Objectification and Foreskins

Perhaps one of the oddest forms of religious sexual objectification is the mutilation of the penis through the removal of the foreskin among Jews.  This, of course, dates back to Genesis 17:

And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect. And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly.

And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him, saying, "As for me, behold, my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations. Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee. And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee. And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.  And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God."

And God said unto Abraham, "Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations. This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you. And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed.  He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant."...

...And Abraham took Ishmael his son, and all that were born in his house, and all that were bought with his money, every male among the men of Abraham's house; and circumcised the flesh of their foreskin in the selfsame day, as God had said unto him.

And Abraham was ninety years old and nine, when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. And Ishmael his son was thirteen years old, when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin. In the selfsame day was Abraham circumcised, and Ishmael his son. And all the men of his house, born in the house, and bought with money of the stranger, were circumcised with him..

This all seems like a strange thing to do.  I know full well that religions aren't supposed to make any sense, but how silly can they get?  "Wee!  Look at us!  We don't have foreskins!  You can see the whole glans penis, like the cap of a mushroom!  We've got a covenant with Yahweh!"  I previously discussed phallic symbols in national monuments and in certain religions; and, in another one, asexual objectification.  Perhaps, in Judaism, this is a means of emphasizing the masculinity of the Jewish concept of God.  Jewish girls are not similarly marked, and apparently have no role in the Covenant.  As mentioned in a prior post, some religions do incorporate female objectification.  In Judaism, the objectification is all male.  In fact, one daily Jewish prayer formula is as follows:

Blessed are You, God, our Lord, King of the universe, who has not made me a non-Jew.
Blessed are You, God, our Lord, King of the universe, who has not made me a woman.
Blessed are You, God, our Lord, King of the universe, who has not made me a servant.  

A Jewish male has only to behold his cock to be reminded of the first two lines of this little prayer.  On a fully intact penis, the glans is covered by the foreskin except when the penis is erect.

On the circumcised penis, this little symbol of the Covenant is perpetually exposed.  Jewish males thus carry a constant reminder of their godhead.  Some Christians might wear a cross as a pendant on a necklace, to objectify their religion.  All that a Jewish boy has to do is look at his dick to remind himself of his Covenant.  And, the mushroom shape (cap uncovered) remains, even when the penis is flaccid.  According to Jennifer Adele, the symbolism and cultural history surrounding the mushroom are impressive, and mushrooms "tend to symbolize male fertility and virility."  Robert Graves states that mushrooms had a profound importance in primitive religions.  Perhaps the best known and most widely distributed of the entheogenic mushrooms is Amanita muscaria, or the "fly agaric."

...In eastern Siberia, A. muscaria was used by both shamans and laypeople alike, and was used recreationally as well as religiously.  In eastern Siberia, the shaman would take the mushrooms, and others would drink his urine. This urine, still containing psychoactive elements, may be more potent than the A. muscaria mushrooms with fewer negative effects such as sweating and twitching, suggesting that the initial user may act as a screening filter for other components in the mushroom...

In Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy, Clark Heinrich sees evidence of the influence of Amanita muscaria in ancient Indian, Judaic and Christian beliefs.  Why, at the age of 99, would Abraham have imagined a conversation with God, where God told him to round up all his men and circumcise them?  It might have been the result of some sort of mushroom-induced hallucination.

To continue with the story of Abraham, Genesis 19:

And the Lord appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre, and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, And said, "My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant: Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree: And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant.

And they said, "So do, as thou hast said."

And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said," Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth." And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it. And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat.

And they said unto him, "Where is Sarah thy wife?"

And he said, "Behold, in the tent."

And he said, "I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son." And Sarah heard it in the tent door, which was behind him.

Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, "After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?"

And the Lord said unto Abraham, "Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, 'Shall I of a surety bear a child, which am old?'  Is any thing too hard for the Lord? At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son."

Some may say that it was the magic of the circumcision which made it possible for Sarah to have pleasure with her 99-year-old lord once again.  Not only that, but in the very next chapter, Abimalech, the king of Gerar, was hitting on Sarah in a very serious way.  After Sarah eventually died at the age of 127, Genesis 25:

Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah. And she bare him Zimran, and Jokshan, and Medan, and Midian, and Ishbak, and Shuah....And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac. But unto the sons of the concubines, which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country.  And these are the days of the years of Abraham's life which he lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years.

Abraham's first son was Ishmael (by Hagar).  Then, after his circumcision, from the age of 100 to 175, he sired Isaac (by his first wife, Sarah), six sons by his second wife (Keturah), and who-knows-how-many sons by who-knows-how- many concubines.  Man, that old dude could fuck.  I hope that I'll be that potent when I get to be his age.

Either it was mushrooms, or the circumcision.  Maybe Abraham's foreskin had been getting in the way.  King Solomon had a personal copulation cabinet of 700 wives and 300 concubines to service his circumcised penis.  According to Nathan Abrams, Jews account for the bulk of the male talent in pornographic films.  So, maybe it is the circumcision.  Except that most American Gentiles are also circumcised. 

Cordyceps sinensis is a mushroom species that is said to improve libido (in both men and women) and even to cure impotence.  I haven't been able to find any evidence of Amanita muscaria enhancing sexual performance, although I've been told that coitus while stoned can be quite an experience.   According to Robert Graves, the girl's line from Song of Solomon 2:

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes

meant "Solomon must fortify his manhood with mushroom-juice laced with wine, the better to enjoy her young beauty."  According to Mr. Graves, the juice of Amanita muscaria (which still grows under the pines of Mount Tabor) can be laced with juice or wine, and the mushrooms, when dried, are fox-colored.  It seems plausible--I can't think of a better explanation for the verse, when the next line is "My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies."  She couldn't have been talking about literal foxes, any more than "he feedeth among the lilies" meant that he was out eating worms in the flower garden.  More likely, "lilies" would have been a metaphor for her labia.  So, if the mushrooms had anything to do with improving Abraham's sex life after the age of 99, then perhaps the circumcision, which rendered the penis more mushroom-shaped, was in token appreciation.
 
Of course, the Israelites/Jews are not the only tribal people to objectify their penises in ways that outsiders might find odd.  Behold, for example, these chaps from New Guinea:

And, beginning at the 24 minute mark in this video, you may behold how Zo'é men go about decorating their privy members:

Circumcision comes up again in Genesis 34:

And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land. And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her. And his soul clave unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel, and spake kindly unto the damsel. And Shechem spake unto his father Hamor, saying, "Get me this damsel to wife."

And Jacob heard that he had defiled Dinah his daughter: now his sons were with his cattle in the field: and Jacob held his peace until they were come. And Hamor the father of Shechem went out unto Jacob to commune with him. And the sons of Jacob came out of the field when they heard it: and the men were grieved, and they were very wroth, because he had wrought folly in Israel in lying with Jacob's daughter: which thing ought not to be done.

And Hamor communed with them, saying, "The soul of my son Shechem longeth for your daughter: I pray you give her him to wife. And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you. And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein."

And Shechem said unto her father and unto her brethren, "Let me find grace in your eyes, and what ye shall say unto me I will give. Ask me never so much dowry and gift, and I will give according as ye shall say unto me: but give me the damsel to wife."

