links for mothers whose husband wants to circumcise:
http://www.circumstitions.com/men-vuln.html
http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=112410
for daddy:
http://www.fathermag.com/health/circ/gmas/
http://www.noharmm.org/raising.htm
http://www.noharmm.org/appeal.htm
http://www.drmomma.org/2009/10/dads-view-of-circumcision.html
http://www.circumstitions.com/Father.html
http://www.circumcision.org/satisfied.htm
http://www.circumcision.org/femalesex.htm
Whose Body, Whose Rights? video
How to Identify Circumcision Damage in the Adult Male
And here are the medical reasons (and God-given reasons) to be intact as God planned:
The foreskin has numerous protective, sensory, and sexual functions.
· Protection: Just as the eyelids protect the eyes, the foreskin protects the glans and keeps its surface soft, moist, and sensitive. It also maintains optimal warmth, pH balance, and cleanliness. The glans itself contains no sebaceous glands-glands that produce the sebum, or oil, that moisturizes our skin.11 The foreskin produces the sebum that maintains proper health of the surface of the glans.
· Immunological Defense: The mucous membranes that line all body orifices are the body's first line of immunological defense. Glands in the foreskin produce antibacterial and antiviral proteins such as lysozyme.12 Lysozyme is also found in tears and mother's milk. Specialized epithelial Langerhans cells, an immune system component, abound in the foreskin's outer surface.13 Plasma cells in the foreskin's mucosal lining secrete immunoglobulins, antibodies that defend against infection.14
· Erogenous Sensitivity: The foreskin is as sensitive as the fingertips or the lips of the mouth. It contains a richer variety and greater concentration of specialized nerve receptors than any other part of the penis.15 These specialized nerve endings can discern motion, subtle changes in temperature, and fine gradations of texture.16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23
· Coverage During Erection: As it becomes erect, the penile shaft becomes thicker and longer. The double-layered foreskin provides the skin necessary to accommodate the expanded organ and to allow the penile skin to glide freely, smoothly, and pleasurably over the shaft and glans.
· Self-Stimulating Sexual Functions: The foreskin's double-layered sheath enables the penile shaft skin to glide back and forth over the penile shaft. The foreskin can normally be slipped all the way, or almost all the way, back to the base of the penis, and also slipped forward beyond the glans. This wide range of motion is the mechanism by which the penis and the orgasmic triggers in the foreskin, frenulum, and glans are stimulated.
· Sexual Functions in Intercourse: One of the foreskin's functions is to facilitate smooth, gentle movement between the mucosal surfaces of the two partners during intercourse. The foreskin enables the penis to slip in and out of the vagina nonabrasively inside its own slick sheath of self-lubricating, movable skin. The female is thus stimulated by moving pressure rather than by friction only, as when the male's foreskin is missing.
· The foreskin fosters intimacy between the two partners by enveloping the glans and maintaining it as an internal organ. The sexual experience is enhanced when the foreskin slips back to allow the male's internal organ, the glans, to meet the female's internal organ, the cervix-a moment of supreme intimacy and beauty.
Circumcision is not simply the cutting off of useless skin. Author Gary L. Harryman innumerates what circumcision destroys:
***Its connective synechia, which fuses the foreskin to the glans while the penis develops.
***Approximately half of the smooth muscle sheath called the dartos fascia.
***Most of the erotogenic nerve endings on the penis, including the densely innervated ridged bands, reducing the sensitivity of the penis to that of ordinary skin.
***Specialized epithelial Langerhans cells, a component of the immune system.
***Thousands of coiled fine-touch receptors, including the Meissner's corpuscles.
***Estrogen receptors--the purpose and value of which are not yet fully understood.
***Ectopic sebaceous glands, which lubricate and moisturize.
***The protective covering of the glans, normally an internal structure. The foreskin shields from abrasion, drying, and callusing, and protects from dirt and other contaminants.
***The entire immunological defense system of the soft mucosa, which may produce antibacterial and antiviral proteins such as lysozyme, also found in mother's milk, and plasma cells, which secrete immunoglobulin antibodies.
***Lymphatic vessels, the loss of which interrupts the lymph flow within a part of the body's immune system.
***The frenulum, the sensitive "V" shaped tethering structure on the underside of the glans is also usually amputated, severed, or destroyed.
***The apocrine glands, which produce pheromones, nature's powerful, silent, invisible signals to potential sexual partners.
