In response to my post “Quick, let’s talk about my pee pee” commenter namae nanka provided a link to an article entitled “A Rose by Any Other Name? Rethinking the Similarities and Differences between Male and Female Genital Cutting.” I read the entire thing from start to finish, and all I can say is thank you. I found it extremely illuminating, and I implore anyone considering becoming a parent to read it through and thoughtfully examine your position on circumcision.

The article cogently addresses the main point of my previous post — the assertion that consistently drawing a comparison between FGM and MGM can be useful:

[Some researchers] criticize the fortresslike separation of male circumcision from FGM and suggest that the real issue in the debate is child protection: “Whether we should be subjecting any children to . . . procedures involving the excision of healthy tissue” (Fox and Thomson 2005a:467). In a further article, Fox and Thomson (2005b) develop these arguments and criticize medical and legal authorities for neglecting the rights of children and failing to undertake a full cost-benefit analysis of the effects that routine circumcision has on males.

From an ethics perspective, no coherent criticism of FGM on the basis of a child’s right to bodily integrity can be mounted without also being a criticism of MGM. I think that’s an extremely important point to grasp. The authors drive it home by observing that practitioners of FGM often point to MGM as an equivalent Western practice, saying that it’s hypocritical of us to decry FGM while routinely circumcising our infant males. And in America, you’re cutting boys!

The authors also make an interesting conjecture about Western studies addressing the cost/benefit of circumcision:

…[O]ne wonders whether it is culture or medical science that is really in the driver’s seat here. The evidence thought to show a “potential health benefit” for MGA may in fact be an artifact of its cultural acceptability and long history in U.S. society. By the same token, the absence of any culturally conditioned demand for FGA has discouraged researchers from seeking evidence of the potential advantages of such surgery. It is the cultural demand for MGA that generates the research that appears to implicate the foreskin in whatever disease is holding the public’s attention (Goldman 2004). In a culture that values science, medical (usually miscalled scientific) justifications for cultural rituals must be found, hence the numerous horror stories about the terrible risks of retaining normal human anatomy (Van Howe et al. 2005). As Lawrence Dritsas (2001) has eloquently argued, the cultural tail would appear to be wagging the scientific dog.

Indeed.

One final excerpt, because everyone loves an appeal to evolutionary biology :)

All mammals have foreskins; males are what they are because that is how they have evolved … Evolution, however, appears to be favoring ever-longer foreskins in males (Cold and McGrath 1999), suggesting that they improve survival chances and reproductive health rather than the reverse.

Definitely worth the read.

San Francisco might ban circumcision:

I doubt this bill has a snowball’s chance in hell, but still, it’s food for thought.

It’s particularly interesting how the pro-circumcision people revile what they perceive is a “government intrusion” into their personal decisions. I’d challenge them to put themselves in the shoes of someone who believes circumcision is morally wrong, just for a moment. If your position was that no-one should be able to surgically modify the genitals of an unconsenting infant, what would you do? Would you try to wait it out and educate parents, or would you try to effect legal protection over les petits garçons? I think the answer is clear.

The guy isn’t some leftist whackjob trying to micromanage your family, he’s taking part in a long tradition of recognizing an action is inhumane or detrimental to society, and seeking to have that action illegalized (cf. wife-beating, child abuse, tattooing your child etc.). But admittedly, he’s ahead of his time.

Is there some cognitive dissonance between the liberal part of me that says “keep the government out of my decisions” when it comes to abortion, and the part that wants government to interfere when it comes to circumcision? I don’t think so, and here’s why: no future adult has to deal with the consequences of abortion.

Which brings me back to the TYT video:

Ben Mankiewicz: What are you going to do, ask your four month old?

Ana Kasparian: Right, I know. He thinks that that decision should be made by the boy … or the man …

Ben: Well no-one’s gonna make it at eighteen!

Telling.

It’s a well-documented internet phenomenon that threads about female genital mutilation tend to be hijacked by discussion of circumcision. A while back, PZ brought attention to this fact, after just such a thread was hijacked on his blog. I think this betrays a loathsome societal tendency to ignore women’s issues in favor of more trivial male issues. We’ve seen this before elsewhere. A dominant social/economic group manages to puke up some twisted rhetoric that makes them seem like they’re the ones who are oppressed (Christians, “objectivists,” I’m looking at you). And, since they’re the dominant group, they get to hog the megaphone and drown out the voices of those who are actually disadvantaged. Really nothing new here.

However, I would like put forward a reason why I think the incessant comparison between FGM and MGM is understandable (not always warranted, but at least understandable): male genital mutilation is happening here.

The majority of infants in the US are still being circumcised, so drawing the comparison is at least useful in the sense that it illuminates how such a practice could arise and perpetuate itself. It’s difficult for an American to imagine how a parent could look lovingly into the eyes of their daughter, and then hand them over to someone who is going to razor off her labia. However, we have an innate cultural understanding of circumcision, so we can introspect on our own attitudes towards a similar tradition. Also, if you accept the premise that circumcision is morally wrong, then its defenders become proxy defenders FGM, and we gain great insight into the cognitive biases that drive these barbaric rituals forward through the generations.

