jugheadnaut wrote:welch wrote:John D wrote:
You haven't met my wife!
It's also not about people circumcised as infants, but rather as adults. I would expect them to notice a difference. The question is, how much of it is actually measurable, and how much is what they "remember" it being.
For obvious reasons, it's necessary to use adult circumcision in studies that are looking for before/after trends. This study isn't definitive, but is a pretty solid piece of evidence. Delayed orgasm is more a discrete condition rather than a continuous one, such as if they asked about sensitivity, and this gives the survey participants answers on the subject more credence. And the numerical difference is pretty huge as well, so it's hard to believe something isn't going on.
Here are two additional studies that also showed an increase in delayed orgasm after adult circumcision.
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/e ... 4.abstract
http://www.webmd.com/men/news/20040202/ ... erformance
I'd be interested to see a study that compared incidence of delayed orgasm in circumcised vs. intact population groups, but a quick search didn't reveal any.
Since you seem to have some interest in voices that aren't yours: the problem is, no one is bitching about adults getting circumcised. That's a non-issue. However, there are some problems:
1) Adults heal differently and slower than infants. That's going to affect things like those survey results. (note, to avoid confusion: while I agree that surveys can be done badly, and can lead one astray, I don't consider them inherently (un)reliable. One just has to be more careful when using their data is all.)
2) Adults feel pain very differently from children. That's going to affect things in this case.
3) We assume that most male children aren't overly interested in sex as a thing until puberty. There's some exceptions, but I'm unaware of that assumption being completely wrong, or so wrong as to be unreliable. Whereas an adult male who just had surgery on his penis is going to be VERY aware of how it works in terms of sex afterwards. Any difference is going to be magnified, and understandably so. An infant is not exactly going to care about that for some years.
4) An adult who becomes circumcised will have to spend some real amount of time getting used to "the new normal". Given how reliant sex is on perception, that's going to affect their view on things. I'd wonder if someone asked them 20 years afterwards how they felt about it, if their answers might change. (this may have happened to different subjects.)
5) Related to 4), someone circumcised as an infant, only days old is not going to have any coherent memories of what their penis "should" look like. For all intents and purposes, that's the only way their penis has ever looked or worked. It is, for them, normal, regardless of what other people think.
An analogy is asking an only child about siblings. Speaking as one, most of the questions are well-meaning, but ultimately, I can't really answer them. I have no idea what it would be like to have a sibling, I cannot tell you if I'd ever wanted one other than the occasional "it would be nice to have someone around to play with all the time", which kind of ignores a lot of the reality of siblings. I don't have any idea, whatsoever, of what it is really like to grow up with them. My observations tell me that sibling relationships are as varied as the people in them, so I'm not sure anyone with a sibling can answer that for anyone but themselves without resorting to platitude.
Same thing with being circumcised. I confess to a mild curiosity as to what it would be like to not be circumcised, but that's like wondering what it would be like to be really tall or really short or what have you. It's an interesting thought model, but I can't say I have ever bemoaned my horrible fate to wander the earth in this horribly mutilated state. Shit works well enough for me. The fact that someone else's dick may work better, or worse isn't of any real importance. Everyone's different. I have no way to know what being uncircumcised is like on any level. I can't even tell you what being circumcised is like for anyone but me, and I can tell you in that case, I really haven't spent a lot of thought on it. It's how I've always been. I can tell you more what it's like to have been very blonde as a young child and have your hair color change than I can tell you what it's like to be uncircumcised. Which is why a lot of the sexual function arguments fall flat for many people.
I agree that you don't have many options other than people who were circumcised as adults, and i don't think the survey was badly done, or trying to mislead. I just think trying to apply the results to people who have never been any other way isn't going to work all that well.