“Cut Me, Mick!”

Ah, crap. This is not what I wanted to hear:

Circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection by half, according to a new study conducted among nearly 8,000 adult males in Kenya and Uganda, researchers reported Wednesday.

Circumcision proved so effective that the study was halted a year early and the procedure was offered to all study participants.

Previous research has suggested that circumcision is beneficial, but the new trial is “definitive,” according to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which cosponsored the study with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

“It’s not a magic bullet,” said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organization’s department of HIV/AIDS, but it has the potential to prevent “many hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of infections over coming years.”

I apologize, but my inner third-grader can’t pass up the opportunity to note that the doctor’s name is De Cock. Is it pre-ordained that people with names like that end up studying things that originate in the pelvic region? (Then again, Dick Pound missed his calling as a porn star, so there goes my theory.)

Back to the story:

The reason it bothers me is that I made the decision not to circumcise our son, who turns 11 in two months. My wife didn’t like the idea of circumcision — it seemed unnecessary and barbaric to her — but she left it up to me. (She got to decide when our daughters would get their first haircuts — not exactly analogous, but it did involve sharp instruments and frightened children.)

At the time, I couldn’t see a reason to have him circumcised. And I heard a lot of arguments for why boys shouldn’t be cut, the main one being that it would decrease sexual sensation. The arguments in favor — primarily that a circumcised boy looks like all the other boys in the locker room — didn’t seem particularly strong.

Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the driving force behind routine circumcision was the idea that a cut weasel was less likely to be wanked. In other words, the original motivation for the procedure was to reduce sexual pleasure.

I wasn’t unaware that uncircumcised men had higher risk of getting or spreading STDs. The idea was already out there in the mid-’90s. But we were told by a pediatrician that good hygiene negates the risk. (Funnily enough, the doctor was Paul Fleiss, Heidi‘s father, who was indicted a year after our son was born for helping his daughter launder money.)

We were living in California at the time (hence the contact with Dr. Fleiss, who visited our childbirth class), and were told that only about half the boys in our state were getting snipped. It seemed like a trend — Europeans were no longer doing it, Californians weren’t doing it as much, and the rest of the U.S. would soon follow.

Except the rest of the nation didn’t follow. About 80 percent of boys in the U.S. get trimmed. Plus, we now live in Pennsylvania, where I would assume circumcision rates mirror the national average.

Medical science may yet vindicate our decision. And I still think the procedure is barbaric. But right now, I’m not feeling too confident in the call I made nearly 11 years ago.

Tags: Tags: sex