Cut or Uncut?

[pellaz]

if it were the law the child had to waite till he was 18 years old to get circumcised i bet no one would do it. just a guess.

[Genersis]

if it were the law the child had to waite till he was 18 years old to get circumcised i bet no one would do it. just a guess.

If people are willing to get penis piercings, I think it's safe to assume people will get circumcised. Whatever their reasons may be.

[Brendan]

I'm uncut and I prefer uncut, but according to the UN, WHO and the CDC circumcision does significantly reduce the risk of acquiring and transmitting HIV.

[NorthLondonLad]

I have never been with a guy who had foreskin, and I hope I never do.
I would have to turn him down.

Yeah, call me shallow on that....but I think foreskin is just gross.

Really - what nature intended is gross?

[megumidesu]

Really - what nature intended is gross?

sometimes.

and when i say that , i mean sometimes nature is gross . not that foreskin (or not having it) is gross . i have absolutely no opinion on that matter ~

[cardiganwearer]

The myth that circumcision cuts the spread of HIV is widely challenged. It is based on studies that were ended prematurely, on the grounds that the results were so overwhelming.

There is a considerable school of thought that says the studies were stopped when the researchers had the result they were looking for. The studies are contradicted by transmission rate differences between tribes and nationalities that traditionally circumcise and those that don't. There is a growing view arising from longer term studies that what is actually happening is that circumcised men just get the virus a year later than intact men, on average.

Circumcision did nothing to prevent the spread of AIDS in the USA among a population that was mostly circumcised. In Africa where it is being proposed as a way of reducing infection it offers no protection to women. Condom use, safer, involving no risky surgery does.

The results are always presented as percentage reduction figures which ignore the base rate to which they relate, thus figures like 53% are bandied about, which are not as impressive as they look because the whole population is not at risk and not every instance of sex results in infection.

The results of long term studies show that 56 circumcisions are needed to prevent 1 case of HIV. If we're going to take that much trouble there are better uses of resources to save lives.

http://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/1...dical-myth

http://www.circumstitions.com/HIV-SA.html#56

http://www.irinnews.org/Report/88790/MAL...sion-myths

Circumcision has been held in the past to be a sure-fire cure for malnutrition, paralysis, bed-wetting, hip-joint disease, headache, alcoholism, criminality, club-foot, and heart disease. It was eventually found that it helped none of these conditions. Aids is just the latest in the list of conditions that the circumcisers would have us believe their quackery cures.

If you want to be circumcised, have at it, but it's about time after a century of pseudo scientific bollocks that its proponents just shut the fuck up and stopped offering it as a cure for everything that comes along. It's just one excuse after another for wanting to sexually mutilate babies.

[Nick9]

I think that it is very wrong that parents have the right to decide about that for their boys.

[FrankGaper]

Cut feels different during anal but for oral I really love uncut

[Geminize]

@Cardiganwearer

This recent study, which appears to be of high quality, supports the idea that circumcision reduces the transmission rate of HIV and other STD's. http://mbio.asm.org/content/4/2/e00076-13.full

The new info from this study is that they may have identified how circumcision reduces transmission -- by causing changes to the bacterial fauna on the penis. One of the study's authors notes in the conclusion that this information could lead to new ways to reduce HIV transmission, by altering bacterial fauna without circumcision.

I have no doubt that there have been sloppy studies done and used by people with an agenda. The authors of this study, however, don't seem to be promoting circumcision.

[Lalo]

@ Geminize There are weaknesses to the aforementioned study. First and foremost was the fact that the study was completed in Uganda. There are cultural dynamics at work which could also affect the results of the study and which are dramatically absent from the final report. Ugandan women are much more likely to participate in IVP- Intravaginal practices. These include applying herbs, water, soap and other mixtures into the vagina. These practices have also been linked to an increased risk of HIV transmission. There is not a single mention of this in the reported study. Also, Ugandan men, unlike uncircumcised men in more developed parts of the world, are much less likely to engage in proper penile hygiene and have less access to filtered water sources and soap. So the broad-sweeping generalizations regarding anaerobic bacterial loads really have no merit when one is addressing the specific situation of industrialized nations.

Having said that, Old Testament Judaic laws were often associated with a real threat to health and welfare. For example, eating pork or other "unclean" meats might have developed from poor cooking practices associated with the nomadic life. In the same way, living in dry arid regions does not lend itself to keeping a penis clean when a foreskin is involved. For the time and the place, those things made sense. As far as studies in today's western society, however, there doesn't appear to be any conclusive scientific evidence either way, supporting circumcision or not. The study above basically boils down to "look, we found increased bacterial growth in a warm, moist, dark place"- hardly earth-shattering news really.

As far as I am concerned, the fact that we tolerate this barbaric practice being performed on children is obscene. In my opinion, no child should be circumcised without their consent, barring an individual's religious beliefs. As a society, would we allow a practice of removing female children's labia at birth? I would hope not! Yet what we do to boys has become so commonplace that we don't even question the morality of it. Personally, I think that that is disgusting. At the very least, men should be given the choice when they are old enough to make that choice. I am happily uncircumcised and if I ever had a son, he would be too.