Circumcision again

They woke me up talking about one of my favorite subjects again. Instead of talking about it, I should just show everybody the way to the anti-circumcision web pages, where other people have argued about it much more clearly than I can, since I'm probably going to be long-winded, rambling, and disorganized, and not necessarily logical.

There is a problem with people reading the files on my computer: it slows down my dialup internet connection, and I notice when it's happening, so I hit the button on the firewall and wait a minute until they temporarily stop trying. It's usually less of a problem if I have already gotten the web pages and am 'settled in' instead of just starting up. But that means that a lot of their reading attempts might have been cut off by the firewall. They could have jumped to conclusions about what I was going to say, if they read only a little bit of it, but since I ramble, by the end I could be saying the opposite of what I said in the beginning. So I could have said lots and lots of positive, complimentary, good things about a person, but they might have read only the one small bad thing that I said, and quit reading or didn't get all of it.

Well, last time I talked about this, I focused on one single theme: circumcision and STDs or AIDS. I could still go on about that argument. But I'll go to another topic.

Focusing on one thing helped because this subject has so many parts to it, it would be worth a whole book. That would be an entertaining book, sort of a medical-porn genre.

Well, I have been getting bombarded for most of the past year with questions about a taboo subject, body odors. That started up again and they want me to write about how this relates to circumcision.

Humans evolved in a world without indoor plumbing, so, a long time ago, people didn't take showers every day. They still found each other sexually attractive, or we wouldn't be here. Other nonhuman animals and insects use pheromones to tell other animals whether they are ready to mate. (Pheromones are chemicals emitted by one animal and detected by another animal. They are similar to hormones. They are airborne, and inhaled through the nose like a scent, but they are usually odorless.) So, worrying about how people smell is a modern thing. In the past, it was part of how we bonded socially and sexually.

(This is totally off-topic, and yet, relevant at the same time. I haven't added any new Flickr photos for months, because I spent the last few months in a half-dead state, and also, my laptop is running out of hard drive space, which is why Dennis gave me a zip drive. So I keep hearing voices complaining that my Flickr photos start off with that annoying duck climbing up on my back and trying to have sex with me, and/or pecking my eyes out, instead of sitting still and letting me pet him in a platonic way. I didn't upload the one photo where I snapped the picture at the exact moment when he pecked my crotch, because I thought it wasn't family-friendly enough to keep my Flickr page rated G. By the way, my landlord gave those muscovy ducks away to somebody else, because they kept 'attacking' visitors who didn't understand that they weren't really being violent, just extra-friendly. That duck gave me parasites, too. But he really was a nice duck, you just had to make sure he didn't climb up on your back. One time he got his clawed feet tangled in my long hair and it was difficult to gently remove a large, struggling, flapping duck without hurting him. That took a few minutes, but, obviously I did untangle him. I will eventually add some more pictures that aren't so ridiculous.)

Anyway, back to the topic. 'It smells bad' is one of the excuses for circumcision. There are a few different counterarguments to that. Maybe I should just brainstorm and list them all without elaborating, and then elaborate on them later?

1. maybe it smells good, but we're not allowed to say that or think that
2. washing it off can be done quickly and easily
3. removing the foreskin is permanent - it will never grow back. if you regret it, too bad, you can't fix it. the grief and loss and self-hatred, when you realize that you permanently injured yourself, can even lead to suicide, just like any other form of unnecessary cosmetic surgery - unless you choose to dedicate yourself to an anti-circumcision campaign, which is how some people survive this trauma - by preventing others from making the same mistake.
4. body odors become associated with a memory; smell is a key to triggering a vivid memory of an entire time period of your life, with all of the emotions - whenever a smell is associated with sex, it is permanently part of your memory of that whole experience, that person, the mood you were in, the emotions you felt at the time - everything. so the smell of the human body becomes associated with memories of intimate encounters, closeness, and physical contact.
5. it smells exactly like the smegma that appears on the FEMALE labia, which is the same substance. should we cut off the female labia? (in Africa, they do!)

