The Marking of Your Flesh
The Significance of the Experience
The Symbolic Meaning of Circumcision
The Origins of Circumcision
Circumcision along with tattooing and body piercings are traditional body modifications practiced all over the world from stone age communities to modern industrialized ones. All three may have strong cultural and religious significance. Only circumcision is usually regarded as having health benefits.
Because circumcision is now considered to be a medical rather than a cultural procedure it is often done under anesthesia (in fact in some countries it is always performed that way) while getting a tattoo or a piercing still requires enduring pain.
This distinction is a cultural one, a full body tattoo may inflict significantly more (and prolonged) pain than a undergoing a traditional circumcision does.
It is not obvious how, but human communities with no connection to each other seem to have invented circumcision and have been practicing it often for thousands of years. So what is it in the procedure that is so important to us humans that we keep reinventing it?
The origins of male circumcision seems to be obscure. Some try to explain it as some sort of ancient medical procedure. Which does not sound all that likely, since most communities who practice it do not do so to cure any particular disease.
The procedure often serves part of some initiation ceremony marking the transition to adulthood. It is also considered to be a cleansing ritual, not just in the sense of the improved hygiene but in a spiritual level.
Some tribal cultures believe that circumcision may have originated as a form of punishment, but when its advantages became known the custom has spread.
Initiation ceremonies do look like some dare gone out of hand. They usually involve something painful or otherwise difficult, if it looks outright crazy all the better.
A common motif seems to be inflicting pain and bodily injuries on the initiates "to find out what they are made of".
Before someone screams savagery one must remember that some sports played in industrialized countries are only slightly less savage. The Brits play rugby, the Germans have their dueling scars, Americans have the game known as football for a similar purpose, while up north in Canada the game of hockey is the way to show off your masculinity, if you loose a few teeth in the process all the more proof how tough you really are.
What is barbaric is in the eye of the beholder.
But what about upping the game and cutting off some body part? Well, you can't really remove most of them without crippling the owner. Sure something scary would test the bravery of the initiate. How about chopping off part of your dick?
It does sound painful, but as it turns out there are ways to do it that do not kill you, in fact your penis might be better off without the extra skin, especially if you life in some desert in Africa.
The Marking of Your Flesh
In prehistoric times the operation was certainly more risky because means to control bleeding, or infection have not been invented yet. The lack of anesthetics also meant that the initiate had to endure physical pain during the procedure and during the subsequent time of healing which could take a while if infection has set in.
The results of circumcision did not simply serve as an indication that the man has gone through initiation and has proven himself, but also as an identification mark which community he belonged to.
Even nowadays various peoples in Africa who practice circumcision do it differently from each other, so the results readily identify individuals as members of one group or the other.
Some groups use it to mark all of their members, often performing the operation at a much younger age, sometimes right after birth. This takes away the cultural significance as a rite of passage and being circumcised becomes a mark of a membership in the community without being a proof of adulthood.
It may be awkward to think of modern day Americans as a tribe that practices circumcision, but when it is done to fulfill some cultural requirement, e.g. the need to look like peers and male relatives, it is no longer a medical procedure but a cultural idiosyncrasy.
There are communities who identify themselves as ones who do not practice circumcision while their neighbors do. Most Europeans did not traditionally undergo circumcision, and being cut was often the sign of an outsider.
The ancient Greeks and Romans abhorred the practice because it went against their sense of aesthetics how the human body should look like, particularly the Greeks had a preference for a long and tapered acroposthion. They also had a different idea what was appropriate, for example men could show up naked in some public events and were required to compete naked in sport competitions. So normal nakedness meant nothing, but having any part of the glans of your penis visible was still a taboo. The word psolos meant that someone had his glans showing, but it also meant that someone was sexually aroused. That explains why showing off your knob was a no-no in ancient Greece and Rome.
People with shorter than usual foreskins or who had a loose circumcision could show up 'decent' for a sport competition if they used a kynodesme to close their foreskin and hide their glans.
One explanation why some rabbis decided to make full foreskin removal mandatory during Jewish ritual circumcisions -- instead of just nipping the tip of the acroposthion -- is that too many young Jews tried to pass as uncircumcised just by wearing a kynodesme so that they could compete with Greeks in sporting events, and the rabbis did not want them to hide who they were and mingle with the Greeks.
Traditionally only Jews practiced circumcision in Europe, which made them easier to identify during various genocide attempts. This led to certain aversion to the practice, and even some European Jews gave up circumcision because being recognizably Jewish was a death sentence, especially during WWII. In some parts of Eastern Europe, especially in the former Soviet Union all religions were frowned upon so one's best interest was to avoid doing anything that would brand him as practicing any religion at all.
The European aversion to circumcision runs deep indeed, and some Europeans even refuse to undergo medically necessary circumcision because they fear they will "look Jewish", and rather suffer with an inflamed and non-retractable foreskin -- as idiotic as it may sound.
In Southern Europe various Muslims (the Ottoman Empire in the east and Moors in the west) invaded at various times, often ruling the local population for a while and then being kicked out. In those areas being circumcised was regarded as a sign of being a Muslim and it could lead to negative repercussions.
As a result in most of Europe there is still a strong bias against circumcision. Even though it has mellowed somewhat in some places, others constantly try to ban or restrict the practice.
The Significance of the Experience
Many who consider circumcision as an adult or a teenager keep postponing it because they are afraid of the pain. But in most industrialized countries there really is no or almost no pain. The procedure is performed in a hospital either using general or local anesthesia and the patient is given painkillers afterwards, so any sort of discomfort is kept at a minimum.
But it wasn't always the case, and in many poorer countries it still isn't. Humans have practiced circumcision for millennia. Obviously they must have thought that the benefits were worth enduring some pain otherwise the practice would not have persisted.
