Someone get this up on a billboard!
Showing posts with label male and female genital mutilation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label male and female genital mutilation. Show all posts
Monday, 21 October 2013
Friday, 26 July 2013
The Normalization of Male & Female Circumcision
What is so great about this video is that it demonstrates the societal explanations for practicing male & female circumcision are exactly the same in both the 'barbaric' Islamic east & the 'enlightened' American west. In both cases religious traditions are fundamentally at the root but are more widely explained as being done in the interests of health, hygiene & some mysterious localized standard of 'normality': "it's just what we DO here". In both cases it is ultimately presented as something done for the child's benefit, something that they will thank you for in later life, for making them like all the others in their area, & then carry out themselves on their own children.
One of these, of course, is seen (in our own present paradigm) as essentially harmless & trivial, whilst the other is seen as the greatest evil under the sun, even though the actual procedure - the taking of a razor blade to the healthy genitals of children - is exactly the same in both cases.
This whole issue I find a great thought experiment, to try take oneself out of ones culture to see the thing before you as it really is, stripped of all the cultural explanations attached to it, which can be so different from how you've always seen it before.
The video was brought to my attention by the excellent Tumblr blogger Oratorasaurus, whose posting it naturally brought forth all the usual comments, such as:
Circumcising girls is a lot more harmful than circumcising guys. The long term effects of a circumcision for a guy? The penis is less sensitive. For a girl? It makes sex painful.To which he responded:
First things first: Did you watch the video?
Secondly, circumcised penises tear during sex, the skin actually will tear because it is stretched too tight across the erect penile muscles. This causes pain. This causes soreness. This causes a week or longer of not being able to have sex, of hoping that you don’t have an involuntary erection because it will cause the skin to tear even more. I know, this happens to me. And according to a recent study, women find sex with a circumcised penis more painful than sex with a uncircumcised penis (which makes sense, since the foreskin keeps all the vagina’s juices inside of the vagina whereas without the foreskin, they leak out all over the thighs, legs, and bed).
Thirdly, I feel that MGM and FGM are rather equal in their severity. The clitoris being removed is rather terrible, but the foreskin has 20,000–70,000 of erogenous nerve endings, the majority of which are concentrated in the ridged band, which encircles the inner opening of the foreskin. When the penis is flaccid, the nerve endings are protected but, when erect, they are exposed. Circumcision removes about three-fourths of the nerve endings in the penis, leaving the circumcised penis severely disabled by comparison. Compare this to the 8,000 erogenous nerve endings in the clitoris and the complete lack of them in the labia. I am not suggesting that one is worse than the other, but people need to realize that the severity of their shock and rage when they hear about FGM needs to the same when they hear about MGM.
Fourthly, only a lack of sensitivity?
"For the glans penis, circumcised men reported decreased sexual pleasure and lower orgasm intensity. They also stated more effort was required to achieve orgasm, and a higher percentage of them experienced unusual sensations (burning, prickling, itching, or tingling and numbness of the glans penis). For the penile shaft a higher percentage of circumcised men described discomfort and pain, numbness and unusual sensations." - See more at: http://oratorasaurus.tumblr.com/tagged/circumcision+is+genital+mutilation/page/2#sthash.VL2ISotf.dpuf"burning, prickling, itching, tingling", “numbness", “discomfort", “pain", “unusual sensations"… see those? Those are not simply descriptions of less sensitivity.
And lastly, I feel that you are woefully uninformed about circumcisions and are only looking at what society tells you in order to come to those woefully inadequate views on the subject. So let me lay down some facts for you to go through, to read up on, and hopefully come out of this little exchange far better prepared and informed about circumcision and how it is, in fact, genital mutilation:
The vast majority of medical organizations in the world with a policy on circumcision are outright against it. Including:
Swedish Pediatric Society (they outright call for a ban)
Royal Dutch Medical Association calls it a violation of human rights, and calls for a “strong policy of deterrence." this policy has been endorsed by several other organizations:
The Netherlands Society of General Practitioners,
The Netherlands Society of Youth Healthcare Physicians,
The Netherlands Association of Paediatric Surgeons,
The Netherlands Association of Plastic Surgeons,
The Netherlands Association for Paediatric Medicine,
The Netherlands Urology Association, and
The Netherlands Surgeons’ Association.
