Anti-circumcision Essay 2 of 3: Physical and Psychological Realities

Continuation of Part One

Now in theory I could end the series here. I could say that the evidence Mason provided of men going haywire is the images Karella posted, and since I’ve already made my case that one of those images is one offensive comic one person drew 13 years ago, and the other is just ordinary activism, that means that (if my case is persuasive) Mason’s argument is rebutted.

But that wouldn’t be living in the least convenient possible world. And it wouldn’t really get to the heart of what Mason is saying, either.

Mason may or may not be swayed by my above arguments re: the examples Karella gave being highly dubious, but even if she is it could easily be that she has other examples of men from her personal experience in mind who are upset about part of their genitals being cut off and whose brains have gone “completely haywire”, as she put it.

I have two basic points to make: I think the physical reality is worse than she realizes. But perhaps more importantly, there are lots of things that everyone agrees are horrible that are in some sense partially or entirely psychological. And no normal person I’ve encountered, no matter their views on therapy culture and bad societal stances on trauma, would talk about those things the way Mason and others talk/write/think about this. Which is something I’ll go into a little more in the next essay in the series.

Before I go further, let me just say that I do not intend this to be an attack on Mason, or anyone really. This essay should be taken as addressed to this general cluster of attitude towards this issue, which may manifest itself in different ways.

Does the loss of sensitivity actually work the way Mason thinks it does?

And now we’ve reached an important point that I think is worth telling people that can’t be made without me talking about gross things in detail. Will people say that I’m only tormenting people with these details because I got some sick satisfaction from doing so? Or that the fact that I’m even talking about this at all with anyone but a doctor or maybe a therapist is a sign that my brain has gone completely haywire? It’s a catch-22. I can’t defend myself against these ad hominems without explaining my perspective, but I can’t explain my perspective without first refuting these ad hominems. So read on, or don’t.

If it were just some hidden stat for sensitivity, some abstract and theoretical loss of endorphins with no easy way to analyze the difference in sensitivity between intact and amputated without brain-scanning equipment, then that would be one thing.

The effect is not actually that subtle or esoteric. It’s not actually a general, undetectable 20% loss in sensitivity.

It’s more like an obvious 90% loss of sensitivity in the majority of the surface area, with the remainder having sensitivity that seems normal to me, although I don’t know. And those remaining areas of unaffected sensitivity point to circumcision as the culprit, either because it is one of the places that one would expect to be unaffected by circumcision, or because the sensitive area is the circumcision scar itself. And just to be sure, I have done the embarrassing thing and asked a close male friend who was not circumcised about this, and he confirmed the difference.

There’s also the kinetic relevancy of the foreskin to sex. The foreskin acts as a sort of loose glove, creating a gliding effect that reduces friction. This of course affects both the man and woman’s sexual experience. And most people would describe the presence or absence of friction during sex as a tangible physical concern, and not an abstract psychological phenomenon. I understand that there are other things that can reduce friction. I understand that I could counter the friction surplus with artificial lubricant from the store. Even so, I think that if a woman’s ability to produce natural lubricant was taken away from her completely at birth by the decision of her parents, with the approval of the United States medical establishment, for no compelling reason, then that would be bad. Actually bad, not just vaguely and inconsequentially bad. It wouldn’t be “I am persuaded that this is bad, but…” And it would be worse if her parents also reduced the sensitivity of any part of her genitalia to almost nothing.

And these physical problems aren’t totally debilitating, but they’re not trivial either. But I don’t actually think that people’s general approach is to only recognize totally debilitating physical problems as legitimate grievances. If a doctor, let’s say in Japan or China, gave a baby of either sex those problems in some different way, and by a negligent accident instead of on purpose, that people would be able to recognize as awful.

Even if no one ever got circumcised as an adult, even if no one ever did a deep scientific study of how these nerve endings work, I think the difference is pronounced enough that some people would notice that their experiences with their bodies did not quite make sense as a likely way evolution would have done things, and notice their confusion. And not just men who have sex with lots of other men and have plenty of opportunities to observe the differences, some straight guys would notice too, in that world.