Handicapping the discussion at the outset by prohibiting mention of circumcision seems to be an unnecessary, reactionary position on the part of those who would advocate it. Although I’m tempted to agree, because it’s utterly inexcusable that no discussion of FGM can get started without being totally derailed three comments in. Comparison is fine, but cooption is retarded.

I often reflect on my sentiments towards religion, and wonder why I hate it so much. I ask myself why I dedicate so much time to railing against an institution that has done me no more harm than a few shattered delusions and wasted Sundays. I even feel ashamed of this seemingly puerile obsession with denigrating faith, despite a lack of any ostensible wrongdoing on the part of the religious.

However, I’m reminded that there is one grave disservice that religion has done me which I cannot bring myself to forgive. It mutilated my genitals.

Yes, that may seem a hyperbole; even writing it I feel I am being deliberately provocative. But I have to stop and ask myself, am I? Is there any sense in which surgically modifying an unconsenting child’s genitals is not a reproachable human rights violation? Due to its cultural normativity, circumcision may fail to arouse our sense of disgust in the same way footbinding or female genital mutilation do. However, just because we don’t have a gutteral aversion to it does not mean it’s not an egregious act. We tend to look on other cultures’ barbaric rituals with a smug superiority, reassuring ourselves that we’re civilized, but maybe we should turn the lens inward.

Circumcision, is at its root a religious export, and it’s in religion that it takes refuge and perpetuates itself. When a mohel in New York was responsible for the death of a child, no one spoke up against practice of circumcision as a Jewish ritual. Instead, we pussyfooted around the topic, saying that it was merely a problem with the orthodox techniques, or that proper precautions were not taken. No one considered that cutting off part of a child’s penis was inherently wrong. They dare not denounce the religious practice itself, either for fear of being culturally insensitive, or because most of us live in glass houses.

And therein lies the problem. No one will stand up and call this atrocity that it is, because if we don’t respect everyone’s right to have irrational beliefs, then someone may come after our own. Well I won’t feel ashamed for being strident anymore, because we should all have the right to savagely critique one another’s irrationalities; to lay them bare and hack away at them, just like they did to my newborn privates.

I am circumcised, and have spent most of my life believing that circumcision was the right thing to do. However at some point in the recent past, it hit me like a ton of bricks: there are people out there who still have their foreskins intact. A lot of them in fact: most of my good friends and the people I have lived with still have the jacket on their little firefighter. As it turns out, I am actually the odd one out in my circle of friends, so I was recently driven to question the practice of removing the male prepuce.After doing a lot of research, and coming to the hard realization that I had lost something that I would never get back, I changed my mind. I now believe that circumcision is barbaric, unneccesary, and a terrible way to welcome your child into the world.

As you might imagine, I am a tad bitter about the whole affair, and while I don’t blame my parents for doing what they thought was best, I do take issue with the pervasive opinion that forcibly removing part of a child’s genitals is a good idea, and I have taken it as my charge to challenge circumcision at birth* whenever possible.

The most common reason I hear for circumcision is the same reason I was originally circumcised: religious affiliation. Now that I’m an atheist, I couldn’t imagine a worse reason to do anything, let alone subjecting your infant to surgery. However, I’d expect even the religious could appreciate that their children may not share their faith when they become adults. Given that in recent years, people have been changing faiths or abandoning faith altogether at unprecedented rates, any loving parent should concede that committing their child to one religion through body modification is unfair. They should at least wait until the age of consent.

Another commonly cited argument is that circumcision prevents disease. There is in fact a tenuous correlation between circumcision and lower incidences of contracting HIV, penile cancer, and–for female partners of circumcised men—cervical cancer. However, there is no disease circumcision combats that could not otherwise be prevented by good hygiene or responsible sexual behavior. More importantly, it shouldn’t even matter what the benefits are, as long as it’s such a violation of personal liberty. One could argue that giving a newborn gastric bypass surgery would lower their chances of obesity and diabetes later in life, but this conjecture would and thrown out before the benefits are even weighed, because it’s so ludicrous. Other than circumcision, there’s no other elective procedure I could subject my child to at birth , and still be considered a responsible parent.

Circumcision proponents often point out that a circumcised penis is cleaner. They’re right: it is cleaner. But to use an all-too-fitting expression, don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. Removing the prepuce is a high price to pay for genital cleanliness, as would be removing the ear for auricular cleanliness. No sane person would suggest cutting off their children’s outer ears just because they have to wash behind them. As with any other part of the body that requires care, you have to teach your kids to take care of their penises. We teach our children to brush their teeth, wipe their behinds, and wear tampons; cleaning under the prepuce is just part of the maintenance that comes with the human body.