College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia
This procedure should be delayed to a later date when the child can make his own informed decision. Parental preference alone does not justify a non‐therapeutic procedure…. Advise parents that the current medical consensus is that routine infant male circumcision is not a recommended procedure; it is non‐therapeutic and has no medical prophylactic basis; current evidence indicates that previously‐thought prophylactic public health benefits do not out‐weigh the potential risks.…. Routine infant male circumcision does cause pain and permanent loss of healthy tissue. |Australian Federation of Aids organizations They state that circumcision has “no role" in the HIV epidemic. TheGerman Association of Pediatricians called for a ban recently.
The German Association of Child and Youth Doctors recently Attacked the AAP’s claims, saying the benefits they claim, including HIV reduction, are “questionable," and that “Seen from the outside, cultural bias reflecting the normality of non-therapeutic male circumcision in the US seems obvious, and the report’s conclusions are different from those reached by doctors in other parts of the Western world, including Europe, Canada, and Australia." (scroll to page 7 for the English translation.)
The AAP was recently attacked by the President of the British Association of Paediatric Urologists because the evidence of benefit is weak, and they are promoting "Irreversible mutilating surgery."
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan has taken a position against it, saying it is harmful and will likely be considered illegal in the future, given the number of men who are angry that it was done to them and are becoming activists against it.
The President of the Saskatchewan Medical Association has said the same (link above).
The Central Union for Child Welfare “considers that circumcision of boys that violates the personal integrity of the boys is not acceptable unless it is done for medical reasons to treat an illness. The basis for the measures of a society must be an unconditional respect for the bodily integrity of an under-aged person… Circumcision can only be allowed to independent major persons, both women and men, after it has been ascertained that the person in question wants it of his or her own free will and he or she has not been subjected to pressure.”
Royal College of Surgeons of England
"The one absolute indication for circumcision is scarring of the opening of the foreskin making it non- retractable (pathological phimosis). This is unusual before five years of age."…"The parents and, when competent, the child, must be made fully aware of the implications of this operation as it is a non-reversible procedure." |British Medical Association
it is now widely accepted, including by the BMA, that this surgical procedure has medical and psychological risks. …. very similar arguments are also used to try and justify very harmful cultural procedures, such as female genital mutilation or ritual scarification. Furthermore, the harm of denying a person the opportunity to choose not to be circumcised must also be taken into account, together with the damage that can be done to the individual’s relationship with his parents and the medical profession if he feels harmed by the procedure. …. parental preference alone is not sufficient justification for performing a surgical procedure on a child. …. The BMA considers that the evidence concerning health benefit from non-therapeutic circumcision is insufficient for this alone to be a justification for doing it. |Australian Medical Association Has a policy of discouraging it, ad says “The Australian College of Paediatrics should continue to discourage the practice of circumcision in newborns.”
Australian College of Paediatrics:
"The possibility that routine circumcision may contravene human rights has been raised because circumcision is performed on a minor and is without proven medical benefit. Whether these legal concerns are valid will probably only be known if the matter is determined in a court of law …..Neonatal male circumcision has no medical indication. It is a traumatic procedure performed without anaesthesia to remove a normal and healthy prepuce.”|Royal Australasian College of Physicians
Some men strongly resent having been circumcised as infants. There has been increasing interest in this problem, evidenced by the number of surgical and non-surgical techniques for recreation of the foreskin.|ON that note, 74% of Australian doctors overall believe circumcision should not be offered, and 51% consider it abuse. Circumcision used to be common in Australia, but the movement against it spread faster there than America, where rates continue to drop.
Royal Australasian College of Surgeons I like this one especially. It’s a detailed evaluation of the arguments in favor of circumcision, They note that during one of the recent trials in Africa, the researchers claimed there was no loss of sexual satisfaction, when in fact there was. But the RACS called them out:
“Despite uncircumcised men reporting greater sexual satisfaction, which was statistically significant,Kigozi et al (2008) concluded that adult male circumcision does not adversely affect sexual satisfaction or clinically significant function in men." In general, they discuss how there’s no evidence to support it.The Norwegian Council of Medical Ethics states that ritual circumcision of boys is not consistent with important principles of medical ethics, that it is without medical value, and should not be paid for with public funds.
The Norwegian Children’s Ombudsman is opposed as well.
The Denmark National Council for Children is also opposed.
And recently, the politically appointed Health minister of Norway opposed a ban on circumcision, yet the ban was supported by the Norwegian Medical Association, the Norwegian Nurses Organization, the Norwegian Ombudsman for Children, and the University of Oslo.
