Kellogg I think. He was a “doctor,” but only trained under a water healer, and he believed that spices, led to night emissions, and lusty thoughts. So he started a granula food basically grains with a little bit of honey. But he believed it was harder to jerk off if you were circumcised.
I’ve heard a few things: Christian lawmakers or biblical beliefs influencing conventions, it’s “more sanitary” and “healthier”, because the doctors want to grind up the foreskins into youth serums and sell them to the wealthy elite… I’m sure it boils down to a combination
Social norms, easier to maintain cleanliness, aesthetics
For those saying it’s easy enough to clean if you know what to do, keep in mind most men aren’t great about cleaning themselves thoroughly.
I’m not saying all or even most men should have it done. That is completely up to the person and/or family (obviously infants can’t make an informed decision)
I did foreskin restoration to get back what I could and I have to say: it really feels like I was born to have one.
Works better, feels better, looks better and healthier, it’s so cruel that we damage children’s genitals, especially should be banned when adults almost never choose to get this done, we are literally forcing a choice on kids they would never choose for themselves as adults
The most common reason I’ve heard personally is “it’s cleaner”, which is a terrible argument when we have running water and showers. It’s terrible that this is still practiced, as a victim of this who sees the damage it is tough to deal with.
Oh and a bonus to the cruelty if you had it done before the year 2000, it was mostly done without anything for the pain, they just started crushing, ripping and cutting
Looks mainly. But since most of us are circumcised we’ve never had to learn how to properly care for an uncircumcised penis and don’t really want to learn.
XIX century American society was rapidly modernizing but in the same time had some very reactionary tendencies. A lot of new religions sprouted then, and there was a general moral panic about society losing its morality, in many ways connected with the civil war and emancipation of slaves and women. One of the guys who decided he can improve on Americans health was Dr. Kellogg…who promoted whole grains, exercise, abstinence from alcohol….and genital mutilation. His recommendations were to burn on female clitorises by carbolic acid and to remove the foreskin because he believed that by removing the most sensitive parts, he could remove pleasure from sex so people would have less of it. Luckily, the FGM part didn’t get popular. Male one….however did. It then got a lot pseudoscientific explanations to justify the practice. It’s, forntuatelly, been in decline for a bit now.
Everyone is gonna blame religion but that was actually such a small part of it…in the US at least. It was thought to be a prevention from diseases and ailments…. so it was medical science that pushed it.
Dumb tradition…it’s dumb to talk about cleanliness because a woman’s private area is more complicated than a mans with that yeast infection men rarely get..would she circumcise her labia for cleanliness…probably not. .especially without their consent….
Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. I’m not kidding. Well, not the cereal, but the actual guy John Harvey Kellogg.
The late 1800s to early 1900s were a wacky time and it became a thing to circumcise boys so they wouldn’t masturbate and waste their vital fluids. American circumcision isn’t religious like many people think. It’s more stealing religion’s thing for weird pseudo-science purposes.
should be made illegal and considered genital mutilation unless you have excessively long foreskin causing actual problems.
I know labia trimming is a thing but it is done after legal adulthood in majority if not all cases.
So the real question is, why is male genital mutilation done prior to legal adulthood not considered genital mutilation and made illegal, when female labia trimming is done and not considered genital mutilation if done prior to legal adulthood?
You’ll be hard pressed to find a circumcised man who is complaining that they were mutilated. We don’t remember it, and many of us are perfectly happy with it. If you’ve ever watched a baby get circumcised, they cry for about 2 minutes after the fact and are fine. You all make a bigger deal about it than it needs to be. All I know is I had a friend who was uncircumcised and got it done while in his late teens. He said he did it because he was prone to infections, beneath the skin, would cum too quick, and it would smell at times. He said it was painful getting it done as a grown man but he doesnt regret it at all and feels its much more sanitary. You all keep your ant eaters, we’ll keep our unsheathed swords.
It started as a religious thing. Now it is common among almost all males here in the US. Fathers usually say they want their son to look like them. I never saw an uncut guy until I went to college. Back then dorm showers were open and guys had no issues being naked in the bathroom.
Because to American society only women and girls bodily autonomy is paramount. So much so they ignore that a constitutional amendment calls for equal protections for all under the law.
