[HISTORICAL NOTE: This is the first of the No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? reruns. These reruns are less generally endorsed than the previous set of reruns.]
[By request of Zuiyo Maru.]
I am, like most right-thinking people, anti-circumcision. The health benefits are fairly small (as are the risks, to be fair), which means it’s primarily an aesthetic procedure. And, no, you do not get to do aesthetic surgery on babies’ genitalia. If they like the way circumcision looks they can get the procedure done when they are of age. (As regards the religion issue: I am uncomfortable forbidding circumcision to devout Jews and Muslims, but I also see the merits of the “kids shouldn’t have to get surgery because of their parents’ religion” argument. Regardless, in the US, most circumcision is not of Jews or Muslims.)
At the same time, I am very against people calling male circumcision “male genital mutilation.”
The number one rule of writing things is to remember that the people you’re talking about are reading your article. If you wouldn’t say it to their face, don’t put it in print. Autistic people will read your article calling autistic people empathyless monsters. Geeks will read your article talking about how weird and freaky cons are (“sometimes people dress up in costume!”). And circumcised men are reading when you call their genitals mutilated.
You’d think this would be easy to remember, because four-fifths of American men and a third of worldwide men are circumcised. It’s not like circumcised men are a tiny minority one could conceivably forget about.
And, you know, I feel like “don’t do aesthetic surgery on babies’ genitals” is a strong enough argument without having to add in “…because they’re horrible and ugly and a perversion of the way genitals are supposed to be!” Like. It doesn’t matter. Circumcised penises are fine. Uncircumcised penises are fine. It’s just that what one wants one’s genitals to look like is a decision that should be made by adults who have assessed the benefits and consequences of the procedure, not by parents when the child is too small to speak, much less consent.
And that’s an argument you can make without having to call people’s perfectly attractive, perfectly functional, perfectly okay genitals mutilated.
Thing of Things 
Labelling it “mutilation” seems like one of those things that is technically justified, but falls apart once you look at the (very strong) connotations of the term.
Most men get along just fine with circumcised penises. As long as they’re being done in a hopsital setting by a trained professional, you’re pretty much a-ok. Opinion’s on how it looks are pretty variable; there’s no social consensus that they’re ugly. It’s only mutilation insofar as any permanent bodily cosmetic change is mutilation, and that cheapens the term beyond usefulness. And once people figure out that’s how you’re using the term “mutilation,” it’s pretty easy to point out how obvious it is that you’re trying to implicitly compare it to graver forms of mutilation. I believe this is sometimes referred to as the “worst argument in the world.”
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(Disclaimer: I’m uncircumcised and think circumcision seems like a mildly bad thing)
Circumcision is definitely a highly highly non-typical of genital mutilation. Calling is such is definitely a non-central fallacy, where you give something a label that sort of fits but for which it is highly atypical and use the associations of the label to do most of the arguing for you (http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/). The people who make this argument should feel bad about making it.
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It is in fact by a substantial margin the most common kind of genital mutilation so I disagree that it’s non-central.
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Is it highly untypical of genital mutulation? I was under the impression that it was fairly typical but the more extreme cases get more attention.
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It’s typical if you weigh the variations by occurrence, yes. It’s atypical in the sense that nearly every other form of genital mutilation is significantly worse, in terms of pain caused or functionality lost. On the harm axis, male circumcision sits apart from the other forms.
That’s not to say that occurrence is irrelevant; if nothing else, the frequency makes even the minor risks worth heeding (particularly when you have unlicensed practitioners doing the cutting).
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I wanted to write something about how introducing the concept of non-typical was trying to make a comparison with FGM, and that’s a rather bad idea for a slew of reasons. Then I seemed to remember someone making this point in a concise manner with which I agreed almost completely.
“In my experience, whenever you talk about female circumcision someone will show up and be like WHAT ABOUT MALE CIRCUMCISION and whenever you talk about male circumcision someone will show up and be like WHAT ABOUT FEMALE CIRCUMCISION. I wish that everyone would collectively agree this is bad behavior, because both conversations are important and it is really hard to talk about both at once. (I also think it’s fairly uncontroversial that male circumcision is not as bad as most forms of female circumcision. Prepuce removal is basically equivalent; infibulation is not.) ”
Ozy Franz, July 7, 2014, in a SSC thread.
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It destroys almost all of our ability to feel pleasure- just like the majority of mutilated women support FGM, it is still mutilation.
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tw: the thing ozy just said not to do
Uh, what exactly is the argument here?
“Don’t use terms that describe [part of] someone in writing that you wouldn’t use to their face”? That’s okay, I call it male genital mutilation in face-to-face discussions with circumcised men too.
“Don’t describe things as mutilated when in fact they are perfectly attractive”? Aesthetics are subjective and personally I do find circumcised penises unattractive and perverse, to the point where the prevalence amongst people I meet has been a major obstacle to becoming more comfortable with sex with cis men (though I can get over it with the right person). People with differing opinions can of course express theirs too.
“Don’t say things that may trigger people’s insecurities and other unhealthy feelings about their bodies”? I have respected the requests of friends who asked me not to talk about circumcision around them for this reason, and would accept requests for trigger warnings in writing if I wrote publicly. But by default when such requests have not been made I expect most people to be able to handle comments describing them as mutilated without too much emotional harm, and consider the need to promote the social unacceptability of mutilating your children in the strongest possible terms to be a higher-priority concern.
[context: I am an uncircumcised man living in the US.]
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100% agreement on all points, Ozy.
That having been said, most of the “multilation/multilated’ rhetoric I’ve heard has been from people with circumcised penises, and that makes it a little muddier. I’d agree that it’s uncool for people without penises or people with uncircumcised penises to refer to circumcised penises as mutilated, but I also don’t want to police how people refer to their own penises, especially if they’re experiencing their circumcision as traumatic mutilation, etc.
