Intactivism Rears Its Head
October 6, 2007 by Sara Ost
Filed under Misc., Safety, Sexbolt Saturday, Surgery
The official ribbon of Genital Integrity.
Circumcision: if you are male and were born in, say, 1967, there’s an 85% chance you made the cut. But the rate of male circumcision in America is slipping steadily. If you are male and were born in 2004, not only are you not even reading this post, there’s a near fifty-fifty chance you are uncircumcised. Globally, about 1 in 4 men are circumcised.
Whether for religious reasons or family tradition, is circumcision really healthier, um, all around?
Intactivists, as they refer to themselves, are calling for an end to circumcision. The movement to save the foreskin is growing even amongst Jewish groups. Several prominent Jewish writers have questioned the tradition in recent writings. Motivations for intactivism vary. One leading intactivist joined the movement because he resents being circumcised himself.
The circumcision debate has long raged, but as to the alleged health benefits, there’s no definitive answer. It’s not medically necessary, so insurance providers increasingly deny coverage for the procedure. Yet some physicians still recommend it. Whether as a preventive for masturbation, syphilis, or currently, HIV, the unsubstantiated (and sometimes ridiculous) claims come and go. As for the hygiene argument, I’m curious to know what any pediatrician readers think. The American Academy of Pediatrics says circumcision is unnecessary, but makes no normative statement.
Is circumcision another example of successful social conditioning? Or going a step further, as intactivists do, is it an archaic blood ritual depriving humans of their right to genital integrity? The truth is that men’s perfectly functional penises have long been altered because someone - God? - decided thousands of years ago that lopping off infants’ foreskins was awesome good stuff. To be fair, circumcision may have made very good sense for those living in a hot climate in the days before running water and modern health care. Perhaps, for some, it still does. What do you think?
Moving along, both sides of the circumcision debate claim that sexual pleasure and sensitivity are enhanced, but that’s clearly subjective. I suggest more testing.
Further reading:
Incredibly, er, tasteless circumcision cartoon
Yahoo Health graphic comparison and what it actually looks like (sensitivity alert, gang!)
Did you know? The human male is the only primate whose penis does not have an actual bone in it! (This is called a baculum, and most male mammals have one.)
Kelly Townsend
Cutting part of the genitals off enhances sexual pleasure? Then cutting all of them off must …
The “it made sense before running water and modern health care” (and modern surgery) story was made up by a quack called Remondino in 1900. It never did.
Love the site name, Hugh. And thank you for stopping by and adding your comment!
I really don’t care one way or the other about circumcision, but I have to ask, do museum display makers deliberately omit the penis bone from skeleton displays? I don’t recall ever seeing one.
We can take to heart the suggestion about doing more testing into the effects of foreskin amputation on a man’s sexual experience (and his partner’s), but it won’t change the infant circumcision debate one bit. Infants don’t have sex.
HIS body, HIS decision.
Jim: Quite possibly they do - and keep them in their offices to show people. Quite a remarkable proportion of people (men especially) seem to delight in phallic displays of one kind or another, whether it’s “ethnic” carvings or jokey toys, like booze dispensers in the form of the Mannequin Pis (sp), that famous Belgian fountain. The os penis or baculum usually ends up in a bottle on its own in the pathology lab. They vary widely from animal to animal, but you’d never guess what you were looking at if you weren’t told.
Hi Sara,
I run a site dedicated to FGM. This is the first time I’ve heard of the Genital Integrity ribbon. Is it a real campaign? Thanks.
Marianne, hi there. To my knowledge, the campaign is real. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genital_integrity
Absolutely real. Note especially the symposia. The proceedings of the last several have all been published in book form. FGC is an important issue at them - more especially the ones held outside the US. Hanny Lightfoot-Klein was at the last one.
Only reason why I was surprised, was because I consider myself as part of the “Genital Integrity” movement, and am very close with many of the activists, but had not seen the ribbon before, or if I did, it just did not register at the time.
What does it matter if still works?
I mean, really.
On a side note: uncut pee-pees creep my out.
No like!
Wes, it doesn’t work as well (http://www.circumstitions.com/Sexuality.html) and sometimes it doesn’t still work at all (http://www.circumstitions.com/Complic.html)
On your side note, refined Chinese men used to regard unbound women’s feet as uncouth, too. In a sane world, a preference for genitals with part cut off would be generally regarded as the weird fetish that it is.
Probably because that’s what you have/are used to, Wes. In normal parts of the world they think circumcised looks weird and deformed. Probably because it’s missing a bit and has a strange scar.