LogFAQs > #953689669

I can understand how it became a tradition for ancient Jews, since living in a desert region with limited access to soap and water means there are clear health benefits to not having to worry about penile hygiene (and, in a pre-germ theory society, "health benefits" and "God doesn't hate you" are pretty much interchangeable). Continuing it today is very much a matter of tradition for tradition's sake, but I can at least understand where it came from.

For Gentile Americans, the tradition was started by Dr. Kellogg, who was a puritan that proposed it as a way of making sex/masturbation less pleasurable to discourage people from doing it (for women, he proposed burning the clitoris with a bit of oxalic acid, but that never caught on), since sex was such an immoral thing. It caught on, since there were enough puritan influences floating around back then for society to like the idea of cutting down on all that sinful sex-having, and has since become a tradition as fathers pretty much just say "might as well make his look like mine" and don't question how utterly pointless it is.

thedeerzord posted...

But there's also the fact that circumcised penises are unattractive, and are physically revolting to some people, especially in America.

Take me for example.

Whenever I see a uncircumcised penis in a pornagraphic video, I immediately gag and exit out of it.

Aesthetic preferences like that are very much a matter of social expectations. Being circumcised is the norm, so anything that deviates from that is weird (especially where the stigma around foreskins usually comes with the assumption that those that have them don't understand how to clean them, which is largely baseless). It's nothing really inherent in it so much as it is what you've been raised to expect.

That said, justifying surgery like that with aesthetic preferences really isn't okay, even if we ignore the fact that said cosmetic surgery is being performed on non-consenting infants. Try reversing the sex: imagine if you felt that vulvas looked better without the clitoris, and stated that in an effort to pressure women into getting a clitorectomy (or to justify having such a procedure performed on an infant daughter). You'd see a pretty massive backlash, and quite justifiably so. So why is it okay to say something equivalent about men?

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