There was a comment some time back on Alas by a kinky person who described how they were only kinky because they felt deeply broken and fucked up … while that’s obviously not my experience, and while I do feel like those kinds of descriptions reinforce some really bad ideas about kink … also I’m uncomfortable telling someone not to express their experience. Especially a traumatic one.
So yeah. I’m uncircumcised and think circumcision seems like a medium bad thing.
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As an intact man, I feel more strongly about “uncircumcised” than “mutilated”. I don’t used “mutilated” because it just makes more heat than light (though Aristotle said it was mutilation if the part cut off does not grow back). I object to “uncircumcised” because it makes genital cutting the default and the norm, and intactness the marked condition, the deviation. I also avoid the long c-word with its connotations of “purification” and its vagueness (it means “cut around”, not cut off, and around what?)
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I guess I feel like there are various different sets of connotations one could attach to ‘mutilation’ depending on the context. I think it would be very reasonable to call, say, chopping off a baby’s fingers “mutilation”, even though it might be rude to refer to a person without fingers as ‘mutilated’. In the context in which it’s used to talk about circumcision, I think the intent is to pass a strong judgement on the people who do it, not to make commentary on the visual appeal of the result.
As a circumcised man, I’m entirely comfortable with the use of the word ‘mutilation’ to refer to what was done to my genitals, especially if it causes even one baby to be spared the practice.
(Now, some people might say that it’s inappropriate to compare male circumcision to female circumcision because the latter is, in the worst case, much worse. I don’t know how to easily measure these things and I don’t begrudge those people their reasoning; all I’m saying is that I, as a circumcised man, am totally comfortable asserting that my genitals were mutilated and I’d prefer other people didn’t have it done to them without a choice.)
This is not to say, incidentally, that the result has been extremely traumatic for me. It probably was at the time, of course, but I obviously don’t remember the operation itself. I suspect that it’s caused some damage to my sex life (my physical sensitivity is, as far as I can tell, well below average), but that’s not critical to my self-worth or anything, and I don’t miss what I’ve never had. (But I think the people who assert that sensitivity is not significantly affected by circumcision are pretty clearly selling a bill of goods. I would like to see a serious academic study of this, if it weren’t so politically fraught as to be impossible several different ways.)
Anonymous because I don’t want my parents ever finding this and experiencing the amount of guilt that might otherwise seem appropriate for discovering that one’s child feels that they were ‘mutilated’; I give them the benefit of “everyone was doing it, society accepted it, and authority figures encouraged or perhaps even insisted on it.” If you feel like my identity might affect how you feel about my post, I’ll give you ‘between 500 and 1000 lesswrong karma’ in case that helps.
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Apparently, circumcision reduces the risk of HIV transmission in such a big way that WHO officially recommends it as a method of prevention: http://www.who.int/hiv/topics/malecircumcision/en/
At the same time, opponents list all sorts of negative effects to one’s sexuality: http://americansecret-themovie.com/
It’s worth noting that most cases of circumcision have nothing to do with HIV prevention, and even if they did, it’s not warranted until the kid becomes sexually active, at which point he’s mature enough to at least have an opinion about that. Thus, circumcising newborns is not a good idea. It’s not entirely clear though at which age we should consider this opinion to be sound enough, since this procedure is irreversible, and is believed to probably have some effects. I’m generally against things like allowing parents to give their newborns earlobe piecing, but this procedure is quite minor, sort of reversible, and inconsequential (unless of course you’re in Russia, where having a hole in your ear and getting into prison will almost certainly make you a sex slave), so I also think that children should be allowed to make this decision as soon as they are able to articulate it. Circumcision is a more serious procedure, so a case could be made for establishing a minimal age of the legal ability to consent to it.
Also, the idea of preventative appendectomy didn’t really take off, which is probably the closest analog to circumcision as a method of HIV prevention – permanent removal of a seemingly unimportant body part in order to reduce the risk of dangerous medical conditions. However, in case of appendectomy, the procedure itself is more complicated, risky, and expensive than circumcision, so the analogy isn’t really perfect.
People who are calling circumcision male genital mutilation are obviously trying to make a point that it’s just as unethical as female genital mutilation. And of course there’s an obvious counterargument: the damage from male circumcision isn’t nearly as high as that from FGM. Some also argue that a direct analog would be the removal of the clitoral hood, which is absolutely not what is usually meant by FGM. Probably most people who are concerned about FGM would be against such procedure too, as well as massively subjecting girls to any other kind of aesthetic genital surgery that an adult woman can consent to, and probably to the same extent as they believe that male circumcision is unethical. However, since there are no actual cultures where than happens, we don’t have any experimental way to figure out whether there is a double standard here or not.
And now I wonder if using the word “mutilation”, as opposed to something less loaded, when talking about FGM could inflict some psychological damage beyond what’s already been done.
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Circumcision has the same effects as FGM- it destroys almost all of a males ability to feel pleasure, and causes trauma later on. FGM also reduces the chances of STD’s and HIV, yet the WHO doesn’t recommend that. It is sickening you even try to justify this.
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As w other commenters – I agree with this, but also think that a circumcised man (or other person with a circumcised penis) is allowed to call it mutilation if they wish.
And I don’t see any moral reason why parents’ religion should allow them to perform aesthetic surgery on their children but then I’m also generally not for parents’ rights to make a lot of decisions for their children. But *not* letting people circumcise for religious reasons would be a lot harder to pull off than discouraging/reducing circumcision ‘just because’.
