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Over at LiveScience.com, there's this article about a study on circumcision .
How much does circumcision alter what a man ultimately feels? Scientific studies aiming to answer this question have been inconclusive.
Now researchers prodding dozens of male penises with a fine-tipped tool have found that the five areas most receptive to fine-touch are routinely removed by the surgery.
The finding, announced today, was detailed in the April issue of the British Journal of Urology (BJU) International.
Well that sounds like a big ol' "NO" to me.
According to a study by the National Health and Social Life Survey, the U.S. circumcision rate peaked at nearly 90 percent in the early 1960s but began dropping in the '70s. By 2004, the most recent year for which government figures are available, about 57 percent of all male newborns delivered in hospitals were circumcised. In some states, the rate is well below 50 percent.
More at the link above.
A few people have recently submitted comments that essentially say "research shows there is no evidence..." but have no provided any links to references. I am not posting new comments that simply assert a relationship or deny a relationship. Please provide evidence/links to support any major claims if you want your comments posted.
Latest news is that HIV+ who are circumcised are more likely to transmit the virus to women:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/96175.php
Note that
1) this study appears to have resulted in eight extra women acquiring HIV than if all the men had been left intact.
2) that the rate of transmission was higher even after the healing period, which means that more women may acquire HIV after the experiment is over, solely because their partner was circumcised as part of an experiment.
This is not the first time that HIV in women has been linked with partner circumcision:
To be clearer, the study shows no significant difference in rates of transmission, though it is true as you say that eight more women in the circumcision group contracted the virus, something that is alarming all on its own.
I suppose that if circumcision were consistently found to decrease men's risk of acquiring the virus it could be argued to decrease the risk to the women who have sex with them, but it seems to early to be able to say that with confidence. Condom use still seems necessary... and more effective.
A question I have is about whether men (or women) in the US are particularly resistant to the use of condoms on a regular basis.
If male to female transmission is higher, then that in turn increases the risk to men who have sex with them. My second link did show a statistically significant connection between HIV status in women and partner circumcision btw.
Either way, I think we can all agree that circumcision can only help men who are having unsafe sex with an HIV+ partner. HIV doesn't strike people at random, and it just seems to me that the focus should all be on ABC (Abstinence, Being faithful, Condoms). Any partial solution, be it circumcision, vaccine, or microbicide will lead to more unsafe sex. This will presumably be more so for circumcision, since it's the most sensitive part of the penis being removed. There have already been reports of people thinking that circumcision means they don't need condoms despite all the warnings. I genuinely think that promoting circumcision will result in more deaths from AIDS in Africa rather than fewer. If funds and health resources are diverted from ABC to circumcision, this will only make things worse.
The article says this btw: "Some previous studies found that circumcision led to little, if any, decrease in penile sensitivity". If you look at such studies, they almost always measure sensitivity of the glans, rather than the inner foreskin. They typically don't even measure the most sensitive part of the glans. To me, that either suggests ignorance on the part of the researchers, or that they didn't actually want to find any decrease.
I don't have a problem with condoms btw. I used them for over two years with one girlfriend who didn't like the Pill.
Elizabeth, there is not just anecdotal evidence that suggests men who are circumcised are more resistant to condom use. Robert Bailey leader of two of the African trials has also admitted that the intervention groups in the African studies showed more risky behaviours and less consistent condom use. This makes biological sense, after all, circumcision excises tissue containing most of the fine touch nerve endings on the penis. So adding a condom to that is like being double desensitised.
We also have research evidence that heterosexual men who have been cut may be more likely to have anal sex (see Laumann's research into male sexual behaviours) This is backed up by anecdotal evidence from those communities in which most men are excised. Again backs up the case for the sensory deficit shown by Sorrells et al.
It's also interesting to note that no one looks at excising the female labia and hood as a prevention against HIV although similar circumstantial evidence exists to that which excited the circumcision lobby to do the RCTs on male foreskin excision in Africa - ie a large study has shown a correlation between cutting and HIV protection, many of the areas which cut these parts show a lower rate of HIV and they have lots of Langerhans cells. There are also studies which appear to show a link between poor genital hygiene and HPV (such as Human papillomavirus and risk factors for cervical cancer in Chennai, India: A case-control study by Franceschi et al ) and hygiene is now mentioned as a risk factor on cancer help sites, yet no North American ever says on seeing a little newborn baby girl 'eeugh natural is sooo disgusting and unhealthy, lets cut her dirty little baby bits.'
Excising this tissue from baby girls, even with anaesthetic would be deemed an unacceptable breach of her bodily integrity and any attempt to justify it medically (as Egyptian doctors have typically tried to do) an apology for a barbaric ritual best consigned to history. We apply this to the amputation of the labia minora (8% of Egyptian circs) and to the clitoral hood (apparently the main target of most Indonesian circs, and an unknown number of Egyptian and Afghani and African circs) as much as the clitoris even though i don't think there's been any study proving widespread psychological or sexual dysfunction from FGC (in fact those having a clitorectomy for vulval cancer here in the West are typically told most women can come afterwards). When the BMJ ran an article saying that 800 women in Britain were having their labia/hood circumcised voluntarily on the NHS there was outrage at the risk to sensory pathways and the fact that society (and pornography) may be encouraging body dysmorphia, but no mention to the risk to sensory pathways in excising genital parts from a man, nor the body dysmorphia involved in foreskin hatred.
