Denmark may soon be the first country in the world to issue a ban on non-therapeutic circumcision

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[–]Andythrax 14 points15 points16 points 12 years ago (55 children) | Copy Link

Im circumcised. I got it done in August 2012. im fairly open about it. I was 21years old. I suffered little to no pain and only mild discomfort for 4-6 weeks following the operation. That is to say I was sexually active before, and have been since the operation. How do I find it/did I find it?

Pre circumcision I was happy, I had good healthy solo sex life, and good healthy couples sex life and on one occasion triples sex life. Then I got phimosis for unknown reason and this less to the circumcision. I am so happy that ultimately it was my choice, I decided enough was enough and had it changed. Post OP I've had fairly good solo sex life and better couples sex life. No triples though, so that's probably a side effect (or it's unconnected, im no pro on causality)

It's a subjective thing in all honesty and nobody can say one way is better than the other than either experiencing both, or being given the choice to have the chop. Regardless of my health issues I was given the choice and got to experience a foreskin for 20 good years of my life and 1 pretty shit one. My twin brother had a circumcision shortly after birth and he will never know what it's like to have a foreskin, or clean out smegma...

tldr it's a choice, let people choose. Don't force it on babies, it's disgusting to do that.

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I doubt they removed 15 square inches of tissue in your circumcision. At birth, when they use one of the three standard clamps, most doctors just cut around the bell and remove what would be 15 square inches on the typical adult male's penis. In fact, that removes so much skin that when the adult man has an erection, it pulls skin that would normally be scrotal or pubic hair up onto the shaft of his penis. Some have so much skin removed that the hair follicles go all the way up to the scar.

Those men often have to shave or tweeze or get electrolysis to remove the hair. If they don't remove the hair, then they get to have sex with a hairy-shafted penis.

For those men, the tight skin actually keeps pressure back on the corpus cavernosum, making their penis appear shorter.

Also, besides removing the rigged band which grips and glides over the glans of the penis during intercourse, routine infant circumcision removes about 80% of the nerve endings of the penis. And by completely exposing the glans of the penis to air and fabric, a mucous-membrane tissue is converted to regular skin tissues, with many more layers of skin cells covering each nerve, effectively making the glans less sensitive.

You had a choice as an adult, and you chose a fairly radical solution. There are numerous treatments of phimosis that do not involve circumcision, such as treatment with steroidal creams and preputioplasty.

It is good that you offered your perspective, because it is rare that an adult male will choose to be circumcised. My guess is that you retained much more foreskin than they remove from babies (I am guessing they removed less than half as much), and will probably not suffer from many of the issues that effect men who were circumcised in childhood .... such as infection (shitty diaper anyone?), skin bridges, skin tags, scarring, uneven scarring, or one or more of many other complications, including death.

And all of the above do not address the ethics of removing perfectly fine, working body parts from a newborn baby without informed consent, issues affecting bonding, relationships, adult sexuality, likelihood to lack empathy, increased probability of criminal behavior, divorce, sexual dysfunction and many, many more ...

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[–]nobody2000 4 points5 points6 points 12 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

Hey! Me too!

I was 22 when I began to get phimosis. I didn't realize what was going on - I thought honestly that my penis was getting bigger and my skin would stretch to accommodate. After it got tighter, I looked into it, and I saw that I had phimosis.

Unfortunately, leaving it so long meant that through sex and masturbation, microtears left the end slightly scarred and hardened. As a result, circumcision was the only option left.

The only difference I notice is with blowjobs. For some reason, handjobs and masturbation are the same, and sex with a condom is the same (haven't had sex without a condom since geting cut).

It's possible that the girls I'm dating aren't great at giving blowjobs. Who knows? I went and had sex with an ex girlfriend (literally, for science), and it was the same.

I'm super glad that I was able to choose, and honestly, I don't miss what got chopped off. Sure - I'd have preferred to not go through any of it, but I'd much rather be circumcised than have to deal with phimosis.

What's a sad and odd silver lining is that I always wonder if routine circumcision wasn't a thing, whether or not I'd be viewed as a freak since I don't have my hoodie anymore. Part of me thinks "relief" that I can get with a girl and not have to worry about her reacting poorly. Obviously I'd prefer that everyone gets to stay intact, but it's always something I wonder.

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[–]TheEquivocator 1 point2 points3 points 12 years ago (13 children) | Copy Link

lead perfectly healthy sex lives,

But they do not.

How do you define "healthy" that you deny this? Circumcised sex is surely not detrimental to a person's health (if anything, it may confer slight health benefits, which is why it was common practice for so long).

and by and large do not feel themselves to be diminished by the operation.

because they don't know any better

Nonetheless. I can understand why you oppose circumcision on the grounds that it deprives someone of potential pleasure that he'd have had the ability to experience, but "depriving of potential pleasure" ≠ "causing suffering".

