Why is it so hard for Jesse to understand that it would suck to have somebody waltz into your store in masks and steal shit, knowing you are completely powerless to stop it? YOU JUST GOT ROBBED. That’s gonna make you feel crappy, ripped off, dehumanized, unsafe.
Yeah, it’s not “your” stuff, it doesn’t come out of your paycheck, but it’s a place where you spend a huge chunk of your waking hours. Even if the job sucks, it feeds your family. You’re probably at least sort of friends with your coworkers, and maybe some of your regulars. And a gang of assholes just showed up and showed they have less than zero respect for you. I’m an antisocial cynic but even I am not so feeling-less as to just shrug my shoulders and let that pass.
If somebody came into your office and took a huge dump on the carpet, you wouldn’t care at all unless you were the janitor?
(None of this is meant to say that retail workers should be OBLIGATED to defend store property. But if they have the feeling that they should, I totally understand that)
Circumcision is such an insanely inflamed topic in moms-of-baby-boys circles that, as someone who neither buys the medical arguments for circumcision nor thinks that circumcising infant boys is a terrible ethical breach, I've spent years trying to avoid the topic online. So I thoroughly enjoyed this episode's deep dive into Internet Bullshit: The Circumcision Edition. Great research and presentation, Jesse. And this was probably Katie's funniest sign-off ever.
When I was still hospitalized after the birth of my baby boy, my Southern mom asked me if I was going to have him circumcised. (Circumcision was nearly universal among white Southerners when I was growing up, I'd guess for reasons that started with 19th-century beliefs about hygiene and turned into a "Let the boy look like his father" tradition over time.) I said no, I wasn't, and she said, "You know he'll always have terrible recurrent infections until you circumcise him." I wanted to ask her if she thought that ~70% of the world's men and boys were going around getting recurrent penile infections all the time, but I chickened out and just said, "My baby, my decision."
Fast-forward a few weeks to my attempt to meet other moms at the local La Leche League meeting in my lefty town. Somebody asked if I'd had my baby circumcised, congratulated me for not having done it, and added, "Men who don't have foreskins lose sensitivity and thrust more violently during sex." I guess I could have asked her if she thought ~30% of the world's men were going around having violent sex all the time, but I chickened out and got the hell out of there.
Thank goodness my kids are older and I can now talk to the other parents about uncontroversial issues like sex ed and gender identity.
Being around crime is unsettling. I was legitimately confused by Jesse's response in the original podcast. You don't even have to like your job, have pride in the company, or be a shareholder to be impacted by an antisocial, chaotic, and oftentimes aggressive act, especially when it's repeated! Then you're required to clean up the mess, restock the shelves like nothing happened, and I'm sure fill out some sort of paperwork. Also, employees at these stores have now been given opportunity to steal themselves and blame it on the thieves.
I’ve noticed a pattern when parenting or adult/child interactions are involved K&J seem to fall into a black pit of “I don’t get it”.
Probably just due to a complete lack of experience with young kids or something.
Genitals are a recurring topic for young kids. Caretakers have to be prepared to discuss ANYTHING. My daughter was convinced she was a boy for like a year because she discovered she had a tiny penis and figured it would grow as she got older. So…time to talk about clitoris. Yeah. You have to take kids into the bathroom stalls when you got to go. Especially if you have runners (control the exits!!). Little boys are fascinated by their penis. And if they notice differences. There are questions. You have to teach them how to stand to pee (boys raised by only women often insist on sitting and can be intimidated by urinals).
They would absolutely want to know why dad’s penis is different. Couple that with circumcised men having a whole set of hygiene practices that uncircumcised men do not and I get why a guy might favor circumcision. …..even if they awkwardly explain all of it with “so they look like me”.
Especially if you believed the procedure wasn’t a big deal (accurately or not). And when you reflect on your life as a circumcised male and realize there doesn’t seem to be a single problem you’ve suffered as a result.
The “Oh my God, how weird to think of your kids genitals!” Reaction is naive. Let me tell you, once you have kids your entire existence is largely defined by shit and piss and genitals and the occasional awkward question about genitals…..at least the first few years.
Then you have to worry about them getting pregnant or getting someone pregnant. So. More genitals. And I guess today, you might have to worry about double mastectomies or voluntary castration. So more genitals.
The hugs and pictures are really sweet though. I dig story time too.
I don’t understand why Jesse felt the need to pull, entirely out of his ass, a fake statistic that “aside from Israel” the US is an outlier in terms of circumcision rates.
