Correct me if i’m wrong, but isn’t there medical evidence that circumcision decreases the risk of HIV transmission?

I’m just curious, with you majoring in Legal Studies, how do you regard the obvious conflict the 1996 Female Genital Mutilation Law has with the 14th Ammendment and specifically the Equal Protection Clause contained therein?

The Equal Protection Clause states that all classes of US citizens shall be treated equally under the laws of The United States yet the 1996 FGM law is discriminatory by it’s very verbage. It was written to specifically exclude males from protection by naming the specific parts to be protected and all those parts are exclusively female parts therefore excluding males. The only way I know of that such discriminatory laws can stand inspection is if there is a compelling governmental interest in continuing the discrimination. An example of this is in racial issues where blacks are given preferences because the government realizes there is endemic discrimination and blacks are given preferential treatment to equalize the endemic discrimination. What compelling interest would the government have in denying males equal protection of their genitals?

Can females be protected and males not and the law stand Consitutional muster? Is the denial of protection of males justified?

Many will try to justify it on First Ammendment religious rights but that also does not stand inspection. The FGM Law does not allow for religious circumcisions and female circumcision is almost exclusively a Muslim practice and those who practice it claim it as a religious requirement. The US Supreme Court has inspected similar cases where parents wish to deny a child medical treatment on religious grounds. In those cases, the court has decided that the one with the most to lose prevails. It would be a difficult argument to press that losing a part of one’s genitals is a lesser loss than just one of 613 religious dictums and especially when the child can come into full compliance on attaining majority at the age of 18 years by his own decision.

I suspect that if this ever comes before The Supreme Court, the court will strike the law down and Congress will be left to scramble to replace it with a law that does protect females and is in compliance with the 14th Ammendment. Is there any way to write such a law to protect females and not protect males and not conflict with the 14th Ammendment?

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A man with a foreskin has three primary erogenous zones. The most sensitive of these are the frenulum and the inner foreskin. The head places a distant third with most men. Circumcision damages or removes the frenulum and the inner foreskin. It also turns the mucous membrane of the head, which is like the inside of a vagina or a mouth, into something more like the skin on your arm. 4 1/2 million years of human evolution did not leave a mistake in a reproductive organ. The reports of circumcision preventing anything, are incomplete, speculative, and based on poor science. Many of the circumcised men took off before completing the study, and their HIV status is unknown. We don’t need to welcome babies into this world, by subjecting them to extremely painful, unneeded surgery on healthy parts. This is madness. It’s also unethical. The penis belongs to the boy, not the surgeon, or the parents. Why does ‘first, do no harm’, apply to everything but an American boy’s penis? What other healthy body part can be removed without consent, and sold for profit, with no knowledge of the parents? Circumcision is the biggest scam imaginable. The frenulum and inner foreskin give as much sensation as the clitoris. Removing the foreskin of a girl is a felony. Removing the foreskin of a boy is normal. Even if he is circumcised with anaesthesia, salty urine hits the wound afterwards. I happened upon a boy being circumcised in the hospital 35 years ago. His screams made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It is impossible to communicate what he sounded like, but I thought he was being murdered. None of this produces any measurable benefit. There is not one single medical organization on this planet, which recommends circumcision for medical reasons. HPV can be prevented with an innoculation. Circumcision does not prevent HIV. To discover this, we have to look no further than the high rate of HIV infection in the circumcised US, and the low rate of infection in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, etc, all non-circumcising countries. Circumcision has always been a solution looking for something to cure. In the future, it will be looked back upon the same way we look at foot binding, skull shaping, lengthening neck rings, etc… a mistaken belief, which does more harm than good. Why put your son at risk for MRSA, staph, meatal stenosis, skin bridges, hidden penis, and all the other unintended side effects of circumcision? How much trouble is a female foreskin to maintain? That’s how much trouble a male foreskin is. There is no way that a penis with the foreskin amputated feels as much as a whole one. 20,000 nerves hit the operating room floor, and can never be reattached, or compensated for. It is time we let logic and reason enter, and pay more attention to the less biased studies of other countries, such as Canada, New Zealand, Britain, and Australia, who used to circumcise routinely, but no longer do.

Laura:

Yes, there is. Significant evidence of a significant reduction in risk.

Amendment has one ‘m’. Jesus Christ.

WTF Laura. I don’t think thats right.

Great article, but was weird reading this from a male author.

Thanks for the vocabulary lesson. I’m a real grown-up now.

Denmark is considering dealing with male circumcision as we are with female circumcision: making it illegal until the age of consent. Sounds like a good idea to me because its logical.

