Circ/Foreskin info
This is a TON of info for the intactivist movement about the problems with circumcision, and info about the foreskin and it's purpose. Many links abound in this post as well.
Genital integrity is a basic human right.
Over 80% of the world is intact.
This is an excellent movie (done by doctors opposing circumcision) about foreskin’s
purpose and harm of circumcision.
http://www.doctorsopposingcircumcisi...o/prepuce.html
Even a perfectly performed circumcision does life-long harm.
1. It removes the most sensitive parts of the penis (Ridged band and Frenulum)
2. Glans (the head of the penis) is designed to be an internal organ being protected by the foreskin. So once the foreskin is being removed, the glans become an external organ. Being constantly rubbed against underwear leads to it’s keratinization (the skin gets thick and rough, partially loosing sensitivity; the same way as it does on our feet once we start walking). It’s a matter of fact, it looses so much sensitivity that a circumcised man without a condom on feels less than an intact man wearing a condom.
Please take a look at a recent sensitivity study published in the BJU International (British Journal of Urology) in April 2007.
This study was the first time that the intact and circumcised penis were thoroughly, systematically and scientifically tested for sensitivity. The testing method was monofilament testing, the same method used in assessing peripheral neuropathy, such as lack of feeling in the feet of diabetics. The resulting measurements of sensitivity are quantifiable and reproducible. The study was submitted for peer review before being approved for publication.
The study's objective: to map the fine-touch pressure thresholds of the adult penis in circumcised and uncircumcised men, and to compare the two populations.
The conclusion, from the abstract: The glans of the circumcised penis is less sensitive to fine touch than the glans of the uncircumcised penis. The transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis. Circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.
Full text of the study (pdf), http://www.icgi.org/touch-test/touch-test-article.pdf
Graphs illustrating the comparison findings http://www.icgi.org/touch-test/
3. Moisturizing the glans is another important function of foreskin. Once removed, the skin of glans gets dry which most of the time leads to inability to have sex/masturbation without an artificial lubricant. On the other hand intact men do not need it at all. Foreskin slides up and down the shaft of the penis providing an easy and smooth penetration, lubrication and additional pleasure for both partners.
4. The pain during circumcision is truly agonizing.
Do you know how they circumcise newborns? First, because the foreskin is attached to the glans exactly like the fingernail is attached to the finger, they have to rip open those adhesions. They force a blunt probe under the foreskin and run it all around. Think about how that would feel under your fingernails and add on it that foreskin is the most sensitive part of the body. Then they slice open the foreskin and peel it away from the glans. Then they put a clamp on and crush the foreskin to halt the worst of the bleeding. Then they take a scalpel and slice the foreskin off. Oh, and by the way, did you know that over 85% of neonatal circumcisions in the US are still being preformed without any/adequate anesthesia?
If one wants to put their baby through this nightmare, they at least must have guts to see how the procedure is being done. As you can see on this video, the doctor claims that he uses anesthesia…well, make sure your speakers are on! http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...27632617&hl=en
There has been actually a study that was stopped before being completed due to too much trauma to babies http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9712/23/ci...on.anesthetic/ .
There has been another study that was comparing pain sensitivity in newborn vs. adults. The results were quite shocking! Newborn indeed don’t feel pain the way adults do. They feel it 1. more intense; 2. on a larger area and 3. for a longer period of time!
Lucky babies would pass out being unable to coop with such intense pain; not lucky ones will not and will go through the whole agony all the way.
There has been also a study that proved that intact boys and girls have higher thresholds of pain than circumcised boys. It was published in the Lancet (British medical journal) in 1997.
While permanent psychological impact of circumcision is still mostly unknown, it’s logical to assume that just like any extremely painful and traumatic event-even if forgotten-it can lead to a permanent emotional/psychological scar/damage.
