Some kinds of arguments are best introduced as thought experiments: suppose there existed a painful, unnecessary, possibly injurious rite-of-passage that has persisted purely by way of its constant reiteration as a social institution. Would you elect to have such a procedure done on yourself? On your friends? On your family? In the United States, we laugh with pity at the savages who thrust their hands into mitts filled with fire ants or “elongate their necks” with rings. And everywhere else, they laugh at us when we circumcise our boys.
The affirmative arguments form a fittingly short list: there are no genuine points for non-therapeutic circumcision in the United States other than the artificial one that most American males have traditionally gotten one. But this point is tremendously robust, and an entire discipline—sociology—speaks to it.
The list of inherent objections looms much larger. Not only is the procedure itself painful, there’s a chance of sustaining injury, disfigurement, infection, or any combination thereof. In being uncircumcised, there isn’t much risk of serious infection in our hygienic, antibiotic-enlightened modern society, and there is a marked loss of sexual sensitivity and pleasure for both parties. (The preceding is a piece of evidence that those of fundamentalist persuasion once used as justification and might actually commute to the paragraph above.) The procedure itself is quite irreversible, which is apparently an important consideration for some men; a simple Google query yields an entire foreskin restoration subculture, with detailed instruction on how to—I mention with a shudder—set the weights. And the most pressing argument: surely in this freedom-loving country, the value of consent is worth the price of adulthood circumcision. About the nature of his own penis, does it not stand to reason that a man should be allowed to argue his own case?
But honestly, the case doesn’t even need to be proven at all; circumcision in the developed world does not usually have its basis in medicine. Even the AMA now discourages it as a matter of routine, and throughout most of the rest of the world, it has all but vanished. Thus, it remains an prominent institution in the United States only because of a silly but strong norm. So how can we rid ourselves of it? The tempting solution, of course, is to lean on tort law or to criminalize the practice entirely, but because of lobbying and Establishment Clause concerns, even with religious exemptions this isn’t plausible. And moreover, for two reasons it’s not even necessary: not only is it disappearing on its own, it’s difficult to argue that it’s even traumatic.
On the first, even twenty years ago—when our parents had to make the decision—circumcision was still practically universal, but a change in the zeitgeist has come; the data are in, and the practice is dwindling, a trend that seems likely to continue in light of immigration and our increasingly globalized culture. And on the second, even those in the circumcision-as-mutilation camp are hard-pressed to conflate it with something as vile as female circumcision, its grisly cousin; aesthetics aside, a properly circumcised penis remains perfectly functional. Speaking anecdotally, it just hasn't made much of an impact on my own life, and I suspect in moments of similar candor most of my peers would probably agree.
What can be extrapolated from such mixed conclusions? A simple maxim; non-therapeutic circumcisions are clearly unnecessary and somewhat barbaric, but—and of course I would save this for last—we must not make a mountain out of a mohel.