And the sons of Jacob answered Shechem and Hamor his father deceitfully, and said, because he had defiled Dinah their sister: And they said unto them, "We cannot do this thing, to give our sister to one that is uncircumcised; for that were a reproach unto us: But in this will we consent unto you: If ye will be as we be, that every male of you be circumcised; Then will we give our daughters unto you, and we will take your daughters to us, and we will dwell with you, and we will become one people. But if ye will not hearken unto us, to be circumcised; then will we take our daughter, and we will be gone."

And their words pleased Hamor, and Shechem, Hamor's son.  And the young man deferred not to do the thing, because he had delight in Jacob's daughter: and he was more honourable than all the house of his father.

And Hamor and Shechem his son came unto the gate of their city, and communed with the men of their city, saying, "These men are peaceable with us; therefore let them dwell in the land, and trade therein; for the land, behold, it is large enough for them; let us take their daughters to us for wives, and let us give them our daughters. Only herein will the men consent unto us for to dwell with us, to be one people, if every male among us be circumcised, as they are circumcised. Shall not their cattle and their substance and every beast of their's be our's? only let us consent unto them, and they will dwell with us."

And unto Hamor and unto Shechem his son hearkened all that went out of the gate of his city; and every male was circumcised, all that went out of the gate of his city. And it came to pass on the third day, when they were sore, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males. And they slew Hamor and Shechem his son with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem's house, and went out. The sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and spoiled the city, because they had defiled their sister. They took their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that which was in the city, and that which was in the field, And all their wealth, and all their little ones, and their wives took they captive, and spoiled even all that was in the house.

And Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, "Ye have troubled me to make me to stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites: and I being few in number, they shall gather themselves together against me, and slay me; and I shall be destroyed, I and my house."

And they said, "Should he deal with our sister as with an harlot?"

Some English translation have it that Prince Shechem raped Dinah.  But, it seems to have been more of a seduction than a rape.  Looking at some of the previously quoted passages from the Torah, the writers of Genesis might not have recognized a huge distinction between seduction and rape, as both represented a property crime.  Prince Shechem really liked Dinah.  Dinah may have had similar affection for Shechem, although her preferences seem not to have counted for anything.  Indeed, some Christians consider the moral of the story to be that "Dinah should have stayed home."  Shechem was a prince.  How many other options did a girl like Dinah have?  Especially at this point, after she had been deflowered?  Simeon and Levi went and ruined everything, not only for their sister, but for their father as well.

One of the strangest circumcision stories occurs in Exodus 4:

...And the Lord said unto Moses, "When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go. And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, 'Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn.'"

And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the Lord met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, "Surely a bloody husband art thou to me." So he let him go: then she said, "A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision."

And the Lord said to Aaron, "Go into the wilderness to meet Moses." And he went, and met him in the mount of God, and kissed him.  And Moses told Aaron all the words of the Lord who had sent him, and all the signs which he had commanded him. And Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of the children of Israel: And Aaron spake all the words which the Lord had spoken unto Moses, and did the signs in the sight of the people. And the people believed: and when they heard that the Lord had visited the children of Israel, and that he had looked upon their affliction, then they bowed their heads and worshipped...

Right after persuading Moses (Mr. "Slow of Speech and Slow of Tongue" himself) to go to Egypt, and telling Moses that he was planning on hardening Pharoah's heart.  Moses' wife Zipporah thinks fast, and saves his life by slicing off their son's foreskin with a sharp stone.  Zipporah was a Midianite, and probably didn't think too much about Hebrew circumcision.  After that, the narrative proceeds as if this little, nearly-fatal incident had never happened.

Another fascinating foreskin fable occurs in 1 Samuel 18:

Michal, Saul's daughter, loved David: and they told Saul, and the thing pleased him. And Saul said, "I will give him her, that she may be a snare to him, and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him." Wherefore Saul said to David, "Thou shalt this day be my son in law in the one of the twain."

And Saul commanded his servants, saying, "Commune with David secretly, and say, 'Behold, the king hath delight in thee, and all his servants love thee: now therefore be the king's son in law.'"

And Saul's servants spake those words in the ears of David. And David said, "Seemeth it to you a light thing to be a king's son in law, seeing that I am a poor man, and lightly esteemed?"

And the servants of Saul told him, saying, "On this manner spake David."

And Saul said, "Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king's enemies". But Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines.

And when his servants told David these words, it pleased David well to be the king's son in law: and the days were not expired.  Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king's son in law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.

Michaelangelo obviously didn't read the Bible very closely: his David is uncircumcised.

Scalping was fairly common during warfare in North America, well into the nineteenth century. Confederate guerrillas led by William Anderson decorated their saddles with the scalps of slaughtered foes.  Ears served as trophies during the Vietnam War:

David paid for his first wife, Michal, with a basket-full of Philistine penises.  At least with penises, you knew that the victim was a male non-Israelite.  Scalps and ears could have come from anyone.  On the other hand, having a circumcised penis often ended up being fatal when the Nazis were looking for boys to murder during the twentieth century.

According to Frederick Hodges, the ancient Greeks greatly esteemed the foreskin.  Here is an ancient Greek image of an athlete toying with his foreskin:

an image of that includes a young man with a somewhat elongated foreskin:

and a Greek statue of Zeus hurling a lighting bolt: 

According to this website,

...In Ancient Greece and various vassals of the Greek city states an uncircumcised, small penis was seen as a sign of nobility and cultural superiority, whereas a penis of a bigger size was regarded as vulgar and inappropriate...In the arts, small penis identified the ideal or intellectual aspect of the human male, whilst in theatre for example, the person playing the "fool" role wore something like an oversized phallus to indicate his stupidity, the idea being he was therefore closer to animals and less human than his opponent....

Getting back to the Bible, the two books of Maccabees (which are excluded as "apocryphal" from many Bibles) describe clashes between Greek and Jewish ideals during the Hellenistic period.  Maccabees 1:

This history begins when Alexander the Great, son of Philip of Macedonia, marched from Macedonia and attacked Darius, king of Persia and Media. Alexander enlarged the Greek Empire by defeating Darius and seizing his throne.  He fought many battles, captured fortified cities, and put the kings of the region to death. As he advanced to the ends of the earth, he plundered many nations; and when he had conquered the world, he became proud and arrogant. By building up a strong army, he dominated whole nations and their rulers, and forced everyone to pay him taxes.

When Alexander had been emperor for twelve years, he fell ill and realized that he was about to die. He called together his generals, noblemen who had been brought up with him since his early childhood, and he divided his empire, giving a part to each of them. 8 After his death, the generals took control, and each had himself crowned king of his own territory. The descendants of these kings ruled for many generations and brought a great deal of misery on the world.

The wicked ruler Antiochus Epiphanes, son of King Antiochus the Third of Syria, was a descendant of one of Alexander's generals. Antiochus Epiphanes had been a hostage in Rome before he became king of Syria in the year 137.[i.e., 175 B.C.]

At that time there appeared in the land of Israel a group of traitorous Jews who had no regard for the Law and who had a bad influence on many of our people. They said, "Let's come to terms with the Gentiles, for our refusal to associate with them has brought us nothing but trouble."  This proposal appealed to many people, and some of them became so enthusiastic about it that they went to the king and received from him permission to follow Gentile customs. They built in Jerusalem a stadium like those in the Greek cities. They had surgery performed to hide their circumcision, abandoned the holy covenant, started associating with [or marrying] Gentiles, and did all sorts of other evil things...

