Oct 25, 2021
This letter to the editor was published in The New Yorker on October 25, 2021.
Kudos to Shteyngart for bravely exposing the harm that can be caused by circumcision. His heartbreaking personal struggle, while extreme, is more common among circumcised men than the public has been led to believe. Since 2008, when I co-founded Intact America, an organization that seeks to change the way people in this country think about circumcision, I have heard from thousands of men who have suffered lifelong physical and psychological damage from the procedure. According to a 2019 report published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, in the U.S., where nearly all circumcisions take place in medical settings, eleven per cent of pediatric-surgery malpractice cases involve circumcision. Yet American doctors and hospitals keep putting babies at risk with a medically unnecessary procedure that is not routinely performed on male children in any other Western country. We must ask why we allow doctors and hospitals to profit from cutting the genitals of male children even as we fight to outlaw female genital cutting, here and abroad.
Georganne Chapin
Jul 30, 2021
Men circumcised as babies are 4.5 times more likely to experience erectile dysfunction than intact men. Learn more.
#fridayforeskinfacts #circumcision #erectiledysfunction #ED
Feb 21, 2016
Last week, Intact America launched a petition to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The petition demands that the AAP follow the recommendations from its own research about infant pain, and tell its doctors to END THE PAIN and stop circumcising baby boys. Our goal is 29,000 signatures by February 29. We need your help! Please sign this petition, and share it with your friends. Ask them to sign and share it, too!
Intact America insists that the American Academy of Pediatrics issue a new circumcision policy—one that honors and protects baby boys from harm.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently said that babies shouldn’t be subjected to unnecessary pain. But the AAP continues to promote “routine” infant circumcision, a painful, medically unnecessary surgery that removes a normal part of a baby’s penis.
Last month, the AAP published research showing that common medical procedures carried out on newborn babies are very painful, and that the effects of the pain can last many years. The procedures mentioned included heel sticks, insertion of IV needles, and circumcision. The AAP report also found that commonly used pain relievers are neither effective nor safe.
Infant circumcision differs from the other procedures discussed in the report in that it is an invasive surgery that neither tests for nor treats any illness, and permanently removes a natural and valuable part of a boy’s sexual anatomy – the foreskin. The pain from circumcision is intense and continues for days or weeks after the surgery.
Circumcision, originally promoted in the 19th century as a way to prevent masturbation, has become part of American medical culture. Every year, a million baby boys in the United States are subjected to this surgery, although no medical association in the world recommends it.
Some of the falsehoods currently used to support circumcision include hygiene, disease prevention, and aesthetics.
The truth is:
- The intact penis is easily cleaned throughout a boy’s and man’s lifetime.
- Circumcision does NOT prevent sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV. European countries where fewer than ten percent of all men are circumcised have about the same STD rates as the United States, where circumcision is common.
- Any preference expressed by men or women for the circumcised penis is a result of cultural conditioning. Besides, as the U.S. circumcision rate declines, and the number of intact boys and men grow, the intact penis will no longer seem strange or unattractive.
Many Americans also believe that circumcision is “just a snip” – a minor, brief, and painless procedure that babies will not remember. This is FALSE, and the new AAP article on pain proves it.
Because circumcision is NOT medically necessary, and because the pain it causes is unmanageable and harmful over the long term, Intact America demands that the American Academy of Pediatrics tell its doctors to end the pain and stop circumcising baby boys.
Help us reach 29,000 signatures by February 29, 2016.
Please sign our petition TODAY.
Apr 8, 2014
In a new “listicle” posted on its website this week, The Huffington Post outlines Eight Things America Gets Wrong About Sex. From health care to homophobia, the piece covers a range of historical and sociological reasons for America’s sexual dilemmas. It speaks to just about everything, except anatomy. And what’s one thing about American sexual organs that’s unique compared to much of the rest of the world? That’s right—routine male circumcision.
It astonishes me that in talking about sex, pretty much nobody mentions that most adult men in the United States today have been deprived of the most pleasurable, sensitive part of their penises. Without a foreskin and its sensory feedback, a man has difficulty controlling the timing of his orgasm. Also, because he’s missing the very organ that serves a gliding and lubricating function—and because he has a scar where his foreskin used to be—his penis is calloused and dry, when compared to that of an intact man; this creates a friction during intercourse and compromises the pleasure of both sexual partners.