Type four fgc is a pin prick, but is called mutilation while removing erogenous tissue and multiple light touch nerve bundles effectively reducing pleasure and sensation of males is perfectly fine. The logic ducks.
In my family the older generations were born at home and not cut so when WW II came they were forced to Have it done as adults and didn’t want their sons to experience that so he it done for them at birth
Circumcision, particularly when performed in infancy or childhood, is associated with a significantly reduced risk of developing invasive penile cancer. This protective effect is thought to be due in part to the prevention of conditions like phimosis and the accumulation of smegma, both of which increase the risk of penile cancer and are more common in uncircumcised men.
Before the discovery of rubber, hair ties and elastic bands were hard to come by. Harvesting foreskins filled this societal need. . . . .now, it’s really just low cost crumbed frozen calamari rings so demand for the product has definitely dropped, though it’s still widely practiced.
There was a special on HBO that I saw years ago–“The history of sex.” According to the show, one of the reasons it became popular in the USA, is because they popularized the idea that it would keep adolescent boys from masturbating. Which was interesting to me, because when I was young, I wondered how cut guys could jerk off, when there was nothing to jerk. I also wondered about the reference to some kind of lube when jerking off, and wtf they would need that.
From hospital getting money to do it to the selling of the skin to the likes pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies. Sure kids die but profits must be made.
It’s a vestage of the mistaken belief that masturbation is harmful. Unfortunately, Christians once believed that any sexual behavior that didn’t result in the potentiality of a child was sin, and through accretion, believed that deviating from this in any way would result in all sorts of maladies.
They got this belief from misunderstanding what was going on in the narrative of Onan – Judah’s son – in Genesis 38. He was tasked by Judah against his consent to sleep with Tamar so that his brother Er would have an heir to his name. But Onan didn’t want to do that so he “went into her” and “spilled his semen onto the ground” and he was killed. Now, the thing to understand is that the terms “spilled his seed on the ground” actually mean literally “corrupted with semen the ground”. It’s clear even in Hebrew what happened here: Onan had sex with Tamar, and then pulled out right before ejaculating so that he ejaculated on the ground in front of her vagina instead of into her vagina.
There was no masturbation here, and the whole reason that he was killed (assumably by God) is that at this pivotal moment when Judah needed to have an heir, Onan basically said “I’m glad my brother is dead because I hate him, I’m going to rape his wife but deny him a legal heir by not producing a child with her. I’m glad he’s dead and I’m glad he will have no offspring to his name, even by my seed.” But the idea that what God struck him down for was intentionally non-procreative sex stuck.
As an aside, this cannot be upheld in the whole of scripture. No such punishment is prescribed when a man has an emission of semen by any means that doesn’t involve intercourse in the hygiene laws, in Proverbs 5, Solomon tells his teenage sons to delight in the breasts of the wife of his youth always, in the same passage he talks about their “streams”, “springs”, and “fountains” adding in that they should be for them alone and not for strangers with them, and in Song of Solomon, the woman says that her lover is like an apple tree among the sons, one she wants to sit beneath and taste of his fruit, and later in chapter 7 he describes her navel as having the best mixed wine.
Basically, the Mosaic law passes no judgement on masturbation when it had the perfect opportunity to – actually multiple times – Solomon seems to suggest to his sons with the ejaculatory imagery of Proverbs 5 that they should masturbate or have sex with their wives to keep themselves away from strange women who would at best waste them away with unhealthy promiscuous sex that would spread disease, and at worst act as a lure to be sold into sexual slavery to foreigners. Song of Solomon expresses a desire on the part of the woman to give her lover a blow job, and Song of Solomon 7 has the young man looking hungrily at her wet vulva while comparing it to a drink. All of these involve non-procreative sex and are described positively (except the hygiene law, which is basically God’s way of telling Israelite masturbators to make sure they wash up after).
America and the UK were largely Christian countries and so they carried that mistaken ethos on through their history. In the mid 1700s, the idea that sickness and disease were the result of some divine punishment began to be replaced by modernist thinkers with more scientific explanations… except that they didn’t know how to explain the “sin of onanism” very well. There was also a perception that Jewish boys didn’t masturbate (ha! fat chance! everybody does it!) and eventually the association began to be made that actually the reason for that was that they were circumcised.
