![]() ![]() The United States is the only developed country that practices routine circumcision on a majority of newborn boys for non-religious reasons. They also won’t be able to “compare” their sexual experiences with a version of themselves from an alternate universe in which their genitals had been left intact when they were children: this point will become important later on. So if a girl has her labia removed (which is a federal crime in most Western countries), or if a boy has his foreskin removed, neither one will be able to experience any of the subjective sensations that go along with those specific activities when they grow up and become sexually active. And just like the foreskin, they are richly supplied with nerve endings, blood vessels, and sebaceous glands that provide natural lubrication during sexual activity.ĭepending on one’s sexual preferences, the labia can be tugged, stretched, sucked on, and otherwise “played with” as a part of one’s sexual experience the same thing is true of the foreskin. “The labia are part of the vulva!” Quite right. “That doesn’t make any sense,” you might say. Imagine a study that claimed to show that removing a girl’s labia minora-her vaginal “lips”-did not reduce the sensitivity of the vulva. Specifically, it loses all of the sensitivity experienced in the foreskin itself, along with all subjective sensations that are unique to having a foreskin.Ĭhief among these sensations is the feeling of rolling the foreskin back and forth over the head of the penis-the “glans”-during sex, foreplay, or masturbation (see this NSFW video to get the idea): that specific feeling does not exist without a foreskin. It is made up of sensitive tissue (more on this below) so if you remove it, the penis loses sensitivity by definition. Before we get into the details of the science, and looking just at this claim from the “headline” conclusion, it might be helpful to review some basic anatomy. “ Circumcision does not reduce penis sensitivity.”īut that’s not what the study showed. ![]() What did the researchers discover? According to a typical headline from the past few days: The new study is by Jennifer Bossio and her colleagues from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada: it looked at penile sensitivity at various locations on the penis, comparing a sample of men who had been circumcised when they were infants (meaning they had their foreskins surgically removed), with a sample of men who remained genitally intact (meaning they kept their foreskins into adulthood). That’s including from the New York Times, whose Nicholas Bakalar has more or less recycled the content of a university press release without incorporating any skeptical analysis from other scientists. Earp / ( day, another round of uncritical media coverage of an empirical study about circumcision and sexual function. ![]()
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