Even a perfectly performed circumcision does not guarantee that a person will not have more serious (beyond the mentioned above) problems in his future sexual life. Such problems as, for example, too tight (sometimes even painful) erections can be due to removal of too much foreskin and whatever left over just not enough to accommodate a normal erection are much more common than many people think since it’s nearly impossible to know for sure how much is “too much” until the penis reaches its full-grown size. Removal of too much foreskin can also lead to a shaft of the penis being hairy (it pulls skin from above to more or less accommodate an erection).
As any surgery, circumcision may have some very serious (even life threatening) complications. http://www.circumcisionquotes.com/complications.html
http://www.cirp.org/library/complications/ . Of course, the most horrible complication is death and there were quite few of them as well (here is the most recent one http://healthblog.ctv.ca/blog/_archi...2/2967860.html ; and I’m talking about reported deaths only; god knows what is the real number, because those infants who, for instance, went to a cardiac arrest or had difficulty breathing (due to excruciating pain of circumcision) and got brain damage due to lack of oxygen, or died due to an infection following the circumcision will most likely not be reported as circumcision victims.
Worth while mentioning most recent scientists discovery that Langerhans cells that are present in the foreskin are behave as ‘natural barrier’ to HIV.
Bellow are the links.
http://body.aol.com/news/articles/_a...28234109990019
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030500357.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q..._uids=17334373
http://www.womenshealth.gov/news/english/602421.htm
Outside of Israel, the U.S. is the 2nd highest circumcising country in the world and after Africa, has the 2nd highest infection rate. Plus the fact that more than 80% of the world's men are "uncircumcised" and countries in Europe have an extremely low HIV+ rate.
As you can see, nature designed a man’s body to be just as perfect as it can! And why would anyone want to rip off their child from all these benefits of having a whole perfectly functioning body remains a big mystery for me.
Also the two most common reasons for circumcision just drive me absolutely nuts! One is “he won’t remember it”. Would that be ok if someone, let’s say, rape a women and then injected her with a drug which would erase this event from her memory. Would this kind of rape be ok just because she doesn’t remember it?
Or would that be ok to actually rape an infant (s/he won’t remember it anyway, right?!).
Second is “Looking like a daddy down there”. Hmmm…makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?! With this logic I sure feel very sorry for a kid whose daddy got his leg or arm amputated…
Oh, yes, the locker room argument is a “good” one as well! I like what one guy said: "Dude let's get it straight, you are laughing at me because you got a part of your dick cut off?!.."
It’s just doesn’t make any sense! It sounds more like some poor excuses that people make up to feel better about something that they feel in their heart (and their instinct) is wrong.
Some women would leave the decision up to their husband because he has a penis. Well, maybe he does have a penis, but she is the one who has foreskin. When fetus develops in uterus, the very same tissue that becomes foreskin in boys, becomes clitoral hood and labia in girls. Same tissue that both in boys and girls serves the same purpose: protection and sexual pleasure. That is why amputating foreskin in boys is equal to amputating labia/clitoral hood in girls; another words, female genital mutilation (FGM) is the same think as male genital mutilation (MGM), ‘nicely’ called circumcision.
Also unlike circumcised males, women have intact genitalia, and therefore, they are the ones to experience sexual pleasure the way it was meant to be.
This is a very interesting movie (contains NO violence) about female genital mutilation. As you can see, they do it to their girls because it was done to them, so there must be nothing wrong with it. Also as you can see, the women think that there is nothing wrong with them and that female circumcision is TOTALLY NORMAL. And of course, just like any mutilation, it’s surrounded by myths and misconception to keep it going. The most common myths about FGM include: intact vagina isn’t healthy, dirty, disgusting and that circumcision is necessary in order to have kids. http://www.thenewsroom.com/details/3...fe+and+Leisure
Started as a cure for masturbation (yes, you read it right! masturbation was considered to be evil and sinful and was blamed for all sort of illnesses including paralysis and mental retardation http://www.cirp.org/library/history/ ) these days male circumcision is surrounded by a lot of myths and misconceptions to keep it going. Most those myths are about intact babies/boys’ penises care. Some would say that it’s very hard to take care of them, that circumcised penises are somehow cleaner, healthier and things like that.
