- Joined
- Feb 2, 2019
This is why I got interested in the subject as a teen, despite myself not ever having any issues relating to this.
I was part of a market research group for sex educational materials for teens. They wanted to know what names we thought were best, hear our comments, etcetera. They also had us do some of the tests on a computer.
There was one question which had really anomylous answer; it was a question about condom usage and one of the (wrong) answers of the multiple choice question was that circumcision would reduce sensitivity. I picked it, just for curiosity sake, because the weird thing was, that answer had nothing to do with the question. Then rather than telling me it was the wrong answer, it told me that I was wrong about losing sensitivity from circumcision. I accepted it as truth, but some curiosity about the way it was structured lingered. What did that have to do with safe sex? Why was it in there? Why was it stuffed into a question, essentially half-hidden, yet obviously put in there with specific intent?
I forgot about it for a while, but whenever something popped up, like a european country wanting to ban circumcision for babies, it scratched that old itch and I read whatever I could about it. Each time a European country made moves towards this, they were prevented by jewish lobby's with accusations of antisemitism and that it was an attack on religious freedom. Each time it was dropped and not a single European country ended up going through with it, even though at its face it is barberous to do cosmetic surgery on newborn babies and seems to go against many of the values that we hold.
In more recent years I've read numerous studies on the subject. There were so many that were obviously bad and what seems to me, only done with the intent to deceive. Studies in Africa which are used to say that circumcision helps prevent STD's, when even in the paper it clearly states that only the circumcised group was shown how to use condoms. Perhaps more relevant to your point, studies that enjoyment is equal for circumcised and uncircumcised, when you read the study, they asked the question "do you enjoy sex" and 100% answered yes, of both circumcised and uncircumcised group. In fact they answered yes overwhelmingly to almost every question in the study, making me wonder if they even spoke english/understood/cared about the answers in that specific one. I can dig them up if anyone cares.
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It's true that studies about enjoyment of sex show at best marginal differences. There is some statistically relevant difference in enjoyment more so for the female partners than the men themselves (the back-forth motion of foreskin helps maintain natural lubricant whereas a circumcised penis scoops out the fluids), but we're still talking about small differences of 2-5% reporting higher enjoyment. It's almost too small to even mention.
Though the question itself is a red herring. You're cutting off something that has nerve endings in it. By definition, you're reducing sensitivity. It's not just about exposing the glans and the keratinization that follows, it's also that you're cutting off healthy tissue that has evolved for a purpose.