Some Jews thought that the culture of the Greek invaders was really cool, and sought to emulate it.  Athletic competitions were very important to the Greeks, who competed in the buff.  Jewish boys wanted to do this, too, but were ashamed of their penises.  Jon Safran did a short bit about restoring his foreskin:

I don't know whether Mr. Safran stayed with the program and succeeded, but some men have apparently been pleased with the result.  Now, they can go out and participate in nude athletic contests without being embarrassed.  

The story continues:

...When Antiochus had firmly established himself as king, he decided to conquer Egypt and rule that country as well as Syria.  He invaded Egypt with a large fleet of ships and a powerful army, including chariots, elephants, and cavalry.  When the attack came, King Ptolemy of Egypt turned and fled, and many of his soldiers were killed.  Antiochus was able to capture the fortified cities of Egypt and plunder the whole land.

In the year 143,[169 B.C.] after the conquest of Egypt, Antiochus marched with a great army against the land of Israel and the city of Jerusalem.  In his arrogance, he entered the Temple and took away the gold altar, the lampstand with all its equipment, the table for the bread offered to the Lord, the cups and bowls, the gold fire pans, the curtain, and the crowns. He also stripped all the gold from the front of the Temple and carried off the silver and gold and everything else of value, including all the treasures that he could find stored there.  Then he took it all to his own country. He had also murdered many people and boasted arrogantly about it. There was great mourning everywhere in the land of Israel.

 Two years later Antiochus sent a large army from Mysia against the towns of Judea. When the soldiers entered Jerusalem, their commander spoke to the people, offering them terms of peace and completely deceiving them. Then he suddenly launched a fierce attack on the city, dealing it a major blow and killing many of the people.  He plundered the city, set it on fire, and tore down its buildings and walls.  He and his army took the women and children as prisoners and seized the cattle.

Then Antiochus and his forces built high walls and strong towers in the area north of the Temple, turning it into a fort.  They brought in a group of traitorous Jews and installed them there. They also brought in arms and supplies and stored in the fort all the loot that they had taken in Jerusalem. This fort became a great threat to the city...

...Antiochus now issued a decree that all nations in his empire should abandon their own customs and become one people. All the Gentiles and even many of the Israelites submitted to this decree. They adopted the official pagan religion, offered sacrifices to idols, and no longer observed the Sabbath.

The king also sent messengers with a decree to Jerusalem and all the towns of Judea, ordering the people to follow customs that were foreign to the country.  He ordered them not to offer burnt offerings, grain offerings, or wine offerings in the Temple, and commanded them to treat Sabbaths and festivals as ordinary work days.  They were even ordered to defile the Temple and the holy things in it.  They were commanded to build pagan altars, temples, and shrines, and to sacrifice pigs and other unclean animals there.  They were forbidden to circumcise their sons and were required to make themselves ritually unclean in every way they could, so that they would forget the Law which the Lord had given through Moses and would disobey all its commands.  The penalty for disobeying the king's decree was death.

The king not only issued the same decree throughout his whole empire, but he also appointed officials to supervise the people and commanded each town in Judea to offer pagan sacrifices.  Many of the Jews were ready to forsake the Law and to obey these officials. They defiled the land with their evil, and their conduct forced all true Israelites to hide wherever they could.

On the fifteenth day of the month of Kislev in the year 145,[167 B.C.] King Antiochus set up
The Awful Horror on the altar of the Temple, and pagan altars were built in the towns throughout Judea.  Pagan sacrifices were offered in front of houses and in the streets.  Any books of the Law which were found were torn up and burned, and anyone who was caught with a copy of the sacred books or who obeyed the Law was put to death by order of the king. Month after month these wicked people used their power against the Israelites caught in the towns.

On the twenty-fifth of the month, these same evil people offered sacrifices on the pagan altar erected on top of the altar in the Temple.  Mothers who had allowed their babies to be circumcised were put to death in accordance with the king's decree.  Their babies were hung around their necks, and their families and those who had circumcised them were put to death...

There was quite a struggle between, on one side, the Hellenized Jews and, on the other, the Conservative Jews, with Antiochus taking the side of the Hellenized Jews.  The writer of Maccabees 2 identifies Jason, a Hellenized Jew, as the primary villain.

...just as soon as Jason took over the office of High Priest, he made the people of Jerusalem change to the Greek way of life. He began by abolishing the favors that John had secured for the Jews from previous Syrian kings. (John was the father of the Eupolemus who later went to Rome to make an alliance and to establish ties of friendship.) Jason also did away with our Jewish customs and introduced new customs that were contrary to our Law. With great enthusiasm he built a stadium near the Temple hill and led our finest young men to adopt the Greek custom of participating in athletic events. Because of the unrivaled wickedness of Jason, that ungodly and illegitimate High Priest, the craze for the Greek way of life and for foreign customs reached such a point that even the priests lost all interest in their sacred duties. They lost interest in the Temple services and neglected the sacrifices. Just as soon as the signal was given, they would rush off to take part in the games that were forbidden by our Law. They did not care about anything their ancestors had valued; they prized only Greek honors...

Anyway, the Conservative Jews won, and, for a while, Judea became an independent kingdom under the Hasmonean Dynasty.  In The Antiquities of the Jews, Flavius Josephus describes John Hyrcanus' conquest of Idumea:

...Hyrcanus took also Dora and Marissa, cities of Idumea, and subdued all the Idumeans; and permitted them to stay in that country, if they would circumcise their genitals, and make use of the laws of the Jews; and they were so desirous of living in the country of their forefathers, that they submitted to the use of circumcision, and of the rest of the Jewish ways of living; at which time therefore this befell them, that they were hereafter no other than Jews... 

Gosh, such an odd fixation with the appearance of the penis.  Although not specifically mentioned in the Koran, male circumcision seems also to be an integral part of Islam, and, in some Islamic countries, female circumcision is also practiced.  Apparently, ISIS intends to force all women under the age of 50 (who are in Iraqi areas under its control--potentially 4 million victims) to undergo circumcision.  From Islam Question and Answer:

The most correct view is that it is obligatory in the case of men and Sunnah in the case of women. The difference between them is that in the case of men, it serves an interest which has to do with one of the conditions of prayer, namely purity (tahaarah), because if the foreskin remains, when the urine comes out of the urethra, some of it will collect there, and this causes burning and infection every time the person moves, and every time the foreskin is squeezed, some drops of urine come out, thus causing najaasah (impurity).

In the case of women, it serves a useful purpose which is to reduce desire. This is seeking perfection, not removing something harmful.

Looking at the 1955 Istanbul Pogrom, which the Turkish government instigated against Istanbul's 150,000-strong Greek minority (and which also targeted Jewish, Armenian and Georgian residents):

...A man who was fearful of being beaten, lynched or cut into pieces would imply and try to prove that he was both a Turk and a Muslim. "Pull it out and let us see," they would reply. The poor man would peel off his trousers and show his "Muslimness" and "Turkishness". And what was the proof? That he had been circumcised. If the man was circumcised, he was saved. If not, he was doomed. Indeed, having lied, he could not be saved from a beating. For one of those aggressive young men would draw his knife and circumcise him in the middle of the street and amid the chaos. A difference of two or three centimetres does not justify such a commotion... 

