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[Sparklehorse]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
I'll never know what I've been missing.

"Cultural anthropologist Leonard Glick explores the history of the Snip from a skeptical perspective in Marked in Your Flesh, published this summer by Oxford University Press (serious scholarship, truly!). Glick acknowledges that in the book of Genesis, circumcision is the sign of God's covenant with Abraham. But then he takes the line of the anti-circumcision movement: Circumcision is painful, irreversible surgery to which newborn boys cannot consent. Its health benefits are marginal and overstated. And far from being an extraneous bit of flesh, the foreskin is "richly endowed with specialized nerves," making it 'the principal site of sexual sensation' in a man who has one. 'Circumcised men have lost more capacity for optimal pleasure than they will ever know,' Glick sighs. (He never comes out and says so, but his sense of loss seems personal.) In support of this proposition he cites the 12th-century Jewish physician and philosopher Moses Maimonides, who wrote that 'if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened.'"

How come you didn't also link to this article about how it's okay for some men to be squicked out by watching the mother of their child give birth?

Covering Shape Shifter's ass on the research for board bill