Laura, Yes there is evidence that female circumcision protects the female from getting HIV. Does this mean we should promote female circumcision?

Jesus, Tobin. I know I wouldn’t want to be made fun of for my creepy dog dork.

Thanks for calling it a creepy dog dork. If you don’t like them, take it up with your maker. Fortunately, none of my lovers has ever felt that way. Perhaps you’d like someone to circumcise Michaelangelo’s The David? Come to think of it, why is every single nude portrayal of a man in art uncircumcised? Perhaps it is because a scar is not really that attractive. I wonder if the lovers of Mario Lopez, Leo DiCaprio, Colin Ferrell, Sean Connery, Josh Hartnett, etc, think that their penises are creepy, or compare them to dogs, as you do? Is jealousy of a dog sad?

Laura, circumcision is like a cheap condom that fails 40% of the time. Trusting male circumcision for protection from HIV infection could be a fatal mistake.

http://www.studentsforgenitalintegrity.org/hiv/

The risk reduction for HIV contraction is for men, not women. This is because the underside of the foreskin (among other places) is a mucus membrane, through which viruses like HIV can easily pass into the bloodstream. It does not eliminate a man’s risk of contracting HIV, nor is this an argument for the circumcision of all male infants.

But to lie and say there is no association/evidence is unacceptable.

First you say: “Sexually speaking, a cut penis functions just the same as an uncut one.”

Two paragraphs later, you say that intact men need less lubrication, because of “the natural sliding motion the foreskin provides.” If that’s not a difference in sexual function, I don’t know what is.

You also say: “you’d think having less cock would be seen as inferior…” To those of us who understand the functions of the natural penis, mutilated genitals ARE seen as inferior. And many of us are quite angry that part of our penis was removed without our consent, and have begun a process of foreskin restoration.

I am a fourth generation American male. Circumcision has not been practiced by my family throughout those times. We simply did not follow what, at the time, was considered a ‘cultural norm’.

The fact that ‘Everyone else is doing it!’ didn’t affect our decision. If there were problems later, we dealt with them through medications, or IF NEEDED, they were circumcised. Nobody needed that in their childhood or adulthood. Sure, some were made fun of, but we are ‘normal’, they are the ones who are different. They had their most sensitive parts removed. Having all of what we were born with shows the sensibility of our parents, not simply acting like drones, programmed to do what is put into our heads.

“a cut penis functions just the same as an uncut one. Both elongate, harden and eventually ejaculate.” Yes, both get you to the destination, but the comfort and pleasure of the journey are very different. With so many fewer nerves for feedback, a cut man has to work hard to get enough stimulation to achieve orgasm - “achieve” being the operative word. An intact man can take it easy and enjoy the many and varied pleasures of the journey. It has been compared in musical terms - a cut man to the end of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (file:///M:/www.circumstitions.com/Sounds/rite.mp3), an intact man to the beginning of the 4th movement of Sibelius’ 2nd Symphony (file:///M:/www.circumstitions.com/Sounds/sibelius.mp3)!

Your figure of 30-34% men circumcised worldwide is too high. 25% worldwide would be conservative. With 3 billion males in the world, the half-billion Muslims are the biggest single group, followed by about 160 million in the US, some tens of millions each of tribal Africans, South Koreans, Filipinos and older Commonwealth men, a few million Jews and barely a million Australian Aboriginals and Polynesians.

Seems a little defensive.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I feel like this article is this guy’s way of whining because he’s been turned down because of his penis.

Laura Hermanns: Recent studies carried out in Africa showed a 61% protective effect from male circumcision but these studies are fraudulent. Here is why:

A study such as this one has to conform to actual populations and the effects in such a population and this one doesn’t. If it did, The US would be remarkably free of HIV. The vectors of transmission would be sufficiently broken that the virus would run into road blocks that stopped it in it’s tracks. Instead, The US has the highest HIV infection rate among the industrialized nations.

We can look at another disease and a similar intervention to see why this is not true. Polio is an easily transmittable disease and can be transmitted by simple casual contact. In contrast, HIV is a relatively difficult disease to transmit requiring intimate contact and the exchange of bodily fluids. The polio vaccine is only 70% effective but wiped the disease from the population in a single generation by sufficiently breaking the vectors of transmission. With 80% - 90% of sexually active men in The US “vaccinated” with circumcision, if the study was true, the virus would run into roadblocks at every turn and HIV would be as rare in The US as the ebola virus. (which is non-existent in The US)

The American instigators and participants of the study are on the record as being vigorous proponents of male circumcision for the past 25 years. It is obvious that the constructed not only the study but the results in an effort to reverse the current trend of The US abandoning male circumcision.