Well, sounds really good if not for the fact that it’s the most common misconceptions. In infants and young boys foreskin is fused to the glans with the same tissue like our fingernails fused to our finger-beds (during circumcision it feels kind of like ripping off your nail from nail-pads just much more intense since it’s the most sensitive part of the body; it has by far more blood vessels and nerve endings than any other part of the body).
At some stage (it can be anywhere between 2-16 years of age) the tissue naturally breaks down and foreskin separates from the glans, becoming retractable. Most boys will become retractable by the age of 8. Before a boy is retractable, NO ONE should EVER mess with the foreskin except for the boy himself (the owner of the penis). It should NEVER be pulled back by onyone else. It is absolutely harmful (and this can lead to infections and growth of scar tissue) to forcibly retract foreskin and clean underneath. It is also absolutely unnecessary. It’s kind of like ripping off you’re a nail to clean the nail-bed.
Foreskin is fused to the glans protecting them and the only thing which can be in there is smegma (which is a natural discharge, full of antibodies; girls, by the way, produce by FAR more smegma than boys do and we never consider their vagina to be dirty because of that). So, the proper care for an intact penis of young boys is just to wipe/wash it from outside (and from outside ONLY) as if it was a finger and this is all there is to it. Period.
When boys are fully retractable (rarely before 5 years of age) it’s enough to just to tell them to pull the foreskin back during bath and that will be enough. Before puberty (usually about 14-16 years of age) the glans don’t even need to be washed with soap. After that age it will take a boy just a couple of seconds to pull the foreskin back, soap it and rinse it with water. No matter how you look at it, keeping girls genitals clean are so much more harder, and yet no one suggests to cut her labia off in order to get rid of smegma or to make it “cleaner”. Just think how ridicules this whole thing sounds!
Parents should be wary of anyone who tries to retract their child's foreskin, and especially wary of anyone who wants to cut it off. Human foreskins are in great demand for any number of commercial enterprises, and the marketing of purloined baby foreskins is a multimillion-dollar-a-year industry http://www.foreskin.org/f4sale.htm
Jewish and circumcision.
You're Jewish! The bible says to circumcise!
Yes, it does. Up until Greece, circumcision (called milah) was nicking the tip of the foreskin with a knife. The foreskin was still intact, however. About two thousand years ago, for fear of assimilation with the Greeks, the rabbinate declared that brit milah was not enough. Brit periah was now the standard, the laying bare of the glans. This is NOT what Abraham did. This is NOT biblically mandated. AND the fact remains, any child born to a Jewish woman is Jewish, despite the status of his foreskin. If, for some reason, you cannot perform the procedure, a drop of blood from the penis will suffice. If circumcision was still brit milah, I wouldn't have such a problem with it.
Evidently there are plenty of Jewish people these days that refuse to perform MGM (male genital mutilation) on their baby boys even for religious reasons:
Jewish Circumcision Resource Center (a great website with the information linked to studies/references) http://jewishcircumcision.org/spectator.htm
http://www.jewishcircumcision.org/
This organization works in Israel http://www.kahal.org/
Jews against circumcision website (quote: Even Rabbi Maimonides acknowledged that circumcision is a way to curb masturbation) http://www.jewsagainstcircumcision.com/
Brit shalom (Hebrew covenant of peace) is a naming ceremony for Jewish boys that is intended to replace the traditional brit milah ceremony as an initiative by some, more liberal, Jews who do not approve of circumcision of boys. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_shalom
If an adult wants to get circumcised, it’s definitely his body and therefore, his choice. There are benefits of being circumcised as an adult vs. as an infant.
