Letters to the Editor
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Reduces HIV Transmission
Circumcision does significantly cut the rate of HIV transmission.
... is only half the statement. The full statement is:
Circumcision does significantly cut the rate of HIV transmission by replacing a large area of healthy tissue with a small area of scar tissue.
In fact, if you chop the whole thing off, it is no longer possible to transmit HIV through that penis! What a remarkable breakthrough, sign me right up.
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Weighing in on this....
I have to weigh in on this one. I am come from a non-Jewish family that arrived in the U.S. after WWII. My brothers and I were born in the U.S. and neither brother was circumcised upon birth. One brother ended up with a circumcision when he was 8 years old after intense problems with his foreskin. My older brother got a circumcision when he was in his thirties, voluntarily, for personal reasons. He said it was a great decision and wondered why he waited so long.
My personal feeling toward this situation is that this wife sounds selfish and dizzy. Did this just pop into her head? She married a Jewish man for God’s sake and she decided just before birth of their child she did not want to follow thousands of years of tradition like it is yesterday’s news?
Conflating circumcision with female genital mutilation is ridiculous for reasons too obvious for me to go into.
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6,000 years of human stupidity
doesn't mean it should be continued. Too bad the author was a wuss and mutilated his boy. He should have told his mother to kiss his ass.
All religions when taken to this extreme are equally atrocious. Fuck all the offshoots of Abrahamism.
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there are worse things than circumcision
I say this as a circumcised man.
Why do writers publish the most intimate details of their personal lives on internationally read web magazines? If I had a choice between being circumcised and having all the details of my family bickering published for millions of people to read, I'm pretty sure I'd go with the former.
Don't writers have any sense of propriety any more?
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Why Neal Pollack is a genius
"Maybe everything I'd always thought about my penis, and, by extension, the world, is also wrong."
XD
Disappointing that he gave in to what sound like a pair of control-freak parents, though. Don't get me wrong: I don't have my foreskin and I've never really missed it, but if I were having a child and my parents acted like this, I'd be tempted to not only not circumcise him, but also to raise him as a Satanist or something.
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Jeesh! It's just a foreskin, people.
Man. Sometimes these 'letters' posts really put patience to the test. Then again, all of this vitriol maybe proves Pollack's point: that some people take circumcision a bit too seriously.
As a 1st-time expecting father, I really liked the piece, simply because my wife has accumulated over a dozen pregnancy/early parenting books over the past few months--from the hippie classic 'spiritual midwifery' to something called 'the girlfriend's guide to pregnancy'--and not one of them (excepting about 2 pages of 'Sp. Mid.' with advice on how to help your lady stay 'groovy' and 'psychedelic' throughout her pregnancy) says anything to dad, or breaks the tony robbins/7 habits mold of self-help advice for the type of people who get on pre-school waiting lists before they even conceive.
I have always found Pollack's schtick a little tedious, but I found myself really relating to his dilemma--not over the circumcision per se (we're waiting to find out baby's sex the old-fashioned way, so we still have a 50/50 chance of avoiding that decision), but over the fact that there are dozens (if not thousands) of little landmines in the early parenting process that come as a genuine shock to us recovering-slacker-daddy types who don't want to micromanage our kids' lives and live in terminal fear of canned self-help rhetoric. Personally, I relate a lot more to an aging punk rocker/writer entering fatherhood than the 'supermom-married-to-fabulously-wealthy-and-preternaturally-patient-and-loving-spouse' people who are responsible for the bulk of parenting lit.
so thanks for the candor and the levity, neal--you just sold a copy of your book, if that's worth anything.
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Chanukah
Most people don't realize this, but the guerrilla war behind the holiday of Chanukah was prompted in large part because the Greeks prohibited Jews from circumcising their baby boys and Converts.
In my synagogues, there's a Bris (circumcision ceremony) about once a month, a fine celebration with lots of bagels and lox and other shmears. I've seen a lot of them by now, the boy usually cries more when they uncover him than the actual cutting. The actual cutting is complete in about a fifth of a second or so; I've seen what they do in hospitals, and that is barbaric. If you want to circumcise your son, find a Mohel, even if you're not Jewish.
If I should be blessed with a son, I would make a fine party as well; it would be one of the happiest days in my life.
And if you don't like it, or think it barbaric, well, tough.
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Unnecessary Plastic Surgery
About 2 weeks before I was due to give birth to my son my OB asked whether or not we
were planning to circumcise him. I had not even thought about circumcision prior to her
asking me the qestion. My husband is from Europe and is not circumcised. Since I had no
feelings either way, we decide not to circumcise him. When I told my Dr. of our decision she said that she was glad to hear it. She herself is the mother of three boys, none of whom have been circumcised. She told me that she would never have given me her opinion if I had decided to to circumcise him, but since we had decided not to she said that she and most of the other doctors on the staff consider it to be "unnecessary plastic surgery". We live in the NY City area and my son was born in an NYC hospital. It seems to be rather commonplace in the NY area not to circumcise - I don't know how it is in the rest of the country though. I also checked in advance with our pediatritian - he said that the medical community is "neutral" on the subject - as other letters have pointed out - and that it is purely a matter of personal taste or tradition.