Body parts belong to the person they are attached to and he or she has an automatic right to choose to keep all of them. The only case in which this right can be overridden is where there is an overwhelming risk of leaving them and the person is not able to consent - because they are in a coma for example.
I'm upset to find the web is full of women blogging in support of forced male circumcision. I ask them all to think a little about how they'd feel if the roles were reversed, and all America's disgust and body dysmorphia was applied to their innocent delicate bits.... and precious research dollars being spent on halting a decline in infant female circumcision and promoting it as a benefit rather than a violation....
If women aren't prepared to lay down their prejudices and look at this issue from an ethical standpoint (let alone a scientific one).....then may Solomon's wisdom - and his knife - be applied to them.
How little our society knows about this unique structure of the penis! It is a jack of all trades but does each exceedingly well – at least two dozen functions. I’ll focus on sexual pleasure only, for brevity. As the primary organ of sexual touch and endowed with a denser supply of fine-touch receptors than anywhere on the male body (anywhere even on the rest of the penis), it is THE primary source of sexual pleasure in the male. Please see http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/sorrells_2007/. This sentence sounds absurd to an American nation of cripples (59% infant circ rate, higher for current male population, 15% globally) who have hardly had contact with a whole man, but is true. Cold and Taylor ‘boldy went where no man has gone before” in their histological study which helped elaborate science’s understanding on what nature has taken millions of years to perfect – the tremendous and varied nerves gracing this structure, capable of transmitting the most exquisite and delicate sensations of touch, heat, and pressure. Please see http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/taylor/ Actually, at least 8 prior scientific authors dating back to the mid 1800’s have elaborated on the types of nerves found within the prepuce, but it seems modern science, and American science in particular, does not celebrate sexual pleasure and has hidden this information, unconsciously perhaps. Spoken more succinctly than I could, Paul M. Fleiss, M.D. in What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Circumcision says
“The primary zones of erotogenous sensitivity are the frenulum, ridged band, and preputial orifice, and the external fold of the foreskin. Continuous and gentle stimulation of any one of these areas can elicit pleasure, orgasm, and ejaculation. “
Each component of our sexual anatomy contributes to the complex interplay and symphony of sensations, collected by the organ, and transmitted to the brain whose development perfectly matches and decodes that tactile experience, solely for the pleasure of its owner, and taking any part away is like hearing a beautiful Mozart symphony…without the string section. Who would suggest reducing the labia minora or clitoris even one little bit? Why do we consider penile reduction surgery 'ok' in this country? Bodily integrity against a background of cultural value placed on obviously essential body parts makes cutting on non-consenting humans for any reason other than dire medical emergency seem like a heinous crime. Denmark is considering nonconsensual circumcision just that. So should we, as we already have a 1970’s law banning FGM, including for reasons of religion, it is important to note. That law sits right now, in our books, and yes, U.S. doctors engaged in cutting women for the same reasons (please look it up if you are doubtful) in this very country in which we are living, right up to the year in which this law took place.
I’ll list a few other functions of the foreskin and every one of these functions, including those of sexual pleasure (not a phrase we like to associate with science, but I dare say within the realm of human experience, and so *should be given equal status) have studies to back it up. But I’d like to suggest people here consider that there are two groups of areas where studies are not necessary; shared similar experience and experience of body functioning.
This partly explains why we have so few studies documenting the sensitivity of female genitalia – we all know that cutting genitalia means a bleaker sexual experience (this reason of sexual sensation adds to our prior reason – bodily integrity – to fight for genital integrity for females), and given the lack of personal understanding around basic male sexual anatomy, why some people have published poorly designed studies that don’t even measure what the specific anatomy can detect. For example, the glans is endowed with deep pressure receptors, and very few fine touch receptors, yet Master and Johnson tested glans of intact vs cut men in a way that would not elicit any difference because they were ignorant of the specific sensitivity of the glans. It’s not so amazing that being sexual ‘experts’ their knowledge is often re-quoted as fact (without even a full disclosure of their methodological approach), when in reality, they might as well have been testing the eyes of color-blind vs color-capable individuals with black and white images, and concluded that there’s no difference in vision between the two!
The reason that we lack studies on male sexual experience is because funding is not available for controversial sexual studies in a foreskin-phobic society, and because we devalue the sexual experience of men, trivialize it, and maybe reaching into (for others) uncharted emotional territory, subtly shame and blame men around their sexuality, just as we do for women. In males, we take that sexual shame into the area of male genital disfigurement. Being a nation comprised of mostly disfigured men, we call this ‘normal’ and ‘attractive’, like a nation of war vets missing their left ears since birth, and judging a biologically normal two-eared person as unattractive.
