Quote:
Originally Posted by glongley  I think when you talk to pregnant moms you also have to set them up for whatever may come from bringing it up with their husbands, so they can anticipate the need to educate their husband gently and supportively, and so they are empowered and prepared to take a stand on the issue, no matter what irrationality they get from their DH. This is not to diss circumcised men - they are victims and understandably function out of a place of trauma. Just that even if the wife doesn't want it, if she is not assertive in the martial relationship, or is unaware of some of the psychological dynamics of a circed dad considering the possibility of not circumcising a son - its likely to happen anyway because the husband insists on it, and very commonly the wife will just automatically defer to the husband to avoid conflict, or "because he has the penis."
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Yeah, I think this is by far the #1 obstacle we face. Circ'ed men, for fairly understandable psychological reasons, are going to stubbornly insist on circing, and their wives/partners are often going to have trouble going to the mat on this issue when not only do they not have penises themselves, they may in many cases not have experience with intact men and so take the circ'ed penis as normal and ordinary.
For women like these, often the only factor that really weighs on the other side is the maternal desire not to put their babies through unnecessary pain. I agree with that sentiment of course, but I actually think it's a very
very minute factor on the list of reasons not to circ (not to mention that it then becomes so easy to dismiss that concern by using anaesthesia). In fact, if I had to put my son through ten times the amount of pain circumcision causes in order to keep him intact, I would not hesitate.
ETA: The more positive, flip side of this is that it strikes me as culturally very unlikely that, once the chain of circing "to match dad" is broken within a paternal lineage, a future intact man in that line will flip things back by having his son circ'ed. Really, it's fairly amazing when you think about it that the default got flipped the other way. It would be fascinating to study how it managed to gain enough of a foothold to become the norm; once it did become the norm, it's not nearly as surprising that it continued (and continues), but the original process of making it so widespread is hard to imagine. I think though that regardless of how that happened, we have a different society today where it will not likely happen again, so it is almost inevitable that the circ rate will steadily drop off and that at some point there will be a "tipping point" where a father's desire to have his son look like him (and his psychological need to deny to himself that there is anything wrong with what happened to his own penis) will get more and more overruled by the new social norm.
I literally feel like crying.
I can't be around a hungry/needing baby so I try to avoid her as much as possible. Good thing she has a cat(s); we can't really go to her house b/c dh is allergic.