Swedish Association for Sexuality Education published this guide that talks about circumcision, in a pretty negative way. not an official advocacy policy but it makes it fairly clear. it also mentions the frenulum is sexually sensitive, and helps prevent infection by blocking fluid from the urethra; the frenulum is often removed in an infant circumcision, yet easier to leave intact if an adult is circumcised.
this study shows significant harms to men’s sexual ability and satisfaction after circumcision.
And here’s a list of medical literature proving the dangers.
Circumcision decreases penile sensitivity
Circumcision associated with sexual difficulties
Circumcision linked to alexithymia
The exaggeration of the benefits of circumcision in regards to HIV/AIDS transmission
Circumcision/HIV claims are based on insufficient evidence
There is no case for the widespread implementation of circumcision as a preventative measure to stop transmission of AIDS/HIV
Circumcision decreases sexual pleasure
Circumcision decreases efficiency of nerve response in the glans of the penis
Circumcision policy is influenced by psychosocial factors rather than alleged health benefits
Circumcision linked to pain, trauma, and psychosexual sequelae
Circumcision results in significant loss of erogenous tissue
Circumcision has negligible benefit
Neonatal circumcision linked to pain and trauma
Circumcision may lead to need for increased care and medical attention in the first 3 years of life
Circumcision linked to psychological trauma
Circumcision may lead to abnormal brain development and subsequent deviations in behavior
Anyone who supports this rather despicable practice is directly and justifying the mutilation of infant boys (which kills roughly 117 every year). And they have the gall to say that we are contrived in our outrage, because it can’t possibly be as bad for men as it is for women.
The fact that they can go on calling the foreskin “just skin", and ignore the countless articles and studies proving that it is far more than that, is mind boggling to me.
- See more at: http://oratorasaurus.tumblr.com/tagged/circumcision+is+genital+mutilation/page/2#sthash.VL2ISotf.dpuf
Tuesday, 24 July 2012
You Want to Cut Off What???
Nice little piece on circumcision I came across by the writer Vincent Bach, whose other posts on the subject can be found here.
Think about it. What if when your mother was pregnant with you she was openly contemplating the "pros and cons" of cutting off part of your genitals? Doesn't the thought of that sound sort of weird, if not down right scary?
The only reason that you think you have a decision to make regarding whether to have someone cut off part of your son's penis is because you have been raised in a culture that does this. Bizarre, huh? Just why in the heck do we Americans send our newborn babies down to another room right after they are born, strap them down, lyse their prepuce from their glans, put a clamp on it and crush it before finally cutting it away? What possible reason would parents agree to allow some stranger in a white coat to take a scalpel to our perfectly healthy children?
The answer? Sexual oppression followed by years of cultural habit. Throw in a little selfish greed by the professionals profiting from this multi-million dollar cottage industry and you have the makings for a culture that feels they ought to cut off part of your precious newborn's penis. You see, no one in this Country was circumcised except for the Jews before the late 19th century. George Washington and Abe Lincoln were not circumcised and none of their non-Jewish peers were either. Why that changed is a pretty remarkable story actually. Some doctors just after the time of the Civil War actually convinced a Puritanical American population that if you cut most of the skin off a penis (i.e. circumcision), little boys will no longer be able to masturbate. Masturbation at the time was thought to be a dreadful sin and was even thought by many to cause a host of other illnesses. So if masturbation could be discouraged, the theory went, it MUST be. Of course, now we know that circumcision doesn't actually prevent masturbation, it only makes men have to work harder at it.
Unfortunately, by the time we figured out that masturbation wasn't all that harmful and even if it was it still isn't prevented by slicing the foreskin off a penis, circumcision had already become a cultural habit associated with class distinction. Now fathers wanted their sons to be circumcised because they were. Only the lower class heathens were left uncut. Eventually, not wanting to be left out, the lower socio-economic classes began demanding it for their sons as well. And so it continues...
Eventually by the 1960s, some ethicists began to question the practice and as a result EVERY professional medical organization in the world has finally come to publicly admit that circumcision of newborn boys is NOT MEDICALLY NECESSARY and many of the more ethical ones have come to publicly condemn the practice. Cultures don't change overnight. There are vested interests at stake and those vested interests are also working hard to fool you into thinking that circumcision has medical benefits. Rest assured, the only medical benefit of circumcision is to fatten the pockets of those medical professionals who gleefully encourage and participate in the practice.