- adequete pain relieve during and after procedure (also keep in mind that adults don’t pee and poop on the raw wound from circimcision the way babies do);
- significantly less chance of taking too much skin since the penis is ful grown size and no need to ‘guesstimate’;
- prosess of keratinization and partual loss of sensitivity will be much less due to glans being protected by the foreskin all the years preor circumcision;
- his body, his choice! not being ripped off from the basic right of genital integrity and the right to choose whether to preform this cosmetic sergery on the body or not. No one should ever have a right to alter genitals of another person! Kids are NOT a parent’s property!
And one last thing I wanted to mention, if I may. I was raped by two armed people when I was 19. As traumatizing as it was, I’d still choose to be raped vs. circumcised any day. It’s a matter of fact, I consider circumcision to be much worse than rape. In both cases one gets held/strapped down and genitals are being violated. However, the pain of circumcision is so much worse and at least victims of rape normally still have their entire body afterwards, unlike victims of circumcision who get a healthy, functioning, important body part being amputated.
More great links:
Just Like Daddy video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXal6eR8_NI
Penn and Teller video called “Circumcision Bullshit”
Yahoo Video: http://tinyurl.com/23kcyc
Google Video: http://tinyurl.com/2hhud3
While this video is for artificial foreskin (and I really have mixed feelings about the product) this video is AWESOME as far as showing the process of keratinization and loss of sensitivity by using computer graphic, explaining the process in a very powerful and easy-to-understand way. To view the video, please click on the link and then go to “View The SenSlip Video” http://www.senslip.com/Photo_of_the_SenSlip_fitted.php .
TOP 10 ways Circumcised SEX Harms women
http://www.sexasnatureintendedit.com...k_scrapes.html
This website shows very clear (it explains AND also it shows very graphic videos) about how sex with circumcised penis is different than with an intact one. (there are ALOT of videos almost on every page that explains everything in very powerful and easy way).
http://www.myspace.com/intactivist has lot of good videos and articles, including The Nurses of St. Vincent: Saying "No" to Circumcision (short version) http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu...oid=1501353134 ,
also comparison of FGM (female genital mutilation) and MGM (male genital mutilation).
Btw, I didn't write this. Somebody else wrote it and gave me express permission to post it here.
Genital integrity is a basic human right.
Over 80% of the world is intact.
This is an excellent movie (done by doctors opposing circumcision) about foreskin’s
purpose and harm of circumcision.
http://www.doctorsopposingcircumcisi...o/prepuce.html
Even a perfectly performed circumcision does life-long harm.
1. It removes the most sensitive parts of the penis (Ridged band and Frenulum)
2. Glans (the head of the penis) is designed to be an internal organ being protected by the foreskin. So once the foreskin is being removed, the glans become an external organ. Being constantly rubbed against underwear leads to it’s keratinization (the skin gets thick and rough, partially loosing sensitivity; the same way as it does on our feet once we start walking). It’s a matter of fact, it looses so much sensitivity that a circumcised man without a condom on feels less than an intact man wearing a condom.
Please take a look at a recent sensitivity study published in the BJU International (British Journal of Urology) in April 2007.
This study was the first time that the intact and circumcised penis were thoroughly, systematically and scientifically tested for sensitivity. The testing method was monofilament testing, the same method used in assessing peripheral neuropathy, such as lack of feeling in the feet of diabetics. The resulting measurements of sensitivity are quantifiable and reproducible. The study was submitted for peer review before being approved for publication.
The study's objective: to map the fine-touch pressure thresholds of the adult penis in circumcised and uncircumcised men, and to compare the two populations.
The conclusion, from the abstract: The glans of the circumcised penis is less sensitive to fine touch than the glans of the uncircumcised penis. The transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis. Circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.
Full text of the study (pdf), http://www.icgi.org/touch-test/touch-test-article.pdf
Graphs illustrating the comparison findings http://www.icgi.org/touch-test/
3. Moisturizing the glans is another important function of foreskin. Once removed, the skin of glans gets dry which most of the time leads to inability to have sex/masturbation without an artificial lubricant. On the other hand intact men do not need it at all. Foreskin slides up and down the shaft of the penis providing an easy and smooth penetration, lubrication and additional pleasure for both partners.