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I’ve always read ‘mutilation’ as referring to the nonconsensual part, not the physical appearance. Likewise with female genital mutilation – it would presumably be fine if it was consensually undertaken as the result of an informed individual choice with all the usual caveats surrounding consent in marginalized groups (by the same token that voluntary male castration is fine), but the fact that in practice it’s always been nonconsensually used as an instrument of male control makes the word ‘mutilation’ appropriate. (There’s another argument here, that the use of the word ‘mutilation’ wrt circumcision implies an equivalence in enormity to FGM, which isn’t easily dismissed – but that doesn’t seem to be the point you’re making.)
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It’s so crazy that this is even an issue. I have never heard of a man that has ever complained about having been circumcised or not. I suppose their are MRAs that might pretend to care so they have something to make a stink about. But most men would think we’re silly to even mention it.
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It’s an issue. Not, vitally important or anything, but it’s an issue. Inflicting terrible bodily harm upon infants because ??? is pretty terrible. It’s certainly not the worst, but it’s a thing where if you’d look from the outside in you’d be fucking baffled.
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Inflicting terrible bodily harm
You just did exactly what Ozy’s post argues you should not do.
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No, I don’t think it’s the same. If I shoot you, I am inflicting terrible bodily harm. However, you might not end up mutilated as a result of that. The two terms have distinct meanings.
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The best arguments for circumcision are, in order of strength:
1) Some people prefer it.
2) there tradition to it.
3) it’s only technically mutilation in a loose sense.
I dunno about you, but I’m against even technically mutilating children for tradition in the hopes that they’ll like it. It seems patently obvious to me that the burden lies on the pro-circumcision camp to justify cutting at a child’s genitals, and their arguments are very weak, at best.
Just leave that baby’s penis alone. If he really loves the circumcised look, let him make that decision.
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I don’t think anti-circumcosion is about men so much as babies. Like, even if no long term harm happens, you’re hurting babies unnecessarily in the short run, and the benefits and risks at best cancel out.
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If infant male genital cutting could be made completely painless (as some day it probably will be), it will still be a human rights violation, because of how men feel about it, and because of what it objectively deprives them of (freedom of choice about the ownership of their own body, and the significant sexual and protective functions of the foreskin itself).
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Seems pretty important to me. Also there are alot of men who are very upset at having been circumcised. This is a very common position in the “atheist community.” Also of course this is a common view among mras.
Many people claim circumcisions reduces overall feeling in the penis. If this is true (I do not know) then circumcision is incredibly fucked up. And calling it mutilation is justifiable. If feeling is not (usually) reduced then it is aesthetic.
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Many people claim circumcisions reduces overall feeling in the penis. If this is true (I do not know)
Meta-analysis of studies on the subject says probably not.
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I can’t get the full article without paying, which I’m not willing to do, but I’m very skeptical of this meta-analysis. Sexual function could be measured in some objective manner, but satisfaction and sensitivity are subjective and seem to me like they could only be reported accurately by men who were sexually active both before and after circumcision. As far as I know it’s fairly rare for men to be circumcised in adulthood, so I doubt the studies included in the meta-analysis exclusively looked at that group.
If anyone can access the PDF, please let me know if my assumptions are incorrect.
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Would you have made this same objection if the meta-analysis had reached the opposite conclusion?
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I am not convinced either way on the sensitivity issue. It seems complicated. But again my position is as follows:
1) If there is sensitivity loss its mutilation
2) If there is not its an aesthetic surgery
I have not deeply research circumcision. If I found that circumcision did not create sensitivity loss I would be ok keeping it legal. I think its wrong to alter people’s bodies without their consent. But circumcision is important to the culture of Muslims/Jews so I would be ok making an exception to the general rule.
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(I was replying to PP, but that’s disallowed by nesting limits.)
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oh ok
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Matthew, that meta-analysis is by Brian Morris, He has a track record of misstatements. See http://www.circumstitions.com/morris.hmtl for documentation.
He has never seen a reason to cut (boy) babies’ genitals he didn’t like, including to prevent “bathroom Splatter” and zipper injury.
On his personal Facebook page, on his “Likes” you will see he likes “Circumsexual Pride”. “Circumsexual” is what circumcision-fetishists – people who get off on the operation itself – call themselves.
A small, interconnected group of circumcision-advocates has flooded the literature with papers advocating male genital cutting. (They include Robert Bailey, Stefan Bailis, Ronald Gray, Daniel Halperin, Godfrey Kigozi, Jeffrey Klausner, Brian Morris, Stephen Moses, Malcolm Potts, Thomas Quinn, David Serwadda, Dirk Taljaard, Aaron Tobian, David Tomlinson, Richard Wamai, Maria Wawer, Helen Weiss and Thomas Wiswell.) Their common interest seems to be not HIV, UTIs, STDs, penile, prostate or cervical cancer, but male genital cutting.
The question arises whether they peer-review each other’s papers. Brian Morris told the CDC “I am a regular reviewer for circumcision-related articles for professional journals” which suggests an answer, and it is an easy job to go through them and find basic flaws that render their conclusions invalid.
Despite its high ideals, science is a human endeavour, subject to human flaws and cultural biases, and having part of one’s own genitals missing is a powerful incentive to treat that as the norm, and to “find” it to be of value.
As an intact man, I prefer to trust my own experience more than would-be scientific papers by people who have an axe to grind. The foreskin IS important to sexual pleasure, and this was well known for millennia before cutting it off became customary (http://www.circumstitions.com/Pleasure.html ), and is still well known where it is not customary.
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This is me complaining.
When I read this essay I got so angry that my vision narrowed and my heart raced and I started shaking (my own fault; I walked into the tarantula store). I hate being circumcised; thinking about it makes me dysphoric, and because of that I think I get to say I’ve been mutilated, even though I think it’s perfectly fine for other people to prefer that their penis be circumcised. If that’s what they want then I don’t think it’s mutilation and it’s cruel to tell them that their genitals are mutilated. But I also think it’s cruel when people deny that mine are because it comes across as invalidating my feelings and experience.