In the 1800s, they did all sorts of sick horrific things to boys (and girls) to either make them stop masturbating or to prevent them from masturbating. That was when the medical establishment decided that maybe the cure for masturbation was circumcision. That’s how you got John Harvey Kellogg recommending circumcision to cure masturbation especially if done soon after a boy starts doing it as the pain may have a “salutory” effect on the mind. He also in the same text recommends carbolic acid on the clitoris for girls who do it.
Unfortunately, this led to a mass circumcision campaign in England and the US. The UK had basically stopped doing that by the 1950s, Canada and Australia by the 60s and 70s. But the US never stopped. I’m not sure why we never stopped but I hope to be part of the solution. I’ve kept my own son intact despite myself being circumcised. And I hope more and more American parents will join me in protecting our sons from genital mutilation.
Lewis Sayre popularized circumcision in the US in the mid 1800s as a cure for paralysis and other motor neuron disorders. John Harvey Kellogg (the cereal guy) also promoted circumcision, but this was later in the 1800s.
For babies born today, it’s about 50/50 circumcised versus not. So the concerns that they will stand out or a woman won’t know what to do with it are moot for babies now.
I was told (this may not be true) – there was a study in the 40s or 50s that showed it was “healthier” and then it ran wild. But as long as you have a hygiene routine, all the “healthier” stuff was BS. The study was just confirming that not cleaning under your foreskin could cause problems. Duh.
Also around that time a study said tighty-whitey underwear caused scrotum problems during puberty boys (like the underwear prevented the scrotum from descending). So that’s when boxer-shorts became the preferred underwear. My dad has commented he was forced to wear boxers as a kid. But yah, normal fitting underwear does not cause problems.
Well to be quite rudely honest they did that because when you’re whacking off your hand don’t slip off the knob and you punch yourself between the eyes.
Not sure how it started but I’m glad it did. I’ve heard it lowers risk of certain STIs, is easier to clean, and even has some cancer reduction benefits.
It all comes down to that motherfucker who made corn flakes thinking that unsweetened food would stop people from masturbating. Somehow, Kellogg rubbed two brain cells together for what was arguably the craziest idea ever – bring circumcision up and normalize it by making it feel like a very Christian thing to do to your son. Want your son to not masturbate or have premarital sex? Circ that baby.
It’s a lot more complicated than that but that’s essentially the story.
Comments
boils down to catholicism, protestantism, mormonism, or some other ism.
It was based in religion, but became common practice.
Gwenyth Paltrow needs foreskins for her skincare products.
It is entirely cultural.
Was done by protestants in the US for a while and then it became a matter of “my son should look like me” or some shit.
Kellogg I think. He was a “doctor,” but only trained under a water healer, and he believed that spices, led to night emissions, and lusty thoughts. So he started a granula food basically grains with a little bit of honey. But he believed it was harder to jerk off if you were circumcised.
I’ve heard a few things: Christian lawmakers or biblical beliefs influencing conventions, it’s “more sanitary” and “healthier”, because the doctors want to grind up the foreskins into youth serums and sell them to the wealthy elite… I’m sure it boils down to a combination
Social norms, easier to maintain cleanliness, aesthetics
For those saying it’s easy enough to clean if you know what to do, keep in mind most men aren’t great about cleaning themselves thoroughly.
I’m not saying all or even most men should have it done. That is completely up to the person and/or family (obviously infants can’t make an informed decision)
It was just an American thing.
I did foreskin restoration to get back what I could and I have to say: it really feels like I was born to have one.
Works better, feels better, looks better and healthier, it’s so cruel that we damage children’s genitals, especially should be banned when adults almost never choose to get this done, we are literally forcing a choice on kids they would never choose for themselves as adults
The most common reason I’ve heard personally is “it’s cleaner”, which is a terrible argument when we have running water and showers. It’s terrible that this is still practiced, as a victim of this who sees the damage it is tough to deal with.
Oh and a bonus to the cruelty if you had it done before the year 2000, it was mostly done without anything for the pain, they just started crushing, ripping and cutting
All I know is that I didn’t consent to it
Same reason why every president in USA has to go kiss a wall while using a funny hat
It started as a way to prevent male masterbation during the Victorian era. Now it is an absolute cash cow for providers, so they keep doing it.