4. The pain during circumcision is truly agonizing.
Do you know how they circumcise newborns? First, because the foreskin is attached to the glans exactly like the fingernail is attached to the finger, they have to rip open those adhesions. They force a blunt probe under the foreskin and run it all around. Think about how that would feel under your fingernails and add on it that foreskin is the most sensitive part of the body. Then they slice open the foreskin and peel it away from the glans. Then they put a clamp on and crush the foreskin to halt the worst of the bleeding. Then they take a scalpel and slice the foreskin off. Oh, and by the way, did you know that over 85% of neonatal circumcisions in the US are still being preformed without any/adequate anesthesia?
If one wants to put their baby through this nightmare, they at least must have guts to see how the procedure is being done. As you can see on this video, the doctor claims that he uses anesthesia…well, make sure your speakers are on! http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...27632617&hl=en
There has been actually a study that was stopped before being completed due to too much trauma to babies http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9712/23/ci...on.anesthetic/ .
There has been another study that was comparing pain sensitivity in newborn vs. adults. The results were quite shocking! Newborn indeed don’t feel pain the way adults do. They feel it 1. more intense; 2. on a larger area and 3. for a longer period of time!
Lucky babies would pass out being unable to coop with such intense pain; not lucky ones will not and will go through the whole agony all the way.
There has been also a study that proved that intact boys and girls have higher thresholds of pain than circumcised boys. It was published in the Lancet (British medical journal) in 1997.
While permanent psychological impact of circumcision is still mostly unknown, it’s logical to assume that just like any extremely painful and traumatic event-even if forgotten-it can lead to a permanent emotional/psychological scar/damage.
Even a perfectly performed circumcision does not guarantee that a person will not have more serious (beyond the mentioned above) problems in his future sexual life. Such problems as, for example, too tight (sometimes even painful) erections can be due to removal of too much foreskin and whatever left over just not enough to accommodate a normal erection are much more common than many people think since it’s nearly impossible to know for sure how much is “too much” until the penis reaches its full-grown size. Removal of too much foreskin can also lead to a shaft of the penis being hairy (it pulls skin from above to more or less accommodate an erection).
As any surgery, circumcision may have some very serious (even life threatening) complications. http://www.circumcisionquotes.com/complications.html
http://www.cirp.org/library/complications/ . Of course, the most horrible complication is death and there were quite few of them as well (here is the most recent one http://healthblog.ctv.ca/blog/_archi...2/2967860.html ; and I’m talking about reported deaths only; god knows what is the real number, because those infants who, for instance, went to a cardiac arrest or had difficulty breathing (due to excruciating pain of circumcision) and got brain damage due to lack of oxygen, or died due to an infection following the circumcision will most likely not be reported as circumcision victims.
Worth while mentioning most recent scientists discovery that Langerhans cells that are present in the foreskin are behave as ‘natural barrier’ to HIV.
Bellow are the links.
http://body.aol.com/news/articles/_a...28234109990019
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030500357.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q..._uids=17334373
http://www.womenshealth.gov/news/english/602421.htm
Outside of Israel, the U.S. is the 2nd highest circumcising country in the world and after Africa, has the 2nd highest infection rate. Plus the fact that more than 80% of the world's men are "uncircumcised" and countries in Europe have an extremely low HIV+ rate.
As you can see, nature designed a man’s body to be just as perfect as it can! And why would anyone want to rip off their child from all these benefits of having a whole perfectly functioning body remains a big mystery for me.
Also the two most common reasons for circumcision just drive me absolutely nuts! One is “he won’t remember it”. Would that be ok if someone, let’s say, rape a women and then injected her with a drug which would erase this event from her memory. Would this kind of rape be ok just because she doesn’t remember it?
Or would that be ok to actually rape an infant (s/he won’t remember it anyway, right?!).