Don’t believe me? Then explain the uniquely American proliferation of lubricants and masturbation creams, the existence of which many Europeans—most of whom are intact—find strange. CIRCUMserum is available for those who want to combat what it calls “Dullness Syndrome” by restoring “natural feeling for more intense sex”; Stroke 29, Wicked Cream, and others are designed to help circumcised men seeking solitary pleasure, who find the after-effects of circumcision to stand in the way of sensory pleasure.
Understanding
the history of American circumcision helps to explain all of this. In fact, when doctors began promoting circumcision in the Victorian era (late 1800s), the purpose was precisely to reduce pleasure and cause pain–to dissuade men from the “immoral” and “unhygienic” practice of masturbation. Among those who pushed the circumcision solution to masturbation were American physicians Abraham Jacobi (the organizer of the American Pediatric Society) and J.J. Moses (then-head of the New York State Medical Society and president of the Association of American Physicians).
Just as Jewish physician and philosopher Maimonides had recognized 800 years earlier, these fathers of American medicalized circumcision believed that its physiological and psychological effects–aversive pain memory and loss of sensory tissue–would help to diminish sexual gratification, whether self-sought or through genital contact with a partner.
Should we be surprised, then, with findings such as those from Denmark, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology in 2011, showing that circumcised men have greater difficulty reaching orgasm, and that female partners of circumcised men are less likely to feel sexually satisfied?
What is astonishing is that American doctors persist in a practice designed to ruin the natural pleasures of sex, and then deny that it in fact does so. Meanwhile, the vast majority of adult American men are living with scars instead of foreskins. Half of the couple is missing a most basic, sensual part of his anatomy, and we wonder why Americans find sex less than fulfilling.
Georganne Chapin
Sep 18, 2013
Several days ago, Intact America posted this meme on Facebook:
The response was astonishing – the posting got the greatest number of views and comments, by far, of anything we’ve ever posted on our Facebook page.
Many of the comments contained arguments and rejoinders about the relative “badness” of circumcision and rape; some objected strenuously to the insinuation that circumcision was “as bad as” rape; and others said that circumcising an unconsenting infant was “worse than” raping an unconscious woman.
These arguments miss the point of the meme, which is: The fact that a victim has no memory of having been wronged does not mean that a wrong has not been done, nor does it let the wrongdoer off the hook.
Think of it this way: If a neighbor enters your home unbeknownst to you, takes a gold necklace from your jewelry box, and leaves, and you never discover that the necklace is missing, did a burglary occur? Of course. Is the neighbor who took the necklace not guilty, simply because you didn’t miss the item? Of course not. Your home was burgled, and your neighbor is guilty of burglary.
Why should wrongs committed upon someone else’s body be different from a property crime?
Both circumcision and rape meet the common law definition of battery – an intentional, unpermitted act causing harmful or offensive contact with the “person” of another. What makes the act in question “unpermitted” is that the victim did not consent. Lack of consent doesn’t require the victim’s active objection; rather it may come from legal incapacity (i.e., an unconscious individual is, by law, incapable of consenting; a baby is, by law, incapable of consenting). Whether or not the victim later recalls the battery (or recalls it at some subliminal level, as may be the case with any violent act) is irrelevant to the classification of the act as a violation of that person’s rights.
There are those who will say, with regard to infant circumcision, that consent has been given – by the parent. This is another legal fallacy. No person can consent to a legal violation of another. Just as I cannot tell a thief that it is alright for him or her to enter your home and remove your gold necklace, just as I cannot allow another person to have sex with my underage daughter, just as in the United States and most western countries, I cannot permit another person to slice off my minor daughter’s labia or clitoris, I cannot “consent to” (and thereby absolve from culpability the operator) the medically unnecessary removal of perfectly healthy, normal tissue from my son’s genitals. In medicine, parental or “proxy” consent is reserved for operations or treatments needed to save the life or health of a child. “Routine” circumcision – a cosmetic procedure – doesn’t meet this criterion.
The motive of the perpetrator, the batterer, is also irrelevant. The fact that the person who slices off a part of a child’s genitals thinks s/he’s doing the child a favor is no more a defense than the claim of a man who has sex with an incapacitated woman because she “needed it” or “asked for it.”
In striving for equal rights for all human beings, we must avoid being drawn into irreconcilable arguments about which of two horrors is more horrible, which of two violations is worse, and which of two victims is more entitled to protection or to sympathy (or, worse, which deserves condemnation). These arguments only serve as distractions from the real imperative – protecting the vulnerable and holding accountable those who violate them.
Georganne Chapin
