Well as per usual, I have Kanga and Duke to thank for any wisdom I receive.
I have long wondered (in Seinfeldian fashion) What's the deal with circumcision?
Now, many men have taken offense to my stance against circumcisions. I'm sorry to have given offense, I stand by my personal choice, but don't mean to imply that circumcised men are in any way inferior. I've just never really understood why this became such a fad in the North and South America and I've never really had any discussions which have enlightened me. But tonight, at the fabulous Dadeos, enlightenment (at least about circumcision) was achieved.
My problems with circumcision stem from when I found out that my mom told my dad that he would have to get circumcised before they got married (ie before they had sex). He did it. At 22 he got circumcised. Now while I have never discussed this with my father (yeesh, what a bad idea that would be) I somehow think I felt his pain - well, okay I probably haven't been that upset by it but still. So I asked my mom why she made this odd request of the man she loved and she told me that unhooded penises are cleaner and basically it was a fear of the dreaded smegma. I also asked around and this is something many Latin American women in Canada asked of their lovers in that time - the hood just wasn't cool. I did my small survey of about 30 women all living in Western Canada and not all of them had needed to make the request but not a single one of them thought it was an odd request.
I found (and continue to find) this highly disturbing. I also found that many of my friends (my age) had the same opinion (excluding Kanga, who also had her misconceptions about the hooded but not these) that unhooded was cleaner and I encountered a high degree of smegma fear. However, it is now becoming a much more accepted thing and I'm hoping that anti-hooditic sentiment is over. But I was still curious as to why is was done in North America. I mean, Europeans don't chop 'em and they seem to be doing okay. I've also been asked now why I'm so concerned with this. Well, part of this comes from above story about my dad but part of me asks the question "If some part of the vagina was being hacked off and for no real reason, wouldn't I be concerned about it? Even if the part being removed wasn't a key part in sexual pleasure (as is the case with male circumcision), my answer to this question is still yes. I'd want to know why it was being done. Maybe that's just me.
Duke in his wisdom pointed out that many of the people coming over to NA were Puritans. 'Nough said. Though I do find it funny that with so much anti-semitism in the world that we've all adopted this custom. Hey, maybe it was a big jewish plot so that the next Hitler wouldn't be able to tell the Jews from the Arians :) Or maybe it was a big plot from the females to get slightly even for hundreds of years of male oppression :)
But seriously folks, the whole Puritan thing makes sense. And it also helped to answer my second question - we're obviously not all Puritans anymore (certainly not if you're reading this blog) so why is it still happening? And here's where Kanga (aka blackdaisies) came in. She told me that if the father of the child is circumcised then you might want to have the child circumcised so they look the same - so the kid doesn't end up being scared about why he's different from daddy. Being childless, this obvious logic just hadn't occured to me.
I also think that some women of my mother's era also weren't too savvy about that whole area of men (well at least Latin American women, who still on the whole wait until marriage) and so when medical science came out saying "Off with their heads! Otherwise you'll be dealing with orange cheesy stuff everywhere!" some women didn't really know enough about penises to say er, hey wait a minute...
So, while I still hold my personal preferences (everyone's allowed - some men like big breasts some like small etc), I have a better understanding of why things are the way they are in the world of penises. And for those of you who don't know, the hooded ones are not like spaghetti (all covered in cheese) and they are mildly more sensitive but not so much so that you have to be scared.
Funnily enough, I must now get back to my research on Psychoanalytic Cliterary Theory. Sorry freudian slit...slip Literary Theory. So now you can all see why my thought patterns have been odd these weekend - reading too much Freud can do that to a penis..person.
I have long wondered (in Seinfeldian fashion) What's the deal with circumcision?
Now, many men have taken offense to my stance against circumcisions. I'm sorry to have given offense, I stand by my personal choice, but don't mean to imply that circumcised men are in any way inferior. I've just never really understood why this became such a fad in the North and South America and I've never really had any discussions which have enlightened me. But tonight, at the fabulous Dadeos, enlightenment (at least about circumcision) was achieved.
My problems with circumcision stem from when I found out that my mom told my dad that he would have to get circumcised before they got married (ie before they had sex). He did it. At 22 he got circumcised. Now while I have never discussed this with my father (yeesh, what a bad idea that would be) I somehow think I felt his pain - well, okay I probably haven't been that upset by it but still. So I asked my mom why she made this odd request of the man she loved and she told me that unhooded penises are cleaner and basically it was a fear of the dreaded smegma. I also asked around and this is something many Latin American women in Canada asked of their lovers in that time - the hood just wasn't cool. I did my small survey of about 30 women all living in Western Canada and not all of them had needed to make the request but not a single one of them thought it was an odd request.
I found (and continue to find) this highly disturbing. I also found that many of my friends (my age) had the same opinion (excluding Kanga, who also had her misconceptions about the hooded but not these) that unhooded was cleaner and I encountered a high degree of smegma fear. However, it is now becoming a much more accepted thing and I'm hoping that anti-hooditic sentiment is over. But I was still curious as to why is was done in North America. I mean, Europeans don't chop 'em and they seem to be doing okay. I've also been asked now why I'm so concerned with this. Well, part of this comes from above story about my dad but part of me asks the question "If some part of the vagina was being hacked off and for no real reason, wouldn't I be concerned about it? Even if the part being removed wasn't a key part in sexual pleasure (as is the case with male circumcision), my answer to this question is still yes. I'd want to know why it was being done. Maybe that's just me.
Duke in his wisdom pointed out that many of the people coming over to NA were Puritans. 'Nough said. Though I do find it funny that with so much anti-semitism in the world that we've all adopted this custom. Hey, maybe it was a big jewish plot so that the next Hitler wouldn't be able to tell the Jews from the Arians :) Or maybe it was a big plot from the females to get slightly even for hundreds of years of male oppression :)
But seriously folks, the whole Puritan thing makes sense. And it also helped to answer my second question - we're obviously not all Puritans anymore (certainly not if you're reading this blog) so why is it still happening? And here's where Kanga (aka blackdaisies) came in. She told me that if the father of the child is circumcised then you might want to have the child circumcised so they look the same - so the kid doesn't end up being scared about why he's different from daddy. Being childless, this obvious logic just hadn't occured to me.
I also think that some women of my mother's era also weren't too savvy about that whole area of men (well at least Latin American women, who still on the whole wait until marriage) and so when medical science came out saying "Off with their heads! Otherwise you'll be dealing with orange cheesy stuff everywhere!" some women didn't really know enough about penises to say er, hey wait a minute...
So, while I still hold my personal preferences (everyone's allowed - some men like big breasts some like small etc), I have a better understanding of why things are the way they are in the world of penises. And for those of you who don't know, the hooded ones are not like spaghetti (all covered in cheese) and they are mildly more sensitive but not so much so that you have to be scared.
Funnily enough, I must now get back to my research on Psychoanalytic Cliterary Theory. Sorry freudian slit...slip Literary Theory. So now you can all see why my thought patterns have been odd these weekend - reading too much Freud can do that to a penis..person.
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