In other words, I think mutilation is partly subjective. As another example, I’ve had a vasectomy, which for me was a very good thing. It made my body more the way I wanted it to be and in so doing helped give be back a little sense of control. But, I’d expect that a lot of people would be quite upset about having their vas cut out against their will, and would rightly call that a mutilation, because it is counter to what they want their body to be like.
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Here are 230 men who hate that it was done to them. http://www.circumstitions.com/Resent.html Sales of devices for foreskin restoration suggest that more than 100,000 are unsatisfied enough to buy one, and there must be only a fraction of all who wish they weren’t cut. How many would be enough for you, when there is no real world sign of any benefit and those who say they don’t mind, don’t know what they are missing?
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You are either transparently lying, or commenting without reading the thread, since my own complaint is mere inches above yours.
(I don’t suppose its existence will get you to stop making the obviously-bogus claim that this is a trivial issue and nobody cares about it.)
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Do you similarly oppose people lumping hoodectomy in with more severe forms of female genital cutting as “female genital mutilation?” What about the people who label nicking the clitoris (either the glans or the prepuce) as the same (sometimes prefixed with “symbolic,” sometimes not)?
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It seems this arguments proves too much. If you write an article about FGM, presumably some FGM-victims will read it, so should we avoid that term for the same reason?
I guess the last paragraph, “perfectly attractive, perfectly functional, perfectly okay”, is trying to distinguish these two cases. But it seems to me that this is not so clear—in particular, sexual function is cited by opponents of both male circumcision and female genital mutilation; “attractive” seems context dependent; and one would wish for everyone to feel okay about their own genitals.
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As is my wont here, I’m going to say that I mostly agree with you, but I’m going to nitpick one particular point.
I think the latter point is pretty important. It is not the devout Jew or Muslim being circumcised. It is his infant child. The child has no choice in the matter.
But even beyond that, I’m against accommodating people’s religious beliefs when they cause real harm to people (which I believe that involuntary circumcision does). I’m pretty sure you feel the same way about certain subjects. For instance, I don’t recall you writing about it, but I think it’s safe of me to assume that you’re pro choice, no? But religious people believe, sometimes deeply, that abortion is literally murder.
If you are receptive to the argument that parents have “religious rights” to circumcise their children, then I think you should be equally receptive to the argument that religious people who believe abortion is murder should be able to ban abortion for everyone else. After all, in both cases people are forcing their religious beliefs on others (an infant cannot seriously be said to share its parents’ religious beliefs before it is even capable of speech), and if you accept the religious justification for banning abortion, then the consequences of allowing it are much, much worse.
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Religious freedom is not just about individual freedom of conscience. They are also about maintaining peace in a pluralistic society. Part of the bargain there is that sometimes within their own communities religious groups get to do things you think are wrong or even rights-violating.
There is an actual balancing act to be done here.
(Please note that I am not making any claims about the scope of the religious clauses of the First Amendment, but rather describing the purpose of freedom of religion generally. Recall that some of the original guarantees of religious freedom were made as part of the bargain that ended the Thirty Years’ War and decades of religious genocide across Europe.)
FWIW, I think the lack of any mass movement against circumcision implies that it isn’t that big of a deal (for most people; individual cases excepted) and that the argument of “don’t do aesthetic surgery on babies’ genitals” is therefore fairly weak. “Don’t do aesthetic surgery on babies’ genitals” is not a terminal value for me.
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“Part of the bargain there is that sometimes within their own communities religious groups get to do things you think are wrong or even rights-violating.”
That actually is not part of the problem. I don’t know if you are in the US, but we probably have more experience in this area than any other society, and out experience is that the question is complex. But when it comes to harm to children, as in violations of their basic rights, there is no such religious exemption. No one has a right, religious or otherwise to violate someone else’s rights.
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I think the lack of a mass movement against circumcision has more to do with the fact that humans are great at rationalizing and internalizing things that happen to them at a young age. Female genital mutilation (can we call it that?) also tends to be accepted by the communities that practice it and the individuals on whom it’s practiced, and some of the arguments they use to defend it are curiously similar to the ones we see in defense of male circumcision; we don’t usually take that as evidence that it’s no big deal.
How do you feel about tattoos, piercings, and other cosmetic surgery on babies?
For me, I think the rule is “don’t alter other people’s bodies without their consent, except when there’s an urgent medical need and they’re unable to consent”. It seems like a lot of people share that value: I wouldn’t expect anyone to be happy to hear that after passing out at a party, their drinking buddies had taken them in for a surprise circumcision, appendectomy, or tattoo.
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Ginkgo:
Objectively false. Parents have extraordinary levels of control over every aspect of their children’s lives, and in many (most? almost all?) states have guaranteed legal rights to, for example, use corporal punishment.
I mean, couldn’t you have figured this out from the statistic in the OP about how 4 out of 5 American men are circumcised?
taradinoc:
re: FGM, we have far stronger evidence of harm and also a larger number of people complaining, plus there’s a huge amount of really obvious sexism in those societies
Is that really a terminal value for you? Really? It’s not based on a belief that, e.g. following this sort of principle tends to increase happiness?
re: tattoos, etc., I expect a much higher likelihood of regret, and would recommend parents not do that, and since we also don’t have any kind of tradition of doing that sort of thing would be much more comfortable banning it.
Traditions are important to people. If you’ve got a good reason to overturn someone’s tradition because you have evidence it’s causing lots of harm, go ahead. But if you don’t have a lot of evidence you should probably just leave them in peace and let them do their thing.
