I am trying to avoid religious debates as they tend to achieve nothing.
Unfortunately those who regard their opinion as scientific also tend to create some ersatz religion using evolution in their arguments as if it was an all knowing and benign deity.
It could not be further from reality, evolution is a cruel force of nature that works by culling whatever it does not like. Does evolution "care" about your pleasure or well-being? Only to the extent that it serves its purpose.
First of all evolution is an arms race that does not favor you over the menagerie of bacteria, fungi, viruses and whatever else that happen to make their home in the moist warm, and nutrient rich environment under your foreskin.
You have evolved to keep yourself healthy while they have evolved to overcome whatever defense mechanism you may have and thrive in spite of it.
The other problem with the "evolution knows best" argument is that evolution rewards those who produce the most offspring and not those who have the most fun doing it.
One male strategy would be to become hard at the mere sight of a fertile female and mount her just long enough to deposit sperm as quickly and efficiently as possible and move on to the next female.
Doesn't it sound like our closest relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos?
It takes mere seconds of copulation for the average chimpanzee male to ejaculate.
In humans this is tempered by the need to also raise the offspring, not just produce them.
But the behavior described above still has a huge pay off in males with sufficient power. Does Genghis Khan ring a bell? Or, on a smaller scale, just think of all the children whose biological father is not the husband of their mother but the mailman.
When people claim that the foreskin is essential for sexual pleasure they usually show examples how quickly orgasm can be achieved by stimulating the foreskin or the frenulum. If the human foreskin has evolved for any role during sexual intercourse it might very well be to make a man ejaculate as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sure it feels good, but it is not the most amount of pleasure you can derive from your penis nor it is the best way to satisfy your partner. Sexual pleasure does not equal quick orgasm and ejaculation.
But why would some part other than what gives the quickest orgasm provide more pleasure?
The explanation might actually be also the arms race of evolution. Males compete for the females, but more importantly they compete for the egg and the womb that bears their offspring.
In evolution it is not enough to succeed, other must fail. It is especially true if one male gets to impregnate a female, thereby passing his genes to the next generation, while the others get nothing (e.g. if the female of the species only gives birth to one newborn at a time).
Irresponsible modern men might think that getting some action without fathering children is the best of both worlds, but if you fail to father any offspring your genes die with you. In evolutionary terms you are a looser.
In contrast the most successful males are not the ones that copulate the most but the ones who father the largest number of children.
Chimpanzees try to compete with the next guy by producing more sperm than he does. This is why they have so huge balls.
We humans seem to have adapted a different strategy. There are many speculations regarding the shape of the human glans penis and what its function may be. Our closest relatives the chimpanzees have a filiform penis that does not resemble the human penis at all, it does not even have a discernible glans as such.
So why do we humans have a penis that is shaped like a mushroom? Apparently a perfectly good explanation to its shape is that the human glans is a scooping device intended to remove the sperm of competing males who may have recently had sex with the same female (yuck).
Human penis-shape and sperm competition
Why Is The Penis Shaped Like That?
Glans Penis Evolutionary Significance on Wikipedia
The Misunderstood Penis
Semen Displacement as a Sperm Competition Strategy in Humans
Now, if males who scoop better compete more successfully and leave more offspring that can be an explanation for the evolution of shape of the human glans penis. Of course it is not enough to have a shovel, one must be encouraged to use it. And what else would make a man scoop more vigorously than the fact that the mere touch of the scooping surfaces, the is the area at and around the coronal ridge, causes the most intense pleasure.
Yes, in this case evolution does care about your pleasure. A quick orgasm is all you need to deposit your own sperm. But cleaning out what the competition has left behind is hard work. A male would not waste his time and effort doing it unless it feels really good. The obvious way to increase scooping behavior is to make it feel pleasurable but don't make it cause an orgasm too quickly, so the male will spend enough time scooping to effectively remove most of what the competition has left behind.
Having a foreskin definitely works against this scooping action as anti circumcision activists are all too happy to point out.
So how did the mushroom shaped glans penis evolve when men have foreskins?
Well, first of all many men have a foreskin that already fully retracts during erection and cannot cover the glans during sex. Which makes the argument that the gliding action of the foreskin is an essential part of human sexuality that much less believable. Our ancestors might very well have had much shorter foreskins -- the penile sheath of most animals provides no coverage whatsoever in an aroused state, it is there to protect the penis when not in use.
