Wanna hear a dick joke?

Here's one: I've spoken out occasionally against male circumcision, how it's a cruel, needless practice and how it's just as immoral as female circumcision. And then some people get pissed at me for it! That's so stupid it has to be a joke, right? Right? Well, apparently not.

These people get all offended and blubber about how much worse female circumcision is. That so much more gets cut off in female circumcision, and that circumcised males can still have a normal sex life, and that circumcision makes the penis look better, and, most dishonest of all, they claim that circumcision actually lowers the risk of getting HIV by around 50%. Now, the AIDS thing is *technically* true. But what they mean by it is that if two guys both fuck a chick with AIDS, the uncut guy will have a statistically higher risk of contracting the disease than the cut guy. This ignores the fact that they both have a *zero* percent risk of contracting the disease if they don't fuck the AIDS chick in the first place. But of course, it's completely unreasonable to think that maybe parents could just teach their children "Don't go around fucking bitches with AIDS" instead of letting a doctor hack off a third to a full half of their penis skin, along with uncountable nerve endings. And it's more efficient too! After all, who has time to actually educate their children? Irreversible surgical procedures performed without anesthesia are so much *quicker*!

(Anticipating the inevitable response, 'But it's important to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa!' Number one, Africa and America are different places with different circumstances. Number two, if an ADULT male CHOOSES to have the procedure done to reduce his AIDS risk, I have absolutely no problem with that. Otherwise, same thing: Why can't African parents educate their kids instead of hacking up their dongs?)

I've even heard some guys who are circumcised say, "Hey, it's not that big a deal! I'm cut and I don't have any problems jerking off or having sex. I don't understand what's so important about foreskins!" As if this is actually an argument. I'm cut too. And yeah, I jerk off just fine. But see, I don't have anything to *compare* it with. It might be better with a foreskin. It might be worse. I don't know. And the reason why I don't know is because my mother agreed to the procedure out of ignorance and I wasn't given any choice in the matter. Would it be *impossible* to, say, hold off the circumcisions until the kid can decide for themselves if they want it? Saying it's no big deal when you've never known the alternative is like...

Okay, imagine a society where doctors gouge out babies' left eyes with their thumbs because some holy book says for some reason that left eyes are evil. And nobody objects to this because it's been going on for so long that no one bothers to think about it much. "Hey, it's not that big a deal! I got my left eye gouged out as a baby and I don't have any problems seeing with the other one! I don't understand what's so important about depth perception! Besides, in other countries, they cut out babies' left eyes, *plus* their left ears! Now THAT'S barbaric! Only gouging out the eye is so much more humane! Besides, eye patches look cool. Like a pirate! Arrrr! And did you know that having your left eye gouged out helps prevent AIDS? That's right; it makes it 50% less likely you'll see a chick who has AIDS and then take her home and sleep with her."

I want you all to pause for a second and think about this: 'If I had never heard of circumcision before, and then someone told me that people in some other country do it to their babies, would I be as accepting of it as I am right now?' There are many things in life that we accept only because they are considered normal, and so we do not think too much about whether there is any *reason* for doing these things. (Like putting people in jail for not covering their bodies with pieces of cloth, for instance.) If the only justification for doing something is, "because we've always done it", then that is no justification at all.

One more thing. I have pretty strong opinions on this topic, as you can tell, and frankly, I think doctors who perform circumcisions deserve to be sent to jail. If they've performed more than, say, a baker's dozen, they get life. I must be joking, right? That's going way too far, right?

Keep this in mind: scientists have found that babies are actually MORE sensitive to pain than adults. So, whether or not you wanna argue over circumcision's effects later in life, can we all agree that taking a newborn and jabbing him with a knife in the one place it's gonna hurt most is, if nothing else, a really rotten thing to do to a kid!? Does the fact that the baby cannot articulate, "That hurt! Why did you do that to me?" make it okay?

Imagine if there was some guy going around snatching kids out of baby carriages and cutting off their pinky toes with bolt cutters. Don't you think there'd be a wee bit of parental outrage? Don't you think maybe that guy might spend some time in prison? Don't you think he'd be guilty of unconscionable child abuse?

But why? After all, we don't really need our pinky toes. And the pain's over with quickly. And the babies are so young they probably won't remember it. And the toe chopping guy assures all the parents he wasn't doing it for sexual gratification, but because God told him to. Those are perfectly valid reasons, right? We should let him go off on his merry way to kidnap more babies and fill up more mason jars in his basement with infant toes, right? Because that's so much worse than when a doctor gives inaccurate information to a trusting parent to get them to sign a release form okaying the procedure, and then the doc goofs up and cuts off too big a chunk, and then they tell the parents to just go ahead and raise the kid as a girl, right? It happens. Not every time obviously, but it does happen. Anytime you're waving a knife around the most sensitive part of a developing human being's body, the risk of permanent nerve damage exists.

Yeah, I can totally see why people would be offended by my objection to this procedure.

I understand why they're offended.

Because they're fucking stupid.