight than submit to oppression?
I appreciate your arguments - I've never heard circumcision defended in this way before, and I'm genuinely enjoying contemplating this challenge and curious if I might even change my mind. For brevity, I hope you'll graciously permit me to omit quotes and respond to what I think is the core dispute that runs through most of what you're saying.
I understand and usually share the instinct to want to limit the ability of the state to interfere in parents' decisions regarding their children and how to raise them, even when it is (I believe) to the detriment of the kid. For example, I think it's important for parents to be able to opt their children out of sex ed classes, even though I think sex ed is beneficial. I also think parents should be allowed to terrify their children with the idea of Hell, even though I think that's harmful.
There's a few reasons I support giving parents a lot of freedom to raise their kids in ways that I think are wrong or harmful. First, each of us might be wrong about what is harmful or beneficial. Second, parents are in a better position to know what's best for their kids and care most about their kids. But perhaps most importantly, it would be truly terrifying to live in a world where the state is essentially credibly threatening lethal force to prevent you from doing what you might think is an extremely important thing for your children. In some cases so important that you might even be tempted to defend your family and way of life with lethal force yourself. Not only is that unstable on a societal level, it's just awful. Like, I sometimes imagine if social workers decided to take my kid away from me and transition him because he started identifying as trans. I honestly suspect I'd die fighting before allowing that to happen.
But with circumcision, I think it's different. To be sure, it's way less harmful than tons of other things that I would without hesitation permit parents to do to their kids. But there's a few reasons I think it merits an exception to the general rule that parents can do to their kids what they wish. First, we already generally don't allow parents to perform medically unnecessary permanent alterations to their kids' bodies. Banning circumcision simply aligns with that norm. Second, circumcision can still be done when the child grows up if he still wants it done for whatever reason. Third, I suspect most non-Jewish parents don't actually care that much and just do it because it feels like the default. I think getting out of this rut requires changing the default.
The Jewish angle to this certainly hits a lot closer to your (and my) concerns regarding state intrusions, given how important Jews consider it to be to their culture and identity and how important it is to them for it to be done to infants rather than waiting. I'm willing to allow Jews to be an exception to a circumcision ban, even if just for reasons of pragmatism and prudence.
If you don't mind, I'm curious how you determine when the state should be able to override parental wishes, if at all. To take an extreme example, I assume you'd want to state to take custody of children whose parents lock them in the basement 24/7 and physically and sexually abuse them. But what about something less extreme, like female circumcision? That's a practice that is, like male circumcision for Jews, very important to some cultures. It's fine if you can't draw a line that precisely demarcates what's bannable and what's not - the world often doesn't afford us the luxury of that sort of neatness. But I am trying to figure out how you propose approaching these tough questions - what principles, axioms, tests, etc. you'd use, if any, beyond a vague sort of "if it's harmful enough".
This is the entirety of my worry. Social systems shape and move people under low stress, and so it's easy to arrive at the belief that the systems are infinitely strong and the people are infinitely malleable. But crank up the stress past a certain point, and the people start deforming the social systems right back. I want people to be aware of this dynamic when they propose social engineering, because I'm afraid that ignorance will lead to breaking things we can't fix.
This is the first time I've had someone come to this conclusion in one of these conversations. Every previous time, the response has been "if someone doesn't want to follow the law because it violates their religion, they should change their religion." Seeing purportedly liberal people demonstrate contempt for the idea of freedom of religion is one of the most radicalizing experiences I've had in the last few years. Hearing someone at least recognize the problem with that line of thinking is an immense relief, so you have my thanks.
I think we'd both agree that circumcision has been normalized in a way that it shouldn't be, to where it's now seen as a sort of "default" for no good reason. I completely agree that this is stupid, and would like to see it reversed; people should not be circumcising their kids "by default", and the fact they are is indeed bizarre and unjustifiable. If we can still allow people who are doing it for what they see as good reasons to do it, and just tell everyone else to knock it off, I'd be perfectly happy with that outcome.