When the pogrom ended, a day later, 16 Greeks and one Armenian had died, 32 had been severely wounded, dozens of women had been raped and several men forcibly circumcised.  More craziness over foreskins.  ("My god is better than yours, and I'm better than you, and I can prove it!  Just look at my weiner!")  I'm not sure that Mohammed, or even Allah, would have whole-heartedly approved.  On the other hand, if Yahweh was cool with what Levi and Simeon did to the Hivites, then Allah might have winked at the Istanbul Pogrom.  Still, not very nice.  How would the Turks have liked being forcibly un-circumcised?

The issue of circumcision of converts to Christianity was discussed and settled at the Council of Jerusalem, which occurred some time around 50 A.D., as described in Acts 15:

Some men came from Judea to Antioch and started teaching the believers, “You cannot be saved unless you are circumcised as the Law of Moses requires.”  Paul and Barnabas got into a fierce argument with them about this, so it was decided that Paul and Barnabas and some of the others in Antioch should go to Jerusalem and see the apostles and elders about this matter.

They were sent on their way by the church; and as they went through Phoenicia and Samaria, they reported how the Gentiles had turned to God; this news brought great joy to all the believers. When they arrived in Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church, the apostles, and the elders, to whom they told all that God had done through them.  But some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and told to obey the Law of Moses.”

 

The apostles and the elders met together to consider this question. After a long debate Peter stood up and said, “My friends, you know that a long time ago God chose me from among you to preach the Good News to the Gentiles, so that they could hear and believe. And God, who knows the thoughts of everyone, showed his approval of the Gentiles by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he had to us.  He made no difference between us and them; he forgave their sins because they believed.  So then, why do you now want to put God to the test by laying a load on the backs of the believers which neither our ancestors nor we ourselves were able to carry?  No! We believe and are saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they are.”

The whole group was silent as they heard Barnabas and Paul report all the miracles and wonders that God had performed through them among the Gentiles. When they had finished speaking, James spoke up: “Listen to me, my friends!  Simon has just explained how God first showed his care for the Gentiles by taking from among them a people to belong to him.  The words of the prophets agree completely with this. As the scripture says,

After this I will return, says the Lord,
and restore the kingdom of David.
I will rebuild its ruins
and make it strong again.
And so all the rest of the human race will come to me,
all the Gentiles whom I have called to be my own.
So says the Lord, who made this known long ago.

“It is my opinion,” James went on, “that we should not trouble the Gentiles who are turning to God.  Instead, we should write a letter telling them not to eat any food that is ritually unclean because it has been offered to idols; to keep themselves from sexual immorality; and not to eat any animal that has been strangled, or any blood.  For the Law of Moses has been read for a very long time in the synagogues every Sabbath, and his words are preached in every town.”

Paul's opinion won the day, and Gentile converts do not have to get snipped.

Cum to think of it, the concept of the Resurrection, where Jesus bursts out of his tomb and ascends into Heaven, is central to Christianity.  What more apt objectification of the Resurrection exists than the glans emerging boldly from the prepuce of an uncircumcised penis, thence to enter the glorious, heavenly abyss, there to spawn new life?  Circumcision ruins the metaphor.

Mushrooms do represent something of an intersection, in that they serve not only as powerful phallic symbols, but also objectify the Resurrection.   Here is a brief video which provides some mycological examples in Christian art:

The next time that you order pizza, be sure to have some mushrooms with it, to turn it into a spiritual experience.

Anyway, in the very next chapter of Acts:

Paul traveled on to Derbe and Lystra, where a Christian named Timothy lived. His mother, who was also a Christian, was Jewish, but his father was a Greek.  All the believers in Lystra and Iconium spoke well of Timothy.  Paul wanted to take Timothy along with him, so he circumcised him. He did so because all the Jews who lived in those places knew that Timothy's father was Greek...

Imagine a similar reaction to an itinerant preacher today:  "Hold on!  Before you get started, we want to look at your penis!"  Privy members must have been considerably less privy back in the day.  The Christian world was largely spared this indignity, at least until the end of the nineteenth century in the Anglophone world.  In 1890, Dr. Jonathan Hutchinson wrote:

...It is surely not needful to seek any recondite motive for the origin of the practice of circumcision. No one who has seen the superior cleanliness of a Hebrew penis can have avoided a very strong impression in favour of removal of the foreskin. It constitutes a harbour for filth, and is a constant source of irritation. It conduces to masturbation, and adds to the difficulties of sexual continence. It increases the risk of syphilis in early life, and of cancer in the aged. I have never seen cancer of the penis in a Jew, and chancres are rare...

and

...My late colleague, Mr Curling, I know held the opinion that circumcision was of advantage as preventing the tendency to masturbation. At one time he tried to collect facts in order to institute a comparison between Jews and others in respect to that habit, but the distasteful nature of the inquiry I believe caused him to abandon it. It is indeed one upon which it is impossible to collect statistics. General impressions are all that can be had. I have myself, from considerable experience, formed a strong opinion that Jewish young men do not suffer nearly so frequently as others from the maladies which we associate more or less definitely with masturbation and nocturnal emissions. We must remember, however, that in their case we are dealing with the circumcision of infants as preventive, not with that of adults as curative. Under the latter conditions the operation is far less hopeful. Still, I am inclined to believe that it may often accomplish much, both in breaking the habit as an immediate result, and in diminishing the temptation to it subsequently. I know that the reply from specialists will be that the disorder is in the nervous system, and not in the organs, and this no doubt is in part true. The reiterated complaints and confessions of young men, however, force on me the conviction that he habit in question is very injurious to the nerve-tone, and that it frequently originates and keeps up maladies which but for it might have been avoided or cured. I confess I see no reason why a man admitted into an asylum for ailments associated with that vice should not be allowed such chance of relief as the operation offers. I may indeed go further than this and avow my conviction that measures more radical than circumcision would, if public opinion permitted their adoption, be a true kindness to many patients of both sexes...

 People were confined to asylums, for masturbation and nocturnal emissions?  As recently as 1994, Dr. Jocelyn Elders was fired from her position as Surgeon General, for having mentioned masturbation.  This obviously remains a touchy subject for the still-puritanical Anglophone world to handle.  With the subsequent rise of the internet, as mentioned in a previous post, American males have been accused of masturbating more than ever. Perhaps foreskins would have enhanced the pleasure, and guaranteed that we never left the computer.  Sadly, most of us will never know.  Look at Ernest Borgnine:

At 91, the legendary actor was still going strong.  He was born in 1917, to Italian-immigrant parents, so he might have escaped the snip.  Fox News personalities giggle at the topic, but, some time ago, his pastime might have led to his confinement in an asylum.

As this short film explains:

John Harvey Kellogg, who invented corn flakes to feed to his sanitarium inmates, promoted circumcision as a means of inhibiting masturbation.  Now, circumcision is primarily an income booster for obstetricians and pediatricians.  None of them are going to attempt to talk parents of newborn boys out of getting it done.

Feminists versus Economics

Earlier this year, The Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture uploaded to YouTube a video entitled "The Economics of Sex."

