There are facts about circumcision—but you won’t find them easily on
the Internet. Parents looking for straightforward evidence about
benefits and risks are less likely to stumble across the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than
Intact America,
which confronts viewers with a screaming, bloodied infant and demands
that hospitals “stop experimenting on baby boys.” Just a quick Google
search away lies the
Circumcision Complex, a website that speculates that circumcision leads to
Oedipus and
castration complexes, to say nothing of the practice’s alleged
brutal physiological harms. If you do locate the rare
rational and informed circumcision article, you’ll be assaulted by a vitriolic mob of commenters accusing the author of encouraging “genital mutilation.”
How did it come to this? For years, circumcision was a private
decision, encouraged by many doctors, practiced by most families (in
America, at least), but little discussed in the public sphere. Yet in
the past two decades, a fringe group of self-proclaimed “intactivists”
which is what homosexual activists were even into the 70s
has hijacked the conversation, dismissing science
similar to the homosexual movement denying the health risks of homosexual behavior, slamming reason, and
tossing splenetic accusations
homophobe anyone? at anyone who dares question their
conspiracy theory. For doctors, circumcision remains a complex, delicate
issue; for researchers, it’s an effective tool in the fight for global
public health. But to intactivists, none of that matters. The Internet
is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, where human reason leads the
best ideas to triumph. There are plenty of other loud fringe groups that
flood the Internet with false information, but none of them has been as
successful as the intactivists at drowning out reasoned discourse. In
the case of circumcision, the marketplace of ideas has been
manipulated—and thanks to intactivists, the worst ideas have won out.
Like most fringe groups, the anti-circumcision faction is almost
comically bizarre, peddling fabricated facts, self-pity, and paranoia.
The intactivists also obsess about sex
mostly of the homosexual type to an alarming degree. Still,
some of their tactics are shrewd. The first rule of anti-circumcision
activism, for instance, is to never, ever say
circumcision: The movement prefers propaganda-style terms like
male genital cutting and
genital mutilation, the latter meant to invoke the odious practice of
female genital mutilation. (Intactivists
like to claim the two are
equivalent, an
utter falsity that is demeaning to victims of FGM.)
Anti-circumcision activists then deploy a two-pronged attack on some
of humanity’s most persistent weaknesses: sexual insecurity and
resentment of one’s parents
. Your parents, you are told by the
intactivists,
mutilated you when you were a defenseless child, violating your
human rights and your
bodily integrity. Without your consent, they destroyed the
most vital component of your penis,
seriously reducing your sexual pleasure and permanently hobbling you with a maimed member. Anti-circumcision activists craft an almost
cultic devotion to the
mythical powers
of the foreskin, claiming it is responsible for the majority of
pleasure derived from any sexual encounter. Your foreskin, intactivists
suggest, could have provided you with a life of satisfaction and joy.
Without it, you are consigned to a pleasureless, colorless,
possibly sexless existence.
Intactivists gain validity and a measure of mainstream acceptance
through their sheer tenacity. Their most successful strategy is pure
ubiquity, causing a casual observer to assume their strange fixations
are widely accepted. Just check the comment section of any article
pertaining to circumcision. When Slate’s Troy Patterson wrote a piece
thoughtfully weighing
circumcision’s pros and cons, he was attacked for supporting a
“barbaric practice” of “mutilation” that “ought to be illegal.” A
lighthearted Dear Prudence column
suffered the same fate. Intactivists
pummeled the Amazon rankings
of a book about the history of AIDS that mentioned circumcision as a
proven preventive measure. Check any Internet message board
this is also true of homosexual activits and you’ll
find the same ideas peddled as unimpeachable fact: Circumcision is
amputation, a
brutally cruel and
despicable form of abuse. It
damages penises and
violates human rights. And it
irrevocably, undeniably ruins male sexuality for life.