I don't think a principled, fully-general solution to this problem is possible. Which actions should be considered necessary and which abhorrent is a values question. The classic liberal view, it seems to me, was that, roughly speaking, all human values are mutually coherent, and so we should be able to come up with a set of rules that can make at least the vast majority happy. In homogenous, tightly-knit societies of the sort that our civilization was founded on, this was close enough to true for the ideas to work. Unfortunately, the founders mistook local variables for universal constants.
The fact is that not all population-level human values are compatible. It is not true that every African and Ukrainian and Indian and Afghani and Chinese has a California moderate progressive inside them, desperate for escape; that isn't even true for every Texan or Arkansan. It is not true that all religions are the same, or that mutual tolerance between them is possible. There is no general solution to the problem of tolerance, only best-fit local solutions.
What actually happens when mutually incompatible value systems clash is that either they avoid each other, or one forcefully modifies the other. Subjugation and force, strongly applied, can in fact modify practices, at the expense of some variable but potentially very significant amount of human suffering. Hence the British suppressed the practice of sati in India, and the American North abolished slavery, the former with the threat of violence and the later through its execution. The problem is that these sorts of modifications have a very, very bad track-record on net, it seems to me, and a worse one over time as western countries have dropped the force necessary to secure good values, and central and eastern countries kept the force but pursued bad ones, with the result that lots and lots of people died for no good reason, and nothing of value was accomplished through their sacrifice. This pattern has repeated for so long that I think the idea of trying to modify values by force is simply a bad one; the sort of people who can do it isn't the sort of people we are, and pretending otherwise leads to a lot of suffering. We should leave other people alone, neither inviting nor invading the world.
This leads me to my own conclusion: peaceful coexistence is very, very valuable, and much more fragile than people seem to appreciate. If you are fortunate enough to have it, its preservation should be your overriding priority, of far greater importance than minimal gains in social optimality. We should be searching for ways to unify our values, bring them into coherence, rather than actively working to accelerate their drift into mutual incoherence. Once that incoherence arrives, compromise becomes impossible, and the only options remaining are separation or conflict. There is no utopian values-system that everyone will willingly conform to. There is no social mechanism capable of bridging all values-gaps. There is no social system that can peacefully adjudicate all problems. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democratic processes, separation of powers, rule of law, none of these are actually general solutions to the human condition, and none of them can be counted on to keep the peace under sufficiently fraught conditions. The question shouldn't be "what arbitrary value-set should we use these systems to enforce" but rather "are our values sufficiently coherent that these systems can handle them, and if not, how do we minimize conflict now and in the future?" Freedom of speech and the rest of the liberal crown jewels should be recognized as limited tools, not universal solutions, and we should recognize that their failure is inevitable while working to ensure that failure is as graceful as possible.
I don't know if this really answers your question, but it's about the best I can do.
I agree with most of that, broadly speaking. As usual, few people here are as eloquent as you on this subject. You've at least made me much less confident in my position on banning circumcision. Either way, I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me despite few other people probably reading this far back anymore.
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No, that's analogous to people who have had a double mastectomy then mulling over whether to let their kids undergo the same procedure.
I was circumcised for, in hindsight, unnecessary reasons, but I don't really miss my foreskin or care much either way, not that I'd do it to my kid without good reason.
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I think this is almost entirely a result of circumcision having been around for a long time and people being familiar with it. Most people who are fine with circumcision would not be fine with the idea of allowing parents to decide to cut off parts of their children's ears or fingertips or any other body part the non-consensual removal of which in infancy has not been traditionally practiced in the West.
I think that this would still be much better than parents having the right to get their kids circumcised in infancy. With the secret encouragement, at least there is some form of consent from the person who is actually going to be affected.
Well, sure. It being around for a long time shows that it's not a novel practice with unknown consequences, and people being familiar with it means that it's pretty tough to convince people that it's somehow disastrous or monstrous when roughly half of them have a lifetime of experience to the contrary.
