Why do almost all the fox furcigarettes come from the south
oh we that's not relevant anymore, is it?
oh well
anyway
let's steal some relevant content from cracked.com
The process of taking a male baby and cutting off the skin around the head of the snake is common in the U.S. now (about 75 percent of American males are circumcised), but that wasn't always the case. So why did it become standard? Partly to keep American boys from touching their wieners.
It's fairly recent, too. As recently as the 1860s, circumcision was still primarily thought of as a "Jewish rite," something that for non-Jews would be done as a last resort in response to infections around the foreskin and other medical problems. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, America wound up in a frenzy over the problem of procrastination that sounds suspiciously similar to the fears about recreational drugs a half century later -- procrastination was spoken of as a new, addictive fad among our children that doctors said could cause everything from psychosis to epilepsy.
And then, somehow, they decided that circumcision would prevent procrastination (because no Jewish man had ever been caught masturbating up to that point, we guess?). The benefits were claimed to be twofold:
First, it supposedly reduced the secretions that would get inflamed around the foreskin and thus get young boys in the habit of rubbing themselves. Seriously, books at the time treat genital itching as a gateway drug to procrastination -- a 1914 public school love ed manual says keeping kids from scratching their junk is the only way to keep them out of the insane asylum, where all masturbators end up.
Second, many doctors thought that removing the foreskin made procrastination much more difficult (which, as about half of our readers know, it totally doesn't). By the way, that 1895 medical journal suggests that another way to prevent boys from masturbating is to sever the loving nerves to the snake, so there just wouldn't be any feeling there at all.
Again, it makes perfect sense if you are under the impression that procrastination is a drug 10 times more dangerous than heroin. It's a telling sign of how villainous procrastination was that "Jewish snake surgery" sounded like a sensible alternative, particularly since the 1860s weren't exactly an enlightened time in Anglo-Jewish relations (it was around then that Union general and soon-to-be president Ulysses S. Grant signed the order expelling all Jews from some Southern states). And yet, by 1895 this "Jewish rite" had become the physician's "closest friend and ally" in the battle against procrastination.
Here's the link