The act of sex is still pleasurable to them.

"Still..." you even acknowledge it yourself.

Not sure what you think I acknowledge with that word. The act of sex is still pleasurable after circumcision, as it is before it. Possibly it's not pleasurable to the same degree, but I wasn't taking a position on that, and in any case, it wouldn't affect my argument that depriving someone of pleasure he has never known is not "cruel", let alone appallingly so.

[–]Eryemil 5 points6 points7 points 12 years ago (5 children) | Copy Link

[–]TheEquivocator -2 points-1 points0 points 12 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

OK, this is taking it too far. People who were circumcised as infants do not know the feeling of being uncircumcised, lead perfectly healthy sex lives, and by and large do not feel themselves to be diminished by the operation.

This is not an argument against it being cruel.

Sure it is: cruel: "willfully or knowingly causing pain or distress to others". Circumcision surely does not cause significant pain to others (the pain of the operation itself is momentary, to an infant), and while it may cause emotional distress to some (i.e. people who are upset over having been circumcised as an infant), I'd venture that most people who have been circumcised all their lives do not feel emotional distress over the matter. In any case, surely, any such pain or distress is not being willfully or knowingly caused.

So, yes, "cruel" is hyperbolic, IMHO. It implies suffering, which is questionable, and intention to cause suffering, which is surely outright groundless. That's without even getting into the intensifier "appallingly", which should surely be reserved for things that are truly horrifyingly cruel.

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No one ever asks a baby boy if he wants part of his dick removed. No one ever asked me if I would prefer to enjoy sex the way my species was meant to enjoy sex. It's total bullshit. As far as for religious purposes, in a free society/country, this procedure completely tramples over the notion of freedom of/from religion. Imagine it was different, like they removed all of your hair as a baby and made it so it never grows back. You go your whole life as a hairless fuck because doctors unanimously agreed that hair was a hazard because if you don't clean it, you get lice. However, it's rather easy to clean your hair and you just wish you could live your life with a beautiful head of hair, and not live like a bald fuck for eternity. I see very little difference between this and circumcision. It's wrong, and I bet in a few years when the religious zealots finally just shut the fuck up, and stop practicing human mutilation for whatever reasons, we''ll learn that this causes the baby boys a great deal of stress/trauma and finally outlaw this practice at least for baby boys.

Hopefully one day, science and stem cells will be able to give men whose cocks were mutilated without their permission a new chance of regrowing their fs and then we can enjoy/have sex the way our species is supposed to.

[–]VagrantDreamer 18 points19 points20 points 12 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]TheLittleGoodWolf -1 points0 points1 point 12 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

Well the argument could be made that it's like having your nails removed. I'm not fully sure on their exact function actually (although I do know what the foreskin is for) aside from scraping stickers and biting on. I'm also not sure of if they would grow back if removed.

What I do know is that the membrane that holds your nails to your fingers is the same kind of membrane that holds the foreskin to the glans in a young boy. Sure this changes with age but while attached it's pretty much the same way a fingernail is attached.

With your nails removed quickly at birth there will only be small wounds and you don't use your fingers much at that time anyway so it's no real harm. There will never be problems with cuticles, clipping the nails, getting dirt under the nails, accidentally scratching someone etc. Also since you are so young when it's done you won't know what you are missing.

Note that I tried to use similar rhetoric to that used to argue for circumcision. I in no way think that nails should be removed even if I actually don't know their actual purpose I do enjoy a good scratching every now and then.

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not sure if you're being sarcastic or serious.

however, let's assume that you're not being sarcastic, then the distinction does actually matter. as far as i know, most countries already ban female circumcision because it's widely recognised as nothing more than mutilation. the legislation and discussion relating to it may simply want to clarify that this issue is purely about male circumcision.

tl;dr: the word 'circumcision' does not apply exclusively to boys. female circumcision is a thing. clarification, by the article's writer, may be prudent.

for my part, i think denmark is doing the right thing. it's not reasonable to support circumcision because you are already cut ... which seems to be the attitude of most men. the issue is what's best (medically and psychologically) for the child.

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I gotta say props to you for not making an irreversible decision for your son, giving him the bodily integrity he deserves. Quick fact the number of baby boys circumcised today in the us is about 32% whereas 30 years ago that number was in the 80% range or higher. I wonder why it dropped...?

Secondly about mutilation, I copied from wikipedia (since the oxford dictionary failed me)

Mutilation or maiming is an act of physical injury that degrades the appearance or function of any living body, sometimes causing death.

