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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe your traditions are blinding you to the fact that male circumcision falls in the same category.

No, they are not. Perhaps this is "oversharing", but I (male) was circumcised when I was 11 years old, and it was my choice - I wasn't circumcised at birth because I had jaundice when I was born. I had "tight foreskin", making it difficult to follow my doctor's instructions to clean under the foreskin when bathing, which is why I opted to undergo circumcision as a pre-teen. The process itself was pretty brutal (took a couple weeks for everything to heal), but in retrospect I'm very glad that I did it, and only wish I could have done it as an infant so I would have no memory of the surgery.

Plus, circumcision has been definitively proven to greatly reduce the chance of HIV transmission from females to males.

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They're not equivalent in most cases (not all female genital mutilation is performed the same way and I cannot fathom a medical reason for any sort).

But that doesn't mean they aren't in the same general category when defined as surgical alterations of people's genitalia performed for religious or cultural reasons without any medical necessity.

A medically required circumcision when reasoned and self-chosen is an altogether different story.

Except, ironically enough, male circumcision is the perfect example of something that was done for "traditional" religious reasons, but for which now there is ample medical support for it.

For example, circumcision is extremely common in the US, despite the fact that it is relatively very rare for it to be done for religious reasons (only about 2-3% of the US population is Muslim or Jewish). It is done because the medical community broadly recommends it due to its health benefits: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/cdc-encourages-circum...

The biggest misconception about traditions is that people just randomly decided to do it and punish those who don't follow.

The most probable case is that traditions, such as male circumcision were done for a particular purpose and ritualised into a traditional to share and continue that process.

It's only in more modern ages where we said that rituals aren't enough and we need to think of medical reasons for it as well.

Considering how much of the mind is an enigma it's arms race to find out positive reasons of why we do certain traditions before we get rid of them completely from not understanding them.

Think of it like ML at the human level.

ML's entire thing is statistical correlations that aren't obvious.

Tradition is probably operating like that as well. Is all tradition like this and useful? Of course not. But I bet a lot of it is very subtle and nuanced.

It's also worth considering that there are other pressures. For example, women typically find circumstanced penises more appealing. It's very possible that pressure, coupled with the benefits, helped society land on it more than not.

That's a good way of putting it. A sort of black box process that has gone through something to end up the way it is.

There's ample medical support because it's a quick way to make a hundred bucks when you're a urologist.

> It is done because the medical community broadly recommends it due to its health benefits: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/cdc-encourages-circum...

Only recommended in the US. Which indicates that it’s still cultural.

> Except, ironically enough, male circumcision is the perfect example of something that was done for "traditional" religious reasons, but for which now there is ample medical support for it.

There is no medical support for it; all the "medical" support that was published in the past was never replicable and was only a thin veneer over superstition.

IOW, you've already made you mind up that male circumcision is a positive. You'll look for evidence to support your conclusions after establishing your conclusions, just like all the other "traditions" do.

It's horrifying that these are even compared. The foreskin is just some skin and absolutely not required to experience sexual pleasure or climax. But for women, they cut their clitoris out, fundamentally altering their ability to have sex forever.

You cannot compare this. There is no equivalence here. IMO, female genital mutilation is comparable to male gelding --- removal of the entire penis. Both are designed to ruin sexual pleasure

Always weirds me out when a dude compares a circumcision to FGM, like someone is intentionally conflating a much lesser evil with a far greater one.

One, how do you know I am a dude? I am, but you're assuming. Two, I did not compare them, I explicitly said they are NOT equivalent, even accounting for the type of female genital mutilation where the clitoris is merely nicked.

FGM also can be just cutting some skin (the inner labia) and it is comparable to circumcision.

The function of the inner labia is to help keep in moisture and lubricant, very much the exact same function and role of the foreskin.

circumcised males experience less intense orgasm and sexual sensitivity.

> just some skin

You could use chemical or thermal burns to remove all the skin, preserving a numb nub of mechanical structure.