It is tempting to speculate about the effect of male scooping on female sexuality and pleasure. After all prolonged copulation works best if females at least tolerate it, or even encourage it, and they would be inclined to do so if it also felt good to them. As good as it sounds I don't know how it would increase a female's reproductive success. So it might be far fetched to argue that.
If the explanation of the human glans penis is that it has evolved as a scooping device to get rid of the sperm of the competitors it is not too far fetched to assume that prolonged copulation and sexual pleasure in the human male was necessary for it to fulfill its function.
If the scooping mechanism provided an important enough evolutionary advantage to shape the human glans that may very well imply that we have descended from ancestors whose primary means of sexual pleasure came from rubbing the male's glans, especially the area around its rim, against the female's vagina for a prolonged period of time. It was not the quick release ejaculation that comes from the stimulation of the foreskin.
Circumcision removes the foreskin and often the frenulum as well. That leaves a man with all the parts that are needed to have prolonged, pleasurable sex with his partner and without the parts that would work to finish sex as quickly as possible.
Also, after removing the foreskin the parts that can provide the most pleasure -- the glans, the rim and the coronal sulcus become accessible to more direct stimulation.
Blanket statements made by those who oppose circumcision claiming that removing the foreskin necessarily reduces sexual pleasure appear to be unsubstantiated.
Most men circumcised as adults either feel no difference, or experience more pleasure after the procedure.
Those who experience numbness or loss of sensation are often victims of medical malpractice. These symptoms are definitely not the normal side effects of a having one's foreskin removed.
Human penis-shape and sperm competition
Why Is The Penis Shaped Like That?
Glans Penis Evolutionary Significance on Wikipedia
The Misunderstood Penis
Semen Displacement as a Sperm Competition Strategy in Humans
Now, if males who scoop better compete more successfully and leave more offspring that can be an explanation for the evolution of shape of the human glans penis. Of course it is not enough to have a shovel, one must be encouraged to use it. And what else would make a man scoop more vigorously than the fact that the mere touch of the scooping surfaces, the is the area at and around the coronal ridge, causes the most intense pleasure.
Yes, in this case evolution does care about your pleasure. A quick orgasm is all you need to deposit your own sperm. But cleaning out what the competition has left behind is hard work. A male would not waste his time and effort doing it unless it feels really good. The obvious way to increase scooping behavior is to make it feel pleasurable but don't make it cause an orgasm too quickly, so the male will spend enough time scooping to effectively remove most of what the competition has left behind.
Having a foreskin definitely works against this scooping action as anti circumcision activists are all too happy to point out.
So how did the mushroom shaped glans penis evolve when men have foreskins?
Well, first of all many men have a foreskin that already fully retracts during erection and cannot cover the glans during sex. Which makes the argument that the gliding action of the foreskin is an essential part of human sexuality that much less believable. Our ancestors might very well have had much shorter foreskins -- the penile sheath of most animals provides no coverage whatsoever in an aroused state, it is there to protect the penis when not in use.
Modern humans can afford to have longer foreskins that don't automatically retract when erect because they can use their hands to pull the foreskin back for cleaning, sex, etc. Without the ability to "artificially" clean it, a long foreskin that does not automatically retract during an erection would be a serious disadvantage that would surely be selected against. It is not so much that evolution favors long foreskins in modern humans but that it has ceased to punish it.
If the explanation of the human glans penis is that it has evolved as a scooping device to get rid of the sperm of the competitors it is not too far fetched to assume that prolonged copulation and sexual pleasure in the human male was necessary for it to fulfill its function.
If the scooping mechanism provided an important enough evolutionary advantage to shape the human glans that may very well imply that we have descended from ancestors whose primary means of sexual pleasure came from rubbing the male's glans, especially the area around its rim, against the female's vagina for a prolonged period of time. It was not the quick release ejaculation that comes from the stimulation of the foreskin.
Circumcision removes the foreskin and often the frenulum as well. That leaves a man with all the parts that are needed to have prolonged, pleasurable sex with his partner and without the parts that would work to finish sex as quickly as possible.
Also, after removing the foreskin the parts that can provide the most pleasure -- the glans, the rim and the coronal sulcus become accessible to more direct stimulation.
Blanket statements made by those who oppose circumcision claiming that removing the foreskin necessarily reduces sexual pleasure appear to be unsubstantiated.
Most men circumcised as adults either feel no difference, or experience more pleasure after the procedure.
Those who experience numbness or loss of sensation are often victims of medical malpractice. These symptoms are definitely not the normal side effects of a having one's foreskin removed.