I haven’t finished listening yet so maybe it gets better, but the near-complete erasure of the Muslim world in this episode is pretty annoying, again aside from a single sentence of Jesse bullshitting the historical background of circumcision in Islam, which he clearly doesn’t actually know. Point being, circumcision is near universal in Muslim countries, which make up a healthy chunk of the world’s population.
Even aside from Judaism and Islam, circumcision is just as widely practiced in South Korea, the Philippines, and many African and Pacific Islander traditions.
The point is, circumcision is not just Some Weird Jewish Thing, and the fact that Jesse even felt the need to bring up the practice of Metzitzah B’peh (the oral suctioning thing), which is practiced by a vanishingly tiny minority and is often misrepresented as being the norm, speaks to the obnoxious ignorance of their own religion you often see in secular Jews, ignorance that often seems to border on anti-Semitism.
Sorry, this episode bugged me a lot. You guys are better than this.
My husband and I had a baby boy 8 months ago - when I found out I was pregnant with a boy, I initially wanted him circumcised because I believed it was healthier, and honestly, just more attractive (in my opinion as a woman who likes dicks).
My husband was VERY against it. He is circumcised, but has come to the belief that it is a barbaric practice, the health benefits are based on bad science, it can sometimes go very badly, etc.
Since my opinion was not as strongly held, I let him decide for our son.
Having learned a lot more about it, I'm glad we didn't get him circumcised.
Thank you, Jesse and Katie, for discussing this issue - it's a weird thing to be an activist about, but it really is important.
I am of the opinion that circumcision should not be recommended for newborns in general, but should be allowed for religious communities that practice it as a religious rite. Is that too spicy a take?
I am guessing most non-Jewish Americans have pretty indifferent feelings about circumcision. Like the episode mentioned, at some point (and based on bad science) it became, "Oh the doctors said we should do this, so OK." And then generations go by and everyone is circumcised, so then it's the norm and no one questions it. At this point, I think it's mostly perpetuated by aesthetics. Do new parents just want their sons to fit in when it comes time to show that bad boy off during sex?
I have seen some comparisons to female 'circumcision'- aka mutilation. They are not even close to comparable. Male circumcision, outside of the religious symbolism, seems to be a pretty much pointless endeavor. FGM is intended to disfigure and cause pain to women and make sexual encounters miserable for them. While I do not have a penis, I have encountered zero men who have had sexual dysfunction associated with circumcision.
On another note: Why are Alt Right people so obsessed with pedophilia? They will equate literally any behavior with pedophilia. I guess it's like their version of Leftists calling everything they dislike racist?
It’s silly to talk about the problem of modernity vs traditional religion insofar as tradition is not something we preserve because it makes some logical sense in an enlightened rational way. The argument I find compelling about the origins of circumcision and its dispersal around the world (ancient Israelites, some tribal groups in subsaharan Africa, the Philippines) is that people before hygiene was really a concept had some smegma problems which turned out to be solved by not having foreskin so they turned it into a ritual practice to explain why this was good. Now it’s an anachronism, and maybe people in the future will be horrified by the way that we were so blasé about it. At the same time, attempts to compare it to FGM are gross, because FGM is genuinely horrifying.
I’m Jewish and any son(s) I have are going to be circumcised absent very significant changes in the available evidence. I can’t provide a nice rational argument that explains it because I don’t really think that there is anything particularly rational about attachment to tradition. These things often come up with people who do apologetics work and try to explain why you should not be secular and stop eating pork and cheeseburgers by trying to prove how wonderful and helpful and rational the Torah is. People will make grand claims about how pigs have higher rates of worms, which is why people were right to never eat pork, or that eating meat with dairy is bad for your digestion but they aren’t really true. Pigs are more likely to have parasite problems, yes, and that was an actual risk before we had much better meat handling processes, but long-term pathogenic threats are generally not things that influence human consumption pattern because it’s hard to associate one with the other without modern medicine. Meat and dairy isn’t great for our people, but that’s because our people are notoriously not good at eating dairy, not because we shouldn’t eat meat with dairy. Kashrut doesn’t exist because of how it was an amazing food-safety standard (though the practice of using salt to draw out all blood probably has that effect), it exists according to many traditional sources, for the sole reason of making Jews different from other people groups. That’s where circumcision comes from too, almost certainly.
Why do they post a *circumcision* episode on Shabbos? Are they trying to make sure no Jews weigh in?
I haven't listened to the episode yet. Just turning things back on after Shabbos. So here's my un-informed two-cents.
