Non-efficacy of circumcision being the established medical consensus worldwide, I'm going to address one of the most prominent fall-back arguments for the practice of male genital cutting: "I'm cut, I'm okay, so cutting is okay." Substitute 'someone else' for 'I' as appropriate.
The crux of the issue is, why do men who have been genitally altered from their natural state, the mechanics of their reproductive hardware forever changed, sexually sensitive tissue irreversibly removed, their individual autonomy denied, by and large (though there are many exceptions) seem, at least superficially, to feel okay about it?
- Lack of accurate knowledge
The first and most obvious reason genitally cut men typically seem to feel okay about having been circumcised without their consent is lack of understanding of what was actually done to them, on an anatomical level.
Separated At Birth:
If you’re like most American men, you’re circumcised. But you probably haven’t given it any thought since junior high school, when you first noticed that not every kid in the locker room looked the same. In fact, if you’re single or childless now, you may think that it’s purely a father/son issue of little concern to you. Think again. "Circumcision removes one-third to one-half of the skin on the penile shaft," says Ronald Goldman, Ph.D., executive director of the Circumcision Resource Center in Boston and author of Circumcision: The Hidden Trauma. "The average circumcision cuts off what would grow into about 12 square inches of sexually sensitive skin."
According to Canadian pathologist John Taylor, M.B., the foreskin is one of the key erogenous zones of the male body. Its 240 feet of nerves and 1,000 nerve endings are similar to those on the fingers and lips.
Growing up and learning about one's own sexuality a task sufficiently complex that considering your own body to be in some way defective, especially due to a deliberate act, is beyond the level of self-evaluation most circumcised men rise to. Couple this with a thorough lack of education (POLL: What version of male sexual anatomy were you taught in school?) and a general taboo concerning sexual matters (except where exploited for marketing purposes), and it's something most men never seriously consider. Many circumcised men literally do not understand the functional aspects of the normal male anatomy, because they could not learn it from self examination, were never taught about it, and were never driven to learn about it.
CIN:
Denial prevented me from wanting to find out. Denial that there was anything
wrong. Denial, in the form that what was done to me must have been done for
some good reason. And denial of my true feelings, shrouded in the medical
myths that continue to protect and foster routine infant genital alteration
in my culture, the same medical myths you can see promulgated regularly in
newspapers, advice columns, talk shows, and internet newsgroups. Denial is
real, and there is a lot of it out there. Denial is part of the process of
grief.
- Need to retain control
American culture values individual autonomy and power. For a man to admit that he was harmed by genital cutting as a child is to admit powerlessness and lack of autonomy. There is only one way to maintain the illusion of autonomy and power: Embrace what cannot be changed and what was not self-chosen, and define the result as acceptable, or even desirable.
Cat Saunders:
To any circumcised man who says involuntary circumcision is no big deal (since most circumcised men can't remember it), I say denial runs deep. However, I bet this denial would end immediately if I suggested to such a man that a team of Sumo wrestlers (to analogize the size difference between infants and medical personnel) will now overpower him, forcefully strap him to a board, and cut off a slice of his penis without anesthesia. Would he still say this is not genital mutilation?
- Need to feel whole
Nobody wants to feel like a part of them is missing. A person lacking any musical talent is unlikely to feel that the musically talented part of them is missing. However, a person who had substantial musical talent but lost it to brain injury is much more likely to feel incomplete. One's sense of wholeness is rarely described in terms which have never been experienced or cannot be recalled. Furthermore, sexuality is a key component of most people's understanding of themselves, so there is a strong desire to want to feel okay about it. Since neonatal genital cutting is (mostly) irreversible, the only solution, again, is to view one's only known state as whole.
Dr Janet Menage MA MB ChB:
The intellectualisation of a harmful act is a way of turning "bad" into "good" - the thought process may run thus: "my parents cut off part of my body and despite the fact that I didn't like it, my parents are good - so cutting off part of my body was good - therefore, to be a good parent myself, I must do the same to my son...". And so the cycle of abuse continues. Similarly within the medical profession- "I was circumcised/have done circumcisions - I was not harmed/have not harmed my patients - therefore to circumcise is trivial, harmless and necessary..." If the doctor is in a process of trying to deny that he has been harmed by his own circumcision, he may be psychologically compelled to repeat the act on his patients to "prove" that circumcision is "harmless". In addition, when a circumcision victim becomes a circumciser, he is no longer powerless to attack - he is now the powerful attacker, thus redressing some of the balance in relation to his own fear of repetition of his own trauma.
When confronted with the fact that they were, to use a controversial but accurate word, mutilated, they react incredulously, deride the very subject matter as absurd to even discuss, or get angry.
mutilate – 1. to deprive (a person or animal) of a limb or other essential part. 2. to injure, disfigure, or make imperfect by removing or irreparably damaging parts.
One might ask, what good can come from encouraging men to examine what really happened to them? The answer is simple and of critical importance. A man unwilling or incapable of admitting the truth about his own circumcision, of necessity, will affirm his own manhood my diminishing that of his very own sons.
And that, my friends, is a shameful cycle of violence that must be broken, even at risk of bruising the adult male ego.