I'd like to feature your letter in our October newsletter and invite readers to comment here, if that would be OK with you. That way we might raise awareness and get others' insights.

What do you think?

In the current world climate there is a lot of contempt for Muslim traditions and their culture. Its more often in Islamic societies that female clitoral circumcision has occurred and thankfully it seems to be in a decline. Although to our western mind set it might seem ridiculous, one has to wonder where the custom came from. In this current society where women's liberation is still a hot topic the most assumed reason is that it was a means by which men could subjugate their female companions.

It has also occurred to me that perhaps it was a means of avoiding orgasm. Maybe at some stage they discovered that things got more harmonious when the women were surgically deprived of their sensitive areas.

We will never know either way, unless someone has recorded it somewhere. Perhaps Marnia in her exhaustive research has come across something. Maybe they couldn't quite master the "Sacrament of the Bedchamber" so they got the scalpel out instead.

Either way please don't let it be thought that I am a proponent of the procedure in either man or women.

For some reason I was circumcised as an infant but I have never found it in me to consider that I was gravely injured by the procedure. It was what my parents and society considered prudent at that time and it was carried out with good intentions.

I've been there. Don't do it.

After a beautiful home birth my exwife and I had our son circumcised at 7 days. We were there with the young doctor who we chose to do it. Lovingly in support of our beautiful son. Circumcision was the cultural norm for us, I had been at birth also. He was strapped to a plastic board as described and a clamp mechanism that fit over the head of the penis with a screw tightened ring which crushed its way through the foreskin was applied. The doctor was inexorably competent. his nursing staff hid in the outer rooms. we tried to comfort our baby. He screamed and squirmed. I am still retraumatised in my body as I type this, and I still feel sick and horrified when I contemplate my involvement. This is one of the things that I regret the most. it was torturing an infant. My own son who I loved and cherished. That was 27 years ago. Don't do it.

I have gone into my own body memory and felt residual pain in my penis. I have apologised to my son directly while knowing that he would not have any consious memory.(I hope) He even got a bit of his own back by running off with a girlfriend of mine and living with her for a few years. She was a bit younger than me. It's all water under the bridge now. And we are on good terms. I was incredibly enrolled in my societies stupid violence.

My second son was not circumcised.

Tears come to my eyes,and I'd like to be forgiven. but what is done, is done. And whether forgivness happens or not. There is no going back.

That's this fathers views on the subject.

Two Jews standing at a urinal.
Jew One : I see you are Jewish
Jew Two : Yes how did you know?
Jew One : You were circumcised by Rabi Rabonowich.
Jew Two : That's right. How did you know it was Rabi Rabonowich?
Jew One : Because he can't cut straight and you are peeing on my shoe.

I am not sure, do the Jewish Rabis still do it?

I was circumcised at the age of 2; my parents tell me....and I suffer no complexes about my sexual organs. Neither do most people who get circumcised. As long as you go to somebody who is competent; then its fine and has no drawbacks.

Male circumcision was possibly a way of preventing build-up under the foreskin in a hot or humid climate, and then became part of the religious culture in many parts of the world. Though obviously painful at the time, it does NOT and was not intended to reduce male enjoyment of sex later on. Unlike the misleadingly named 'female circumcision' whose SOLE purpose is to take away the most immediate means of sexual gratification from women so that they would not bother to 'stray' from their husbands when they grew up. This is not a cultural issue, it is just plain wrong to genitally mutilate. If we want a fair comparison, it is not with male curcumcision. A fair comparison is, imagine someone had cut the whole head of our penis off. That's the level of violence that is being done to baby girls.