Is it ever okay to be horrified by something that didn’t bother you much before? Does the psychological side of this have any substance that I should consider to be legitimate or ordinary?

I would say yes to both. There are lots of thought experiments I could use to try to demonstrate this. I could just describe the equivalent effect on a woman’s genitals, with her not realizing anything was wrong, and ask people what they would think if she had a strong emotional reaction when she eventually did realize that what she was experiencing was both less than what she could have had, and intentionally done to her by people and legal systems she thought she could rely on, or at least rely on more than that. But that would be too straightforward a comparison, and it wouldn’t be very interesting to read. I could also explain the underlying principles without referring to any demonstrative example at all, but that would be too dry.

Before I tell you my example, which will hopefully illuminate the underlying psychology, why don’t you try to think of one for yourself? Something totally horrible, for reasons apart from any tangible physical effects. I can think of many things that are like this, some of them real situations that happen to people, some of them more fictional.

How about a food metaphor?

Let’s say you grew up, and you thought all the food you ate tasted basically normal. It wasn’t the best food ever, but it was nice enough, it fulfilled the biological urge, and there were other good things about your experience with food besides the taste, like the good times had discussing recipes with others, or the simple fun that comes with putting a fork in two brioches and moving the forks so that it looks like two legs that are doing a funny dance.

Then one day you happen across a secret storage space behind the shed, and you discover that your parents and society at large had been working together to surreptitiously add the meat of your deceased cousin to all your meals for your entire life. And that this was also being done to millions of other men, and is continuing to be done with no end in sight. And it’s not that this society has no taboo around cannibalism, their taboos around cannibalism are actually mostly the same as ours, except that, because of some historical accident or social blindspot, they make a special case for this specific form of cannibalism. Apart from the people who fail to recognize being forced (or tricked, if you make that distinction) into eating one’s cousin’s corpse as a special case, and are completely horrified.

And of course, if this was never kept from him, if he always knew that he was eating his cousin’s corpse for as long as he could remember, then the horror would come when he first had the opportunity to realize that this special case was not justified.

And part of that horror would be a general sudden downward reassessment of civilization’s moral competency, not to mention his parents’ moral competency. Which is something I would imagine most rationalists would relate to. It was even a story thread in HPMOR, part of Harry’s character arc, something he struggles with but eventually comes to terms with, which is good.

Do you see how saying “you were never particularly bothered by the taste before” would be missing the point? Do you understand how people can have deeply held personal preferences that are larger than their immediate physical experience? Is it a sign that someone has lost touch with reality, for someone to be agitated by learning that they had been tricked into eating their cousin for years and years?

I’ve seen rationalists advocate that some things that are illegal and very broadly held to be completely taboo should be legal. Even if you think that cannibalism is just an arbitrary taboo, and it’s fine if none of the parties involved object, does that mean someone is necessarily overreacting if they are horrified that they were forced to eat someone against their will?

And then on top of that, there’s also the horror that comes from caring about all the other people experiencing this, from knowing that their basic human rights are being violated. It shouldn’t be a foreign concept to anyone, for someone to suffer because other people are being hurt, even if all those people are male.

How would the people who did not make a special case for one kind of cannibalism look to the rest of the world? Even to some people who were in some sense persuaded by their arguments for basic individualist reasons, it would seem like the people who were bothered were overreacting to a technicality. It would seem to outsiders like the people who were upset were extending a taboo in a direction it didn’t make sense to extend it. Because those people are still operating from the perspective of the special case.

It may seem like an unfair analogy, to compare something like forced cannibalism to something like forced foreskin amputation. Perhaps it is. And yet even so, there are things to recommend the involuntary cannibalism situation over having part of one’s genitals cut off.

1. Eating your dead cousin is to some degree purely psychological, compared to having part of your genitals cut off as an infant, which is both physical and psychological.