Circumcision is an act of physical injury that degrades the appearance and function of the penis, correct? It causes around 100 yearly deaths in the U.S alone, so there's the sometimes causing death part too. Wouldn't this be enough to call it mutilation of boys genitals? I.E genital mutilation?

Don't shy away from the word because it sounds horrible, people live through plenty of horrible things and are just fine. It does not change what happened though, they still went through an ordeal.

In case you wonder why Oxford failed me they said mutilation was:

the action of mutilating or being mutilated

Didn't help much.

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points0 points 12 years ago (5 children) | Copy Link

[–]TheLittleGoodWolf 6 points7 points8 points 12 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

It degrades the appearance in that it is altered from it's natural state. I know appearance is highly individual but there will be scarring.

Function, the natural state of the glans is to be moist, it's an internal organ and when the foreskin is removed it dries. The function of the foreskin is to keep the glans clean, moist and healthy. This is done with smegma, which is actually antibacterial and antifungual, it is produced constantly so the excess needs only to be rinsed off and all is well. Removing the foreskin removes it's function.

Now to your sources, checking the citations for the first statement of sexual function you have this quote

Circumcision in adolescence or adulthood may evoke a fear of pain, penile damage or reduced sexual pleasure, even though unfounded.

So while unfounded it is still a possibility meaning it's not disproved. But it gets better.

The Royal Dutch Medical Association's 2010 Viewpoint mentions that "complications in the area of sexuality" have been reported.

and then:

Additionally, the procedure may carry the risks of heightened pain response for newborns, castration anxiety for boys in the phallic stage, and dissatisfaction with the result.

There's also this about the studies made in africa:

Three studies in Africa several years ago that claimed that circumcision prevented AIDS and that circumcision was as effective as a 60% effective vaccine (Auvert 2005, 2006). These studies had many flaws, including that they were stopped before all the results came in. There have also been several studies that show that circumcision does not prevent HIV (Connolly 2008). There are many issues at play in the spread of STDs which make it very hard to generalize results from one population to another.

From wikipedia about HPV:

...a randomly selected circumcised man is less likely to be found infected with cancer-causing types of HPV than an uncircumcised man.

No strong evidence indicates that it reduces the rate of new HPV infection

Condoms make these points moot either way since neither of them are protected against by circumcision, there is only a decrease in risk.

Here is some light reading about myths and facts about the foreskin and circumcision.

Some citations from part 3 about sexual impacts:

Circumcised men are 4.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with erectile dysfunction, use drugs like Viagra, and to suffer from premature ejaculation (Bollinger 2010, Tang 2011). Men who were circumcised as adults experienced decreased sensation and decreased quality of erection, and both they and their partners experienced generally less satisfaction with sex (Kim 2007, Solinis 2007).

In a landmark study of US women, 85% who had experienced both circumcised and intact men preferred sex with intact men. Sex with a circumcised man was associated with pain, dryness and difficulty reaching orgasm (O'Hara 1999). In another study, women were twice as likely to reach orgasm with an intact man (Bensley 2003). Even when a woman said she preferred a circumcised partner, she had less dryness and discomfort with intact men (O'Hara 1999).

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Circumcised and anti-circumcision here.

It's awesome that you're OK with your body. Everybody should get that chance. You lucked out because, despite the choice being made without your consent, it happened to be a choice that you're OK with. I'm not OK with what was done to me, and that's the problem.

I'm probably an extreme, but I find the practice of voluntarily harming an infant, and in such an intimate and permanent way, to be an affront to humanity perfectly on par with rape. Others take a less emotionally charged view, but I find that the parallels between the two become more and more apparent the more one thinks about it (and in this case, one's parents are usually complicit in the crime, so there's also a pretty severe sense of betrayal involved).

I haven't found many anti-circ guys out in meatspace, but that's probably due to the nature of the topic. Being vulnerable enough to admit to feeling intimately harmed isn't a common thing among men. Thanks to the relative anonymity of the Internet though, there are other places where you can find such sentiments... if you poke around for anti-circ activism and support groups, you can find highly populated message boards filled with a lot of anger, sadness, resentment, dysmorphia, and sense of loss.

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There are a number of specifics, in addition to the the lack of choice in the matter. Sorry for the long post.

Partly it's the knowledge that a major erogenous zone was largely ablated. 100% of the sensitivity is lost from the amputated tissue. That tissue happens to be highly innervated mucosal membrane and a primary erogenous zone for males (not "just skin" as often claimed).

