I think it's helpful to keep in mind Margaret Mead's saying to the effect of "if a fish were an anthropologist, the last thing it would discover would be water."
In this situation, circumcision is so much a part of our culture that we accept it as normal, harmless at worst and beneficial at best. Anti-circumcision information that lays out its true horrors can be dismissed as "biased" because we're so used to thinking of the pros of circumcision and how ordinary it is.
Compare and contrast to female genital cutting and the cultural aspects of this debate come into focus. Where on earth could you find "non-biased" information on female circumcision, laying out the pros and cons in a rational, scientific, non-emotional way? You can't - because the subject is taboo. It is culturally accepted in the West that female genital cutting is universally evil. (In countries where it is the norm, on the other hand, the exact same rationales for male circumcision are trotted out: "it's cleaner," "men prefer it," "it's healthier.")
So it's considered perfectly normal to enroll thousands of men in trials to determine the efficacy of circumcision to prevent HIV infection, but the one study presented at a World AIDS Conference demonstrating that, all other factors being equal, female circumcision is associated with a much lower risk of HIV infection went absolutely nowhere. Not a single scientist is signing up intact women to get circumcised to see what would happen to HIV infection rates in intact vs. cut women -- because it is simply accepted that female genitals are harmed by cutting, whereas male genitals are improved by cutting.
That's not scientific. That's not rational. That's culture all the way.
Scientists are just as susceptible to cultural bias as anyone else. The problem comes when they can't or won't see that they are filtering information through the lenses of cultural bias.
To understand how circumcision came to be normalized and rationalized through so-called "scientific" means, it's really important to look at the history of circumcision in the 19th and 20th centuries. You simply cannot understand how it came to be acceptable to cut off large chunks of newborn baby boys' genitals in a medical setting until you look at the history of medical doctors rationalizing circumcision for what we can now see as completely ludicrous (and often culturally based) reasons.
These are two sites to start learning about the history of circumcision:
http://www.icgi.org/information/medicalization/http://www.historyofcircumcision.net/
And a particularly good book is:
http://amzn.to/cUlAXW
I knew going into it that it would be bad. I just didn't think I'd burst into tears over it.
