For context, I’m circumcised and expecting a son and my wife and I are torn about the circ. We’re American so from a cultural standpoint circumcision is the default choice. Thing is, there’s no real benefit besides practicing a religion we don’t believe in, and I’m uncomfortable about cutting the tip of my son’s dick off.
On the other side, I’ve met a guy who was bullied in high school so bad for it he got a circ as an adult. Apparently crazy painful recovery. I’ve also talked to women who are generally grossed out by uncircumcised men. I don’t want to make him feel like something’s wrong with him his whole life because I was uncomfortable with the idea.
From a moral standpoint I’m against it, but from a social and cultural standpoint I feel like I should do it? It’s a crappy situation. If there’s any uncircumcised American men who want to talk about their penis I’m all ears.
Edit: I really appreciate everyone’s responses I never expected to hear from so many people. With the decision hinging on social and cultural norms it’s been really helpful to be able to take the temperature like this. I obviously need to talk to my wife, but given the overwhelming support of dick hats I don’t thing we’re going to do it. Thanks, lemmings!
I’m going back to bed and I wouldn’t be super if it’s biased, it’s just what I found when I wondered how you would actually measure this. A minor point though: they didn’t go to Uganda, they reviewed a number of studies and in one of them some other people went to Uganda. (Or I’m failing to read.) Agreed that sounds like a messed up way to do a randomised study. The papers subtitle is “results from a randomized controlled trial of male circumcision for human immunodeficiency virus prevention” and that sounds more reasonable but I’m not going to dig any deeper tonight
I read that, and even talked about that in my comment. Please don’t be condescending. I clearly meant the original study’s* authors.
There’s a vaccine though, which we are already now giving to young boys as well.
Sorry, it both wasn’t clear what you meant, and I thought read in a way other people might completely discount that study. I appreciate my reply pointing out I had asked someone else their experience was probably a bit condescending, but the comment here was just there for clarification since it didn’t read to me as being clear
Fun fact: a lot of these attempts backfired when circumcised men mistakenly thought that they were now immune rather than just less likely to get HIV, so they had more unprotected sex and the infection rates actually increased.
This was about HPV, not HIV. It’s the virus that causes genital warts, and can be oncogenic.