The Insideous Reason We Still Cut Boys

“How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them.” —Benjamin Franklin

If your excited neighbor came home from the hospital with his newborn son and you noticed that the child’s earlobes had been cut off, you’d be alarmed, and you would likely call the police. But if, instead, the only thing that had been cut off the child’s body were the foreskin of his penis, you wouldn’t be alarmed and you wouldn’t call the police.

It is surprising to many that there are potential complications from circumcision. Every year in the United States, for example, more than 100 baby boys will die from complications from an unnecessary non-medically-indicated routine circumcision. One hundred dead baby boys in a country of 330 million people is considered a mere “statistical zero.”

This thinking is appropriate for unavoidable deaths from plane crashes, scaffolds falling, working in the oil and/or coal industry, et cetera — deaths from necessary infrastructure. This thinking is unacceptable for deaths from unnecessary procedures.

Circumcision is a tradition that we don’t think much about, if we think about it at all. We started circumcising during prehistoric times for prehistoric reasons involving sacrament and such. This was when we might have sacrificed countless people to countless gods for countless reasons. We managed to grow out of most of this. We later justified circumcision with post hoc reasons, including tradition and the goal of curbing male sexual pleasure (which probably worked to a degree, given the removal of thousands of sensitive nerve endings) in the hopes of reducing the rate of masturbation (which probably didn’t work, because he still has most of his penis).

This can be confusing. Why are most circumcisions performed by doctors who pledge in their Hippocratic oath to “First, do no harm”? Cutting is mutilation, and mutilation is harm. Why are the rest of circumcisions performed by clerics who lack medical expertise? And how has no one properly answered why the penis is the only part of a baby boy that isn’t protected by the law?

What we do know is that most men today — and most men ever — are happily intact. If there were any kind of significant common problem with an intact penis, we would have heard about it. It should also not surprise that medical organizations avoid recommending routine circumcision. Attempts to justify circumcision — juxtaposed against the baby boys who will be killed — seem to amount to nothing more than “Yeah, but still!”

We might expect this issue to borrow heavily from the fierce battles over abortion rights in the United States. Her body, her choice? Quite right. Routine male circumcision similarly challenges bodily autonomy. Why is this issue not ascendant? Why are we not discussing boys not being granted their complete bodily agency?

And why are we dodging the perfect compromise? We leave the infant boy alone. We later educate the young man about his option to have a circumcision. His body, his choice. If we’re right, he never has a body part cut off. If we’re wrong, he maintains the option to undergo circumcision to right the wrong. We meet in the middle, and everybody wins.

Proponents of circumcision have no choice but to avoid this compromise. If circumcision ceases to be forced and becomes instead an option, within as little as one generation we would round into form with the rest of the developed world, routine male circumcision will vanish, and no one would miss it. It would soon enough seem a lot like cutting off an earlobe. We can’t allow circumcision to disappear, because it would force us to admit that we have been and continue to be making a mistake.

Internal contradictions like these — e.g., when our opinion doesn’t match our behavior or another of our opinions — result in a stressor known as cognitive dissonance. To cope with the resultant stress, we use defense mechanisms that tend to manifest in one of three reactions. One is simply to slink away from the mistake in the hopes of avoiding the issue altogether. Where are the people who argued that gay marriage would ruin us? And those who thought legalized marijuana would do the same?

A second, more aggressive reaction is justification of the mistake by any means necessary. This is where you’d hear cosmetic justifications — “Girls like it better!” — for circumcision. It’s also where you might justify cutting off an earlobe by arguing that there are now fewer skin cells at risk of melanoma.

The least likely but healthiest reaction to cognitive dissonance is to be brave, own the mistake, correct course, and move on. Admitting a mistake in public, however, is something humans go to great lengths — fierce and desperate lengths — to avoid. But despite the challenge and rarity, this ideal reaction is not impossible.

In 2017, comedian Jerry Seinfeld appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert after the sexual assault allegations about Bill Cosby, his favorite comedian. When Colbert mentioned that he wasn’t able to separate Cosby’s comedy from the accusations against Cosby, Seinfeld started by saying he could separate the comedy from the man and the disgusting behaviors. Once the show came back from commercial, however, Seinfeld had changed his mind. He no longer thought he could separate comedy from the behavior. About the shift in opinion, he quipped: “You never see someone say, ‘You know what? You’re right. I’m wrong. I’m going to change my opinion.’ You never see that.”

When we do, it’s impressive. In 2006, the animated sitcom South Park ran an episode mocking Al Gore and his documentary An Inconvenient Truth for offering what they considered an unwarranted take on climate change. In the episode, Gore tries to convince the town that there’s a monster called ManBearPig — “half man, half bear, and half pig” — that represents “the single biggest threat to our planet.” The townsfolk are repeatedly warned but dismiss the threat that never presents. “Boys, there’s no such thing as a ManBearPig,” a character’s father says. “The Vice-President is just desperate for attention.” The episode’s critique was clear.

A little over a decade of bonkers weather later, South Park ran an episode entitled “It’s Time to Get Cereal,” in which they revisit Al Gore and ManBearPig. This time, the monster is depicted as real, viciously attacking the townspeople of South Park who now have to stop pretending the monster is a hoax. The townspeople are admonished: “ManBearPig is real. … We have to all put our pride aside and be willing to say maybe we were wrong.”

It’s indeed time to get cereal and say maybe we were wrong about routine male circumcision. Male bodily autonomy — his body, his choice — would force us to admit that we have been and continue to be mistaken. That is our ManBearPig. We will continue to circumcise boys — without consent, without reason, without the statistical zero of 100 dead baby boys becoming an actual zero — until we muster the courage to admit that our ManBearPig is real.

Edan Tasca is a Toronto-based registered psychotherapist. He is a director and the Mental Health Chair for the Centre for Inquiry Canada, a humanist charity dedicated to advocating for science and secularism.