***As much as 50% or more of the total penile skin, radically immobilizing and desensitizing whatever skin remains.
***The "gliding" mechanism. If unfolded and spread out flat, the average adult foreskin would measure 15-20 square inches, the size of a postcard. This abundance of specialized, self-lubricating skin gives the natural penis its unique-hallmark ability to smoothly "glide" back and forth within itself, permitting non-abrasive intercourse, without drying out the vagina.
***The pink to red to dark purple natural coloration of the glans.
***10% to 20% of its circumference because its double-layered wrapping of loose foreskin is now missing making the circumcised penis thinner.
*** As much as one inch of the erect penis' length due to scarring and shrinkage from loss of the mobile, richly vascularized foreskin.
***Several feet of blood vessels, including the frenular artery and branches of the dorsal artery, the loss of which interrupts normal blood flow to the shaft and glans of the penis, damaging its natural function and possibly stunting its growth.
*** An estimated 240 feet of microscopic nerves, including branches of the dorsal nerve.
*** Perhaps most importantly, between at least 10,000 to 20,000 specialized erotogenic nerve endings of various types, which can discern slight motion, subtle changes in temperature, and fine gradations in texture.
And occasionally a boy will lose his life from this needless operation. It has been estimated that as many as 209 babies die every year from circumcision and related complications.
Correction- the foreskin protects the glans AND protects its inner mucosa where the most erogenous sexual receptors are located in the ridged band and frenulum. (Such protection from the sun which harms the receptors). The glans corona has only 15% of the sexual receptors which fight against the populace pain receptors located there. 65%-85% of the sexual receptors are cut off, 85% when the frenulum is scrapped off. The amount of receptors removed are equal to all ten fingertips. (Sorrells et al. "Fine -Touch Pressure Thresholds of the Adult Penis".
ReplyDeleteForming a hangman's noose, the erogenous value of the frenulum continues through its connected looped ridged band, decreasing value, with the lessor erogenous value being at the ridged band ventral. The glans corona's erogenous value increases as the ridged band"s erogenous value decreases, thus compensating the difference.
Note: Langerhans cells have been suggested to allow HIV entry as reported in the three African studies on male circumcision and HIV. There are more Langerhans cells in the tonsils yet tonsillectomy is not recommended. Langerhans secrete langerin which has been shown to kill HIV.
The circumcised penis uses 10x the pressure for vaginal intro over an intact penis.
One FUNCTION of the DARTOS MUSCLE is it tenses with en erection thereby creating a one piece solid skin tube where any action on the shaft is transferred to the erogenous ridged band which through its loop to the frenulum, this action is transferred to act on the frenulum, all this elicits an orgasmic response. No action on the shaft is wasted these erogenous structures, the ridged band and the frenulum. (Dr. John Taylor "Frenular Delta")
Circumcision always removes all of the ridged band being at the extreme foreskin tip and part to all of the frenulum. Action on the shaft is wasted on these structures. Action must be directly on the frenulum remnant, if any remains.
A new study found that approximately 117 neonatal (first 28 days after birth) circumcision-related deaths occur annually in the United States, one out of every 77 male neonatal deaths. http://www.icgi.org/2010/04/infant-circumcision-causes-100-deaths-each-year-in-us/
I like the image of a rural English church at the top of this page.
ReplyDeleteYou are a childhood educator and mother. Stably married mother to a man who is perhaps the only sex partner you have ever had. Like so many women from the American interior, you are a Christian and probably evangelical as well. Family, country, God. And you have no difficulty with private property either.
But unlike your mother's generation, and perhaps your grandparents as well, you are dismayed by the American obsession to make the penis bald. You have the good fortune to live in a state which the American Foreskin Holocaust appears to have been bipassed. Many promiscuous Texas women post of ample experience with intact men, and not just Chicanos. I have heard a Texas woman say on YouTube that circumcision was totally alien to her rural Texas upbringing. Only in college did she discover the American obsession with the bald penis.
Tragically, there are young American fathers who dislike being reminded that they lack something nature intended, every time they change a diaper or give a bath. They fear that an intact son will be bullied in the locker room, rejected when he starts dating. This drives a wedge between themselves and the mothers of their sons. In the USA right now, women are more accepting of foreskin than str8 men are. Women have done far more introspection about appearance conformity and genital conformity than men have.
When the body and attitudes about the body clash, I say change the attitudes. I invite all fathers to join me here.