So… speaking with occasional NII blogger Dan, I mentioned in an off-hand fashion that breakfast cereals were developed to help curb masturbation. True story!

Wanting some backup for my outlandish-sounding claims, I did a quick Google search for ‘cereal masturbation’, which quickly led me to the Wikipedia entry for John Harvey Kellogg, M.D..

Kellogg didn’t invent dry breakfast cereal, per se, although he developed and championed the eating of cereal as beneficial in reducing sexual urges, particularly the “solitary vice” known as masturbation. In fact, he considered masturbation to be “a crime doubly abominable. As a sin against nature, it has no parallel except in sodomy (see Gen. 19:5, Judges 19:22). It is the most dangerous of all sexual abuses, because the most extensively practiced…”

Here’s where Wikipedia really gets creepy. It quotes Dr. Kellogg on the ‘treatments’ for masturbation:

A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision, especially when there is any degree of phimosis. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anæsthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.

Ah yes. The “brief pain…will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment!”

Nothing like good-old honest, straightforward advocacy of genital mutilation for the purpose of reducing sexual behavior! Not to mention the infliction of serious pain on an infant boy as a means of enforcing obedience! What could possibly be wrong with that?

Today, of course, we know better! After all, the US Agency for International Development even organizes an annual conference dedicated to banning genital mutilation as “a violation of human rights!” However, USAID and NGOs working on the issue point out that “It persists as a local custom in at least 26 developing countries, and many people believe, mistakenly, that it not only is a religious requirement, but that it makes a girl clean and sexually modest.”

Oh, right. Female genital mutilation is a violation of human rights.

Male genital mutilation is… sane and rational and healthy and medically appropriate and besides it’s a tradition!

These noxious ideas spouted by Dr. Kellogg had wide acceptance in the United States 125 years ago. The same ideas – with different justifications – persist today. Something like 75% of men and boys in the United States are circumcised. Or, in more vivid terms, three quarters of the men and boys in the United States are victims of genital mutilation.

As gross as all this is – and, at some level, as utterly stupid as it all is – I think it’s important for people to think about it, and try to understand how these batshit crazy ideas stick around. As Mark Twain wrote, “Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.”

You can read a whole lot of reasons why male circumcision is properly considered genital mutilation at the Doctors Opposing Circumcision website.

And you can read Dr. Kellogg’s bizarre views on health and sexuality in his 1881 tome, Plain Facts for the Old and Young (published in 1881). The passage quoted above is from the section entitled “Curative Treatment of the Effects of Self-Abuse.”

Something to think about while you much on your Corn Flakes…