I can tell my own personal experience with this. I had a brief encounter with a European immigrant, someone who I worked with on an overnight cleaning job. I quit that job, and back then, I was very antisocial, so I didn't stay in contact with this guy afterwards. So I only had the one encounter.

He had a foreskin. It did have a strong smell. It was strange to me because I associated that smell with my own body - it was exactly the same, but stronger. However, I was already anti-circ back then, and was fully committed to accepting everything and getting used to it, no matter what. So I decided that the smell was just something you got used to. I thought I would probably learn to like it if I had enough pleasant experiences with it. And the smell was only noticeable in the beginning, for a minute, which might be because it was underneath his clothing all day.

I also knew already that there are many benefits to keeping the foreskin intact, and you lose a lot when you remove it. So I said, if it bothered me, I could just get him to wash off, which is easy and trivial, because the permanent loss of the foreskin is a major loss. If people are aware of how functional the foreskin is, if they appreciate what it does, if they understand that it feels a lot of sensation, and protects the glans from drying out, and makes vaginal intercourse much easier, and does a lot of other useful things, then the smell seems like no big deal in comparison. And, as I said, I think it's something people learn to like whenever they get used to it.

I wanted to focus on #3 in the brainstorming list above. The others are pretty self-explanatory. During the 'discussions' going on in my mind, they said 'circumcision is a load of crap,' and suggested an alternative title: Circumcision Is Suicide. That's not necessarily true for everybody... but there are SOME people who DO feel that bad afterwards.

When I was a little kid, I used to sometimes have nightmares - probably fake nightmares, now that I know about dream control. I occasionally dreamed that I had severely injured a person or animal, sometimes a person I loved, like my parents, and they were injured so badly that they could not be fixed, and had to be 'put out of their misery.' I would then have to completely kill the person or animal. These were horrible dreams and I would wake up crying.

Whenever you inflict permanent injury on yourself or someone else... The doctors and nurses who circumcise infants - you can't go tell them that circumcision is wrong, and that they've been doing something horrible for years and years. They have to protect themselves against realizing how bad it is. They have a very strong rationale for why they do what they do, and if that rationale breaks down, they need something equally strong to substitute for it, something positive, something they can do to make up for all that they have done.

And right now, there isn't much a person can do. I can imagine a corporation that would find a way to regrow a fully functioning foreskin (or female genitals, or anything else removed or changed by cosmetic surgery). However, it would be very expensive in the beginning, so not everybody could do it. You could argue about whether health insurance should cover this: you are the victim of an 'accident' that occurred in your infancy. But healthcare is a mess in this country... and that's too big of a topic for me to get into - I would have to explain everything I've learned in all of my reading over the past few years about WHY the healthcare system is such a mess. Anyway, it would be difficult, dangerous, expensive, and not everybody could do it. Some people would go without.

If you remove something, and you absolutely cannot get it back, ever, that seems like too big of a risk to take.

People in the USA don't know what they're missing - they don't know what life with a foreskin is like - because they lost it when they were infants. So they don't know what they're doing to their children.

But if you circumcise yourself as an adult, you have years and years of experience with having a foreskin, so you notice the difference when it is gone. There are anecdotes on the net, where people described all of the differences that they observed after getting circumcised as adults. And some of them were badly traumatized by it, deeply regretting this self-inflicted permanent injury, and, as I said, some people even feel suicidal.

This isn't as severe, but I have body parts that I lost. I had eight of my teeth removed whenever I was too young to refuse consent. The internet didn't exist back then, so we couldn't just google some counter-arguments whenever big decisions needed to be made. If you wanted to research something, you had to go to a library and you had to know exactly what you were looking for. Information was difficult to find. Especially anecdotes - the stories people tell. You might find something 'official' and 'scientific' published in a book, but you wouldn't find the experiences and stories of ordinary people. Maybe for popular topics, yes, but for obscure topics, it was harder. So I couldn't have gone online and researched whether other people might have chosen not to get braces on their teeth, or chosen not to remove the wisdom teeth, and read about what happened to them.