Do your son a favor and think about his rights as a human being. You know, those inalienable ones that you and I take for granted. If he someday wants to tattoo his heiny, pierce his nipples or God forbid cut off part of his penis, that will be his right. But maybe he won't be concerned with the masturbation hysteria of the 19th century. Maybe if you could ask him he would say, "YOU WANT TO CUT OFF WHAT?!?!?!!?"
I know that's what I'd say.
Think about it. What if when your mother was pregnant with you she was openly contemplating the "pros and cons" of cutting off part of your genitals? Doesn't the thought of that sound sort of weird, if not down right scary?
The only reason that you think you have a decision to make regarding whether to have someone cut off part of your son's penis is because you have been raised in a culture that does this. Bizarre, huh? Just why in the heck do we Americans send our newborn babies down to another room right after they are born, strap them down, lyse their prepuce from their glans, put a clamp on it and crush it before finally cutting it away? What possible reason would parents agree to allow some stranger in a white coat to take a scalpel to our perfectly healthy children?
The answer? Sexual oppression followed by years of cultural habit. Throw in a little selfish greed by the professionals profiting from this multi-million dollar cottage industry and you have the makings for a culture that feels they ought to cut off part of your precious newborn's penis. You see, no one in this Country was circumcised except for the Jews before the late 19th century. George Washington and Abe Lincoln were not circumcised and none of their non-Jewish peers were either. Why that changed is a pretty remarkable story actually. Some doctors just after the time of the Civil War actually convinced a Puritanical American population that if you cut most of the skin off a penis (i.e. circumcision), little boys will no longer be able to masturbate. Masturbation at the time was thought to be a dreadful sin and was even thought by many to cause a host of other illnesses. So if masturbation could be discouraged, the theory went, it MUST be. Of course, now we know that circumcision doesn't actually prevent masturbation, it only makes men have to work harder at it.
Unfortunately, by the time we figured out that masturbation wasn't all that harmful and even if it was it still isn't prevented by slicing the foreskin off a penis, circumcision had already become a cultural habit associated with class distinction. Now fathers wanted their sons to be circumcised because they were. Only the lower class heathens were left uncut. Eventually, not wanting to be left out, the lower socio-economic classes began demanding it for their sons as well. And so it continues...
Eventually by the 1960s, some ethicists began to question the practice and as a result EVERY professional medical organization in the world has finally come to publicly admit that circumcision of newborn boys is NOT MEDICALLY NECESSARY and many of the more ethical ones have come to publicly condemn the practice. Cultures don't change overnight. There are vested interests at stake and those vested interests are also working hard to fool you into thinking that circumcision has medical benefits. Rest assured, the only medical benefit of circumcision is to fatten the pockets of those medical professionals who gleefully encourage and participate in the practice.
Do your son a favor and think about his rights as a human being. You know, those inalienable ones that you and I take for granted. If he someday wants to tattoo his heiny, pierce his nipples or God forbid cut off part of his penis, that will be his right. But maybe he won't be concerned with the masturbation hysteria of the 19th century. Maybe if you could ask him he would say, "YOU WANT TO CUT OFF WHAT?!?!?!!?"
I know that's what I'd say.
Friday, 4 May 2012
In Defence Of The Foreskin
You know, I've been trying for awhile to find a simple way to explain to circumcised men – & uncircumcised women – how an intact penis - which of course neither of those groups have first-hand experience of - is actually supposed to feel like & work. And I think the best I’ve come up with so far is this: The Eyelid.
It's something we all have, so is something we all can relate to & easily visualize. If you feel the way the eyelid effortlessly slides over, moistens & protects your eyeball – & also how sensitive that eyeball itself is, not able to be exposed to the air for long without drying out & toughening up, or even be directly touched without at least feeling uncomfortable – well, that’s exactly how an intact penis feels & what the foreskin is for. The foreskin isn’t some extraneous piece of skin like an earlobe, or a part of the body that can be cut away only to grow back, like fingernails or hair: it has a specifically designed purpose, & that purpose is directly analogous to, as I’ve already said, that other intrinsic part of an intact body, the eyelid.
Just thought I'd pass that on, anyway. Here also are a couple of interesting links upon this subject I came across recently:
http://www.circumstitions.com/FGMvsMGM.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17320788
Monday, 13 February 2012
28,000,000 Africans To Be Genitally Mutilated By UN
Being English, circumcision has always seemed a rather strange, foreign & frankly barbaric practice to me. Until a couple of years ago, I, like many others, believed it an almost exclusively Jewish religious practice, & had literally no idea that as many as 60% of all American males had undergone genital mutilation.
