Additionally, there’s the matter of pleasure. I know that some people dig on toe stimulation, but they still have five left in that instance. I think it is an error of yours to try & separate the rights argument from the benefits from foreskin argument, they are entirely & inextricably intertwined. If foreskin truly was devoid of worth & function I doubt that anyone would really have a problem. That’s not the case.

I bring this up because I think his naive reaction of ‘you gotta be kidding me’ is just about right. A father immediately shrinking their son’s penis via surgery is pretty random when you consider it in isolation. Really, I’m not sure if my son really believes circumcision exists even now.

I don’t accept the rights-based argument here. Conceptions of what constitutes a “normal” body are socially constructed. It doesn’t make sense to talk about the infant having a “right” to have his body look one way or the other. In pre-Christian Polynesian society a 12-year-old would have a right to be tattooed just like his peers so as to avoid social exclusion; in modern American society tattooing that 12-year-old would be a crime. What we have here are different social constructs. The choice between social constructs should be left up to the parents, within reason.

Secondly, your attempt to cast the objection as some ignorant goy just doesn’t work. Believe it or not Jews aren’t the sole group who deem themselves something special. You know which other ethnic group thinks that they’re really something special? All of them.I was raised a Catholic, who think they’re so special they only consider less than ten from tens of thousands of competition Christian outfit as churches. I’m in Turkey right now, & you’d better believe that everyone here thinks of themselves as something special. There’s an excellent post on this very website about American Exceptionalism, the view that America is really something pretty fucking special. My home country thinks of itself as something special because it’s not quite in Europe, every European country thinks that they are something special because they aren’t their next door neighbour. It’s a lovely viewpoint: you’re something amazing & you didn’t even have to try! It’s nonsense, but in a million & one forms it’s practically universal.

Do you know what you call someone who thinks that their people is something special? Normal.

So I struggle to be impressed by all that ”People apart” stuff. I think that the problem isn’t that we don’t know what it feels like for a Jew, it’s that you haven’t worked out that gentiles all do exactly the same. I get that your upbringing, like mine, made you feel that you were something special & had according responsibilities (believe me, singing in Midnight Mass is a pain), it’s just we disagree over where the line should be drawn. I say slicing up an infant’s is on the wrong side of it, you disagree (most probably because you don’t think that removing a certain bodypart constitutes ”harm”, which I have to say I find both understandable & very misinformed). That’s the difference, not that I lacked a childhood which tried to mold me as a member of an ancient traditionalist counter-culture.

Indeed in upbringing terms we aren’t at all alien, just from separate traditions. Hell, with this assimilationist spiel I’m probably holding myself well apart from those foolish ethnic collectivists, who I chide for…Holding themselves apart from each other. But so be it. Belonging to a people who are something really remarkable & different to the rest & etc etc is nothing remarkable at all. What’s remarkable is getting the fuck over yourself, disregarding the ethnic hagiography you’ve been spoonfed from day one, ignoring all that ”allegiance” bullshit (be it a white nationalist calling you a ”race traitor” or some murderous morons all primed for some honour killing, they’re just variations on a theme) &…Getting on with it. Not taking a knife to your son’s genitals in the name of an argument to tradition isn’t a bad start, in this instance. In fact a good line to draw would be cutting your healthy child at all once the umbilical’s gone.

Because we all have to work out who we are for ourselves at some point. Nobody can tell us, least of all via the medium of scar tissue.

Why should I care more about the parents feelings that the impact upon the child? According to a sensitivity study & the reams of anecdotal data (including my own experience) what they are globe-trotting to have removed is, or at very least has a high likelihood of being, an enormously erogenous zone.

Two, in fact (inner foreskin + frenulum).

Now if people decide for themselves that pleasure is outweighed by other factors, or is not present, then that is entirely acceptable. No objections: you may do with yourself as you please. But to inflict your prejudices onto others bodies? Entirely reprehensible & totally unacceptable.

You are simply too ignorant to offer proper consent on somebody else’s behalf over this matter.

But to be honest, I think much of the difference in perspective between Jews and some gentiles on this question goes back to a basic difference in our experiences of identity formation. Jews are mostly comfortable with the idea of being marked as different from birth. We are different. We are different in the way we are raised. We are a people apart. We are that way because of the way our parents shaped us. We don’t get to make the choice ourselves. One might phrase this in a hostile fashion — one might say our parents have done this “to” us. But that would be silly. Rather, we are brought up to feel that we are part of a group identity to which we have a responsibility. The ways we are shaped are the people we become. And to deny the markers of Jewishness, to renounce that identity, is seen as an act of betrayal and self-hatred. Obviously, there are different levels here, and loyalty to your identity isn’t the only ethic around; I’m married to a non-Jew because I fell in love with her, and so forth. But for most Jews, to not circumcise your son, especially in a society where circumcision is widespread and easy to do, would be an act of gratuitous denial of one’s identity. It is an act of “passing”. And in every minority culture with a history of discrimination, passing is betrayal.

Obviously a bodily modification is something very different from just going to Hebrew school or whatever. But still, when I look at the miscomprehension I see in the comment thread here, I think some of it stems from the fact that perhaps the ethnic majority don’t experience ethnic identity formation in early childhood in quite the same way. Basically, to me, the idea that parents shape their kids in ways the kids don’t have a say in just sounds like, well, life. I understand why many fathers want their sons’ penises to look like their own. I’m not going to say it’s okay for me to want that because I’m Jewish, but not for some Lutheran guy because he just wants it that way.