Erm, ouch?
Out of context: Reply #20
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- Scotch_Roman0
^ actually niko, you're not totally off the mark. Modern circumcision was begun by rabbis in the 1600s, to keep kids from wanking but also because before that, circumcision was a tiny cut—only enough to draw blood. Some Jewish kids around that time started trying to stretch themselves back out so they'd be like the cool uncircumcised kids. That was when a group of rabbis got together and decided to start taking off the entire foreskin, to literally cut the "problem" off at the pass.
Fast forward a couple hundred years. American doctors started showing interest in circumcision (before this in Anglo-American culture, circumcision was almost non-existent). They really didn't know anything about it, and descendants of the aforementioned moils taught these impressionable American doctors to circumcise baby boys in the way rabbis had done it since the 1600s. Later on in the early 20th century, the practice became repackaged as a necessary precaution for sanitary reasons, but without any medical studies to actually back that up that claim.
So what we call circumcision today is actually a form of mutilation based on ignorance—because from Abraham until the 1600s, only a tiny cut was made as a symbolic gesture. No nerve endings were severed. But the way it's done these days, men end up losing a considerable amount of nerve endings and up to a third of the tissue comprising their unit.
I've only recently found all this out. Having a kid makes you think twice about these kinds of everyday procedures.
- ...Nothing against Jews, it might as well been some legalistic Puritans who started the trend, for what it's worth.Scotch_Roman