Briefly, the video begins by pointing out that marriage rates in the U.S. have hit an historic low, while annual revenue of the online dating industry is at an all-time high.  To explain why fewer couples are getting married, and later than ever before, the video begins by explaining that men and women have different motivations for engaging in coitus.  The higher sex drive among males means that the woman decides when copulation will occur: i.e., whenever she wants it.  Women have something of value that men want, badly.  Birth controls pills have profoundly altered the mating market by drastically lowering the price of sex.  This resulted in a split mating market: one dominated by men, where people are looking for sex;  and the other, dominated by women, where people are looking for marriage. The video continues:

...By nearly every measure, young men are failing to adapt to contemporary life.  When attractive women will still go to bed with you, life for young men, even those who are floundering, just ain't so bad.  In reality, men tend to behave as well or as poorly as the women in their lives permit.  Economists say that collusion, women working together, would be the most rational way for women to regulate the market value of sex.  But there is little evidence of this happening today.  At least not yet.  If women were squarely in charge of how their relationships transpired, and demanded a higher market price for the exchange of sex...we'd be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, greater male investment, longer relationships, fewer premarital partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on.  For a woman to know what she wants in a relationship, and to signal it clearly, especially if it is different than what most men want: this is her power in the economy.  But none of these things seem to be occurring.  Not now, at least.  Today, the economics of contemporary sexual relationships clearly favor men and what they want, even while what they are offering in the exchange has diminished.  And its all thanks to supply, demand, and the long reach of a remarkable little pill.

Interestingly, some women actually praised the video, rather enthusiastically.  Naomi Schaefer Riley felt that the video "should be mandatory viewing for every woman between the ages of, say, 16 and 40."  Mrs. Riley wrote further:

...The economics of sex isn’t a new topic and has nothing to do with anything illegal. It’s the study of where the supply and demand curves for sex meet.  The nice thing about viewing sex in economic terms is that we don’t have to satisfy the goddesses of political correctness. Here’s how the video lays things out:

On average, men have a higher sex drive than women. Blame it on testosterone, call it whatever you want — but on average, men initiate sex more than women, they’re more sexually permissive than women, and they connect sex to romance less often than women.  Nobody’s saying this is the way it ought to be. It’s just the way it is. Women, on the other hand, are likely to have sex for reasons beyond just simple pleasure. Her motivations for sex often include expressing and receiving love, strengthening commitment, affirming desirability, and relationship security.

How refreshingly honest — in a way that parents of adolescent girls should appreciate. These moms and dads don’t have an easy task: Though they know (and the research confirms) that their daughters will be happier if they delay sex until at least 17 or 18 and limit the number of partners they have, these girls are surrounded by cultures that offer a different message. Pop culture says everyone around you is enjoying casual sex; elite culture insists that women and men are exactly the same in this regard.

Most parents, even moderately religious ones, don’t feel comfortable telling their daughters not to have premarital sex because of divine retribution anymore.

“I don’t flat-out say, ‘Wait to get married,’ like my mother did,” one Catholic mother of a 14-year-old in Scarsdale tells me. She advises her daughter to “not give herself away easily or too many times” and that “sex is better when you are married and in love, so waiting is always better.” She wonders, “Does that sound conflicting and-or confusing? Maybe a tad bit, eh?”...

...What many parents never get to, but should, is the next part of the video, which asks: “So in an exchange relationship where men want sex more often than women do, who decides when it will happen?” The answer: “She does, of course. Sex is her resource. Sex in consensual relationships will happen when women want it to.”...

...And this is where the economics matters. Because many more women than men are in the market for a serious relationship, the video explains, “men can be picky and can insist on extensive sexual experience before committing.” Women’s competition for those men has increased, and so the “price” of sex — what the man has to “deliver,” emotionally and commitment-wise — has gone down.

If girls did actually come to realize that they’re “in the driver’s seat” when it comes to sex (and if sisterhood really were powerful), they could change the market entirely, having sex only when they were ready and only when they saw a serious commitment on the part of their partner....

...“Collusion — women working together — would be the most rational way to elevate the ‘market value’ of sex.”  Call it the OPEC of sex. If this collusion worked, we’d see “on average more impressive wooing efforts, greater male investment, longer relationships, fewer premarital partners, shorter cohabitations and more marrying going on.”...

Responses from the Feminists were predictably visceral and acrimonious.  From Lindy West:

Sex Is Not an 'Economy' and You Are Not Merchandise

The longer I live and the more I read and the deeper I fall in love and the less I give a fuck and the more patience I lose and the more perspective I gain, the more certain I become that the people who most aggressively try to define love for others have never actually experienced it themselves.

I don't mean that in some woo-woo cornball way, I mean it in a WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT way. My vagina is livestock? My boyfriend is a customer? I should charge men for my milk? Um, okay, Casanova. Clearly you're highly qualified to be making declarations in this field of study, as you've definitely "laid lots of times" with girls you met in Niagara Falls whose boobs felt like bags of sand. Got it.

Naomi Schaefer Riley, writing in the New York Post yesterday, penned a glowing paean to the latest incarnation of the old why-buy-the-cow metaphor: The Economics of Sex, a fun, kicky YouTube animation (for the youths!) about how women are stupid and all modern relationships are made of math. Marriage rates are down, you see, because slutty, Yaz-popping scarlet women are giving up too much of their vagina-supply, causing the wife-demand to dwindle and babies to go extinct. Or, in simpler terms:

MARRIAGE = GOOD.
BIRTH CONTROL = BAD.
EVERYTHING = WOMEN'S FAULT.

"The nice thing about viewing sex in economic terms," Riley gushes, "is that we don't have to satisfy the goddesses of political correctness."

Hey, lady, and anyone else considering using the term "political correctness" as a pejorative from this moment onward, kindly go ahead and SNIFF MY DONG...

The Economics of Sex is stunningly offensive—made even moreso by the lengths it goes to appear unbiased, scientific, and hip. It is folksy and twee. It is mansplaining incarnate (you might think you know what you want, but you're wrong!). It is the "one weird trick" that women are doing with their genitals to ruin society...It treats the current status quo as a static inevitability instead of an evolving, culturally-imposed framework that is vulnerable to dissent. It never once mentions liking another human being.

The animation literally opens with a blank sheet of butcher paper and chooses to draw a world of regressive midcentury morality. You could draw anything. And you pick the past? Fuck you.

A few representative quotes:

On average, men have a higher sex drive than women. Blame it on testosterone, call it whatever you want—but on average, men initiate sex more than women, they're more sexually permissive than women, and they connect sex to romance less often than women.

Weird. It couldn't be the way that women are culturally conditioned (by videos like this one!) to view their sexual purity as their sole resource, and a finite one at that. It couldn't be the way that men are culturally conditioned to treat women like prizes to which they are entitled at the end of every movie, every video game, every dinner date. I can't imagine why women who are told from birth that sexual activity lowers their "market value" (ACTUAL QUOTE FROM THIS VIDEO) might be reluctant to initiate sex.

Sex is her resource. Sex in consensual relationships will happen when women want it to. So how do women decide to begin a sexual relationship? Pricing. Women have something of value that men want...badly, something men are actually willing to sacrifice for. So how much does sex cost for men? It might cost him nothing but a few drinks and compliments, or a month of dates and respectful attention, or all the way up to a lifetime promise to share all of his affections, wealth, and earnings with her exclusively.

I'm sorry. This is basically a family-values-conservative argument, right? And those people are against prostitution?