The male "intactivists" I've run into always veered into anti-semitism. This is probably less true for the granola-mommy types that avoid phthalates, feed their kids organinic carrot sticks, and delay or space out their kids vaccines. I think, from the comments here, those are the people that K&J focused on.
However, I don't see any reason for circumcision, unless you're Jewish and commanded to do so. If you're not Jewish, be uncut! Let your foreskin flap in the wind!
That being said, I'm always wary of groups that want to limit or regulate it, simply because I don't want to remove access for Jewish people. It's just like I've been opposed to the California ballot propositions for free-range eggs, outlawing veal and Foie gras, because the next thing they'll decide is that Kosher slaughter is cruel and outlaw that (as has already happened in some EU countries -- even though they'll permit Halal slaughter).
My elderly mother read an anti-circumcision article in the New Yorker a couple of years ago (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/a-botched-circumcision-and-its-aftermath) and felt bad about the fact that I had one! She sent me an email apologizing. I told her not to read the New Yorker, that I'm very proud of my circucision, and that I would feel awful if I didn't have one as a Jewish person.
Katie should do exposure therapy by driving over bridges in videogames. GTA V with the first person view option would be ideal. Also it would be funny to watch her learn to play GTA. Jesse, you should buy her an Xbox and make her stream it on Twitch
If the intactivists actually wanted to achieve anything, rather than just screaming childishly and making fools of themselves, they would focus on ending hospital circumcision as a default practice and educating non-Jewish or -Muslim parents-to-be on the subject. I would be totally in favor of the US being like Europe, Latin America, etc. I’m a big fan of foreskin--on other guys.
I just think it’s bizarre that some people, including a lot of self-hating Jews, get so worked up about it. I’m Jewish. I’m circumcised. And I could not possibly give less of a shit. My penis functions just fine. It looks fine. Maybe there are some people who would be more into me if I were uncut. But there are also people who prefer it cut, so it’s kind of a wash. I really just do not care even a little bit, and anyone who gets on a stage and throws a temper tantrum because daddy gave him a bris needs to grow the fuck up.
Why is it so hard for Jesse to understand that it would suck to have somebody waltz into your store in masks and steal shit, knowing you are completely powerless to stop it? YOU JUST GOT ROBBED. That’s gonna make you feel crappy, ripped off, dehumanized, unsafe.
Yeah, it’s not “your” stuff, it doesn’t come out of your paycheck, but it’s a place where you spend a huge chunk of your waking hours. Even if the job sucks, it feeds your family. You’re probably at least sort of friends with your coworkers, and maybe some of your regulars. And a gang of assholes just showed up and showed they have less than zero respect for you. I’m an antisocial cynic but even I am not so feeling-less as to just shrug my shoulders and let that pass.
If somebody came into your office and took a huge dump on the carpet, you wouldn’t care at all unless you were the janitor?
(None of this is meant to say that retail workers should be OBLIGATED to defend store property. But if they have the feeling that they should, I totally understand that)
Circumcision is such an insanely inflamed topic in moms-of-baby-boys circles that, as someone who neither buys the medical arguments for circumcision nor thinks that circumcising infant boys is a terrible ethical breach, I've spent years trying to avoid the topic online. So I thoroughly enjoyed this episode's deep dive into Internet Bullshit: The Circumcision Edition. Great research and presentation, Jesse. And this was probably Katie's funniest sign-off ever.
When I was still hospitalized after the birth of my baby boy, my Southern mom asked me if I was going to have him circumcised. (Circumcision was nearly universal among white Southerners when I was growing up, I'd guess for reasons that started with 19th-century beliefs about hygiene and turned into a "Let the boy look like his father" tradition over time.) I said no, I wasn't, and she said, "You know he'll always have terrible recurrent infections until you circumcise him." I wanted to ask her if she thought that ~70% of the world's men and boys were going around getting recurrent penile infections all the time, but I chickened out and just said, "My baby, my decision."
Fast-forward a few weeks to my attempt to meet other moms at the local La Leche League meeting in my lefty town. Somebody asked if I'd had my baby circumcised, congratulated me for not having done it, and added, "Men who don't have foreskins lose sensitivity and thrust more violently during sex." I guess I could have asked her if she thought ~30% of the world's men were going around having violent sex all the time, but I chickened out and got the hell out of there.
Thank goodness my kids are older and I can now talk to the other parents about uncontroversial issues like sex ed and gender identity.
Jesse, a dog bar mitzvah is called a bark mitzvah, obviously. What kind of Jew are you?