More generally, it seems obvious to me that this entire argument is yet another round of the usual Progressive word games. Circumcision is not an obscure practice, the outcomes are not in doubt, and those outcomes do not justify the histrionics activists inevitably deploy. Circumcised men get on just fine. If some think the practice harmed them, they are free to act differently with their own children, but there is no crisis here, and attempting to force the outcome you prefer will cause vast amounts of harm for very, very little benefit.
Our current experiment with prepubescent transition rather indicates otherwise; we've just in the last few years started letting parents put their children through incredibly invasive surgeries on the very slimmest of justifications, of a sort that would have been absolutely beyond the pale as recently as a decade ago. In any case, it seems to me that circumcision is considerably less harmful than losing a fingertip, and I think if people decided they needed to do weird ear stuff with their kids, we'd probably let them.
I disagree. Kids don't have a good understanding of the consequences either way; parents do, because in most cases they've lived with the consequences all their lives. More generally, I do not see why we should consider children free agents capable of making serious life decisions. Baring the small fraction committing severe abuse and neglect, there is not going to be anyone more committed to a child's welfare nor more invested in good outcomes for them than their parents. I absolutely do not trust teachers or other agents of the state to make better decisions for children than parents on net, and deeply resent their attempts to usurp parental powers while conspicuously neglecting the attendant responsibilities.
I am not arguing that it is disastrous. Clearly millions of men live fine lives despite being circumcised. However, it does seem monstrous to me, a totally unnecessary and creepy violation of infants' bodies.
I am not a progressive. I think that banning circumcision is something that people of all political stripes should be able to get behind. As for histrionics, I mean I think that some level of histrionics is justified by the fact that parts of babies' dicks are getting cut off for absolutely no reason other than that a bunch of people are too stupid to not cut parts of their babies' dicks off.
How would banning circumcision cause vast amounts of harm?
I would be as against parents non-consensually forcing kids to transition as I am against parents deciding to circumcise their kids. If you want to compare apples and apples, we should compare teenagers deciding to get circumcisions with teenagers deciding to get gender transition medical intervention, not compare infants being forcibly circumcised to teenagers deciding to get gender transition medical intervention.
We would not. Current social norms are that for a parent to cut part of his or her infant's ear off would be a very bad thing to do, something worth serious legal penalties. It would be very hard for me to imagine such norms changing any time soon.
I feel the same way, but none of that is any justification for letting parents cut parts of their kids' dicks off for absolutely no good reason.
I had it done to me, would rather it had not been done, and nonetheless do not consider it creepy or a violation of my body. What explains the difference in reactions, do you suppose?
Good. Stop talking like one, and stop thinking like one. Stop pretending that your idiosyncratic values are universal truths that need to be enforced by the power of the State, because you were able to draw a facile comparison between one thing and another thing and so apply a negative-affect label. Leave other people the fuck alone, and let them leave you alone, and pursue happiness as best you see fit in your own life.
If one parent did it, sure. If a whole bunch of parents started doing it, and "studies show...", they'd do as they pleased and everyone would smile and nod. The part you're missing here is that there is a fundamental difference between individual quirks and social norms. Circumcision is a social norm. Some weird bullshit someone makes up tomorrow is not a social norm. These two things get treated differently, because they are different. Social infrastructure is not in fact arbitrary, and pretending it is will only make you look foolish.
By removing one of the few remaining principles of tolerance we haven't yet managed to demolish, and establishing common knowledge that absolute political dominance is the only way to secure the future of one's tribe. Enforcing a circumcision ban on the Jewish community means telling them they don't get to be Jews anymore. If the government can pull that off, no one is safe. If no one is safe, the system you rely on for clean water and electricity will no longer function.
