Originally Posted by Kong
What value do you place on sensation, the protection of the glans, and loss of the ridged band— things that circumcision alter on a male.
The first of these — the purported loss of sensation due to loss of foreskin — seems to be the crux of many anti-circumcision arguments.
In my opinion, the only people who can empirically address the issue of sensation at all substantively are men who undergo circumcision as an adult. And even then, it doesn’t really answer the question about infant circumcision. (Incidentally, some men who have undergone adult circ have chimed in in other threads here, and some have reported no overall change in sensation, others positive change, others negative change, if I recall correctly.)
The inferential problem arises from neural plasticity — the brain’s extraordinary ability to rewire itself, especially during our earliest years.
Take the case of an amputee. Sometimes, after having an arm of leg cut off, a patient will report phantom sensations in the missing limb arising from stimulation of other body parts. Rubbing an amputee’s face, for example, might elicit sensations that seem to map onto his or her missing limb. What’s going on here, most likely, is remapping of the primary somatosensory cortex, a part of the brain that receives sensory input from the body. When input from a particular part of the body is lost, the bit of cortex no longer “occupied” will often be “taken over” by input from another body part. To take a completely unrelated example, there is growing evidence that blind individuals’ occipital cortex — often called the “visual cortex,” since in ordinary individuals it is devoted almost solely to vision — is activated during Braille reading. The brain has an incredible way of reorganizing itself in response to environmental variation.
Okay, hopefully that explanation was reasonably clear. My point is that there’s no theoretical, anatomically based reason to assume that the loss of the foreskin — especially at a very young age — would lead to any chronic loss of sexual sensations. Sensation occurs in the brain, not in the penis. I’d suspect that the remaining penis, post-circumcision, would gradually “remap” onto whatever neurons no longer received input from the missing foreskin (since those parts of cortex are anatomically adjacent), and sensation would remain quite similar in the long run.
None of this is to argue in favor of circumcision. Due to some persuasive posts in other threads at Thunder’s Place, I have changed my mind on the topic and don’t think babies should be circumcised. But I think we should be cautious in making any assumptions about the sensory experiences of circumcised and uncircumcised men. No one has experienced two lives, one in which he was circumcised as an infant, one in which he was not; and only such a man could definitively answer the question of sensation.