Being around crime is unsettling. I was legitimately confused by Jesse's response in the original podcast. You don't even have to like your job, have pride in the company, or be a shareholder to be impacted by an antisocial, chaotic, and oftentimes aggressive act, especially when it's repeated! Then you're required to clean up the mess, restock the shelves like nothing happened, and I'm sure fill out some sort of paperwork. Also, employees at these stores have now been given opportunity to steal themselves and blame it on the thieves.
I’m not really bothered by “moist” or “penis”, but “moist penis” is definitely a contender for least favorite phrase.
I’ve noticed a pattern when parenting or adult/child interactions are involved K&J seem to fall into a black pit of “I don’t get it”.
Probably just due to a complete lack of experience with young kids or something.
Genitals are a recurring topic for young kids. Caretakers have to be prepared to discuss ANYTHING. My daughter was convinced she was a boy for like a year because she discovered she had a tiny penis and figured it would grow as she got older. So…time to talk about clitoris. Yeah. You have to take kids into the bathroom stalls when you got to go. Especially if you have runners (control the exits!!). Little boys are fascinated by their penis. And if they notice differences. There are questions. You have to teach them how to stand to pee (boys raised by only women often insist on sitting and can be intimidated by urinals).
They would absolutely want to know why dad’s penis is different. Couple that with circumcised men having a whole set of hygiene practices that uncircumcised men do not and I get why a guy might favor circumcision. …..even if they awkwardly explain all of it with “so they look like me”.
Especially if you believed the procedure wasn’t a big deal (accurately or not). And when you reflect on your life as a circumcised male and realize there doesn’t seem to be a single problem you’ve suffered as a result.
The “Oh my God, how weird to think of your kids genitals!” Reaction is naive. Let me tell you, once you have kids your entire existence is largely defined by shit and piss and genitals and the occasional awkward question about genitals…..at least the first few years.
Then you have to worry about them getting pregnant or getting someone pregnant. So. More genitals. And I guess today, you might have to worry about double mastectomies or voluntary castration. So more genitals.
The hugs and pictures are really sweet though. I dig story time too.
I don’t understand why Jesse felt the need to pull, entirely out of his ass, a fake statistic that “aside from Israel” the US is an outlier in terms of circumcision rates.
I haven’t finished listening yet so maybe it gets better, but the near-complete erasure of the Muslim world in this episode is pretty annoying, again aside from a single sentence of Jesse bullshitting the historical background of circumcision in Islam, which he clearly doesn’t actually know. Point being, circumcision is near universal in Muslim countries, which make up a healthy chunk of the world’s population.
Even aside from Judaism and Islam, circumcision is just as widely practiced in South Korea, the Philippines, and many African and Pacific Islander traditions.
The point is, circumcision is not just Some Weird Jewish Thing, and the fact that Jesse even felt the need to bring up the practice of Metzitzah B’peh (the oral suctioning thing), which is practiced by a vanishingly tiny minority and is often misrepresented as being the norm, speaks to the obnoxious ignorance of their own religion you often see in secular Jews, ignorance that often seems to border on anti-Semitism.
Sorry, this episode bugged me a lot. You guys are better than this.
My husband and I had a baby boy 8 months ago - when I found out I was pregnant with a boy, I initially wanted him circumcised because I believed it was healthier, and honestly, just more attractive (in my opinion as a woman who likes dicks).
My husband was VERY against it. He is circumcised, but has come to the belief that it is a barbaric practice, the health benefits are based on bad science, it can sometimes go very badly, etc.
Since my opinion was not as strongly held, I let him decide for our son.
Having learned a lot more about it, I'm glad we didn't get him circumcised.
Thank you, Jesse and Katie, for discussing this issue - it's a weird thing to be an activist about, but it really is important.
I am of the opinion that circumcision should not be recommended for newborns in general, but should be allowed for religious communities that practice it as a religious rite. Is that too spicy a take?
Anybody else notice Jesse bizarrely thinking “just the tip” is a circumcision joke instead of the real way it’s used in common nomenclature?
I am guessing most non-Jewish Americans have pretty indifferent feelings about circumcision. Like the episode mentioned, at some point (and based on bad science) it became, "Oh the doctors said we should do this, so OK." And then generations go by and everyone is circumcised, so then it's the norm and no one questions it. At this point, I think it's mostly perpetuated by aesthetics. Do new parents just want their sons to fit in when it comes time to show that bad boy off during sex?