FGM refers broadly to a multitude of traditions related to modification of female genitalia, not only to that one specific kind. And generally speaking, they're all illegal in the west, even ones where the damage is comparable to male circumcision.

You can compare this, fundamentally and in principle. Both involve the irreversible mutilation of an infant's sexual organs. One might not be quite impactful as another later in life, but on principle they're equally abhorrent in a society that believes in bodily autonomy and values its children.

> The foreskin is just some skin and absolutely not required to experience sexual pleasure or climax.

A significant portion of ED is traced back to male genital mutilation.

> Always weirds me out when a dude compares a circumcision to FGM, like someone is intentionally conflating a much lesser evil with a far greater one.

You keep avoid using the term "male genital mutilation". Always weirds me out when people don't want to call an amputation, an amputation.

(See how that works?)

Definitively proven? I can’t wait to see that randomized controlled clinical trial. FWIW the language I see used is compelling evidence, where are you getting definitively proven from?

FWIW all I had to do was Google "male circumcision hiv clinical studies", it's not that hard to find:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4233247/

From the introduction: "Three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in sub-Saharan Africa have shown that adult male circumcision reduces the risk of HIV acquisition in men by about 60% [1-3]."

Except a few results down the page there's an article that links a bunch of studies that claim the studies your article quotes are faulty:

https://intaction.org/circumcision-hiv-a-dangerous-mistake/

https://www.aidsmap.com/news/aug-2012/male-circumcision-may-...

https://www.aidsmap.com/news/feb-2013/circumcision-makes-no-...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210509203032/https://www.monit...

Which by the way would invalidate the CDC's encouragement of circumcision since that advice is based on the three studies your article a few comments up quotes:

"The guidelines point to research, much of it done in sub-Saharan Africa, showing that circumcision reduces the transmission of STDs, including HIV and the human papillomavirus, which can cause cancer."

Wow, talk about cherry-picking, and apparently you picked all the rotten cherries.

First, the comment I was responding to specifically requested randomized, controlled studies, which is what I responded with. I just looked at the first 3 of your links, and these are just observational/questionnaire studies, a decidedly less definitive source of evidence.

Most hilarious to me is that your second link, titled "Male circumcision may not make much difference to overall male HIV incidence in Caribbean context" and from 2012, even has a big box at the top stating "This article is more than 10 years old. Click here for more recent articles on this topic". Clicking that link brings up a page with loads of articles, and a summary header: "Voluntary male medical circumcision (VMMC) lowers the risk of female-to-male sexual HIV transmission by about 60%. VMMC is an important part of public health programmes in African countries with a high prevalence of HIV and a low rate of male circumcision."

Even your own links argue against your points.

I don't think the age of an article invalidates it's findings by default, but of course I'd expect new insights with the passage of time.

I'm doubting myself as ever in light of your comment, but the fact that there are studies, with any credibility at all, with a conclusion contrary to your earlier point namely that it is "definitively proven to greatly reduce the chance of HIV transmission from females to males" shows that that's pushing it at the very least.

And even if you're right, that doesn't excuse genital mutilation.

There is two factors to this:

1. Less sex 2. Less moisture kept on the penis during sex.

But I don't think permanently altering a baby's penis is worth the trade off of being able to have sex with people who suffer HIV.

Maybe in Africa where there's nothing else, but not in a world with better medical services

It doesn't matter if there are (extremely overstated) medical benefits. Cutting off pieces of a babies genitals is wrong. Full stop.

Not arguing your point, but ending a comment with "... Full stop." doesn't make you somehow more right, it just broadcasts that you are uninterested in hearing any arguments or data that are contrary to your opinion. Which is good, I guess, to let us know that we shouldn't waste our time.

Yes, that was my point. This is an issue I won't budge on.

Exactly.

Covid vaccines do not contain 5G microchips. Full stop.

The Earth is round. Full stop.

Many things simply are not worth wasting time listening to someone's "data" or "arguments" contrary to my "opinion".

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