HISTORY OF MALE CIRCUMCISION.

HISTORY OF MALE CIRCUMCISION.

It has been variously proposed that male circumcision began as a religious sacrifice, as a rite of passage marking a boy's entrance into adulthood, as a form of sympathetic magic to ensure virility, as a means of suppressing (or enhancing) sexual pleasure, as an aid to hygiene where regular bathing was impractical, as a means of marking those of lower (or higher) social status,
as a means of differentiating a circumcising group from their non-circumcising neighbors, as a means of discouraging masturbation or other socially proscribed sexual behaviors, to remove "excess" pleasure, to increase a man's attractiveness to women, as a symbolic castration, as a demonstration of one's ability to endure pain, or as a male counterpart to menstruation or the breaking of the hymen.

It has been suggested that the custom of circumcision gave advantages to
tribes that practiced it and thus led to its spread regardless of whether the people understood this.

It is possible that circumcision arose independently in different cultures for different reasons.

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  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_male_circumcision  

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