And this reason – that you expect that they would be unhappy – is a very good one for not doing that!
But observably most circumcised people don’t care.
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I’m not much of a student of history, so I’ll take your word on this. However, I don’t think it matters. You’re talking about something that happened 400 years ago; we’ve moved on quite a bit by then. I am doubtful that religious people are so deeply attached to circumcision that there would be an armed revolt if it were banned. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, though; is that actually what you’re suggesting, or have I misconstrued you?
Modern, first-world democracies are ruled by secular law. In my opinion, we should not be allowing any exemptions for religious reasons to laws that apply to the general populace. This includes circumcision, abortion, gay marriage, women’s rights… hell, even taxes on churches.
At any rate, I mostly agree with you on this point:
…except that clearly we have different definitions of “lots of harm.” But for that matter, why should the standard be “lots of harm?” Why is it okay to permit traditions that cause some harm but have no benefit whatsoever, or at least so little benefit that the benefit is outweighed by the harm?
I just can’t grok the logic of allowing people to perform morally negative actions for religious/traditional reasons. I realize that in practice this is a huge uphill battle because 80%+ of the United States is religious and would strongly disagree with me, but from a secular perspective the answer to the abstract moral question here seems very clear to me.
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“I am doubtful that religious people are so deeply attached to circumcision that there would be an armed revolt if it were banned.”
Strongly disagree. It is actually much worse “armed revolt if practice is banned”. Right now in Kenya (and a few other countries), there are reports of uncircumcised men have to hide to avoid being cut. One example in Huffpost but you can also find other similar stories in bbc (as well as foxnews, the dailyfail, etc).
If you mean in Europe and the US, probably not, the practice would just continue but out of hospitals and with no or little formal sanction. Look for herpes due to orogenital suction for a relevant example of illegal acts excused under the guise of religious practice/tradition.
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No, I don’t think there would be an armed revolt. The reference to the Peace of Westphalia was intended to illustrate the general idea of a pluralistic basis for freedom of religion.
In the modern, first-world context, “peace” between religions and between subcultures entails not just a lack of violence. It also implies tolerance, a willingness to let each faith or culture manage its own affairs so long as it grants the same privilege to others. This is not unlimited or unqualified, but it means that there definitely should be a balancing test performed before you try to appropriate the mechanisms of the state to destroy their traditions.
And again to clarify, the rules I am describing are not encoded in any substantive way in our Constitutional rights to freedom of religion, which rights are individualistic. These rules are just good norms to follow, norms that we generally do follow (see: the Amish, the Hasidic Jews).
An analogy: Canada does not have the absolutist free speech guarantee we have in America. Theirs is qualified, and has occasionally resulted in genuine suppression of speech for its content (under hate speech laws). I strongly disagree with this, and think that Canada is violating some fundamental rights of its citizens by doing this.
However, I do not think America should take any action to change this beyond maybe occasionally Americans have conversations with Canadians and say “you know folks, I really think y’all would be better off doing things more like we do”. It’s their country and they get to make the rules and everything is just a little bit more pleasant if we don’t yell at them too much and they don’t yell at us.
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Because people disagree on which actions are morally negative, and you, like literally every other American, are part of a minority religious group. If your group pushes too hard to have each and everything it recognizes as “morally negative” banned, then other groups might do the same… and there is no guarantee you’ll win.
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“If your group pushes too hard to have each and everything it recognizes as “morally negative” banned, then other groups might do the same”
This is exactly what conservative Christians are doing with gay marriage and abortion right now. But that’s really just what politics is. Ideological groups try to get the government to make laws enforcing what they think is right. It’s baked into democracy. Trying to ban circumcision wouldn’t create the scenario you fear because it already exists.
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If you do not allow parents to do even things to their kids that cause some harm, you end up banning not just circumcision, but such activities as taking the kid to church when the kid doesn’t want to go. Or for that matter giving the kid a piece of candy when the piece of candy statistically reduces the child’s life expectancy by 0.000000000001%.
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“the lack of any mass movement against circumcision”
When does a movement become “mass”. It is very much a grass-roots movement. There are now branches of The Whole Movement in every state of the USA and many other countries, to mention only one face of Intactivism. It is growing exponentially.
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“Part of the bargain there is that sometimes within their own communities religious groups get to do things you think are wrong or even rights-violating.”
Then the question arises, why is minimal, surgical, aseptic, pain-relieved genital cutting of girls for religious reasons outlawed in the USA and most of the developed world, with religion specifically excluded as an excuse?
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Hugh7: Because minimal cutting for girls is the tail end of a distribution of cutting badness that includes mostly practices that are not minimal.
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Alex Godofsky:
This sounds like an admission that all the arguments in favor of male circumcision also apply to FGM — some would even argue that our society has a huge amount of really obvious dismissal-of-harm-inflicted-on-males — so the only difference is one of degree. And that seems like a precarious position to be in, unless you can come up with a good reason why this number of people complaining can be ignored but that number can’t be.
No, I don’t think it’s based on that belief. Here are a couple thought experiments:
(1) Suppose you can predict accurately that your friends would have an 80% chance of being made happier by a surprise appendectomy, and a 20% chance of being made less happy by the same amount. Removing their appendixes without their consent would increase overall happiness. Does that give you the right to do it?
(2) Suppose you can ensure that none of your friends miss their appendixes by hypnotizing them after the surgery. Does that change anything?
IMO, #1 is unacceptable. Regardless of how likely it is to make them happy, you do not have the right to mess with other people’s bodies without their consent.
I find #2 even creepier: forcing people to accept what you’ve done to them is stealing both their consent and their agency by violating their meta-consent.
And if you amputate part of someone’s body as an infant, knowing that whatever you do to them, they’ll grow up accepting it and thinking of it as normal… that seems like basically the same thing as #2. You can’t assault someone, condition them to accept it retroactively, and then point to their happiness as proof that it was OK all along.
