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I find this willingness to apply 'deranged' label to resentment over getting mutilated unsettling. Can't help but see it as a defense mechanism first.
Mutilation is a technically accurate but very strong word, and I do think that being mildly frustrated over it is reasonable, but uh, most people who get conspicuously upset about it are not bodily autonomy advocates getting conspicuously upset about other example of medically unnecessary procedures(eg doctors pressuring women into unnecessary c-sections), they’re MRA’s going on screeds who are also getting much more upset about it than seems reasonable.
Maybe, either way, I think being very upset over it is permissible.
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We've experienced it, and do not consider it worthy of the term "mutilation". No perceptible loss of function has been observed; while I'm sure there is a quantifiable difference, that difference appears to be entirely swamped by other factors.
It is, in fact, possible for a person to fixate on something minor and blow it up out of all proportion. One of the best ways to tell whether this is happening is to look at whether their experience generalizes. The experience of circumcision-objectors observably does not generalize very well. You can tell people that they've been mutilated, but many of us do not in fact perceive ourselves to be mutilated. You can claim that sexual pleasure would be greater; okay, so instead of it being the most intense physical pleasure we ever experience, it is instead the most intense physical pleasure we ever experience. Like, you get that sex is primarily a trigger, right? Do you think if you shave a few millimeters off a gun's trigger, it makes the gun less powerful?
It's vanishingly rare here, I think experiencing the alternative gives you just as much standing to judge it. I'm not sure if I quite understand what you have in mind when you say "the experience of circumcision-objectors observably does not generalize very well". Here, practically any adult man would consider it an unambiguous mutilation if proposed without absolute necessity.
The exact extent of the loss of function is of little interest to me, it's a technicality dwarfed by the default of no wanton destruction of body parts that I know to be perfectly good as they are. I could probably live with the tip of each finger, say 0.5cm, removed. You could prove it's only 8% loss in general performance, I don't care - it has to be a significant, unambiguous improvement before it deserves even a conversation.
I especially dislike how meaningless the practice is in the US, and as such, a reminder that men are disposable. If it were a genuine ritual you go through when coming of age or whatever, I'd be far less disgusted, even though it would hardly be any more of a choice.
I'm not demanding each 'victim' to be mad about it, of course, perspective @self_made_human describes is reasonable.
If you haven't experienced the loss, I think it's easy to overestimate the degree of loss involved. If you have experienced it, and if the argument is that the loss is significant in specific ways, knowing that the loss does not seem significant to you in those specific ways seems like strong evidence in a way that "I enjoy this and do not want to lose it" is not. You can imagine what that loss would be like, but I have actually had the experience.
I think his perspective is similar to mine. I will not be circumcising my male children. But people who choose otherwise are not "mutilators", any more than people who send their children to a public school have "sold their children into child slavery". The label is too non-central to be useful, and it seems to me that it's primarily useful to try to spin up a victimhood narrative that just doesn't seem appropriate to me. Male disposability is a real thing, but the object-level facts can't support the weight "mutilation" is trying to load here.
Only men cut well out of childhood do. But I would not cede the exclusive right to judge the matter to them anyhow. I only meant I consider being and not being all natural as far back as you can remember equal standing here.
I don't agree. Yes, it's a strong word, it is sufficiently central here. I would say such parents are perpetuating mutilation, just not the worst imaginable exact kind.
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"Mutilated" is a loaded term. Are dentures being put in and your objections overruled mutilation? Getting your ears pierced as a child?
The obvious counterpart, female genital mutilation, has much more grounding as such, since it is explicitly designed to deny women sexual pleasure, and the clitoris contributes a great deal more to it than the prepuce does for the penis.
I'm circumcised, and I'm apathetic about it. I don't see myself as being deprived of anything in particular, and it wasn't done when I was too young to remember the difference. Now, I'm also against people having their bodies modified against their consent for most reasons, and the benefits of circumcision are minimal if they exist at all. I just happen to think that the men who consider it a cut-down hill worth dying on are overstating its impact. It likely contributed nothing to what ails them, unless the circumcision was really botched, and I don't think that's accusation in play. It's a trivial procedure, or less African witchdoctors and Rabbis with incisors couldn't pull it off reliably.
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