Second is “Looking like a daddy down there”. Hmmm…makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?! With this logic I sure feel very sorry for a kid whose daddy got his leg or arm amputated…
Oh, yes, the locker room argument is a “good” one as well! I like what one guy said: "Dude let's get it straight, you are laughing at me because you got a part of your dick cut off?!.."
It’s just doesn’t make any sense! It sounds more like some poor excuses that people make up to feel better about something that they feel in their heart (and their instinct) is wrong.
Some women would leave the decision up to their husband because he has a penis. Well, maybe he does have a penis, but she is the one who has foreskin. When fetus develops in uterus, the very same tissue that becomes foreskin in boys, becomes clitoral hood and labia in girls. Same tissue that both in boys and girls serves the same purpose: protection and sexual pleasure. That is why amputating foreskin in boys is equal to amputating labia/clitoral hood in girls; another words, female genital mutilation (FGM) is the same think as male genital mutilation (MGM), ‘nicely’ called circumcision.
Also unlike circumcised males, women have intact genitalia, and therefore, they are the ones to experience sexual pleasure the way it was meant to be.
This is a very interesting movie (contains NO violence) about female genital mutilation. As you can see, they do it to their girls because it was done to them, so there must be nothing wrong with it. Also as you can see, the women think that there is nothing wrong with them and that female circumcision is TOTALLY NORMAL. And of course, just like any mutilation, it’s surrounded by myths and misconception to keep it going. The most common myths about FGM include: intact vagina isn’t healthy, dirty, disgusting and that circumcision is necessary in order to have kids. http://www.thenewsroom.com/details/3...fe+and+Leisure
Started as a cure for masturbation (yes, you read it right! masturbation was considered to be evil and sinful and was blamed for all sort of illnesses including paralysis and mental retardation http://www.cirp.org/library/history/ ) these days male circumcision is surrounded by a lot of myths and misconceptions to keep it going. Most those myths are about intact babies/boys’ penises care. Some would say that it’s very hard to take care of them, that circumcised penises are somehow cleaner, healthier and things like that.
Well, sounds really good if not for the fact that it’s the most common misconceptions. In infants and young boys foreskin is fused to the glans with the same tissue like our fingernails fused to our finger-beds (during circumcision it feels kind of like ripping off your nail from nail-pads just much more intense since it’s the most sensitive part of the body; it has by far more blood vessels and nerve endings than any other part of the body).
At some stage (it can be anywhere between 2-16 years of age) the tissue naturally breaks down and foreskin separates from the glans, becoming retractable. Most boys will become retractable by the age of 8. Before a boy is retractable, NO ONE should EVER mess with the foreskin except for the boy himself (the owner of the penis). It should NEVER be pulled back by onyone else. It is absolutely harmful (and this can lead to infections and growth of scar tissue) to forcibly retract foreskin and clean underneath. It is also absolutely unnecessary. It’s kind of like ripping off you’re a nail to clean the nail-bed.
Foreskin is fused to the glans protecting them and the only thing which can be in there is smegma (which is a natural discharge, full of antibodies; girls, by the way, produce by FAR more smegma than boys do and we never consider their vagina to be dirty because of that). So, the proper care for an intact penis of young boys is just to wipe/wash it from outside (and from outside ONLY) as if it was a finger and this is all there is to it. Period.
When boys are fully retractable (rarely before 5 years of age) it’s enough to just to tell them to pull the foreskin back during bath and that will be enough. Before puberty (usually about 14-16 years of age) the glans don’t even need to be washed with soap. After that age it will take a boy just a couple of seconds to pull the foreskin back, soap it and rinse it with water. No matter how you look at it, keeping girls genitals clean are so much more harder, and yet no one suggests to cut her labia off in order to get rid of smegma or to make it “cleaner”. Just think how ridicules this whole thing sounds!
