u/ballistic762

Circumcision permanently blunts that peak for us.

This table measures average happiness while people are doing common activities (not long-term life meaning).

(Bryson & MacKerron, 2017)

Among all the things people actually spend time doing, intimacy/making love sits alone at the top with a coefficient of 14.20. Exercise lands around 8.12. Talking, chatting, socializing is 6.38. Everything else trails further behind. Nothing else comes close to the intensity of that peak. Sex isn’t “just one part of life.” According to the data on what people feel in the moment, it is the single strongest source of experienced happiness people ever get. For many of us, though, that peak is strongly diminished. Some men are left with a more severe circumcision that took huge portions of the frenulum and left only tight, scarred skin behind.

When some inactivists shrug and say “there’s more to life than sex” or dismiss the whole thing as no big deal, they are not really understanding what was denied from us. They’re minimizing a permanent loss of sensation and function that many of us still feel every day, and in doing so they only deepen the isolation for those of us who refuse to pretend the damage never happened.

Circumcised men need to stop treating this like a gentle-parenting debate and start taking the permanent harm seriously. We need to outlaw it now, the same way FGM is banned, and put our energy behind the intactivist organizations that refuse any compromise and demand a complete end to the practice.

Rare find here from a deleted series of posts, showing that even in the mid-2020's RIC is ongoing while declining. An older millennial mom took her first son in to get circumcised at a pediatric clinic. She was in the room for it and said she’d never heard him scream like that. It shook her.

Later that night she’s holding him while he’s asleep in her arms and his breathing is all labored and stressed. This infant already went through hell and he’s going to be dealing with the pain for weeks.

I just finished the POTS interview where u/cartersteinhoff talks about how people infantilize the mothers in these situations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZSdmYNMs6o It’s one thing to talk about “they don’t know any better,” but watching her go through with it with no real critical-thinking amazes me.

The post was deleted from the IG mom's account due to shame, she regrets what she did.

I honestly didn’t get the infantilization critique until I saw this. That’s why I think this needs to be shared more. A lot of people still default to the soft version of the story where parents are just confused or misled. Footage like this cuts through that. It describes the decision, the infant suffering, and the aftermath all in one place. If it opened my eyes the way it did, it can do the same for others who are still stuck in the excuses.