The term “awakening” is super loaded these days. New age people use it to signal they have elevated above the sheep, religious zealots use it to signal some sort of process of enlightenment in regards to their God, and conspiracy theorists use it to delineate between those who see the truth and those who don’t. It often contains within it a harsh judgment of others, which always makes it land as kind of a sticky, pokey, and mean concept.
I don’t believe in an innate awakening, or that there is a discreet reality we are supposed to wake up into. Everybody’s awakening looks different. Some people are even waking up into worlds that other people are asleep in; that’s okay, it’s beautiful in a hodgepodge kind of way. I think the most important part is that one can identify that they have themselves woken up from a slumber—not necessarily that everyone else is sleeping, but that you had been sleeping and now you feel awake.
Even before I had these terms, my life moved like this. I felt it most strongly with relationships. After breakups, I’d feel like the person who was in that relationship had been sleeping the whole time and now a new Josh walked through the world. Other events like this include psychedelic experiences, observing violence, and reading books by fearless writers who seemed to wake me up from a slumber (Marshall McLuhan comes to mind).
One place where I truly felt a real awakening was in regards to my penis. Other than “ew, uncircumcised penises are gross,” I never really thought deeply about the shape and form of my member until my oldest sister was giving birth to a boy. On the family text thread, there was a lively discussion about whether or not to do it. Lots of news articles and scientific studies and various rationales were passed around.
Here’s a quick roundup. Circumcising lowers the chance of:
HPV
HIV infection.
Penile cancer
Cleanliness
There is no other medical reason to circumcise.
Let me break those down real quick:
Almost the whole population is going to be vaccinated soon, and the prevalence of HPV is going to go down immensely. Also, I have HPV and am circumcised, and I am fine.
HIV infection: these studies were all done at peak HIV infectiousness and in sub-Saharan Africa where sex-ed is a completely different story.
Penile cancer: This one always makes me laugh. Penile cancer is SO, SO rare. 0.001% of men get it, and I guess circumcision lowers that rate by a few percentage points.
Cleanliness: While some Jewish texts imply it’s for cleanliness, even if this were true, there is more access to showers and soap now than there was, say, thousands of years BC in the damn desert.
Regardless of all the nuance on this above, none of these are good reasons to circumcise nearly every single male born. Around 85% of sexually active men are circumcised. The circumcision rate is thankfully declining year over year.
Since the medical reasoning doesn’t hold water anymore, circumcision is squarely a cosmetic surgery. The new (pedophilic) rationale is that “a boy’s penis should look like his dad’s.” If that’s the case, a plastic surgeon should be doing it. As someone who only has one testicle (I will talk about it in another post sometime), my son’s genitalia will probably never really look like mine so that reasoning doesn’t even stand in my situation. But the question still stands: How is it that we live in a society whose top priority at the joyous miraculous birth of a child onto this Earth is to chop off the tip of their dick?
Awaking to this particular truth—that I was genitally mutilated almost immediately after arriving on earth—fills me with grief and fear of the medical industrial complex, of my family, of my ancestors, and of the harmful effects of mindless traditions. Since there is no medical imperative to circumcise, it means that we do it for “tradition.”
Whose Tradition?
Nearly all anthropological studies of circumcision both in Jewish and other lineages go back to blood sacrifices. Modern people feel—with our big fancy medical laboratories, white coats, and sterile hospitals—that we have somehow left the pagan spirit world behind us for the storybooks and religious texts. I’m here to tell you with complete certainty and clarity that it is alive and well, out in the open, and nowhere near the fringe. Circumcision is a great example of this.
While conspiracy theorists make wild claims about liberal pedophilic death cults, their children’s dicks are being given as blood sacrifices every day. I might sound like I’m perhaps exposing a conspiracy of some kind, or perhaps like I’m using a metaphor or extreme language to get a rise. I’m not. There is 0, zilch, zero, none nein, absolutely no reason to circumcise your child. But we do it anyway. Why? Pump me full of all the forced logic and inane rationalization you want:
A man’s dick should match his sons!
It’s cleaner!
We’ve always done it this way!