Also, I am annoyed because my mom taught me how to pluck my eyebrows, when I was a young teenager. I was taught that having any eyebrow hair over the bridge of my nose was bad. So I ripped out all the hairs over my nose bridge, over and over again, week after week, and as a result, the roots of the hairs scarred, and they never grew back. They grew back a little bit, but it's sparse - only a few hairs here and there. That bothered me, because I eventually changed my mind about plucking eyebrows, and I wanted them back. I grew up and appreciated the beauty and touchability of thick, full, unplucked eyebrows. Hair is there to be stroked and petted.

I have a picture from back then, but the scanner isn't set up on my computer right now, and that's a big nuisance project that I won't be doing anytime soon, so I can't easily show the picture. (I tried to take a picture of the picture using my digital camera.) It shows my eyebrows plucked almost down to nothing, and I was also trimming them short with scissors, too, and it looked horrible, like I had some disease.

The teeth lost, and the eyebrow hairs, aren't as bad as circumcision. I can only faintly imagine what it would be like to lose a part of your body that felt sensation. Teeth and hairs don't feel much sensation - I guess hairs do, somewhat. But the foreskin feels A LOT of sensation. You notice a big difference when it is gone.

If some guy is with a woman who complains about the way that he smells, and wants him to get circumcised because of that, she needs to understand just how much sensation that skin feels. I can't emphasize that enough, and I've already rambled for too long. But I want to contrast how trivial the smell is, next to how important the foreskin is - and that assumes you don't like the way it smells.

I rambled enough... Hearing voices asking me to talk about the subject of body odors and social/sexual bonding, for the past few days - I gave in and finally talked about it. This is one of those 'taboo' subjects in the USA... and the Europeans are at risk from the 'Circumcision Prevents AIDS' bullcrap, because their belief systems aren't strong enough or explicit enough to ACTIVELY FORBID circumcision. You can't just passively neglect to circumcise. You have to actively, strongly say that it is not allowed.

I associate Judith Swack with the onset of my overt psychotronic attacks, so I don't really trust her... However, there was one thing that I really agreed with, and admired. She was Jewish, however she rejected the Jewish practice of circumcision. She still called herself Jewish, and still was part of that religion, but she strongly disagreed with that one thing, and said that if she had had a son, she would have kept him intact. I think other Jewish families should do the same thing.

In the USA, circumcision isn't religious, it's part of mainstream culture. So they could just as easily 'forget' to circumcise, for passive reasons ('my health insurance provider wouldn't pay for it, so we didn't do it' - that's why they stopped circumcising in Great Britain, if I recall). But the Jewish religion actively REQUIRES circumcision. Mainstream USA does it merely because it's popular, it's common practice, it's quick and easy to do, and the hospital encourages it - but in reality, they don't care one way or the other about it. There are men who don't even KNOW that they're circumcised, don't know there is such a thing as circumcision, until they grow up and read about it on the internet, or see another guy who 'looks different,' or see something in porn videos. Nobody ever told them 'You Must Circumcise!' If they happened to have their baby outside of a hospital, for whatever reason, they might just accidentally forget to circumcise their baby. It would not be a conscious decision, it would just be ignorance and inconvenience. Anyway, there is a big difference between passively neglecting to circumcise, versus being ACTIVELY FORBIDDEN to circumcise. And there is a difference between passively going along with the routine of the hospital circumcising your baby for you, versus being actively required to circumcise because you're Jewish. As I said, Europe is in danger because they are 'passively neglecting' to circumcise, and that's not strong enough to fight against the disinformation about AIDS. ('They' said they are tempted to start a 'Circumcision Causes AIDS' campaign.)

Rambling... I type too much. In person, I don't talk like this. However, 'they' demanded that I talk about this subject, for the past few days. So, here it is.