2. I don’t know how large a conspiracy it would take to try to sneak parts of a specific body into one person’s food no matter where and what they eat, but let us imagine that it could be avoided by being very careful about what you eat. Even if it was very difficult to be careful enough to stop people from sneaking the meat in, even if you had to put a lock on your fridge, set up a monitoring system, and research chemical tests you could perform on your food before eating it, even if the steps you would need to take require more tenacity and discipline than some people have easily accessible, and taking those steps was made more difficult because of the emotional tax of the fact that each one serves as a painful reminder of eating your dead cousin, let us say it could be done well enough that you could be reasonably certain there was no human flesh in your diet. Whereas with foreskin restoration, it’s both very difficult and time consuming, and it only partially resets you to how things would have been physically.

3. Lastly, I think that our society’s attachment to sexual autonomy is, in some ways if not in others, stronger than our attachment to not-cannibalism. You could have a scene in an ordinary middlebrow R-rated comedy where someone is tricked into eating human flesh and it would plausibly be funny. Depending on how it was handled, it wouldn’t even have to be a particularly edgy comedy.

It would be much, much, much harder to get an audience to laugh at an entire scene where a woman’s breasts are cut off against her will, even if her character was fully unconscious and anesthetized while it happened. Even if only one quarter of just one of her breasts was excised, that would still be very, very dark. Even if she was the villain, even if she had killed a dozen people for money, even if the operation was the result of a medical mistake and the doctor thought she had breast cancer, even if the medical mistake was the result of her own schemes backfiring on her, even if it was all just CGI and not actual documentary evidence of this happening to a real person, even if there wasn’t much blood, even if you just showed the surgery and not the physical and psychological aftermath, the people in the theater would look away, if the visual lasted longer than five seconds. They would get up and walk out of the theater. Many of them would get angry at the director, or at whoever showed this to them without warning them first.

For the people who stayed in the theater, the movie would cease to be an ordinary R-rated comedy. It would cease to be any kind of comedy. Not just from that point on, every joke in the movie up until that scene would be reinterpreted as the director luring the audience into a false sense of security. Not only could the movie not be a comedy, it couldn’t even be a revenge thriller. Not really. Even if the director’s authorial intent was to make an ordinary revenge thriller, where the antagonist receives a gruesome punishment, the movie would instantly become a deconstruction of revenge thrillers in the eyes of most film critics. It would be a meditation on the folly of revenge, or the director reminding the audience of the profound truth that they as humans still feel some instinctive level of compassion for very cruel villains, or something.

After the movie was over, and the audience returned home, the image would still be in their head, and they would try to do something to distract themselves and get the image out of their head, even though it was just a movie. And some of them would have nightmares. Even some people who weren’t particularly predisposed to nightmares would have them. Even a few people who just had the movie described to them by a friend or read the synopsis on Wikipedia would have nightmares. Even though it was just fiction, and it didn’t even happen once, let alone hundreds of millions of times. That’s how strongly people feel about a woman’s breasts being mutilated against her will without medical justification. Is it just an aesthetic preference, to care more about things like this than some other bad thing that could have happened to the woman in the movie, to be more bothered by it?

Even if it is, I don’t actually believe that rationalists are beyond what one might cavalierly describe as “strong aesthetic preferences” like this, not even the 99^th percentile of uber-rationalists. Even if they were, that wouldn’t make the strong aesthetic preferences of others a sign of psychosis. And yet somehow the special case remains, and not just because people have convinced themselves that infant circumcision is theologically or medically justified. Although I think they may not have fully unconvinced themselves, so to speak.

Edit 7/8:

I think I failed to communicate something important to some readers in the second half of this essay, so let me elaborate:

There is a category of things that can be done to a person that constitute a serious violation of that person, or that person’s preferences, or that person’s rights as an individual, or however you want to think about it. I don’t think there is any consistent sensible set of rules for what should and should not be part of that category that would exclude involuntary circumcision that would not also exclude many things which are widely agreed to be serious violations. That’s part of what I was trying to communicate with the cannibalism analogy.

“Most people accept this is normal” is not really a basis for exclusion from the category. It is not a justification people would place assign any weight to if something was done to them that they considered to be a serious violation but society (or a hypothetical society) considered to be normal.