Thankfully the percentages have come way down saw something recently that said only half of new born are circumcised.
Looks mainly. But since most of us are circumcised we’ve never had to learn how to properly care for an uncircumcised penis and don’t really want to learn.
I’m Canadian and I feel like most of us born in the 90s are circumcised. I know me and all the homies are
I’m glad I had mine done at birth
XIX century American society was rapidly modernizing but in the same time had some very reactionary tendencies. A lot of new religions sprouted then, and there was a general moral panic about society losing its morality, in many ways connected with the civil war and emancipation of slaves and women. One of the guys who decided he can improve on Americans health was Dr. Kellogg…who promoted whole grains, exercise, abstinence from alcohol….and genital mutilation. His recommendations were to burn on female clitorises by carbolic acid and to remove the foreskin because he believed that by removing the most sensitive parts, he could remove pleasure from sex so people would have less of it. Luckily, the FGM part didn’t get popular. Male one….however did. It then got a lot pseudoscientific explanations to justify the practice. It’s, forntuatelly, been in decline for a bit now.
Dr Kellogg, from Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, who genuinely believed sex was a sin.
I have my foreskin, but I can peel it all back.
Everyone is gonna blame religion but that was actually such a small part of it…in the US at least. It was thought to be a prevention from diseases and ailments…. so it was medical science that pushed it.
Dumb tradition…it’s dumb to talk about cleanliness because a woman’s private area is more complicated than a mans with that yeast infection men rarely get..would she circumcise her labia for cleanliness…probably not. .especially without their consent….
It helps us decide when to use is vs are
Badumdum ding
Stop worrying about other dude’s dicks. You’re weird as fuck.
The Corn Flakes guy has a lot to do with it
Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. I’m not kidding. Well, not the cereal, but the actual guy John Harvey Kellogg.
The late 1800s to early 1900s were a wacky time and it became a thing to circumcise boys so they wouldn’t masturbate and waste their vital fluids. American circumcision isn’t religious like many people think. It’s more stealing religion’s thing for weird pseudo-science purposes.
should be made illegal and considered genital mutilation unless you have excessively long foreskin causing actual problems.
I know labia trimming is a thing but it is done after legal adulthood in majority if not all cases.
So the real question is, why is male genital mutilation done prior to legal adulthood not considered genital mutilation and made illegal, when female labia trimming is done and not considered genital mutilation if done prior to legal adulthood?
Because I had no vote?
You’ll be hard pressed to find a circumcised man who is complaining that they were mutilated. We don’t remember it, and many of us are perfectly happy with it. If you’ve ever watched a baby get circumcised, they cry for about 2 minutes after the fact and are fine. You all make a bigger deal about it than it needs to be. All I know is I had a friend who was uncircumcised and got it done while in his late teens. He said he did it because he was prone to infections, beneath the skin, would cum too quick, and it would smell at times. He said it was painful getting it done as a grown man but he doesnt regret it at all and feels its much more sanitary. You all keep your ant eaters, we’ll keep our unsheathed swords.
It started as a religious thing. Now it is common among almost all males here in the US. Fathers usually say they want their son to look like them. I never saw an uncut guy until I went to college. Back then dorm showers were open and guys had no issues being naked in the bathroom.
As an American, I still have mine. But tbf, I’m not White American.
“Health reasons ” Personally i was born at a military hospital so.
Turtle necks as sooooo European
There are very few known harms and it reduces the risk of UTIs and the spread of certain STDs. I don’t know when that became common knowledge though
Because to American society only women and girls bodily autonomy is paramount. So much so they ignore that a constitutional amendment calls for equal protections for all under the law.
Type four fgc is a pin prick, but is called mutilation while removing erogenous tissue and multiple light touch nerve bundles effectively reducing pleasure and sensation of males is perfectly fine. The logic ducks.
The story is so insane you wouldn’t believe me if I told you and Reddit would ban me if I even tried.
Just don’t mutilate your son’s genitals okay? Let’s end this cycle once and for all.
Kellogg
Religion then custom.