I have seen some comparisons to female 'circumcision'- aka mutilation. They are not even close to comparable. Male circumcision, outside of the religious symbolism, seems to be a pretty much pointless endeavor. FGM is intended to disfigure and cause pain to women and make sexual encounters miserable for them. While I do not have a penis, I have encountered zero men who have had sexual dysfunction associated with circumcision.
On another note: Why are Alt Right people so obsessed with pedophilia? They will equate literally any behavior with pedophilia. I guess it's like their version of Leftists calling everything they dislike racist?
Ugh.
It’s silly to talk about the problem of modernity vs traditional religion insofar as tradition is not something we preserve because it makes some logical sense in an enlightened rational way. The argument I find compelling about the origins of circumcision and its dispersal around the world (ancient Israelites, some tribal groups in subsaharan Africa, the Philippines) is that people before hygiene was really a concept had some smegma problems which turned out to be solved by not having foreskin so they turned it into a ritual practice to explain why this was good. Now it’s an anachronism, and maybe people in the future will be horrified by the way that we were so blasé about it. At the same time, attempts to compare it to FGM are gross, because FGM is genuinely horrifying.
I’m Jewish and any son(s) I have are going to be circumcised absent very significant changes in the available evidence. I can’t provide a nice rational argument that explains it because I don’t really think that there is anything particularly rational about attachment to tradition. These things often come up with people who do apologetics work and try to explain why you should not be secular and stop eating pork and cheeseburgers by trying to prove how wonderful and helpful and rational the Torah is. People will make grand claims about how pigs have higher rates of worms, which is why people were right to never eat pork, or that eating meat with dairy is bad for your digestion but they aren’t really true. Pigs are more likely to have parasite problems, yes, and that was an actual risk before we had much better meat handling processes, but long-term pathogenic threats are generally not things that influence human consumption pattern because it’s hard to associate one with the other without modern medicine. Meat and dairy isn’t great for our people, but that’s because our people are notoriously not good at eating dairy, not because we shouldn’t eat meat with dairy. Kashrut doesn’t exist because of how it was an amazing food-safety standard (though the practice of using salt to draw out all blood probably has that effect), it exists according to many traditional sources, for the sole reason of making Jews different from other people groups. That’s where circumcision comes from too, almost certainly.
My wife has driving anxiety and it’s how I keep her trapped and married to me.
Why do they post a *circumcision* episode on Shabbos? Are they trying to make sure no Jews weigh in?
I haven't listened to the episode yet. Just turning things back on after Shabbos. So here's my un-informed two-cents.
The male "intactivists" I've run into always veered into anti-semitism. This is probably less true for the granola-mommy types that avoid phthalates, feed their kids organinic carrot sticks, and delay or space out their kids vaccines. I think, from the comments here, those are the people that K&J focused on.
However, I don't see any reason for circumcision, unless you're Jewish and commanded to do so. If you're not Jewish, be uncut! Let your foreskin flap in the wind!
That being said, I'm always wary of groups that want to limit or regulate it, simply because I don't want to remove access for Jewish people. It's just like I've been opposed to the California ballot propositions for free-range eggs, outlawing veal and Foie gras, because the next thing they'll decide is that Kosher slaughter is cruel and outlaw that (as has already happened in some EU countries -- even though they'll permit Halal slaughter).
My elderly mother read an anti-circumcision article in the New Yorker a couple of years ago (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/11/a-botched-circumcision-and-its-aftermath) and felt bad about the fact that I had one! She sent me an email apologizing. I told her not to read the New Yorker, that I'm very proud of my circucision, and that I would feel awful if I didn't have one as a Jewish person.
Katie should do exposure therapy by driving over bridges in videogames. GTA V with the first person view option would be ideal. Also it would be funny to watch her learn to play GTA. Jesse, you should buy her an Xbox and make her stream it on Twitch
If the intactivists actually wanted to achieve anything, rather than just screaming childishly and making fools of themselves, they would focus on ending hospital circumcision as a default practice and educating non-Jewish or -Muslim parents-to-be on the subject. I would be totally in favor of the US being like Europe, Latin America, etc. I’m a big fan of foreskin--on other guys.
I just think it’s bizarre that some people, including a lot of self-hating Jews, get so worked up about it. I’m Jewish. I’m circumcised. And I could not possibly give less of a shit. My penis functions just fine. It looks fine. Maybe there are some people who would be more into me if I were uncut. But there are also people who prefer it cut, so it’s kind of a wash. I really just do not care even a little bit, and anyone who gets on a stage and throws a temper tantrum because daddy gave him a bris needs to grow the fuck up.