Oxidizing Material

But you use your fingertips. You don't use a foreskin.

tronvillain

I use mine all the time.

Corwin

Oh get over it.... you can pick things up just fine with trimmed fingers. People do it all the time... you don't actually LOSE any sensitivity worth keeping anyway.... they bend, they grasp, they pick things up. And you don't have to trim your fingernails or get dirt under them. (Makes handwashing easier too!) And chicks dig it when you don't have those sharp gross looking dirty fingernails too.... so why not? Of course you don't have a choice in this example... we are, after all, strapping you down without your consent....

Baloo

Tronvillian. Corwin. I am trying to make an informed decision as to whether or not, when I have children, I should consider an anesthetized circumcision. It is the pro's and con's of this decision that are up for debate. Are you honestly trying to tell me that as part of that decision, I need to factor in just how barbaric and traumatic NON-anesthetized circumcisions are? Could you provide a more flagrant example of a strawman fallacy? Just curious.

Corwin

Yes. You need to factor in how much impact having had a normal, useful and functional part of your body sliced off will be later in life. Whether it hurt or not is more or less irrelevant. You also need to factor in the question of the sexual impact later in life.... and how much a future son may resent never having had the chance to make the decision for himself whether or not he'd get the full range of male sexual response.

Gurdur

Ah, the clash of different world-views with all the majesty of tectonic plates colliding.

tronvillain

Baloo:
Even with anaesthetic, any surgical procedure involves some degree of trauma - there's a con for you.

So you consider it established that all circumcisions should be done with anaesthetic? I think that the rest of us were unaware that we were supposed to only be discussing anaesthetized circumcision.

tronvillain

Gurdur:
It still makes no sense to me. The only way I can see the foreskin affecting urination is if someone doesn't retract it.

MrDarwin

The claim that circumcision causes no harm is purely anecdotal and without basis, as far as I now. Most men who claim they're just fine circumcised have no basis whatsoever for comparison; they have no idea what it's like to be uncircumcised. Is there anybody here who's been on both sides of the divide, so to speak? And can anybody point me to studies of relative rates of impotence and other forms of sexual dysfunction in circumcised vs. uncircumcises men? And has anybody heard any circumcision horror stories? There's a few out there.

Using precisely the same reasoning as that used to support circumcision, we could cut the rate of breast cancer in women in half by surgically removing one of their breasts at birth. They don't need both breasts, do they? They only need one of them to suckle a child. (Heck, with bottle feeding, women don't need breasts at all! Chop them both off!)

In case anybody was still wondering, I am vehemently opposed to circumcision. Anybody who wants it badly enough can get it when they're old enough to make an informed decision. To do such a thing that is medically unnecessary to an infant is mutilation, pure and simple. And has anybody reflected on the fact that (in the U.S.A.) it is purely a secularized vestige of religious belief? That alone should make any freethinkers stop and think before subjecting their infant boys to it.

alek0

I would like to point out that using word "uncircumcised" to refer to men who haven't been surgically altered is ridicilous. Do you call women with breasts "unmastectomized"?