Which is what it is, of course: mutilation. There is no difference between taking a scalpel & cutting off part of the healthy genitals of a female infant & taking a scalpel & cutting off part of the healthy genitals of a male infant. Male & female circumcision are carried out in many parts of the world by the same religions, or were until relatively recently, & for similar reasons. There is no society that practices female circumcision that does not also carry out the same practice on its males. The only difference being that female circumcision is illegal in just about every nation in the world & considered by us all to be just about the worst thing imaginable, whereas male circumcision is legal everywhere, & at most a source of amusement.
How did this come about? How did one of these come to be seen as the ultimate horror to all civilized folk & the other a respectable 'medical procedure' in the most powerful country in the world? Why did America of all places adopt such a practice when the rest of the developed world continued on as perfectly happily without it as they always had before?
To answer this, we have to go back a hundred years or more. In Europe, Victorian-era fear of sexuality, & the popularly held belief that masturbation resulted in physical & mental illness, led to straitjackets, electric shock devices, & the apparatus pictured above becoming commonly advertised in the backs of newspapers & widely implemented among the upper & middle classes - the logical end result of 1600 years of legalized Christianity.
In America, though, a different approach became widespread thanks largely to John Harvey Kellogg, an American medical doctor - & yes, the guy who invented the cornflake. Wikipedia tells us:
He was an especially zealous campaigner against masturbation; this was an orthodox view during his lifetime, especially the earlier part. Kellogg was able to draw upon many medical sources' claims such as "neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism," credited to one Dr. Adam Clarke. Kellogg strongly warned against the habit in his own words, claiming of masturbation-related deaths "such a victim literally dies by his own hand," among other condemnations. He felt that masturbation destroyed not only physical and mental health, but the moral health of individuals as well. Kellogg also believed the practice of this "solitary-vice" caused cancer of the womb, urinary diseases, nocturnal emissions, impotence, epilepsy, insanity, and mental and physical debility; "dimness of vision" was only briefly mentioned. Kellogg worked on the rehabilitation of masturbators, often employing extreme measures, even mutilation, on both sexes. He was an advocate of circumcising young boys to curb masturbation and applying phenol (carbolic acid) to a young woman's clitoris.
In his Plain Facts for Old and Young, he wrote: “ 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 anesthetic, 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... ”As an alternative to this he also recommended
“..the application of one or more silver sutures in such a way as to prevent erection. The prepuce, or foreskin, is drawn forward over the glans, and the needle to which the wire is attached is passed through from one side to the other. After drawing the wire through, the ends are twisted together, and cut off close. It is now impossible for an erection to occur, and the slight irritation thus produced acts as a most powerful means of overcoming the disposition to resort to the practice ”
Well, the long & the short of it is that Kellogg's ideas took off, & in America became the norm. Circumcision became accepted for men raised there - as it had been for Jewish men for countless generations - as something your parents did to you as a child 'For Your Own Good' - because they cared for you - & continues to this day to be referred to as a 'medical' procedure, even though for practically all of the infant boys who are made to suffer the ordeal, there is no medical reason or benefit to it whatsoever, & in fact introduces life-threatening dangers: in America more than 117 boys die of complications arising from circumcision each year.
Returning to the initial topic, here's the thing:
HIV is spread by the exchange of bodily fluids. Circumcision does nothing to prevent the exchange of bodily fluids. Why then is the WHO supporting this program? If you still have to use a condom after being circumcised so as not to catch AIDS, why bother circumcising African men in the first place?
The U.S has the highest rate of HIV infections in the western world, yet also has the highest rate of male circumcision of all developed countries: clearly, circumcision does not prevent the spread of HIV. It seems likely that whatever health benefits show up statistically are more likely to be related to the religious life an orthodox Jew or Muslim is practising rather than the act of circumcision itself. It seems also likely that the impetus for the WHO program is coming from sources with a religious &/or imperialistic agenda. The whole thing is very strange, very scary, & very suspicious too.
Please don't mutilate your children. And please don't support the mutilation of other peoples children, either.
http://www.who.int/hiv/topics/malecircumcision/en/
http://www.avoiceformen.com/featured/politics-money-and-ideology-whos-circumcision-plan/
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Germaine Greer on Male & Female Genital Mutilation
I have to admit, I have a soft spot for Germaine Greer. It's true, of course, that much of her writing is openly contemptuous of men, & therefore surely the very opposite of everything this library should be housing. But beyond all that sorry misandry, she has a good mind, & her own opinions. Of all the major second-wave feminist writings I found The Female Eunuch to be the most interesting, intelligent & (comparitively speaking) fair. And she has, as Dennis Potter once said of her, the courage to change her mind in public, which is a quality I much admire in anyone, & one which should be treasured wherever found. So, I like to hear what she has to say, even if I disagree with the greater part of it.