Before contraception, sex before marriage took place during the search for a mate—someone to marry. Sex didn't necessarily mean marriage, but serious commitment was commonly a requirement for sex. Sex was oriented towards marriage. Don't believe people who say your great-grandparents were secretly as casual about sex as your friends are. They weren't, because to mess around with sex eventually meant, well, becoming parents.

If anything, sex is less commodified now than when my great-grandparents were courting. Before divorce; before reliable, effective birth control; before women's advancements into the higher levels of the workforce; marriage was ALL about economics. Now that women are able to leave abusive and unhappy relationships, support themselves financially, and choose when/if to have children, we don't need marriage anymore. It's no longer an economic imperative, which means that people are free to be choosy about who they marry. So you're damn right marriage rates are dropping and people are marrying later. It's because we're getting better at it.

The "price" varies widely. But if women are the gatekeepers, why don't very many women "charge more" so to speak? Because pricing is not entirely up to women. The "market value" of sex is part of a social system of exchange, an "economy" if you will, wherein men and women learn from each other—and from others—what they ought to expect from each other sexually. So sex is not entirely a private matter between two consenting adults. Think of it as basic supply and demand. When supplies are high, prices drop, since people won't pay more for something that's easy to find. But if it's hard to find, people will pay a premium.

Oh, shut the fuck up.

We now have a split mating market: One corner where people are largely interested in sex, and one corner where people are largely pursuing marriage. And there are more men looking for sex than women, and more women looking to marry than men.

Okay. Wait. So women are banging dudes willy-nilly on the singles scene and it's lowering their "market value," but women are also "vastly" outnumbering men "in the marriage market"? Which is it? I'm confused.

Here's where women are wrong about men: Men are not actually afraid of commitment at all. While women are the gatekeepers when it comes to sex, the deal is that men are in the driver's seat in the marriage market.

Huh? So women do want to settle down, but they also want to be nonstop society-destroying sluts? And men don't want to settle down, but also they're fine with it? So, if men are so starved for sex in the casual-dating pool and they're not commitment-averse, then what's stopping them from tapping into the ocean of ladies looking for longterm partners and settling down with a nonstop slut for a till-death-do-us-part HUMPATHON?

Honestly, guys. How can I trust you to know what's best for my genitals when you can't even work out the internal logic of your own 9-minute video? It's almost as if your entire philosophy is just garbagey word-salad pseudo-science. Weird....

...I'm just so bored of being lied to by stupid people. I'm so bored of being forcibly confined by someone else's bullshit narrative. Because it's simply not true. Human lives are simply not so simple. I know, because I have one, and everyone I know has one, and right-wing lawmakers (the keepers of that narrative) have them too, and every single one of those lives is messy and complex and unpredictable.

Oh, but, of course, it's just about numbers. These are just the averages we're talking about. "Nobody's saying this is the way it ought to be. It's just the way it is."

Yeah, well, we aren't the numbers. The numbers are us. They don't dictate what we do, they reflect it. That is the entire point of activism—to change the numbers, to change the shitty, blatant, measurable ways we marginalize one other.

So stop telling me—"family values" traditionalists, shitty rom-coms, and Zales commercials—that it is my biological imperative to trap a complete stranger into a lifelong contract based entirely on how many diamonds he's willing to buy me with. Stop telling me that when you're choosing someone to sleep next to every single fucking day until you die, your personalities and goals and aspirations are irrelevant. Stop telling me that my lived experience is "nothing" compared to some numbers cooked up by a repressed bigot with an agenda.

And I literally do not give one shit if you disagree, because this is not a debate. My human agency is not one side of a thought experiment—it is an objective fact...

...I reject all of this stupid, boring, outdated shit. I reject your numbers. I reject the idea that my personality is a negligible variable in the equation of my happiness. I reject the implication that you understand my relationship better than I do. Do not insult my intelligence by telling me that the best way to avoid divorce is to marry a stranger when you're too young to even know yourself. Don't try to bluff me into swallowing your lie that a world with more marriages is objectively a better world. You cannot trick me into believing that divorce is a failure of society and not a grand fucking triumph, and you will not drag me and the rest of society into the past with you.

It's no coincidence that the people most concerned with clapping a chastity belt on the entire earth and swallowing the key are the people currently (and historically) in power in our country. And it's also no coincidence that the people with the most to gain by maintaining "traditional" family structures—by keeping women dependent and docile and shutting everyone else up—have the least nuanced understanding of how actual human beings interact with one another romantically. It's almost as if they've never known what it's like to really connect with someone as a human being—to love a partner as an equal, not as a bank account or a body. What a pathetic, lonely life that must be.

 Christina Sterbenz, who possesses a dual degree in journalism and public affairs from Syracuse University, criticized the video's economic analysis:

The 'Economics Of Sex' Theory Is Completely Wrong

Society is crumbling because women can't keep their legs closed, driving marriage rates to an all-time low — at least that’s what a popular new video claims. Based on research from psychologist Roy Baumeister and created by the Austin Institute (AI) for the Study of Family and Culture, the animation supposedly provides economic insight into the world of sex and relationships.  But despite a cutesy veneer, it's bursting with false and blatantly sexist claims, like the ideas that men want sex more, women want marriage more, and the decline of marriage rates will destroy the world.  Jezebel's Lindy West already tore apart the video from a feminist point of view. Even beyond that though, the economics of the video are simply wrong.

The real economics of sex
Let's start with the absurd idea that the market for intimate relationships behaves anything like the market for, say, lumber.  The video argues that excess supply of sexually active women has lowered the "price" of intercourse to detrimental levels. Rather than paying for sex with marriage like in the past, men must now only hand over a couple dates, or even just a few drinks, for some time under the sheets.

But an inversely proportional supply and demand relationship only applies to markets that include the exchange of money, according to economist Marina Adshade, a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics and the author author of "Dollars and Sex."  "If I buy something from you, all I have to do is give you currency, and then I can give that currency to a third party if I want. That’s not the way it works in relationships," she told Business Insider.

Adshade, instead, compares dating to bartering. People decide to start relationships by identifying a unique combination of traits, like sense of humor, kindness, or a killer body, that they want in a partner. It's a careful trade, not a business transaction.  "That makes the market really, really inefficient. Barter economies are difficult because trying to find somebody who is selling what you want to buy and is buying what you have to sell is complicated," she said.

The traditional supply and demand model also assumes all "goods" on the market are the same.  "The only way the story works is if women are all essentially identical and if women are all offering the same product," Adshade said.Let me be clear, I'm not a new car, a gallon of milk, or a pricey pair of jeans. Labeling women (and men for that matter) as commodities ignores the complexity of human interaction.

For the sake of argument though, if women were goods, the market would contain far too much variety for a simple correlation between supply and price. Regardless of the cost, men will always have vastly different preferences — and options.  "If the market’s not clearing, it’s not because there’s excess supply — which is what the video is arguing. It’s simply because these markets are unbelievably complicated," Adshade explained.

After making the dubious argument that dating follows the laws of supply and demand, the video makes an even more ridiculous case for how women can increase their likelihood of marriage: collusion.  Collusion occurs when businesses agree, usually underhandedly or illegally, to control the market by forming a cartel. The video suggests that women should "police" each other to prevent casual sex — as it claims they used to do in the days before birth control.

I can't even begin to fathom the implications of women shaming each other into saving sex for well-behaved, marriage-minded men. Even the video artist's interpretation of these sex police looks like Hitler in a mini-skirt. But again, the economic theory swings and misses.