I grew up mexican catholic, thank god thats not a common practice.
In my family the older generations were born at home and not cut so when WW II came they were forced to Have it done as adults and didn’t want their sons to experience that so he it done for them at birth
Because for some reason people here decided genital mutilation is only bad if it’s a girl
do American catholics and orthodox men also usually get circumcised or is it mainly culturally protestant thing?
Looks cool
It’s cleaner and looks better. Can’t say that on Reddit without mass downvotes though, just watch, they love to embrace their dick cheese lmao.
Porn makes people think that’s the “normal” way to be.
If you took all the circumcised foreskin in the world guess how much foreskin you’d have and what you could do with it
We didn’t get a choice.
It is religious practice for Jews like me, but I don’t know any specific reasons
Health reasons.
Circumcision, particularly when performed in infancy or childhood, is associated with a significantly reduced risk of developing invasive penile cancer. This protective effect is thought to be due in part to the prevention of conditions like phimosis and the accumulation of smegma, both of which increase the risk of penile cancer and are more common in uncircumcised men.
Evidently most women prefer the circumcised look
Money
* Male genital mutilation. Call it for what it actually is. It severely reduces the sensitivity.
Don’t know but glad I was.
Before the discovery of rubber, hair ties and elastic bands were hard to come by. Harvesting foreskins filled this societal need. . . . .now, it’s really just low cost crumbed frozen calamari rings so demand for the product has definitely dropped, though it’s still widely practiced.
Not really sure. Maybe a cycle started in the 50s. Skipped me.
There was a special on HBO that I saw years ago–“The history of sex.” According to the show, one of the reasons it became popular in the USA, is because they popularized the idea that it would keep adolescent boys from masturbating. Which was interesting to me, because when I was young, I wondered how cut guys could jerk off, when there was nothing to jerk. I also wondered about the reference to some kind of lube when jerking off, and wtf they would need that.
Bc we don’t have any eaters here, so no need to introduce them now
Greed, there’s a lot of money in circumcision.
From hospital getting money to do it to the selling of the skin to the likes pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies. Sure kids die but profits must be made.
Idk. Probably many reasons.
Probably some out dated beliefs about hygiene among them.
If I had a son, I wouldn’t have had it done to him.
Without creating more things unnecessarily to do. There isn’t more way to make money out of it. American are very good at that.
It’s a vestage of the mistaken belief that masturbation is harmful. Unfortunately, Christians once believed that any sexual behavior that didn’t result in the potentiality of a child was sin, and through accretion, believed that deviating from this in any way would result in all sorts of maladies.
They got this belief from misunderstanding what was going on in the narrative of Onan – Judah’s son – in Genesis 38. He was tasked by Judah against his consent to sleep with Tamar so that his brother Er would have an heir to his name. But Onan didn’t want to do that so he “went into her” and “spilled his semen onto the ground” and he was killed. Now, the thing to understand is that the terms “spilled his seed on the ground” actually mean literally “corrupted with semen the ground”. It’s clear even in Hebrew what happened here: Onan had sex with Tamar, and then pulled out right before ejaculating so that he ejaculated on the ground in front of her vagina instead of into her vagina.
There was no masturbation here, and the whole reason that he was killed (assumably by God) is that at this pivotal moment when Judah needed to have an heir, Onan basically said “I’m glad my brother is dead because I hate him, I’m going to rape his wife but deny him a legal heir by not producing a child with her. I’m glad he’s dead and I’m glad he will have no offspring to his name, even by my seed.” But the idea that what God struck him down for was intentionally non-procreative sex stuck.
As an aside, this cannot be upheld in the whole of scripture. No such punishment is prescribed when a man has an emission of semen by any means that doesn’t involve intercourse in the hygiene laws, in Proverbs 5, Solomon tells his teenage sons to delight in the breasts of the wife of his youth always, in the same passage he talks about their “streams”, “springs”, and “fountains” adding in that they should be for them alone and not for strangers with them, and in Song of Solomon, the woman says that her lover is like an apple tree among the sons, one she wants to sit beneath and taste of his fruit, and later in chapter 7 he describes her navel as having the best mixed wine.