All right, here’s another thought experiment:
(3) Suppose it’s really important to me that I slice off my mailman’s earlobes. My father did it, his grandfather did it, it’s a family tradition going back for centuries, and I’ll be super sad if I don’t get to do it too. I’ll be very careful about it, there’s no risk of infection, but the mailman’s body will be visibly altered forever. Heck, if the mailman’s happiness is an issue, I can even hypnotize him to accept it afterwards — although it is necessary that he be kicking and screaming while I remove his earlobes. Shall I be left in peace to continue this noble tradition, or do you have a good reason to overturn it?
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4/5 ths of US men? That is higher than I expected.
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Fortunately, the current incidence is lower than that: http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb126.pdf (see page 2).
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Hell, I was shocked by the 30% worldwide figure.
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Content Warning for frank descriptions of circumcision to get people to think about it.
I’m going to have to be the one to say it: infant circumcision is mutilation. It fits most (but not all) of the connotations of mutilation, and it is similar to other things that would also be considered mutilation. (Note: Just to underscore, I am only talking about infant circumcision, which is automatically nonconsensual.)
Cutting off pieces of people without their consent is generally considered mutilation. For it to not be mutilation, there needs to be medical necessity. These principles match our intuitions about cutting off pieces of ears, noses, or fingers.
As Ozy points out, there is no net medical necessity for circumcision. It’s primarily cosmetic, despite people’s flimsy medical rationalizations.
Because there is no medical necessity, then infant circumcision remains in the “cutting pieces off of babies” reference class, rather than the “necessary surgical amputation” reference class. So, if you accept my premises or priors, then circumcision is mutilation. It’s also sexual assault (though without mens rea).
Now let’s address the counter-arguments. Ozy points out that many men might not like being referred to as “mutilated.”
I fully agree that some men might find the word offensive, and it might be pragmatic to avoid it in some discussions. Mutilation includes connotations like “disfigured” or “rendered imperfect” which are subjective and could be offensive.
But that’s a different question from whether “mutilation” is an accurate categorization. The other connotations of mutilation, such as “damaged”, “injured”, and “permanent” are obviously present. I would also argue that nonconsent is an important part of our intuitions about what is and isn’t mutilation.
If permanent tissue removal and nonconsent are sufficient to establish mutilation, then it doesn’t matter what the circumcised person thinks.
The fact that some circumcised men don’t think it’s a big deal, and their sexual functional is acceptable, is not sufficiently strong evidence to take infant circumcision out of the mutilation reference class.
– Circumcised men cannot know if they are missing sexual function.
– Men are socialized to be stoic and non-complaining. Their feelings about childhood traumas may not a good guide to what happened.
– Admitting that circumcision is mutilation could be psychologically distressing. Note that mutilation was historically done to criminals and conquered people. Men typically don’t like to think of themselves as having been dominated.
– Time travel doesn’t exist, and adult men who are fine with circumcision cannot undo the trauma they felt at the time nor can they grow back the excised tissue.
– Many people are resilient and recover from all sorts of trauma, like childhood sexual abuse.
Is this a false-consciousness argument? Maybe. But if a guy says that his cock works fine for him, and that being more sensitive would be bad, then I believe him. So the main problem is miscategorization.
Don’t forget: the man who shrugs off circumcision today was once screaming and bleeding as a stranger restrained him, grabbed his penis and cut parts of it off. Even if he is fine with it now, he was not fine with it then. If the same thing happened to an adult man without consent, damn right we would call it mutilation and assault, even if the perpetrators were wearing white coats.
I’m sorry for giving that description, but it’s important to discuss what actually happens in factual terms. Circumcision is always painful even with anesthetic, which isn’t even used in many cases. Since infant circumcision is not medically necessary, medical terms and clinical distance are entirely inappropriate. Infant circumcision isn’t surgery. It’s something else.
Mutilation and assault, while not perfect terms, correctly reflect the nonconsent, emotional trauma, and permanent tissue damage that characterize circumcision. “Mutilation” might not be pragmatic to use for outreach, and the connotation of “disfigurement” is subjective and problematic. But in all other ways, “mutilation” is quite accurate and defensible, unless the word is to become entirely meaningless.
Note: To all people who read this and now feel guilty about not realizing that circumcision is probably mutilation… stop it. There is a lot of mystification and unprincipled exceptionalism about this topic and you shouldn’t blame yourself for that.
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Can you please explain what real fact about the world your “circumcision really is mutilation!” argument purports to establish?
Because it seems to me that there is no disagreement whatsoever about the actual facts on the ground about circumcision, such as “is it consensual” and so on.
So it seems like the only thing you can be arguing is “we should call circumcision mutilation because circumcision is bad and mutilation is a word with negative affect”. (Which interpretation has direct textual support in your comment.)
Why is this a useful or interesting argument? Why not just argue directly that circumcision is or isn’t bad, without worrying over whether you get to occupy a particular rhetorical hill?
———————-
For the record, I don’t actually care whether or not we use the word “mutilation” to describe circumcision, but I resent the idea that which word we use should be dispositive in any way. If we know all the underlying facts, we don’t need to argue from categories (a heuristic), we can argue from first principles.
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“So it seems like the only thing you can be arguing is “we should call circumcision mutilation because circumcision is bad and mutilation is a word with negative affect”.”
No. “Mutilation” is more than just a negative emotional affect It has a specific concrete meaning – the deformation of a body or body part from its natural state, usually by cutting.
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Is there a specific reason you are so eager to use that word instead of the just slightly longer definition you gave?
