circumcision

Oh please. I just read that the American government -- no doubt, in conjunction with the campaign to do away with condoms -- is now pushing circumcision on the rest of the world. This is really funny. We're the only country that mutilates the majority of our penises for non-religious reasons. Circumcision is an artifact of the 1870s, when an ignorant medical culture, dominated by American Medical Association heavyweights like Rhode Island Leutenant Health Commissioner Charles Chapin, who claimed that it was "more important to remove adenoids from the child that it is to remove ashes from the back yard; Georgian hero-surgeon Robert Battey, who performed ovariotomies and clitoridectomies on hundreds of women to alleviate symptoms as varied as backache, anxiety, depression and female hysteria (possibly the biggest joke ever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria); and Lewish Sayre, who circumsized hundreds of young boys who suffered from paralysis, lunacism, brass poisoning and just about every other mental or physiological condition you can think of, not to mention the social diseases of homosexuality and excessive masturbation, with appallingly low success rates and an enormous following of doctors hungry to perform easy, lucrative procedures.
These wackjobs all founded their ideas on reflex theory, which is a little like acupuncture, but permanent. In other words, reflex theorists thought that local or systemic ailments could be cured by cutting off unrelated parts of the body. Reflex theory died, but circumcision remains. Nowadays, circumcision is considered clean, healthy, and profilactic.
Everyone thinks it's great, but the thing is, it's not healthier, cleaner or better in any way. It's absurd. What would you say to someone who offered to remove your eyelids? No study has confirmed the presumed causal relationship between circumcision and reduced instance of venereal disease. The surgery itself, and the accompanying unnecessary risk of acute infection, gangrene, sepsis, hemorrhage or death is the clearest indication that it poses a hazard to the health of our penises. And if you can make it through the traumatic procedure and the following weeks of agony, you'll face an astronomically higher risk of meatal unceration, a rather daunting probability of urethral lesion and stenosis, and a lifetime without a foreskin, for no good reason.
:-*