In the words of S.K. Hellsten in the Journal of Medical Ethics:
From a human rights perspective both male and female genital mutilation, particularly when performed on infants or defenceless small children, and for non-therapeutic reasons can be clearly condemned as a violation of children's rights whether or not they cause direct pain. […] If we allow parents to decide what is best for their children on the basis of the children's religious or cultural identity, we would have no justification for stopping them cutting off their children's ears, fingers, or noses if their religious and cultural beliefs demanded this.
So why do we continue genitally mutilating young boys? Well, we send people to war to sacrifice themselves for freedom. We send people to work to sacrifice themselves in order to have their basic needs met. We send people to school to sacrifice them for awakening.
Sacrifice is an initiation into a new world—a sort of forced awakening. People who have gone to war and died or gone to war and returned have been initiated into a higher level of patriotism. People who go to work their whole lives and accrue wealth are elevated above having their basic needs met. People who go to school and accrue knowledge are elevated above the common thinking person.
Here, I think also of people who are forced to have c-sections because their babies are “breech” or the umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby’s neck, even though there’s no medical or scientific reasoning behind these beliefs. These people are being told that their power, their bodies, and their children’s bodies, belong to something outside of them, something they must comply with.
There is freakishly almost no nuanced debate about circumcision, it’s just accepted as a nearly universal medical need and anyone who argues against it is made to feel they are making a mountain out of a molehill. But female clitorectomies are universally and rightly considered abhorrent forms of mutilation.
The only conclusion I have landed on is that our society operates as some sort of death cult with sacrifices and all, and we are made to sleep through the torture for some greater good.
That’s why we are obsessed with shows and books about cults: we can’t believe what is possible when people are brainwashed. It’s of course always pointed out in these cult documentaries that there is nothing special about people in cults, they are just like us. They just made the mistake of falling asleep in the presence of nefarious forces.
What forces are at work here which make so many people send their children to get the tips of their dicks clipped off?
At both the symbolic and physical level, from the second we are born, we are beholden to some greater being—perhaps the medical industrial complex or something bigger—and it quite literally wants our blood because our blood gives it power.
I obviously did not circumcise our son, and the generational curses we feel that action—or inaction—broke are immense. He’s not uncircumcised, he’s natural. The shape of my penis is unnatural.
I grieve so deeply for the tip of my cock. And I grieve for a world where even if I wanted to post a picture of my penis on Instagram to grieve for my mutilation, I would be banned and blocked. Dicks, death, war, and pussies: all things you cannot televise or post on social media. There is a reason for that.
Censorship like this is collective repression. If these photos were allowed, we’d be able to see day in and day out the destruction, mutilation, and magic that surrounds us every day. We would be ashamed only for a short time because suddenly share in the grieving and disgust for our behavior, and presumably, we’d cohesively work toward making a society that looks very little like this one. As of now, dicks, pussies, death, and violence are only allowed on TV for “entertainment,” but never as reality.
If we could all face, collectively, our own dicks, pussies, death, and war, we’d perhaps make a world where we could be proud of ourselves and our decisions instead of cowering in shame and repression.
If circumcision is so unproblematic, televise it, be proud of it! If going to war is integral to defending our freedom, live stream the whole thing, be proud of it!
No, that can’t happen. If it did, we’d be forced to consider what peace looks like and why it’s important. We’d have less tolerance for violence. We’d be able to imagine possible futures that don’t involve Russian atomic bombs and Chinese takeovers and planetary collapse. While that future would, to many, look like societal collapse, for awakened folk, it would look like everyone reclaiming their agency as community members1 instead of cogs. From the collective would emerge a complete and swift repudiation of the death cult that had it hypnotized for so long.
Have a fantastic week, lovers!
As usual, picture of my son, and i would put picture of my breakfast but i haven’t had it yet.
In writing this line, I feel deep pain and grief that I don’t feel I’m here yet. When I awoke to write this piece, I was laying in bed wondering if perhaps all of this confusion I feel in my head sometimes is actual evidence that I’m some sort of transitional species. I’m bridging—painfully—the gap between an old world and a new world. I’m filtering so much toxicity so that my son doesn’t have to experience it, and I should not expect that position to feel peaceful or cohesive. I’m not yet able to be the community member I want to be in my heart. I don’t have the tools. But I trust I’m moving humanity in the right direction in a real way.
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