Circumcision Series - World's Most Controversial Surgery

Circumcision by David Gollaher, 2000, Edited Excerpts

The Victorian Age: Circumcision Curbs Masturbation

As an omnibus procedure, effective against dozens of widely feared yet poorly understood disorders, circumcision was inevitably enlisted in the late-Victorian war on masturbation. Anglo-American culture was notoriously ill at ease with human sexuality. Indeed, medical thought in the late nineteenth century contained one central principle about male sexuality. The governing assumption was that man’s sexual impulse was by nature aggressive, dangerous, destructive, and indeed the most subversive of human appetites. Just how imperfectly the bonds of work, culture, and society held male lust in check was apparent in the cities, with their rising rates of illegitimate births and epidemics of venereal disease.

In ages past, children’s tendency to play with their genitals had provoked little serious concern; but amidst a general shift in sexual attitudes during the decades of the nineteenth century, popular views of masturbation darkened. Since the Enlightenment, doctors in Western Europe and America had occasionally identified masturbation as a cause of illness. In the course of the nineteenth century it was linked to madness, idiocy, epilepsy, and a multitude of other conditions, all bad.

Circumcision and STDs

Researchers led by Edward O. Laumann, a University of Chicago sociologist, extracted data for the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey. This survey is a rich source of information about the health, attitudes, and sexual activities of Americans. The investigators found that a man’s circumcision status was not useful in predicting the likelihood of his having an STD.

In 1996, Stephen Moses, a Canadian AIDS researcher affiliated with Kenya’s University of Nairobi, shocked a conference of scientists by telling them that there was now a substantial body of evidence that male circumcision provided protection against HIV infection. Prevalent circumcision has not kept the United States from becoming the industrialized nation most afflicted by HIV.

A certain small percentage of men with foreskins will get disease of the foreskin, but you just can’t remove everybody’s. You can’t pull everybody’s teeth to avoid cavities, remove breast tissue from little girls so they won’t get breast cancer.

Articles

According to the following BBC articles, circumcision curbs risk of HIV and cervical cancer, but did not mention masturbation.

Uncircumcised Pupils Sent Home

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6355447.stm

Feb 12, 2007

Circumcision 'Reduces HIV risk'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4371384.stm

Oct 25, 2005 – Africa Study

Aids Risk 'Cut by Circumcision'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3570223.stm

Mar 25, 2004 – India Study

Circumcision 'Curbs Cervical Cancer Risk'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1921837.stm

Apr 10, 2002 – Disclaimer at end of article