General anesthesia for surgery was not invented until 1846 and did not became widespread until 1848. Injectable local anesthetics have not been invented until 1884. So until about two hundred years ago if you wanted to be circumcised you just had to accept that it was going to hurt.
Because the operation is an integral part of many cultures, naturally the most common techniques were the ones that could be performed the fastest. Using a clamp or shield, or just pulling the foreskin forward and cutting it off with something sharp in one quick motion. Even today in industrialized countries clamp or shield guided techniques are often used when circumcising children, and sometimes even when circumcising adults.
In cultures where circumcision is part of an initiation ceremony marking the transition to adulthood the operation is often performed in a manner that tests the initiate's endurance, for example he is not allowed to flinch or show any sign that he is in pain while he is being cut.
Most of those cultures do the operation in a manner that is painful, although not as cruel as some of the modern procedures would be if performed without anesthetics.
But a circumcised penis serves as proof that the owner has endured pain, and wound healing under unsanitary conditions thus he has proven himself.
This had significance especially in warrior cultures. War traditionally meant hacking each other with sharp instruments. Circumcision has provided a relatively safe yet sufficiently frightening and painful way to test how one behaved when his body was being cut.
Someone who could not even go through his circumcision with some composure was not regarded as warrior material.
In Africa showing outward signs of pain during one's circumcision is still considered to be shameful, a sign of cowardice.
Some cultures may require that circumcision has to be performed at a particular age, in a strictly controlled ritualistic manner. The Jewish tradition of circumcising all male children on the eighth day after birth is probably the most well known example.
Of course performing the operation on small children takes away the transition to manhood aspect, being circumcised in those cultures is simply a mark of belonging to a certain group.
Other cultures only require that all males get circumcised, without going into specifics how and at what age the procedure should be performed.
Some other people practice circumcision as a cultural tradition not as part of their religion while others have mixed religious-cultural motives.
Most traditional circumcision methods consist of stretching the foreskin forward, in front of the glans penis, clamping or crushing it and then cutting it off, usually in one quick movement with something sharp. Some of these techniques have been practiced for thousands of years, and they had to be quick to make them tolerable to non-anesthetized patients. In prehistoric times a knife made of obsidian or some other stone was often used, while during the last few hundred years a dedicated circumcision knife or simply a straight razor were the most common choices.
Clamping can be done with lots of different objects, some don't even look particularly medical, like a pair of chopsticks or a split piece of bamboo. Traditional Jewish religious circumcision uses a metal shield with a slit and no moving parts. These only guide the knife, they do not crush the skin and do nearly nothing to reduce bleeding. In fact some cultures view bleeding as an essential part of a circumcision ceremony, a sacrifice of some sort. One reason why many Africans frown upon hospital circumcisions that are painless and almost bloodless -- for them it is cheating.
Going through the procedure, the pain, the piece of flesh cut away and the blood spilled is often viewed as a sacrifice and may have deeper religious or spiritual significance.
Having your foreskin sliced off without anesthetics really does hurt -- I am speaking from personal experience here -- but it is not nearly as painful as anti-circumcision activists want everyone to believe.
Once you have psychologically accepted that your dick is about to be cut and it is going to hurt the physical pain is bearable, especially if the cut is done quickly. It certainly changes your attitude towards pain, and the experience can become a source of psychological strength that stays with you perhaps for the rest of your life.
Probably the fact that the experience makes you more mature in more than one way was one of the reasons why many cultures have prized circumcision as a ritual that transforms a boy into a man.
On the other hand the real scary part is not the pain but the bleeding which can be quite spectacular.
Clamps that don't just guide the knife but also apply pressure can reduce bleeding significantly. Even just using something like hemostats can control initial bleeding.
Crushing techniques can reduce the bleeding to almost nothing but the actual crushing may cause more pain -- I would not know, I have only experienced the non-crushing type of operation. I assume it must be like a really bad zipper accident just a lot worse.
A common method uses ordinary bone cutting forceps to crush the foreskin and guide the scalpel -- this is a method used both in hospitals and by traditional circumcisers in some countries. Dedicated circumcision clamps have also been invented such as the Mogan clamp (a replacement for the traditional Jewish circumcision shield with crushing action) and the Gomco device which is popular mainly in North America.
A lot of 'assembly line' circumcisions are often performed by minimally trained practitioners. These are usually done using disposable clamps that sometimes remain on the penis for days and work by cutting of the blood flow to the foreskin which is either removed right after closing the device or it dies and falls off or removed at a later visit.
On the other end of the spectrum in modern surgical facilities adults and teenagers can now be circumcised by 'blasting' the foreskin off with a laser -- well actually just using a laser instead of a scalpel to make the cut because it also seals the wound and controls bleeding.
If you are getting circumcised in a modern medical facility and you are overly concerned about pain and discomfort, just remember that countless others have gone through the procedure for thousand of years often under unsanitary conditions and without anesthesia. Whatever is going to happen to you in a hospital is probably going to be nothing compared to what they had to endure.
The Symbolic Meaning of Circumcision
For many religions circumcision represents obedience to God. In other cultures it signifies maturity, transition to adulthood, or simply serves as a sign of belonging to a group. Some think nothing of it in spiritual terms and regard circumcision as a medical procedure to improve hygiene and health.
But even for the less spiritually inclined, or to the outright technocrat it still may have a significance, although a different sort.
Circumcision appears to be the first thing invented by ancient humans that does not merely change our environment to accommodate us, but actually improves our own bodies and makes it easier to exist in some environments. It signifies that even from our beginnings we were no longer mere animals forced to accept the arbitrary whim of evolution and nature. We had the power and will to change what we were dealt, even to alter the design of our own bodies.
Is it not the very essence what it means to be human, the thing what sets us apart from the lesser animals?