Every time I have this conversation, I find that my opposite seems to believe that Laws are magic, and that if they can just get their wishes codified, everyone else is forced to do things their way. The popularity of this view is both depressing and maddening. People obey the law because the alternatives are worse. If you make laws in a sufficiently unreasonable fashion, the alternatives no longer are worse, and people will avail themselves of them.
Americans do not share a common set of values. The only way we can survive sharing a country is by leaving each other the fuck alone, and even this requires a great deal of geographic segregation to be practical. The more the government's power is extended, the less the leaving each other alone works, and the more inevitable serious conflict becomes. It is already quite inevitable enough. There is no need to weld the accelerator to the firewall.
Religious belief is a good reason. Personal preference is a good reason. The harm is negligible, your personal disgust is not an argument to the contrary, and the second-order benefits are literally incalculable. You may not like circumcision, but you really, really, really will not like a no-holds-barred fight over the mechanisms of state power.
Oh come on. I just got told how evil and unprogressive it is to not leave other people alone, and let them pursue happiness as best as they see fit. Other than full anarchists, everyone puts some limits on other people pursuing happiness, hell even anarchists do when it infringes on the rights of others. If someone is actually making an argument for why a practice is wrong, you should address those arguments, not moralize about "pursuing happiness".
Yes, we impose some limits on the pursuit of happiness. Specifically, we impose a fairly specific and somewhat constrained set of limits, mostly based on long tradition. That is very different that imposing novel and arbitrary limits by fiat.
People generally obey the current laws. this does not imply that changing the laws to make some large percentage of them criminals if they do not drastically change their behavior will cause them to conform to the new laws. Instead, they will probably fight you. This might be worth it if the heretofore-tolerated behavior is as odious as chattel slavery, but to the extent that "odious" is a free-floating label subject to arbitrary manipulation, it is also an existential threat to anyone living in a values-diverse society.
I am not moralizing about "pursuing happiness". I am pointing out that adherence to the law is a peace treaty, and sufficiently arbitrary laws violate that treaty.
No persuasive argument for why the practice is wrong has been presented, only expressions of personal disgust. The case for serious harm is a non-starter, when so many men who have in fact been circumcised do not perceive themselves to be seriously harmed by the practice. The best argument is that children can't consent, but our system is not built on the presumption that newborns get a say in anything, to the point that we not only flirt but aggressively hands-under-clothes make out with the idea of literal infanticide. It is the norm that parents make decisions for their children, and while there are some exceptions to that norm in the case of egregious mistreatment, expanding those exceptions arbitrarily destroys the norm and everything it supports. And as it turns out, the norm supports an awful lot, because while Orthodox Jews aren't a massive section of the population, Christians are, and we are under no illusions that our own practices will not be next in line for prohibition at gunpoint.
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This is not totally true. Circumcision was unpopular throughout the majority of the anti-masturbation hysteria, and became widespread in the US with the idea that it prevented the spread of STD’s. The middle class adopted it in the interwar era and it became near-universal following WWII.
It is true that circumcision was viewed extremely negatively in the west prior to the very late 19th century, but a lot of the reasoning behind that negative view was antisemitism(I hate to break it to you, but medieval theologians were not particularly concerned with safeguarding sexual pleasure). Yes, the RCC defined it as mutilation and thus technically a sin, but the dominant reasoning for opposition to circumcision among laypeople was anti-semitism.
I’m not saying this to defend circumcision; I don’t intend to circumcise my sons and generally support moderate measures to reduce the circumcision rate in the US. However, I do think it is important not to take the claims of anti-circumcision activists at face value.
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Maybe on the margins, but I doubt it’s going to make much difference.
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If you think people are logical, I have a logically sound bridge to sell.
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I was against circumcision before I knew what trans even is, but I don't think this idea is going to work. People are very good at compartamentalizing.
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As a person who doesn't care about this issue, no not really. I don't see it as life altering in any meaningful way. i'm not sure what would move the needle enough to make me concerned, a high complication rate? But no, very different from chemical castration and brain growth retardation.
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