Letters to the Editor
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To Gordon Wagner
Sorry, did you just use the word "negroes"? Since your terminology as well as understanding of so-called "female circumcision" clearly date back to an earlier, pith helmeted era, let me clarify some things for you.
"Female Circumcision" which is more appropriately called "Female Genital Mutilation" is essentially a clitorectomy--designed to remove sexual sensation and, by extension, sexual drive altogether. It is not the equivalent of circumcision, but more akin to full castration. Human rights activists don't tolerate it for the same reason that we don't tolerate the creation of castratos for chamber choirs anymore.
It is primarily practiced among African Muslims, including Egyptians (most of whom don't qualify as "negroes")--at a rate as high as 95% in some countries. The victims of this practice are preteen or teenage girls, the goal is the suppression of female sexuality, and the practicioners are frequently entirely unqualified witch doctors whose tools include scissors and broken bottles. To compare this to modern western male circumcision is definitely in the realm of apples and oranges.
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shmegegge
"Fuck you ... Bernard!" Peeniegate. I laughed. But, seriously, I'm Jewish and in general I love Jews and Jewish culture and even the Jewish approach to religion where your beliefs are a process of self-discovery. But the one thing typical in the Jewish community that I loathe is parental pressure, and the way some Jewish adult children roll over and say, "Yes, Ma" to every request. I wonder if the author would have even married his gentile wife if his parents had decided their son should marry a Jew and refused to give their blessing. You know, to preserve tradition and not dilute the heritage, blah blah blah. Yeah, Ma, and if you're dying on the hospital table and could be saved and live another five years by a simple but expensive hospital procedure, I suppose I should decline it since healthcare costs are spiraling nationwide. It just doesn't work that way - Neal, you have to do what you believe is best for your child irrespective of tradition or the common good or keeping the peace or whatever. That's my POV.
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again with the foreskins...
We seem to have our eyes on the man the child will become, what he will look like and how he will socialize, and the society in which he will move, and the children he may help create with that penis, and the values he will pass along. Not penis qua penis, but penis as example, as statement, as litmus test, as... measurement. Of something. So size, once again, matters: if not the actual size of the penis, the size of our commitments to the reasons for and against what people do with the foreskin around its tip.
Questions:
Are people foregoing Judaism for Scientology now, what with this lifelong trauma stuff, imposed during an event in infancy? Which side are we who come from neither of these ancient and venerable religious traditions going to take?
The studies indicating minimal long term health effects appear based on sound methods. The part where it causes long term trauma seems bunk. Or are we to simply assume that the majority, or even a non-trivial percentage, of Jewish men harbor unexpressed and poorly remediated long term psychological trauma?
Is this the approach we should generally take with persons from traditions other than our own? Does this seem like an appropriate general assumption to make about a person on the basis of either their heritage or the condition of their penis?
Does our rhetoric for and against this act also say something about ourselves, and the rhetorical risks we're willing to take in debating it? Do we recognize the places in history that resonate, and the ways in which they do, when these varieties of very strong language are employed both for and against this practice?
Actually, this raises an interesting parallax question-- am I the only one who's noticed a connective pattern here? Consider the criticisms leveled by Scientology on psychology and psychiatry? Wasn't it David Rakoff who once described psychoanalysis (from whence these disciplines spring, natch) as "secular Judaism's way of finding spiritual meaning in a post-religious world"?
Is there some anxiety here about the psychology of this, or the Jewishness of it? What would Richard Dawkins do? (you really do not have to answer that question)
What are we attacking here today? The author? His parents? His wife? Religion? Jews? Science? (am I attacking Scientology?) I suggest few of us reading are thinking of the child, really, except insofar as his pain appalls some, or his recovery might be a difficulty to the ones who bore him, our reactions to science and tradition. We've decided a stranger's child's dick matters, and we're wiling to make something of our beliefs about it. Whether or not this dick which is not ours will matter to us in 13, 18... 40 years.
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rare as a white elephant in the States
rare as a white elephant in the States
Huh? That just ain't so.
Circumcision in the US has been on a declining overall trend for decades. It varies by region, with the midwest lagging behind the curve but also declining overall. Regions leading the trend away from circumcision are about 50% circumcised, or less, which is still way more than other developed nations.
In future circumcision will likely continue falling into the minority, so any broad conformity arguments are actually against circumcision.
Nor have I ever heard of partners caring much, one way or the other; aside from some fetishists which may prefer either.
As far as cleanliness arguments go, those are simply false as any reading of pediatric research will show. The idea that a circumcised penis washes itself, somehow rubbing clean of detritus and bacteria in the underwear... one dumb theory.
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There's nothing wrong with circumcision.
It drastically cuts the risk of HIV transmission, it's cleaner and it's more unesthetic than the, um, unsculpted member. However, what the mother of the child wants is a hell of a lot more important than what the Yenta grandmother and the um, what is the word, Yentl grandfather. Whether or not to circumcise is up to the people who are going to raise the child and make the millions of other irrevicable decisions that will be made in the child's life over the course of the years, not the self-important bossy overly empowered grandparents. Moses H. Christ, doesn't the word "boundaries" come into play?