"In the market for love and sex, there are literally millions of people. It's a perfectly competitive market. It's not possible to form a cartel. Period. Without or without enforcement," Adshade explained.  In other words, even if one group of women tried to restrict access to casual sex, an even larger number of women likely wouldn't participate. This concept of policing also revolves around the assumption that men — and I quote from the video — "only behave as well or as poorly as the women in their lives allow." Apparently, men became brain-dead scoundrels about the same time women turned into livestock, pedaling their own meat in exchange for monogamy.

It's also worth noting that Baumeister, the man behind the slut-shaming, isn't even an economist. He's a social psychologist.  "The fact that he keeps saying women should collude just shows he's not an economist. Because no economist would ever say that," Adshade said.

In short, none of the economic theory in the ironically named "Economics of Sex" video makes valid points. And we haven't even addressed the unfounded scientific and political reasoning in the video...

...These are the guys who thought comparing birth control to pesticides was a swell idea, perhaps the most cringe-worthy part of the video:  "How did the market value of sex decline so drastically? Economists often speak of technological shocks that dramatically alter markets. Take pesticides for example," the video explains in a chipper narration, which goes on to discuss how pesticides ruin the environment before bringing the comparison back to birth control. "While the original purpose of the pill was to prevent pregnancy, the data reveals an unanticipated side effect. The pill threw the mating market into disarray."
Before the pill, women were too scared of pregnancy to enjoy themselves outside of wedlock. But as soon as oral contraception came on the scene, the video insinuates, horny females starting jumping into bed with anyone with a Y chromosome. And that's when marriage rates started to drop.
Beyond the abhorrence of the comparison, only the right-wing patriarchy would trash a technological innovation that supported an age of social and political progress for women.

This harmful video preaches a return to the golden-age of chastity, before women possessed the social and financial capital to make decisions, especially regarding sexuality, for themselves. And just as insulting, it relies on illogical economic and scientific research to make that point.  And besides, wouldn't you rather live and date in a world where women don't manipulate men into marriage using sex? Let's just admit we all enjoy it and move on.

Miss Sterbenz is correct that the market for sex is not the same as the product for lumber.  With sex, there is a great deal more product differentiation.  Many women go to quite a lot of effort to objectify themselves sexually, with the make-up, hairstyles, push-up bras, high-heeled shoes, polished poise, diets, etc., to market their wares at the highest price possible.

A product differentiation strategy that focuses on the quality and design of the product may create the perception that there's no substitute available on the market. Although competitors may have a similar product, the differentiation strategy focuses on the quality or design differences that other products don't have. The business gains an advantage in the market, as customers view the product as unique.

 Ben Franklin famously pointed out:

...in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement...

The reality of the situation is that one vagina might serve a man's purpose as well as any other.  The packaging is largely what establishes the price.  Daryush Valizadeh, who is better known by pseudonym Roosh V, and who is renowned for his writings on seduction and antifeminism, laid out a score system for evaluating individual women.  With regard to Miss West's objection to the video:

...I reject your numbers. I reject the idea that my personality is a negligible variable in the equation of my happiness. I reject the implication that you understand my relationship better than I do...

people need to understand that social-science analyses are usually dealing with averages or trends across large groups of people.  Such analyses wouldn't necessarily constitute useful guidance for an individual man or woman to decide what he or she should do.  Each person needs to take stock of his own situation, and his own desires, in embarking upon a plan of action.  Mr. Valizadeh's scoring system might serve as a functional benchmark for individual men.  Various grocery-store magazines provide advice of a similar nature for the ladies.

Miss Sterbenz's assertion that "an inversely proportional supply and demand relationship only applies to markets that include the exchange of money" is false.  In prisoner-of-war camps, cigarettes, rather than money, became a basis for exchange.  Supply and demand relationships may become established anywhere that an exchange of goods and/or services place.

With regard to Miss Sterbenz's complaint that "the traditional supply and demand model also assumes all 'goods' on the market are the same...The only way the story works is if women are all essentially identical and if women are all offering the same product": economists (and other social scientists) always have to make simplifying assumptions in order to study anything, and the video makers were remiss in not pointing this out up front.  Still, the video makers did not produce any specific estimates that relied upon a traditional supply and demand model.  They did point out that we do seem to have a split mating market: one dominated by men, where people are looking specifically for sex;  and the other, dominated by women, where people are looking for marriage.  The video attributes this phenomenon to a supply shock caused by new contraceptives, which dramatically reduced the cost (to women) of casual coitus, which led to a drastic reduction in the cost in the price admission for men.  Which seems reasonable.

If we look at the mating market where people are looking for sex: this segment does indeed seem to be dominated by men.  The beginning of the video mentions that the online-dating industry is bringing in more than a billion dollars annually.  On top of that, for the gents in this segment of the mating market, there is a huge and growing Pick-Up Artist (PUA) industry, that offers everything from YouTube videos (for example, the entertaining Simple Pickup channel) to what seem to be some rather intensive bootcamps.  A lot of Feminists and others (for example, Tom Chivers) are rather critical of PUAs.  According to this young lady, though,

acquiring some basic PUA skills may be quite useful for a gent.  Still, in this segment of the mating market, there are a lot of men who experience sexual frustration as a result of the discrepancy between their interest in sexual activity and their actual exploits.  One, Elliot Rodger, went on a killing spree, ostensibly because he couldn't get any. 

So far, I haven't heard of a Feminist whining because she absolutely could not find a bloke who was willing to give her a good stiff poke.  On the contrary, the typical Feminist complaint is that she can't leave the house without some Patriarch objectifying her sexually.  Hence, the Feminists have created a number of memes and slogans, such as "Sex is NOT an Entitlement!" and "Rape Culture!", to shame less-desirable men away from pursuing them.  The woman will spread her legs for whomever she wishes.  She gets to choose, from among the many, many, many offers that she is likely to encounter during the course of a day.  And, it is usually the same, high-status men who see most of the action, again and again.

For the other mating market, there are plenty of books, advice columns, etc. geared towards telling women how to hook and keep a husband.  There is no similar market for advice for men on how to hook and keep a wife.  Melissa Kite wrote an article where she blamed selfishness on the part of men for women putting off making babies until it is too late.

Lori Gottlieb, famously advised women who were approaching the end of their residual reproductive value to "Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling 'Bravo!' in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics...settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year."  There are no similar recommendations for 40-year-old men.  Indeed, a man who was serious about reproducing would be better off seeking a nubile, hot young blossom, rather than risking it all on a middle-aged hag whose residual reproductive value was quickly approaching zero.

Regarding the video's suggestion that women form a cartel to reduce the supply of pussy, and thus drive up the market price, Adam Smith's famous quote from The Wealth of Nations comes to mind:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice.

Perhaps the authors of the video were inspired by Aristophanes' comedy Lysistrata, where the women of Athens conspire together to withhold coitus from the men, to persuade the men to end the decades-long war against Sparta (I heartily recommend the 2002 Spanish film Lisístrata, which was based on Aristophanes' play).

