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Wellness Wednesday for September 21, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

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At a Q&A I asked Scott Alexander if he was going to circumcise his kid and said he was in favor of it and his wife was against it. I'll be honest, I'm kind of shaken. I'm sometimes able to argue persuasively against male genital mutilation, but I wasn't on that day. I sort of made a fool of myself, I guess. It's a painful subject for me.

It's also just kind of shocking and dismaying, because I think that noticing that male genital mutilation is bad is something almost anyone with basic rationality skills should probably be able to notice, and he didn't. Now I want to ask Yudkowsky. I'll choose my words more carefully.

He mentioned the adversarial collaboration on SSC on the subject, which to me had a lot of obvious holes and flaws in it.

Purposes of the foreskin:

  1. Prevents the covered skin from contacting clothing. Clothing contact desensitizes the penis through a process called keratinization. If you're circumcised, you'll notice that the circumcision scar and the places below the scar are what's sensitive, and everything above that isn't very sensitive. That's not normal.

  2. The foreskin has densely packed nerve endings.

  3. The foreskin provides lubrication, both through natural lubricant and through a gliding motion.

  4. Protective against health conditions including meatal stenosis.

I can also rebut the purported positive outcomes of circumcision, and talk about the risks of the procedure. I have videos of men with botched circumcisions talking about their suffering.

I don't really want to get into a debate about circumcision here. I just wanted to provide an example of what someone arguing the point looks like.

My question is this: Is anyone else shocked/saddened that Scott is pro-cutting?

I was circumcised at around 7 or 8 due to phimosis, or so my parents thought. I don't really recall being inconvenienced in the least, so when I had surgery for appendicitis, and woke up missing my foreskin, I certainly was bemused to say the least! My brother had a similar issue, but he grew out of it, and still rocks a hooded cobra.

I don't know if it had any effect on sexual enjoyment, I still enjoy it as much as any red blooded young man. I am mildly thankful that I don't have to worry so much about keeping a foreskin clean, the idea of dick cheese/smegma is a nightmare haha.

Since there's no tradition of circumcision in my culture, I have little to no interest in circumcising my kids, unless medically indicated. However, it wasn't too painful, I had to go around for a week holding up my pants till the skin healed and the crust fell off, but overall it's not a particularly traumatic event or one I worry about. As a doctor, I certainly appreciate my circumcised patients, much easier to insert a catheter without faffing about retracting the foreskin!

Next time you're masturbating, pay attention to what parts are sensitive and what parts aren't. I think you'll find that only the circumcision scar and everything below it are sensitive.

As somebody who did it after puberty, this is definitely not true, at least not for me, and I didn't feel any noticeable loss of function after, compared to what it was before. Of course, individual effects may vary, I can only talk about my own experience here.

Hmm? Not really. I have sensation in the glans, it's much less sensitive than it used to be (I remember the sensation of it rubbing against clothing being unbearable just after the circumcision), but it's not numb, far from it.

I prefer being stimulated on the shaft, by a large margin, but I wouldn't say that the glans or the margin is useless. I'm pretty sure uncircumcised guys also use their shaft more than the glans, not that I was old enough to try that when it happened.