Basically, the Mosaic law passes no judgement on masturbation when it had the perfect opportunity to – actually multiple times – Solomon seems to suggest to his sons with the ejaculatory imagery of Proverbs 5 that they should masturbate or have sex with their wives to keep themselves away from strange women who would at best waste them away with unhealthy promiscuous sex that would spread disease, and at worst act as a lure to be sold into sexual slavery to foreigners. Song of Solomon expresses a desire on the part of the woman to give her lover a blow job, and Song of Solomon 7 has the young man looking hungrily at her wet vulva while comparing it to a drink. All of these involve non-procreative sex and are described positively (except the hygiene law, which is basically God’s way of telling Israelite masturbators to make sure they wash up after).
America and the UK were largely Christian countries and so they carried that mistaken ethos on through their history. In the mid 1700s, the idea that sickness and disease were the result of some divine punishment began to be replaced by modernist thinkers with more scientific explanations… except that they didn’t know how to explain the “sin of onanism” very well. There was also a perception that Jewish boys didn’t masturbate (ha! fat chance! everybody does it!) and eventually the association began to be made that actually the reason for that was that they were circumcised.
In the 1800s, they did all sorts of sick horrific things to boys (and girls) to either make them stop masturbating or to prevent them from masturbating. That was when the medical establishment decided that maybe the cure for masturbation was circumcision. That’s how you got John Harvey Kellogg recommending circumcision to cure masturbation especially if done soon after a boy starts doing it as the pain may have a “salutory” effect on the mind. He also in the same text recommends carbolic acid on the clitoris for girls who do it.
Unfortunately, this led to a mass circumcision campaign in England and the US. The UK had basically stopped doing that by the 1950s, Canada and Australia by the 60s and 70s. But the US never stopped. I’m not sure why we never stopped but I hope to be part of the solution. I’ve kept my own son intact despite myself being circumcised. And I hope more and more American parents will join me in protecting our sons from genital mutilation.
Lewis Sayre popularized circumcision in the US in the mid 1800s as a cure for paralysis and other motor neuron disorders. John Harvey Kellogg (the cereal guy) also promoted circumcision, but this was later in the 1800s.
For babies born today, it’s about 50/50 circumcised versus not. So the concerns that they will stand out or a woman won’t know what to do with it are moot for babies now.
I was told (this may not be true) – there was a study in the 40s or 50s that showed it was “healthier” and then it ran wild. But as long as you have a hygiene routine, all the “healthier” stuff was BS. The study was just confirming that not cleaning under your foreskin could cause problems. Duh.
Also around that time a study said tighty-whitey underwear caused scrotum problems during puberty boys (like the underwear prevented the scrotum from descending). So that’s when boxer-shorts became the preferred underwear. My dad has commented he was forced to wear boxers as a kid. But yah, normal fitting underwear does not cause problems.
„I am, so my son should too!“ all the way back to Sir Kellog (yes the cereal guy) who advocated for it to stop boys from masturbating- no joke.
Because Americans are lied to about so many things even some doctors truly believe it’s the right thing to do. It’s really terrible.
When my boys were born the doctor tried to convince us cutting was good for them, I said no. Now the choice is theirs.
Blame John Kellog, the cereal guy.
Well to be quite rudely honest they did that because when you’re whacking off your hand don’t slip off the knob and you punch yourself between the eyes.
Bad science. Bad culture.
Not sure how it started but I’m glad it did. I’ve heard it lowers risk of certain STIs, is easier to clean, and even has some cancer reduction benefits.
And personally speaking, I think it looks better.
It all comes down to that motherfucker who made corn flakes thinking that unsweetened food would stop people from masturbating. Somehow, Kellogg rubbed two brain cells together for what was arguably the craziest idea ever – bring circumcision up and normalize it by making it feel like a very Christian thing to do to your son. Want your son to not masturbate or have premarital sex? Circ that baby.
It’s a lot more complicated than that but that’s essentially the story.
As an uncircumcised American, I feel bad for you cut guys. The head of my dick is very sensitive. Took some getting used to, but now it’s amazing.
✡
To get into Valhalla
You saw who we voted for, right? We’re not a smart country.
Muricah baby, with no foreskin you are not a ( something )
Because uncircumcised dicks are gross AF
Read this in Ali G’s voice.