It is important to note that circumcision was originally promoted as a cure for what was considered dangerously unhealthy in the latter part of the 1800’s – masturbation. It gave the struggling new field of medicine some serious traction and credibility, since it could not solve many of the diseases of the day, but at least it knew by ‘borrowing’ from the Jewish tradition, how to cut pieces of anatomy off. It did not have any knowledge of this anatomy beyond what was needed to do ensure the survival of the patient, did not, in fact, wish to know. It was, with the help of many devotes such as Kellog (the cereal guy), successful in convincing the public - amist social discomfort around sexuality and its negative impact on spirituality - of it's moral and physical benefit. People were eager to take any steps necessary to assisting in their moral cleanliness. Conflating cleanliness with morality degraded into the current myth that cut men are unclean.
Funding in the rest of the world for studies on the male structure are completely unnecessary, exactly because their men posses that body part and do not need elaborate studies, in-depth nerve knowledge, and counter-studies to combat the biased and often blatantly false medical studies, to show that yes, we’ll be keeping what nature has blessed us with, thank you very much.
My last point – what other body part can you think of that is dangerous to its owner, contributes to medical risks, and whose value in its function is superseded by its risks? I can think of none, except when it comes to the uniquely United States perception of the prepuce. We’re the only country in the world cutting the majority of our males for non-religious reasons, basing our moral superiority over countries that practice FGM partly on highly selective and biased medical claims. Again, current global circumcision rates are around 15%. We take our children to the doc to help eradicate an ear infection. We don’t ask him to cut out his ear in an operation in which that same child as an infant would be fully conscious! If you think 5-20 minutes of pain on a helpless infant who has no say, should be considered an acceptable proactive medical practice, I invite you - male or female - to consider the situation where a mandatory law requires you have your intact genitals cut without anesthesia. The analogy breaks down a little here on a number of points, but is only meant to illustrate the complete lack of power and autonomy given around the decision to remove someone else’s body parts, for whatever reason. Only when there is a dire and imminent medical situation that could result in death or greater physical damage, and where that person is unconscious or incapable of making their own decisions, should we be allowed to amputate unhealthy body parts. Ethically, we cannot condone cutting healthy body parts that pose no immediate danger.
Nature doesn’t birth every mammal on this planet (except bats) with a foreskin because she’s made a mistake or because she hasn’t selected it out of the gene pool yet and has politely asked *us to finish the job for her. Foreskins are not a congenital birth defect, nor are they vestigial! A female secretes smegma (Greek for soap, since that’s *exactly what it is - there is scientific information about this), have more UTI’s, are equally at risk for AIDS, as compared with their male counterparts.
So, here briefly, are some other reasons for a prepuce:
Provides for smooth intercourse by reducing friction for both partners. The penis is more like a sleeve than a static ram-rod or dowel. Artificial lubricants are rarely needed during sex between an intact man and an intact woman.
Encourages the male to make gentle deep thrusting motions during vaginal sex so that he is in contact with the clitoral hood and clitoris, making it more likely for the female to experience orgasm during intercourse.
Produces smegma, a healthy natural skin emollient, which helps lubricate the skin and allows for effortless insertion during intercourse and greatly facilitates masturbation.
Provides immunological defense during infancy and childhood, when it is tightly fused to the glans via synechia – the same bond that holds your fingernail to it’s bed (imagine a toothpick being pushed underneath to destroy that bond and you may have a flavor for the pain experienced by an infant, and yes, sadly there are studies on infant pain during circumcision – please see http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/lander/. Human vivisection comes to mind after reading that study.)
Provides further immunological defense throughout life through specialized immune cells and activity found only in the foreskin of the penis.
Exposes the primary erotogenic sexual tissue during erection so that a male’s most highly sexually sensitive apparatus via his mucosa may come in contact with the female’s sexual mucosa.
Produces pheromones and releases these powerful sexual attractants more copiously during arousal.
Protects the glans and keeps it moist.
Please see CIRP.ORG and CIRCUMSTITIONS.COM for more information.
Andre Maranhao
To say the science on whether FORESKIN FEELS GOOD is inconclusive is to put too much stock in the reports that seem intended to downplay the value of the intact state. For example, one widely publicized study claimed no difference between cut and intact, but they only tested at two spots on each organ and they didn't measure the foreskin itself at all (and they only had a sample of a few dozen).
A much better study measured 17 standard spots on 100s of penises, including the foreskins of the intact, and the scar lines of the cut. The 5 most sensitive parts were all on the foreskin and frenulum, and among the cut the most sensitive spot was adjacent to the scar.
There simply can be no debate that circumcision removes exquisitely sensitive tissue including about half (that's 20,000) of the specialized pleasure receptive nerve endings.
If parental rights don't include sexual abuse, why should they extend to the amputation of sexual tissue?