In her book The Whole Woman (1999) she writes on the double-standard of male & female circumcision. She asks by what standard the West judges those parts of the world that still practice female circumcision when male genital mutilation is freely & openly carried out at home in America on going on two-thirds of all infant boys, & girls cut themselves, pierce themselves & surgically alter themselves in their millions. She was vilified by practically all organized Feminism for this stance, although it seems to me to be an extremely reasonable, moral, & thoughtful point of view, intelligently stated. The following is a condensed extract from it. It's not the right opinion, or the wrong opinion, it's just an opinion that deserves to be heard but isn't.
_______________________________________
Female genital mutilation (FGM) has been condemned as a violation of human rights by the International Conference on Population and Development, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, and the United Nations Family Planning Authority. Male genital mutilation is seldom condemned. Men mutilate the genitals of other men; usually women mutilate the genitals of other women, except where the procedure is carried out by a male professional. In England a doctor will be struck off the medical register if it is found that he has carried out a female circumcision of any kind. He will not be struck off for splitting a penis down the middle so that its owner can insert rings in it fore and aft for the gratification of himself and partners. He will not be struck off but rather encouraged to 'tidy up' the ambiguous genitalia of intersexual newborns, usually by removing the inadequate penis and creating an opening that will pass for vagina, so that the child becomes a girl, regardless of actual chromosomal make-up. And he may massively mutilate built men and women seeking gender reassignment. But he may not carry out any form of female circumcision at the request of a patient or her parents.
Human beings have always modified the external appearance of their bodies in one way or another; one man's beautification is another man's mutilation. Looked at in its full context the criminalization of FGM can be seen to be what African nationalists since Jomo Kenyatta have been calling it, an attack on cultural identity. Any suggestion that male genital mutilation should be outlawed would be understood to be a frontal attack on the cultural identity of Jews and Muslims.
Notwithstanding, the opinion that male circumcision might be bad for babies, bad for sex and bad for men is steadily gaining ground. In Denmark nearly 2 per cent of non-Jewish and non-Muslim men are circumcised on strictly medical grounds; in Britain the proportion rises to between 6 per cent and 7 per cent, but in the US between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of male babies will have their foreskins surgically removed. No UN agency has uttered a single protocol condemning the widespread practice of male genital mutilation, which will not be challenged until doctors start to be sued in large numbers by men they mutilated as infants. Silence on the question of male circumcision is evidence of the political power both of the communities where a circumcised penis is considered an essential identifying mark and of the practitioners who continue to do it for no good reason. Silence about male mutilation in our own countries combines nicely with noisiness on female mutilation in other countries to reinforce our notions of cultural superiority.
To be sure there are influential feminists who are fighting to eliminate FGM in their own countries and their struggle must be supported but not to the point of refusing to consider the different priorities and cultural norms by which other women live. When I explained to Sudanese women that western women sometimes have their breasts cut and trimmed, they were every bit as mystified and horrified as we are by Pharaonic incision and infibulation. Stephanie Welsh, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her photographs of the ceremonies surrounding female circumcision in rural Kenya, described it as 'a wonderful ritual that unifies the tribe. It's very beautiful - except for the circumcision itself.' Welsh's prize-winning photostory traces the lead-up to the climactic ritual: first the girl's mother builds the house where she will live as a woman; then the girl has her head shaved; circumcised women from surrounding villages gather to paint her with red ochre and assure her that she will have no pain; then they hold her down and stifle her cries as her own mother cuts her with a razor and plasters goat fat on the wound.