Parents should be wary of anyone who tries to retract their child's foreskin, and especially wary of anyone who wants to cut it off. Human foreskins are in great demand for any number of commercial enterprises, and the marketing of purloined baby foreskins is a multimillion-dollar-a-year industry http://www.foreskin.org/f4sale.htm
Jewish and circumcision.
You're Jewish! The bible says to circumcise!
Yes, it does. Up until Greece, circumcision (called milah) was nicking the tip of the foreskin with a knife. The foreskin was still intact, however. About two thousand years ago, for fear of assimilation with the Greeks, the rabbinate declared that brit milah was not enough. Brit periah was now the standard, the laying bare of the glans. This is NOT what Abraham did. This is NOT biblically mandated. AND the fact remains, any child born to a Jewish woman is Jewish, despite the status of his foreskin. If, for some reason, you cannot perform the procedure, a drop of blood from the penis will suffice. If circumcision was still brit milah, I wouldn't have such a problem with it.
Evidently there are plenty of Jewish people these days that refuse to perform MGM (male genital mutilation) on their baby boys even for religious reasons:
Jewish Circumcision Resource Center (a great website with the information linked to studies/references) http://jewishcircumcision.org/spectator.htm
http://www.jewishcircumcision.org/
This organization works in Israel http://www.kahal.org/
Jews against circumcision website (quote: Even Rabbi Maimonides acknowledged that circumcision is a way to curb masturbation) http://www.jewsagainstcircumcision.com/
Brit shalom (Hebrew covenant of peace) is a naming ceremony for Jewish boys that is intended to replace the traditional brit milah ceremony as an initiative by some, more liberal, Jews who do not approve of circumcision of boys. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brit_shalom
If an adult wants to get circumcised, it’s definitely his body and therefore, his choice. There are benefits of being circumcised as an adult vs. as an infant.
- adequete pain relieve during and after procedure (also keep in mind that adults don’t pee and poop on the raw wound from circimcision the way babies do);
- significantly less chance of taking too much skin since the penis is ful grown size and no need to ‘guesstimate’;
- prosess of keratinization and partual loss of sensitivity will be much less due to glans being protected by the foreskin all the years preor circumcision;
- his body, his choice! not being ripped off from the basic right of genital integrity and the right to choose whether to preform this cosmetic sergery on the body or not. No one should ever have a right to alter genitals of another person! Kids are NOT a parent’s property!
And one last thing I wanted to mention, if I may. I was raped by two armed people when I was 19. As traumatizing as it was, I’d still choose to be raped vs. circumcised any day. It’s a matter of fact, I consider circumcision to be much worse than rape. In both cases one gets held/strapped down and genitals are being violated. However, the pain of circumcision is so much worse and at least victims of rape normally still have their entire body afterwards, unlike victims of circumcision who get a healthy, functioning, important body part being amputated.
More great links:
Just Like Daddy video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXal6eR8_NI
Penn and Teller video called “Circumcision Bullshit”
Yahoo Video: http://tinyurl.com/23kcyc
Google Video: http://tinyurl.com/2hhud3
While this video is for artificial foreskin (and I really have mixed feelings about the product) this video is AWESOME as far as showing the process of keratinization and loss of sensitivity by using computer graphic, explaining the process in a very powerful and easy-to-understand way. To view the video, please click on the link and then go to “View The SenSlip Video” http://www.senslip.com/Photo_of_the_SenSlip_fitted.php .
TOP 10 ways Circumcised SEX Harms women
http://www.sexasnatureintendedit.com...k_scrapes.html
This website shows very clear (it explains AND also it shows very graphic videos) about how sex with circumcised penis is different than with an intact one. (there are ALOT of videos almost on every page that explains everything in very powerful and easy way).
http://www.myspace.com/intactivist has lot of good videos and articles, including The Nurses of St. Vincent: Saying "No" to Circumcision (short version) http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu...oid=1501353134 ,
also comparison of FGM (female genital mutilation) and MGM (male genital mutilation).
Btw, I didn't write this. Somebody else wrote it and gave me express permission to post it here.