If parents tore the skin off their infants in any other part of the body, they'd be arrested for abuse. The great unmentionable, of course, is that religion, not medicine, is behind this practice - Judaism and Islam, to be precise. Many secular men, in other words, bear the scars of someone else's religion on their own bodies for life. (I should add, as I have written before, that female genital mutilation is exponentially worse. It removes a girl's sexual pleasure, rather than simply scarring and numbing it.) One commenter on Jeff Goldstein's blog put one rationale for it this way:

Further proof that God exists: he mandates a ritual that tones down the male sex drive, if only by a little, to help men become more godly instead of more carnal.