Male genital mutilation is considered trivial; female genital mutilation is considered devastating even if it involves nothing more than nicking the prepuce of the clitoris to provoke ritual bleeding. FGM takes so many forms that it is doubtful whether it represents a single phenomenon with a single cultural significance. The WHO recognizes degrees of severity of mutilation, one, in which the hood of the clitoris and surrounding tissue are removed, two, in which the clitoris and the labia minora are removed and three, infibulation, widespread in Somalia, Northern Sudan and Djibouti, in which the clitoris and labia minora are removed and raw surfaces created on the labia majora so that they can be stitched together to form a seal over the urethra and most of the introitus of the vagina. The accepted view of what these practices mean can he summed up as follows:
This is indeed a curious explanation of something that women do to women, because it suggests that they are simply carrying out the desires of men, desires which in these cultures men would never have discussed with them. In Ethiopia circumcision is common but not universal among both Christian and Muslim women; when I asked Ethiopian men whether they preferred sex with circumcised or uncircumcised women they appeared not to know. They could not say for certain whether the women in their own families were circumcised or not. Circumcised women in Sudan told me that it was 'no problem for the sex' but 'a big problem with the childbirth'. They thought they might not have it done for their daughters, because it was going out of fashion, but when their mothers became agitated and said that their granddaughters would be considered ugly and unmarriageable, they said maybe they would do it anyway. These Sudanese women were very sensual and up front about their erotic interests; it is impossible to think of them as having no notion of their own sexual pleasure.
There is also a pronounced cosmetic element in the way women talk of their own circumcision. Many women who are circumcised or infibulated also remove absolutely all their body hair; the depilated, infibulated genitalia become virtually invisible — as they were in all western painting and sculpture very recently. Certainly FGM represents a significant health risk but it must also be a procedure with considerable cultural value because it has survived fifty years of criminalization and concerted propaganda campaigns. The fact that it is both painful and dangerous adds to its undeniable function as ideal in the rite of passage from child to woman. As UN workers in Eastern Uganda found, women would not abandon female circumcision until some similarly significant procedure could take its place.
Though I was among the feminists at Mexico City in 1985 who first raised the problem of FGM in an international forum, I am loath now to pronounce upon its significance as a cultural phenomenon given the occult attachment to self-mutilation that can be discerned in our own culture. This can perhaps be explained as partly an angered response to being defined as our bodies. The woman who cuts her body asserts undeniably and emphatically that there is a self that has power over that body. Time and again we are told by young women who cut themselves that they find release in watching their own blood flow. Self-harming of this kind is not a cry for help nor is it clamouring for attention, because it is secret. It is a genuine attack by the self upon the body, by which mental anguish swapped for bodily pain. Self-harming is older than Christendom, embedded in contrition, penance and expiation and rotten with guilt.
Piercing is no less mysterious to a non-piercer than cutting, but the underlying dynamic is similar. Perhaps we should be considering the possibility that FGM acts in a similar way to assert the individual woman's control over her genitals and to customize them to her specification, which may also be the hallmark of the group to which she wishes to signify her allegiance. If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?
We ought at least to entertain the notion that the African woman is having FGM done for herself and allow her the same access to professional assistance as jen angel can expect. Instead of prescribing improved operating techniques and antisepsis, westernized governments have criminalized FGM and driven it underground, so that the painfulness of the procedure and the attendant health hazards are much magnified. In our own culture girls too young to qualify for professional piercings have been known to do it themselves. I used to teach at a school where bad girls carved their own tattoos with steel pen-nibs and coloured them with school-issue ink.
Thirty years ago parents were not fighting with their sons and daughters over piercings and tattoos. No teeny-hopper heroine sported a stud through her tongue as Scary Spice does and sticks her tongue out ostentatiously to prove it. The tongue stud is supposed to have an erotic function in stimulating the underside of the penis during fellatio. What the Spice Girls' eight-year-old girl fans make of this is anybody's guess. Mothers know that their daughters' insistence on having a nose stud or a navel piercing or a bracelet of barbed wire tattooed around an arm is an act of hostility towards them. The child is asserting her right to alter irrevocably, even to damage and destroy, the body that her mother grew for her out of her own substance. The child thinks she is claiming her own body, wiling her autonomy; the mother sees it as mindless tribal behaviour, pretty much as the 'first' world sees FGM. The mother wants the tattoo parlours closed down, and piercing banned. The law capitulates only so far as to impose an age limit, thus presenting the mutilation even more effectively as a privilege, a goal to be fought for, a sign of adulthood, a rite of passage. Though we might suspect that the child who thinks she needs a nose-ring might be afraid that her face is a blank in need of illustration, that she becomes a piercer and tattooer because rings and tattoos make her visible to herself, we have got to see that this is no more than a continuation of the incessantly stimulated desire in the little girl to bedizen herself, to change her hair colour, to paint her face, and her nails. All these are ways of making herself visible. Or invisible, depending how she sees it.
