About the procedure:
... First the child, after 9 months in the fetal position, is tied down spreadeagled and straight-backed in a circumstraint, a plastic board molded to the outline of an infant's body, which is equipped with velcro straps. Next he is covered with a sheet which has a hole through which his penis is threaded. Then his penis is thoroughly swabbed with sterilizing solution. Naturally, this frequently provokes an erection. Some physicians deliberately provoke erections in order to judge the "cutoff line" and to aid in the surgery itself. In any case, in the infant's brand new, wide-open, pre-verbal consciousness, this is his first sexual experience: a torturous nightmare. <65, 66, 67, 68, 69>
http://www.math.missouri.edu/~rich/MGM/primer.html#MBPeople on DU in other threads over the years have asked questions at times about where the seeming connection to sex and violence comes from. Female rape, for instance, where a male forces themselves on an unwilling female as an act of control and dominance, among other things, seems to be reflected in the doctor's circumcision of the male infant.
There you have it, the first instance of the connection between sex and violence, it begins in the first hours and days of life for many males.
Continuing from the same site, emphasis added:
...Because the foreskin of an infant is attached to the head of the penis by the same tissue that bonds a fingernail to a finger, it must be skinned away before it can be cut off. So the doctor forces a metal probe between the foreskin and the head and tears apart this flesh (called synechia) which bonds them together. Next, the doctor has several options for the actual amputation. One commonly used device for this step is called a gomco clamp. This essentially functions as a thumbscrew for the foreskin. I am not making this up. Surgical scissors are used to cut a slit along the length of the foreskin in order to insert the metal "bell" which serves as one jaw of the clamp. The foreskin is pulled over the bell and the other jaw of the clamp is attached. Then, by tightening a screw, the foreskin, one of the most densely innervated tissues of the body, is audibly crushed along two lines (inner and outer foreskin) around its circumference. (Since all the nerves of the foreskin pass through this crush line, the pain perception may be similar to that of putting virtually the entire erogenous surface of the penis in a vise.) The clamp is left on for a few minutes to promote blood clotting, then the foreskin is cut off at the crush line. <70, 71, 72> Afterwards, the raw, bleeding, formerly internal organ is wrapped in bandages and a diaper, and then repeatedly burned with urine and its breakdown product, ammonia, and exposed to infectious fecal matter while healing.
In latter part of the procedure there appears to be a source of pain described which likely lasts for days, however long healing takes; pain that lasts long after any anesthesia that may have been used for the procedure wears off, and lets remember, that for millennia, anesthesia was not used, it appears there was no movement towards anesthesia until 1978 or thereabouts. So what kind of social results might this have?
MGM = male genital mutilation
...The long term psychological impact of birth-related trauma is also relevant to the issue of MGM. Recent studies have found striking connections between birth trauma and adult post traumatic stress and suicide, <93, 94, 95, 96, 75, 67, 78, 97> and adult victims of infant MGM often exhibit a spectrum of symptoms including:
* a sense of personal powerlessness
* lack of trust in others and life
* a sense of vulnerability to violent attack by others
* irrational rage reactions
* addictions and dependencies
* difficulties in establishing intimate relationships
* decreased ability to communicate
* emotional numbing
* reluctance to be in relationships with women
* anger and violence toward women <98>
How many times have you heard jokes told by women about men who don't want to communicate? Who are called "Joe six-pack"?
If the above hypotheses are accurate and scientifically truthful, it makes sense that religions that practiced circumcision for any historically perceived effect would also discover a need to indoctrinate its members against some of the above, especially the last two effects, for human breeding to continue in the mass way that emperors and rulers desired.
It would seem that the psychological and social effects of circumcisions on a mass of infants is indeed profound, though I would certainly expect there to be individual variations. Presumably, this effect would be different from the effect upon an adult having the procedure done of his own free will, where it isn't the 'first sexual experience' with another human wielding a knife and/or clamp.
It's no wonder that humans aren't like their more peace loving cousins, the Bonobos, who apparently use sex to calm each other and preempt interdispute.
Anger, emotional numbing, violence, these are precisely the qualities one would wish in a soldier whose purpose is defined by orders to kill the enemy.
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