Why is Circumcision so Popular in America?

Recent years have raised questions about the ethics and effectiveness of male circumcision

Artwork: “Baby Block” by the author, Joe Duncan

I was taking my father to the airport this morning to see him off when I got a surprise text from a friendly face I hadn’t seen in a while.

It was Julia, my former partner-in-crime and Editor-in-Chief at Sexography, who’s since stepped down and gone to college for psychology, with me taking over the sole editing duties. She was curious about a question I didn’t know the answer to.

Why is male circumcision so popular in America?

I told her I don’t know, but assumed it might have something to do with religion. Perhaps America or Northern Europe’s flavor of Protestantism led to a surge in circumcision after the Protestant Reformation? I wasn’t sure.

But I decided to investigate because it’s a topic on a lot of people’s minds, as young parents are now wondering what’s right for them and their children. Young people are radically questioning—and often repudiating—the traditions of old that we’ve since learned were based on bad science, flawed reasoning, or senseless moral policing.

Does circumcision belong in this category? That’s up to you to decide.

Turns out, the history and significance of circumcision is much more labyrinthine than I’d thought. To understand why it’s gained such prevalence in America, we must explore its linguistic, ethical, historical, cultural, and medical dimensions.

Boundless ink has been spilled arguing in favor of or against circumcision. I’m not here to reinvent the wheel and repeat history. Here are some rather unique frameworks for thinking about it that might help you understand circumcision (and ethics generally) a bit better.

Meditationes de historia obscurationis linguae

First, I can’t help but notice that “circumcision”—which is Latin for “cutting around” if memory serves me right—is a polite euphemism for “chopping off the skin around the penis” in the same way “pork” (short for the Latin porcus, meaning “pig”) is a euphemism for “a chunk of dead pig.” The word “beef” is short for βοδινό (bovino), the Greek word for “beef,” which is also where we get the word “bovine” from.

Don’t worry, I’m not here to lecture anybody on the ethics of meat-eating. But I think it’s related to circumcision because both are sexed and tucked behind obscurantist language. What’s important here is understanding that it’s hard to think clearly about things using indirect language.

Carol J. Adams argued convincingly in her excellent book The Sexual Politics of Meat, that meat-eating has been sexualized as predominantly (or exclusively) male in cultures across the globe. Both circumcision and the idea of the male meat-eater come down to us from at least the Bronze Age, and probably pre-history.

Adams showed we tend to Latinize or Graecize (make Greek) words that make us uncomfortable, like our names for various meats. We apply archaic terms as symbolic representations, called referents or absent referents, thereby dancing around the real name of the activity (or object) in question.

The word “organs” (heart, lungs, entrails) comes from the Greek όργανα (organa), which just means “instruments”—your organs are the instruments of your body. We don’t do this with “skin” (δέρμα or derma), “hair” (μαλλιά or mallia), or “eyes” (μάτια or matia), or their Latin counterparts (pellis, capilli, oculi).

Our insides make us very uncomfortable, just as our sex organs do. Humans have blushed when they’ve had to discuss sex since as long as we’ve had written language.

Penis, vagina, fellatio and anus are Latin words and vulva is Greek. Their English equivalents (dick, pussy, and asshole) are considered more vulgar in English than their Greco-Roman counterparts.

Cunnilingus is a nominalized combination of the Latin cunnis (meaning both vagina and slit) and lingere (meaning lick). Anilingus is a portmanteau of “anus” and “cunnilingus” that blends each word into a new word—cunnilingus of the ass.

This transcends English. Vagina is Latin for sheath (as in, a sword) and Scheide is German for both sheath and separation (as well as divorce)—and it’s the traditional German word for vagina as well.

We also use referents when we want something to sound more important than it is. Shakespeare’s English just sounds more romantic to our modern ears, the same way the King James Bible sounds more ethereal. “Thy shalt not steal” sounds more foreboding and official than “don’t steal” does.

An absent referent is when the alternative word adds nothing to the language, but separates us from the activity in question through a lack of accessibility.

Using “pork” instead of “pig” makes us think of a neatly-packaged and ready-to-cook cutlet rather than a living pig. When you say “pork” you probably picture a product, not an animal—and that’s the point. It’s part of how we normalize our (oftentimes bizarre and violent) cultural rituals.

This allows us to unquestioningly participate in such rituals, often without even realizing what we’re doing because the reality is obscured.

As Adams says:

Because the structure of overlapping absent referents is so deeply rooted in Western culture, it inevitably implicates individuals. Our participation evolves as part of our general socialization to cultural patterns and viewpoints, thus we fail to see anything disturbing in the violence and domination that are an inextricable part of this structure.

In other words, it would be much harder to convince children to eat the cute cows and pigs if we called them cows and pigs. Most people don’t want to see how the sausage is made, literally.

A similar process appears afoot with circumcision. It’s harder to convince parents to cut their newborn baby’s penis without the use of a referent. The entire sentence “circumcise a penis” is a referent.

Referents often blind us to the true severity of our actions, right or wrong, for better or worse, so it’s smart to be on the lookout for them when asking yourself what you believe is right.

The Ancient History of Circumcision

Rooted in cultural and religious tradition, circumcision has evolved over millennia. The Ancient Egyptians practiced circumcision for both religious and medical reasons. They believed it was a rite of passage into adulthood and a religious rite. It’s hard to argue that it was a means of promoting cleanliness in the modern sense, considering the ancients had no conception of microbes and viruses.

Boys were circumcised between ages six and twelve in Ancient Egypt.

Ancient Egyptian circumcision; public domain

Historically, it was believed that circumcision was invented by the Ancient Israelites, something modern-day Christians still believe, and the practice “fell by the wayside” when the Ancient Israelites were taken into captivity. Though it’s quite possible—even likely—that the opposite is true and that the Ancient Israelites appropriated the practice from the Ancient Egyptians, possibly during captivity.

Known as "Brit Milah" in Hebrew, circumcision is a central religious ritual for Jewish males, typically performed on the eighth day after birth. It commemorates the covenant between God and Abraham, as recounted in the Hebrew Bible. This tradition has persisted for thousands of years and remains a fundamental element of Jewish identity.

The problem with the idea that circumcision is originally Jewish is that it assumes that the Pentateuch is much older than it actually is. The Pentateuch was assembled long after Israel had made contact with the Egyptians. It’s also telling that circumcision comes about in Exodus as the Jews are leaving Egypt. While it appears in Genesis, too, all the books of the Pentateuch were written and assembled at the same time.