Partly it's the physical pain from having the glans denuded. Only a minority of guys seem to suffer from it, but I'm one of the lucky few. Without going into too much detail, if things aren't sitting just right, the simple act of walking can become excruciating. I often find myself wishing I could purchase some kind of apparatus that would prevent such chafing, and then I realize that I was born with such a thing, but it was surgically removed.

On a related note, a circumcised penis doesn't quite function as it is supposed to. Call it a minor quibble if you like, but it's a fact.

Partly it's a weird feeling of not being whole, which is difficult to explain. It's an uncomfortable, gnawing feeling that my body isn't all here due to a senseless decision made when I was an infant.

Along with that is a sense of helplessness. If someone came up to me today and announced that they were going to take a chunk of flesh off me without my permission, I'd fight them tooth and nail. But this was done to me while I was defenseless.

Partly it's the inability to put it out of my mind for long. Whether I glance down in the shower or get that pain from walking, I've been reminded of this nonconsensual body modification at least once a day for a couple of decades. What's the line from Fight Club? It's like the sore in your mouth that might heal if only you could stop tonguing it.

As a close analogy, consider if you woke up from being roofied, only to find that your body had been violated while you were defenseless and unable to consent. Imagine if the violation was difficult to just put out of your mind, because it left permanent, physical, visible effects, including but not limited to scarring. And to add insult to injury, many people don't recognize your right to feel violated by all of this. Some even defend the perpetrators and the practice itself.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

There are 7 billion people in the world, are you seriously suggesting there are no people who think circumcised penises are disgusting, if not circumcision itself, just because you've never met such people?

I assume you're American? The majority of men there are circumcised. Ever asked people in Europe, South America, or East Asia?

He said some people find uncircumcised penises disgusting, and although that's a stupid point to use for cutting a piece of a babies body off, I too can use that "argument".

I've never met a single girl that thinks circumcised penises are disgusting either, that doesn't mean there aren't people who think that way.

Then again, I live in Europe and the vast majority of males here are uncircumcised.

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First off, I'm upvoting you - not because I agree with your comment, but because I find it interesting. I would urge other people to not downvote just because they don't like the content.

I remember having my wisdom teeth pulled, and I remember appendicitis, broken bones, so on, so forth. Voluntarily having a circumcision as an adult isn't even close to being comparable to having something traumatizing forced on you (rape, attempted murder, poisoning, etc), and honestly you can probably be put under general anesthetic during the procedure.

Saying that a circumcision is harmless is disingenuous at best and itself harmful at worst: there are far too many cases of an infant getting a deadly desease or dying from a botched procedure to ignore the fact that it is simply a cosmetic procedure.

On top of that, studies suggest that circumcision is actually harmful to a male's sexual health in the long term by decreasing the sensitivity of the glans (for the sake of fairness though, that particular claim is disputed hotly by all sides).

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I've been here before and you are going to have a boatload of negative karma by the time tonight rolls around, if not sooner (it's 10am here).

As for your comment. I agree to an extent on some points. 1. Malice-free, yes. 2. Harmless, for the most part, yes. Statistically speaking it's rare for anything to go terribly wrong though there have been documented incidents. The argument here is don't do anything and you have 0% chance of any harm occuring. 3. Sanitary? Not sure if you mean the procedure itself or having it done makes the penis more likely to be sanitary. If the latter then I would say that's up to the individual to keep it clean when bathing which circumcised or not can be very dirty.

My argument has always been to do what you feel is right in the situation you are in. I'm from the U.S. and from a simple social perspective we chose to have our son circumcised because of the stigma attached to not being so (not right, we get it, but we're not looking, nor are we looking for our son to be, pioneers here). Although this opinion is changing it's just not quick enough. We felt the risk of emotional and psychological damage from feeling "different" far out-weighed the risk of the procedure itself. Physically, though, we know there really is no difference.

Those other cultures where women have their clitoris removed are often criticized. Aside from the usual unsanitary conditions and the fact it happens way after birth, I don't think it's within our right to judge them. Educate? Yes. Judge based on something they've always known to be "right"? No. Same thing here and other "circumcising countries". Educate them first and help make the change.

I said earlier we weren't looking for our son to be a pioneer but hopefully as time goes on and things slowly progress this country will come to understand that circumcision is not necessarily "normal" or "better". It takes time for opinions to evolve but right now it hasn't come full circle and we were not ready to put our son through another kind of abuse, mental, which is (arguably) more severe with deeper repercussions.

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Title	Denmark may soon be the first country in the world to issue a ban on non-therapeutic circumcision
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	898
Comments	322
Date	January 24, 2014 12:41 PM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1w1198/denmark_may_soon_be_the_first_country_in_the/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/denmark-may-soon-be-the-first-country-in-the-world.1004526 https://theredarchive.com/post/1004526

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