In the present scenario, women would be withholding sex, primarily to benefit the women who were in the market for a husband.  From the Wikipedia:

A cartel is a formal, explicit agreement among competing firms. It is a formal organization of producers and manufacturers that agree to fix prices, marketing, and production.  Cartels usually occur in an oligopolistic industry, where the number of sellers is small (usually because barriers to entry, most notably startup costs, are high) and the products being traded are usually commodities. Cartel members may agree on such matters as price fixing, total industry output, market shares, allocation of customers, allocation of territories, bid rigging, establishment of common sales agencies, and the division of profits or combination of these. The aim of such collusion (also called the cartel agreement) is to increase individual members' profits by reducing competition.

Game theory suggests that cartels are inherently unstable, as the behaviour of members of a cartel is an example of a prisoner's dilemma. Each member of a cartel would be able to make more profit by breaking the agreement (producing a greater quantity or selling at a lower price than that agreed) than it could make by abiding by it. However, if all members break the agreement, all will be worse off. The incentive to cheat explains why cartels are generally difficult to sustain in the long run...Whether members of a cartel choose to cheat on the agreement depends on whether the short-term returns to cheating outweigh the long-term losses from the possible breakdown of the cartel. (The equilibrium of a prisoner's dilemma game varies according to whether it is played only once or repeatedly.) The relative size of these two factors depends in part on how difficult it is for firms to monitor whether the agreement is being adhered to by other firms. If monitoring is difficult, a member is likely to get away with cheating (and making higher profits) for longer, so members are more likely to cheat and the cartel will be more unstable...

The video's suggestion that women form a sex cartel is completely absurd.  One important externality not mentioned by the Feminists (if the ladies ever did form such a cartel): men who are already facing a hard-enough time in the free-love market would find their economic plight to be even more discouraging, which might lead to an increase in the  number of men following Elliot Rodger's example.

Women are known to withhold sex from men for various reasons: anger, boredom, a desire to be assertive or manipulative, etc. "Women withhold sex because men let them get away with it. It’s pretty clear it’s the one thing that most guys can’t live without and that they’ll do pretty much anything to keep it coming on a regular basis."  However, this is after a couple has an established "relationship", and an implied entitlement to exclusive coitus exists.  On the open mating market, if a man is dissatisfied with the services of one woman, he may seek a more satisfying experience with one of her competitors.  After the wedding, the wife is the one who holds the cards.

The "Economics of Sex" video seems to have been based to some extent on the article Sexual Economics: Sex as a Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions, by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs.  The authors proposed analyzing a heterosexual community as a marketplace in which men seek to acquire sex from women by offering other resources in exchange, and defined gender roles of women as sellers and men as buyers of sex. Societies endowed female sexuality, but not male sexuality, with value (as in virginity, fidelity, chastity). The article didn't get into the nonsensical cartel proposal, though.  True to form, Laurie Rudman and Janell Feterolf recently published something of a rebuttal:  Gender and Sexual Economics: Do Women View Sex as a Female Commodity?

In the study reported here, data from implicit and behavioral choice measures did not support sexual economics theory’s (SET’s) central tenet that women view female sexuality as a commodity. Instead, men endorsed sexual exchange more than women did, which supports the idea that SET is a vestige of patriarchy. Further, men’s sexual advice, more than women’s, enforced the sexual double standard (i.e., men encouraged men more than women to have casual sex)—a gender difference that was mediated by hostile sexism, but also by men’s greater implicit investment in sexual economics. That is, men were more likely to suppress female sexuality because they resisted female empowerment and automatically associated sex with money more than women did. It appears that women are not invested in sexual economics, but rather, men are invested in patriarchy, even when it means raising the price of sexual relations.

It seems odd that a journal (Psychological Science) that wished to be taken seriously would publish articles that included silly Feminist buzzwords like "vestige of patriarchy", "mediated by hostile sexism", and "resisted female empowerment" in the abstract.  But, as I've noted, prestigious professional journals do tend to publish a lot of ridiculous crap.  So, the Battle of the Sexes is proceeding in the scientific literature.

The term "commodity" applied to coitus seems to be a rather sensitive issue for the Feminists. According to the Wikipedia:

In economics, a commodity is a marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services. The exact definition of the term commodity is specifically used to describe a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. A commodity has full or partial fungibility; that is, the market treats its instances as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. "From the taste of wheat it is not possible to tell who produced it, a Russian serf, a French peasant or an English capitalist."...

Sex would certainly fit the service definition:  if I can legally pay someone to rub my feet in a pleasurable manner, I see no reason why other forms of pleasurable personal service should be forbidden to buy and sell.  As mentioned in a prior post, women have been in the business of providing sex (regarded as "the primitive task of womankind") for men at least since the time that The Epic of Gilgamesh was written.  I think that Feminists like to emphasize their qualitative differentiation across the mating market, which is more flattering than operating from the assumption that one vagina is as functional as the next.  The International Labour Organisation (ILO) affirmed in 1944 that "Labour is not a commodity."  The ILO and the Feminists share a similar abhorrence for the word, which is only a word.

Women, however, as previously mentioned, are quite vulnerable to advertising, propaganda and social engineering.  If they see a situation displayed on a television drama, then they are likely to form the idea that "society" wants them to copy (in their own lives) what was presented on the show.  If corporations decided that they were going to collude together to persuade women to remain chaste before marriage, then, of course, the women would obey and do what they thought "society" was commanding them to do.  However, there seems to be much more money to be made from selling sex (or the desire for sex) than from selling chastity (or the desire for chastity).  In fact, sex seems to form the basis of our economy.  Huge amounts of money are spent on dating websites, on pornography, on learning seduction techniques, on a plethora of things intended to make people appear more sexually-appealing to the opposite sex (fashions, make-up, status symbols, etc.), on jewelry, on dates and other wooing efforts, on weddings, on divorces, and on sex tours:

The pursuit of sex, the procurement of sex and the consequences of sex may actually account for the greatest share of the Gross National Product. Without sex, we wouldn't be producing new generations of citizens to work and pay taxes to support the government, nor to buy the crap that our corporate masters want us to buy.  Why was homosexuality recently decriminalized?  Because there is plenty of money to be made off of gay romance and gay marriage.  Why is prostitution still illegal?  Because, if prostitution were a legal option, then the price of sex would be driven down, pretty close to its actual value.  "You're going to pay for it, one way or another" is a true aphorism.  Getting it for "free" can easily end up costing more than paying as you go.  The Economics of Sex video complained about the unimpressive wooing efforts on the part of young men these days.  Make legal neighborhood brothels available, and wooing efforts will pretty much disappear.

Moreover, sexual imagery is extremely important to advertising and marketing, as described in the post about the Skyy Vodka posters.

Vodka, of course, is very much a commodity.  There really is no difference between one brand of vodka and another.  One brand will cause you to be dizzy and delirious as quickly as the next.  All vodkas are very effective at causing headaches, nausea, vomiting, liver disease and brain damage.  Operating a motor vehicle while under its influence may result in a deadly crash.  Mentioning the real consequences of using vodka isn't going to do a whole lot to boost sales.  Persuade people to associate your brand of vodka with an image of a woman pleasuring herself with the bottle, and you'll be raking in the dollars.  Vodka and sex are both examples of commodities where the sellers seek to use clever marketing and packaging to differentiate their products from others.  To quote Jesus' guardian angel in The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis:

Only one woman exists in the world.  One woman with countless faces.  This one falls, the next one rises.  Mary Magdalene died.  Mary, sister of Lazarus, lives and waits for us, waits for you.  She is Magdalene herself, but with another face...