Cutting Through the Bullsh*t of Circumcision

If you’ve got an iron stomach and a frozen heart, I implore you to hop on YouTube and have a gander at newborn baby boys being mutilated in the good ol’ American way. If you don’t have the nerve to deal with it, I’ll save you some trauma and describe it here. It goes like this:

You take a freshly born little boy and you strap him down into an apparatus that holds his legs apart. It’s called the Circumstraint. (How cute.) There are Velcro cuffs to keep his arms and legs in place so he can’t move while you’re slicing his genitals. Then, you coat his penis in antiseptic. The topical is as much medication as the baby will have during the process and it does nothing at all to alleviate the pain. You can’t sedate babies or give them anesthetics for this procedure — or most others — so he’s literally going to feel every rip, tear, yank, and slice as he’s strapped down to a device in an operating room.

Now, because it’s meant to shield the baby from foreign materials such as fecal matter, the foreskin’s opening is incredibly tiny. The doctor is going to procure some forceps to place them into the tiny opening and widen it. This rips the baby’s synechia, the bit of skin that’s attached to the head of his penis and the inner lining of his foreskin. This is also where the newborn’s screaming becomes so shrill and heartwrenching, where he screams until his lungs have nothing more to offer so his mouth becomes stuck in a silent, breathless, crimson-faced gape of anguish. What we’re doing to our newborn boys is nothing short of barbaric.

But we’ve only just begun.

As the blood begins to form around the tip of his penis, a clamp is attached to his newly stretched skin. Then, a slit is cut into the dorsal side of the tender flesh. The skin is peeled back, revealing the raw and bloody glans (head) of the baby’s penis. Once that’s exposed, a tiny bell-shaped cap is placed on the glans, and the foreskin is stretched over that bell. A string goes around the object to secure the skin, the tighter the better, for it will ooze blood and obscure the view of what needs to be sliced off.

The main event begins. Using either a scalpel or tiny scissors, the foreskin is removed, with careful attention to take as much as possible off to prevent accidentally leftover foreskin from rotting. Now it’s time to snap the handle of the bell off, which means the baby will have that circumcision cap until it, along with his necrotic foreskin, falls off — usually within 5–10 days. Circumcision takes roughly a third of the penile skin system including sensitive inner and outer preputial layers, the peripenic dartos muscle, the frenar band, and part of the frenulum.

But why would secular folks who aren’t using the practice as part of their religion have this procedure done to their kids? It’s a very good question and still remains a bit of a mystery. Curiously, the United States is the only country in the world where the majority of its males have been snipped. Seeing as how that’s the case, you’d think we have a clear consensus on why we’re doing this. Not so much.

A bit of rifling through the annals of its history shows that for the non-religious, American circumcision has its roots in masturbation hysteria. The wisdom of that day was touted (apparently for perpetuity) by none of than Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes’ fame. A man of many talents, Kellogg spearheaded the establishment of the American Medical Missionary College, which later morphed into Illinois University. But in the meantime, Dr. Kellogg ran a sanitarium that specialized in holistic healing methods that included exercise and vegetarianism. As an intuitive man of science, he was a skilled surgeon who pioneered the idea of plentiful and healthy gut flora leading to efficient digestive systems. The belief was so strong, that yogurt enemas were a part of his patients’ routines.

However, as time wore on, the brilliant doctor turned to more religious endeavors, proselytizing inside his medical practice and instilling his morals onto patients. He became obsessed with “onanism,” another word for masturbation. A Seventh-Day Adventist at the turn of the century, sex was a highly regulated affair for people of his faith. Dr. Kellogg was inspired by the teachings of Sylvester Graham (of graham cracker fame, and I’m not even kidding). Graham claimed that eating two meals a day would help stymie the rampant sex drives plaguing the people of their day, so his patients went down to breakfast and dinner with yogurt enemas in between.

That was the easy stuff. Another of Dr. Kellogg’s practices was the cleaving of the foreskin, for it was his remedy for “local uncleanliness” and would deter men from wanton sex and masturbation. We know this today as circumcision and somehow, just haven’t moved on.

But butchering newborn boys’ genitals wasn’t doing the trick for Dr. Kellogg’s time, so he turned to “healing” young girls by applying carbolic acid onto their clitorises, literally blistering then rotting them off. Additionally, Dr. Kellogg suggested the practice of sewing existing foreskins of grown men together with just enough space to allow them to pee, but to cause painful erections. He also recommended a patented cage that went around the genitals and administered an electric shock upon attempts at “self-abuse.” It’s safe to say that though he’d later be best known for his cereal, Dr. Kellogg had an insatiable desire to pump the brakes on … well, desire.

So the mystery remains: Why are we cutting our baby boys? Some say it’s “just tradition.” They want their sons to look like their fathers, who looked like their fathers, who looked like their fathers, and so on. Some say it’s medical, and that it keeps the male parts from becoming infected from having unwashed foreskin. (That, folks, is a terrible reason to cut a baby’s genitals. What if he doesn’t clean his pits and gets some kind of inflamed blockage? Should we just go on and remove the sweatglands from his baby armpits — just in case?)

The fact of the matter is that unless he suffers from phimosis — in which his penis is literally trapped inside of his foreskin — there’s no medical reason to hack at your baby’s genitals. You’re literally removing millions of concentrated nerves for horrible reasons of “tradition.” Besides, shouldn’t that be something a man gets to decide when he’s old enough to consider it?

If you’re on the fence, do your own research. I suggest starting with YouTube and letting your heart do the rest.