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There absolutely is disagreement. Even among anti-circ people here, I bet that there are still holes in their factual knowledge of circumcision:
– Circumcision typically removes a lot of tissue: half of the movable skin of the penis. All of the sensitivity of that tissue is lost and cannot be regenerated. This is permanent physical damage, unlike a ear piercing, which can close up, or birthmark removal, where skin can grow back.
– Circumcision is often done without anesthetic, and can be painful even with it. It may be done with dirty knives in Africa. So it is definitely traumatic and torturous to the baby.
– Circumcision heavily overlaps with what is called “female genital mutilation.” FGM isn’t just one thing. Type Ia FGM is less severe than Western male circumcision. There is another type of ritual male circumcision called “subincision”, which involves slitting open the urethra (I cannot find a link without pictures, but Google if you dare). The harm of male circumcision and FGM are not identical, but there is overlap, especially when you count non-Western circumcisions and subincision.
– Circumcision is a consent violation because it isn’t medically necessary. You do recognize this, but strangely, many people are much less angry about this consent violation than about others, like FGM or sexual violence towards women. This is a strange double-standard.
Even for people who agree with some or all of these facts, they often sound like it hasn’t fully sunk in.
From the article:
An anatomically-equivalent female equivalent of male circumcision would be called “female genital mutilation.” Using the same term “mutilation” for both correctly recognizes the overlap (even if indeed the central example of female genital mutilation is more severe than the central example of male genital mutilation). It also connotes the trauma and permanent physical damage of circumcision, which doesn’t really sink in for a lot of people.
An alternative solution would be to drop the use of “mutilation” for both male and female genital cutting. I would consider this. I’m not just fine with the present double standard about what is and isn’t considered mutilation.
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“Is there a specific reason you are so eager to use that word instead of the just slightly longer definition you gave?”
Yes. As you point out, the single word is more compact and efficient to use.
What is your specific reason that you are so eager to have people stop using it?
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As I read Ozy’s post, I thought to myself “obviously, she is correct”. However, it felt *too* obvious. I’m trying to cultivate the habit of noticing when I calibrate my views too imprecisely. So, I thought I was agreeing with it too much. I skimmed the comments section for one comment which made the best case countering Ozy’s position. It was yours. You’ve changed my mind to agnostic on the subject, from being totally onside with Ozy’s position mere minutes ago.
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Totally anecdotal reply from a circumcised man: Random people on the internet referring to my penis, sight unseen, as “mutilated” are not going to hurt my feelings.
Hearing it from someone with whom I’m about to have sex for the first time might be a little off-putting.
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I’m not sure that the general standard is any less controversial. It’s very common for birthmarks to be removed shortly after birth or while young, even ones small enough to present no significant health risk, and even ones near the genitals.
I don’t find the specific case here terribly important — I’m quite happy with either circumsized or uncircumsized cocks — but I’m increasingly cautious about folk who present strong ethical arguments for what seems like an entirely aesthetic thing.
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“but I’m increasingly cautious about folk who present strong ethical arguments for what seems like an entirely aesthetic thing.”
The point is that it is far from an entirely esthetic thing.
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That’s not been presented at all by the blog post itself, which used pretty much that exact framing of an irreversible surgery with minor health risks and trivial benefits, and not compellingly or even moderately presented by other comments so far.
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I’m not quite following you. Are you suggesting that Ozy is presuming to define the issue? I can assure she is not.
Whether the procedure is or isn’t purely esthetic has nothing at all to do with how it is discussed in a blog thread somewhere.
Very strange kind of reasoning, I have to say.
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I am a they, please. 🙂
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Gingko, I am very ill-equipped to read your mind and even less well-equipped to know every piece of possible data available. If you’d like to present an alternative aspect to the issue, feel free. Understand that the attempts so far in this thread have not done a terribly good job.
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The foreskin is not a birth defect. There is no community of people complaining about having had birthmarks removed. There is no known harm from having birth marks removed.
Instead of thinking first about genital cutting, start at the other end, with the remarkable structure and many functions of the foreskin. Once you understand those, it’ll be hard to get you to take any interest in cutting it off.
For millennia, everyone knew that the foreskin was important for sexual functioning, even its enemies, in fact that was one of their their conscious reasons for cutting it off, to make men less “carnal”. And it works. Cutting it off makes men more goal-directed about sex, because “getting there” becomes all it’s about. Why do you think European men have such a reputation as good lovers?
There is no dotted line, no “right” amount to cut, so no two circumcisions are the same, and nobody will know for sure how it has turned out until he is a man and using it. Any tiny mistake is magnified when he grows up. The frenulum is a tiny membrane connecting the foreskin to the glans. Doctors and mohelim take or leave the frenulum according to their skill, whim or luck. Circumcised men call their frenulum “the male G-spot” but it’s just a remnant of what they once had.
Infant genital cutting offers only debatable or disproven slight reductions in rare diseases of late onset that can be better prevented by other means, or treated as they occur. Claims that it “reduces the risk” of this or that don’t stack up when you look at the numbers. Even by the cutting-advocates’ own figures, it would take scores, hundreds or even thousands of circumcisions wasted for every one case of the disease prevented.
Most of the world does very well without infant male genital cutting. The British Commonwealth did the experiment, cutting a majority of babies in the 1950s. We found it did no good and have virtually given it up – with no ill-effects whatsoever. Our genital health is, if anything, better than that of US men. The US continues doing it from custom, conformity and money – not “health”.
The right to ownership of one’s own body is a basic human right, implied in the US Constitutional guarantees of equality, security of the person and protection from unlawful seizure.