The problem with these arguments is that they’re either entirely made
up or thoroughly disproven. None of intactivists’ cornerstone beliefs
are based in reality or science; rather, they’re founded in lore,
devilishly clever sophistry dressed up as logic. The facts about
circumcision may be hard to find on an Internet cluttered with
casuistry—but they are there. And they prove that even as intactivists
dominate the Internet, the real-world, fact-based consensus on
circumcision is tipping in the opposite direction.
Take, for example, the key rallying cry of intactivists: That
circumcision seriously reduces penis sensitivity and thus sexual
pleasure.
Study after
study after
study has proven this notion untrue. Some men circumcised as adults actually report an
increase
in sensitivity, while many report no appreciable difference; virtually
none noted any notable decrease. Men circumcised as adults also almost
universally report
no adverse effect in overall sexual satisfaction following the procedure. (That fits with what my colleague
Emily Bazelon found
when she asked readers for their circumcision stories a few years ago.)
And genital sensitivity in response to erotic stimulation is
identical in circumcised and uncircumcised men. Don’t trust individual studies? A
systematic review
of all available data on circumcision came to the same conclusion.
Intactivists, then, aren’t disputing a few flimsy studies: They’re
contradicting an entire field of research.
So much for circumcision’s supposedly crippling effect on sexual
pleasure. But what about its effect on health? Intactivists like to call
circumcision “
medically unnecessary.” In reality, however, circumcision is an extremely effective preventive measure against global disease. Circumcision
lowers the risk of HIV acquisition in heterosexual men by about
60 to
70 percent.
And circumcision reduces HIV risk over a man’s lifetime, unlike
condoms, which must be used during each sexual encounter. It’s no wonder
that the World Health Organization has pushed circumcision as a
key tool in the fight against HIV.
But that’s not circumcision’s only benefit. The procedure also
protects men against a variety of other STDs, significantly reducing
their odds of contracting
herpes and
syphilis. Moreover, circumcision is highly effective in
preventing transmission of HPV in men, which in turn reduces their risk of penile cancer. And circumcised men are far less likely to
contract genital warts or
develop urinary tract infections. Fewer circumcisions mean more STDs and infections—and
billions more in health care spending.
As both a personal and public health matter, circumcision is clearly
in men’s best interest. But intactivists, predictably, aren’t having any
of it. Like
anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists,
anti-circumcision activists reject all science that doesn’t fit their
angry, victimized orthodoxy. Does circumcision truly prevent HIV?
Probably not,
they say—but even if it did, it would ultimately increase risk of HIV
by lulling men and women into a false sense of complacency. (Never mind
that this is
emphatically false.) Plus, they claim, circumcision has
such high rates of complication that its benefits couldn’t possibly outweigh its drawbacks. (Again:
simply incorrect.) Anyway, to intactivists, mutilation is mutilation; what does it matter if it’s for the greater good?
Thus far, intactivists’ ideological warfare has remained largely—
though not entirely—toothless. Municipal ballot measures in America to ban circumcision have collapsed under the weight of
their own weirdness; a German court’s anti-circumcision ruling was
reversed by the legislature.
However they keep on getting farther along in the process,
On the Internet, though, it’s a different story. A generation of future
doctors, scientists, and parents has now been exposed to a constant
stream of acrimonious and unscientific lies about circumcision.
remember it took 2 generations for the homosexual "community to get "marriage" Men
across the world have been told their parents mutilated their genitals
and ruined their sex lives. (Some even try to
reverse the “damage”—
for a price.)
Conventional wisdom is starting to hold that even if circumcision is
medically helpful, it’s also sexually harmful. Intactivists, in short,
are winning the online battle.
Is it only a matter of time until they
win the greater war?
remember homosexual "marriage" is much more of a historical anomaly then banning bris milah is!
(
Slate)
Things that are not mentioned ?purposely? in the original article
1. The gay "communities" support of banning Milah
2. That this movement is run very similarly to the toevah movement, (which was changed by television)
3. They ignore the political side for the most part, and how their "losses" were really gains.