To make a brief speculative aside, I believe the cleanliness issue may have played a part in the origin of the practice, but not in the way you might suspect. Uncircumcised genitals require extra care at bathtime. Thus, in the sexually repressive Abrahamic religions, mandating that the prepuce be removed ensured that the appendage wouldn’t draw any more attention then necessary. Another possibility is that circumcision was a rite of passage, whose intention was to demonstrate the machismo of the male undergoing it, as it still is in parts of Africa. Over time, the importance of the act as a rite of passage may have dwindled, but its importance to cultural identity remained, so men chose to perform the procedure on their children.

This brings me to another common contention of circumcision supporters, which is that circumcision doesn’t hurt if the child is young enough. However, if you have ever seen a circumcision, you cannot maintain this opinion. The procedure is manifestly painful, and doctors rarely use anaesthesia. It’s so painful in fact, that babies frequently go into shock. Entirely incapable of crying, their bodies flip into “I’m gonna die” mode. But since an infant does not have the vocal or expressive capabilities of an adult human, so it only seems not to hurt them. The cues that an individual is in mortal pain are not in the expressive range of a newborn, so parents may not realize the harm they are inflicting upon him. Therefore, although there is no evidence of a pain in the long term, it’s devious to assume that this constititues evidence for a lack of pain.

Another common rationalization is that the infant won’t remember it later in life. However, this is a poor reason to hurt to someone you love. I don’t remember being in a crib, so my parents could have gotten away with keeping me in a cardboard box, but they didn’t.

Many circumcision proponents make an appeal to tradition. As a friend of mine once jokingly said “it’s just one of those things you do. You drive on the right side of the road and you get circumcised.” But as someone who is already generally suspicious of tradition, this argument has to be one of the worst for circumcision. Even if we’ve been doing something since time immemorial, that does not lend any legitimacy to it. On the contrary, I think it is one of our highest moral imperatives to closely examine our traditions to see if they are worth passing on. Just think of all the barbaric traditions we have abandoned: slavery, public execution, denying women the right to vote or own property, corsets, foot binding, hair shirts, etc. In the end, I prefer to think of appealing to tradition as “I refuse to evaluate the prudence of my actions, because no one else has.” That does not constitute an argument.

The final argument for circumcision is the one I understand least: aesthetics. Many women—and some men—claim that a circumcised penis is more pleasing to the eye. Well, I believe a man’s right make it to adulthood with intact genitalia trumps a woman’s or a parent’s right to impose their aesthetic preference on a defenseless child. If a man wants to have his penis modified, he should wait until his eighteenth birthday, as he must for tattoos and other body modification.

So circumcision isn’t a good idea, but who’s to say it’s a bad one? It could still be true that while the procedure is ethically questionable, it’s ultimately harmless. In point of fact, a strong case can be built against circumcision. There are various studies that have identified a strong correlation between circumcision and decreased penile sensitivity, but I won’t go into that here. I feel there is a strong enough case without it. Moreover, there are likely members of my audience for whom risk of genital desensitization would not bear heavily on their choice to circumcize.

I feel the strongest ethical argument against male genital mutilation is the simplest: it isn’t your body, it isn’t your choice. The slight chance that the child may grow up to be like me, and wish the procedure had never been done, should give parents pause. Modifying the body of an unconsenting individual is cruel, regardless of their age.

When it comes down to it though, there are some really gruesome facts about circumcision that most people don’t know. It often results in deformity of the penis, and can ruin sexual pleasure entirely. Like any surgery, circumcisions can be botched, and they often are. Removing thirty to fifty percent of the skin from an organ the size of an almond is a risky endeavor, and if the procedure is performed incorrectly, or if the penis heals improperly, there can be terrible consequences [warning, this section links to graphic material]. The skin can heal too tightly on one side of the penis, resulting in erectile curvature. Too much skin can be removed, causing tearing or stretching of the remaining tissue during erection. Or instead, pubic skin can be drawn upward onto the shaft, resulting in a freakish condition known as ‘hairy shaft.’ Another risk is that the skin heals itself to the glans of the penis, forming what’s called a skin bridge. These side-effects are all too common, but once in a blue moon, something really bad happens. Keep in mind that an infant’s penis is very small and delicate, and thus very hard to operate on. Sometimes the entire glans is removed along with the prepuce, leaving a penis with no head. In the worst case scenario, a child’s penis is mutilated so completely, that it has to be removed. In certain cases, the child may even die. I am not making this up, this happens.

Do the perceived benefits of circumcision warrant these risks? Is the prospect of HIV or VD so terrifying that we should jeopardize our children’s sex lives? Is adhering to tradition so imperative that we must do so even when faced with these dangers? I say no.

For a naturalist like me, the final argument is that we evolved the foreskin for a reason; if it had no function, or were harmful to the organism, it would have been bred out a long time ago. Granted, there may not be an immediately obvious function for the thing, and we may be able to live without it, but it’s still part of our biology. It’s still part of what it is to be an intact human male, and no one has the right to take that away.

*I feel it necessary to specify at birth because I really don’t care if people do it when they are adults. Just like I don’t care if they are into S&M, testicle torture, genital peircing, or any of the other weird ass shit adults have the right to engage in. Just don’t do it to kids.