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Never meaning to be offensive: The word cock is 4,000 years old Egyptian. What then would be the female equivalent to cock, that’s “cnt”. Ka-t in hieroglyphics meant vulva, vagina, mother, and women. Qefen-t, another ancient Egyptian word for vagina. Hittite “kun” is tail of an animal, rear end. (That must be how we get quifing. and getting some tail) “Cnt” or “queynte” (old english) did not have a negative connotation, was just the body part. http://www.billcasselman.com/unpublishedworks/cuntwordorigin_use.htm When you long for someone means your dick gets bigger. You’re incorect , intact and circumcised penises do not act nor have the same feelings. Many dislike the word uncircumcised because it gives the impression it needs to be circ’d so say intact, it’s all there. Circ. removes 65% (typical US Radical Circumcision) to 85% (frenulum removed) of the sexual receptors which leaves 15% receptors at the corona thus with the frenulum removed the glans becomes the most sensitive but is the least sensitive of an intact. (Sorrells et al. Fine Touch Sensitivity Test of the Adult Penis). Function, the dartos muscle tenses when erect creating a firm skin tube so that any action on the skin is transferred to the ridged band and so transferred to the frenulum (the male’s nexus) to elicit the stepped orgasmic response. It is common for intact males to have copious amount of precum which circ’d. men don’t given the loss of receptors. It is common for intact males to have the ability to cum by thought alone. Langerin kills HIV so preserve the foreskin. mgmbill.org for equality of the sexes, it’s only fair. I chose circumcision (age 5) and now restoring through stretching. I know it was the worst mistake of my life not having those receptors in a vagina surrogate & No lube $. Spingsteen parody http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU5aXfJLBb4

Women were once in control. There was no violence. (James Prescott “Origins of Violence”) It is thought men were jealous of women because they had a connection with the earth (birthing) and moon (menstrual) so he started to cut their foreskins to get equal footing. Climate change made them nomads so men came into power. Violence became the norm as did circumcision including skinning from the belly button genitals to anus. (circumstitions.com) Historically circ. is the mark of a slave as the Egyptians did to the Hebrews as we did to black and white slaves (criminals sold). The last hundred years it has been a disease looking to cure whatever disease in vogue. This is called the “Pony Express”. The African HIV studies are called “Cargo Cult Science”. www.malecircumcisionandhiv.com

Laura,

The alleged benefit of circumcision for reducing HIV was from an African study whose researchers were biased to begin, with and it has been discredited by many since based on a variety of research flaws (you can Google around). It also ignoree the lack of hygiene in Africa as a contributing factor and assumes the African benefits would also apply here in the US where we have plenty of soap and water.

Think about this: Most U.S. men are circ’d but most HIV deaths and carriers in the U.S. were circ’d at birth. So cutting to end HIV doesn’t seem to work here in the US in actual practice does it?

Not only that, but the number of African men who did not come back at the end of the study, to find out if they had HIV or not, totally outnumbers the reported cases of positive HIV. So the stats don’t reflect reality, only part of it, and the final answer is unknown.

In spite of that, the flawed numbers don’t even stand for that much. The study only shows circ’d men had a 1.6% chance of contracting aids, while the intact men had a 3.4% chance. Or if you were circ’d you had an incidence of 16 men out of a 1,000, while intact men had an incidence of 34 men out of 1,000. I wouldn’t even use a birth control method with as low a success rate as that.

Condoms work much better at preventing HIV, they don’t take 16 years to do any good, they are not permanent, they don’t remove sensitive nerve endings, and they leave no scars.

RobertW

When did the Badger Herald become a place to rail about foreskin and society?

wtf is wrong with you people

Frank, the URL is

http://www.circumcisionandhiv.com/

This article obviously has addressed an issue that is still highly volatile in our society (as most subjects connected to sex are in our neo-Puritan mindset). Just look at all of the dramatic responses above. I think that approaching this topic is extremely important because there is so much mystery and stigma around sexual topics. We need more open discussion to remove the stigma that causes so many to make uninformed decisions.

Furthermore, I was really shocked to find out that somebody was disturbed that this was written by a man. a) we need more men represented in this sex column as it has all been women so far, b) men are the people who have penises and profit the most from them, and c) whoa, talk about response out of left field— I don’t think it is pertinent and if you have a problem with it, it diplomatically behooves you to keep it to yourself. You should be positively adding to an intellectual discussion.