A circumcised man has no idea what he is missing. We hear every urban legend about Friends of Friends who have trouble with their foreskins, but not about the vastly greater number who don’t – or the men who have trouble with being cut:
The risks of infant male genital cutting are understated and under-reported. They include
aesthetic damage
– skin-bridges
– skin-tags
– scarring
– unevenness
– excessive skin removed
phimosis
hairy shaft
haemorrhage
meatal stenosis (narrowing of the urinary opening, very common)
meatal ulcer
de-gloving
urethrocutaneous fistula
infection
– MRSA
– hepatitis
– tetanus
– bladder infections
– septic arthritis
neuroma
epidermal inclusion cyst, requiring more surgery to remove
blockage of the urethra
buried penis
penoscrotal webbing
deformity
necrotising fasciitis (galloping gangrene – very rare)
priapism
gastric rupture
oxygen deprivation
clamp injuries/plastibell ring injuries
loss of glans
ablation (removal) of the penis and
death.
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… and?
That humans treat them into different psychological categories would be interesting, but it’s not terribly meaningful. It’s still cosmetic — that we don’t oppose it only says that we find some distinguishing characteristic, and no one has presented a very compelling case so far.
The lure of exoticism, and frankly I’ve not been impressed, albeit with a small sample size. If you’d like to point to a meaningful meta-analysis, do feel free, but simply saying things without serious support doesn’t provide much. So far, the only linked meta-analysis in this thread suggests that the effects are below significance.
Sure. Without further evidence in contraverse, I’m willing to take this as an argument. Be we allow a huge number of things for custom, conformity, and money, including other forms of surgery. What’s the actual statistical difference here?
Now we’re actually getting somewhere — but not quite there yet. I can easily list events that can happen, if I don’t mind encouraging men everywhere to wince when discussing a snapped frenulum. Without actual numbers, they’re not terribly meaningful when discussing something that happens to close to a billion people, and many are a distraction.
That’s not how things actually work. At all.
For one, the US Constitution does not guarantee “equality” nor general “security” (of the person or any unit smaller than the state). The closest relevant matters on equal treatment under the law, security from unlawful searches or seizures by a government body. In general, the US Constitution does not restrict the decisions of private actors: that’s not its purpose.
Less directly, humans don’t own their bodies in the United States, although the reasons this is the case are fairly technical and usually specific only to certain donations.
And, again, we allow a large number of cosmetic surgeries on individuals who can not consent, allow a large number of surgeries on individuals who can not consent, and even the people the Constitution is actually supposed to keep from keeping your teeth in can do so without your consent in some circumstances.
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“At the same time, I am very against people calling male circumcision “male genital mutilation.”
The number one rule of writing things is to remember that the people you’re talking about are reading your article. If you wouldn’t say it to their face, don’t put it in print. ”
Coming from a person who does not have a circumcised penis, this veers very close to concern trolling. That’s coming from someone with a circumcised penis.
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Another circumcised penis–owner seconding this.
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Are the open threads on a regular schedule? I have a completely unrelated question for the group.
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Once every two weeks, I think.
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Sanity check: do these arguments applysignificantly more to male than female circumcision? E.g. is the problem of calling people mutilated worse for men, or otherwise mitigated?
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I would also be inclined not to call people who have suffered female circumcision “mutilated”, but it is less of a concern, because I would be mildly surprised to discover that I had a circumcised female reader, while the majority of the men who read my blog are circumcised.
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My parents had my penis mutilated as an infant. Mutilation: the unnecessary removal of otherwise normal and functional healthy tissue. That’s the medical definition of mutilation.
Yesterday I learned from my mental health professional that I have “dysphoria” due to this. And I looked it up, and now know that it is worse than major depressive syndrome and has a high risk of suicide for those who suffer from it.
Mutilation should be used exclusively to describe this travesty of human rights, because that’s what it is: mutilation and travesty.
Apparently the pro-circumcion people don’t care if you wind up needing meds and mental health care for life over this butchery, nor do they care if you wind up swinging at the end of a rope or with a gun in your mouth.
I will never see or talk to my parents again for having this done to me. They can go rot in that nursing home. And I hope they suffer everyday wondering where I went and why I abandoned them and why I’m missing. I’ve felt that way ever since I learned what they did to me. So they can now go suffer and never see or hear from me again. Oh, they’ll get over it and soon forget all about me. Isn’t that the same excuse I was given or told to do?
I won’t be attending their funerals, either.
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Hi Gary, I have read your opinion, well you say your parents had you mutilated. Well they had you circumcised . Why do people call this mutilation? It is regular medical procedure, done in hospital based on Lege Artis. You can’t know, maybe you would needed to be circumcised later in the life, maby for phimosis or some other problems, infections , impossibility na of retration , frenulum breve etc etc… and you would suffer much more! So they did the best for you! For your health benefits. Your problem is completely mental as you also have mentioned it. Dysphoria? You should born with it, whether circumcised or not. When did you start to feel your gender dysphoria ? – by the time as a child or as a teenager or adult? Instead of enjoying your life, having healthy genitals, you are talkin about disphoria … many problems are only on mental basis, sometimes caused by small cock. And it is different issue…
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Yes, it’s so loving and thoughtful for parents to plan ahead like that. But why stop at circumcision? If you want the best for your children, shouldn’t you plan for everything?
For example, your children might also need to have a foot amputated later in life, maybe because of complications from diabetes, or because they step on something and it gets infected, or because they’re walking alone in the woods and they get caught in a bear trap. Imagine how much your son or daughter would suffer if they had to gnaw their own foot off to save themselves! So if you really want to do the best for them, you should cut off their feet when they’re babies and save them the pain later in life.
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It is genital mutilation. Circumcision destroys 95% of a males ability to feel pleasure, I know because I’m circumcised. It is genital mutilation and don’t try to say otherwise
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“Don’t Call Circumcised Penises Mutilated”
Don’t call mutilated penises legitimizing euphemisms.
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