In her book The Whole Woman (1999) she writes on the double-standard of male & female circumcision. She asks by what standard the West judges those parts of the world that still practice female circumcision when male genital mutilation is freely & openly carried out at home in America on going on two-thirds of all infant boys, & girls cut themselves, pierce themselves & surgically alter themselves in their millions. She was vilified by practically all organized Feminism for this stance, although it seems to me to be an extremely reasonable, moral, & thoughtful point of view, intelligently stated. The following is a condensed extract from it. It's not the right opinion, or the wrong opinion, it's just an opinion that deserves to be heard but isn't.
_______________________________________
Female genital mutilation (FGM) has been condemned as a violation of human rights by the International Conference on Population and Development, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, and the United Nations Family Planning Authority. Male genital mutilation is seldom condemned. Men mutilate the genitals of other men; usually women mutilate the genitals of other women, except where the procedure is carried out by a male professional. In England a doctor will be struck off the medical register if it is found that he has carried out a female circumcision of any kind. He will not be struck off for splitting a penis down the middle so that its owner can insert rings in it fore and aft for the gratification of himself and partners. He will not be struck off but rather encouraged to 'tidy up' the ambiguous genitalia of intersexual newborns, usually by removing the inadequate penis and creating an opening that will pass for vagina, so that the child becomes a girl, regardless of actual chromosomal make-up. And he may massively mutilate built men and women seeking gender reassignment. But he may not carry out any form of female circumcision at the request of a patient or her parents.
Human beings have always modified the external appearance of their bodies in one way or another; one man's beautification is another man's mutilation. Looked at in its full context the criminalization of FGM can be seen to be what African nationalists since Jomo Kenyatta have been calling it, an attack on cultural identity. Any suggestion that male genital mutilation should be outlawed would be understood to be a frontal attack on the cultural identity of Jews and Muslims.
Notwithstanding, the opinion that male circumcision might be bad for babies, bad for sex and bad for men is steadily gaining ground. In Denmark nearly 2 per cent of non-Jewish and non-Muslim men are circumcised on strictly medical grounds; in Britain the proportion rises to between 6 per cent and 7 per cent, but in the US between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of male babies will have their foreskins surgically removed. No UN agency has uttered a single protocol condemning the widespread practice of male genital mutilation, which will not be challenged until doctors start to be sued in large numbers by men they mutilated as infants. Silence on the question of male circumcision is evidence of the political power both of the communities where a circumcised penis is considered an essential identifying mark and of the practitioners who continue to do it for no good reason. Silence about male mutilation in our own countries combines nicely with noisiness on female mutilation in other countries to reinforce our notions of cultural superiority.
To be sure there are influential feminists who are fighting to eliminate FGM in their own countries and their struggle must be supported but not to the point of refusing to consider the different priorities and cultural norms by which other women live. When I explained to Sudanese women that western women sometimes have their breasts cut and trimmed, they were every bit as mystified and horrified as we are by Pharaonic incision and infibulation. Stephanie Welsh, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her photographs of the ceremonies surrounding female circumcision in rural Kenya, described it as 'a wonderful ritual that unifies the tribe. It's very beautiful - except for the circumcision itself.' Welsh's prize-winning photostory traces the lead-up to the climactic ritual: first the girl's mother builds the house where she will live as a woman; then the girl has her head shaved; circumcised women from surrounding villages gather to paint her with red ochre and assure her that she will have no pain; then they hold her down and stifle her cries as her own mother cuts her with a razor and plasters goat fat on the wound.
Male genital mutilation is considered trivial; female genital mutilation is considered devastating even if it involves nothing more than nicking the prepuce of the clitoris to provoke ritual bleeding. FGM takes so many forms that it is doubtful whether it represents a single phenomenon with a single cultural significance. The WHO recognizes degrees of severity of mutilation, one, in which the hood of the clitoris and surrounding tissue are removed, two, in which the clitoris and the labia minora are removed and three, infibulation, widespread in Somalia, Northern Sudan and Djibouti, in which the clitoris and labia minora are removed and raw surfaces created on the labia majora so that they can be stitched together to form a seal over the urethra and most of the introitus of the vagina. The accepted view of what these practices mean can he summed up as follows:
Beliefs and practices regarding Female Genital Mutilation seem to show a desire to control women's sexual experience and reinforce established gender roles. They support a priority of male over female sexual satisfaction (often at reproductive risk to women) and give evidence of profound ambivalence among men regarding the sexual needs and concerns of women.
This is indeed a curious explanation of something that women do to women, because it suggests that they are simply carrying out the desires of men, desires which in these cultures men would never have discussed with them. In Ethiopia circumcision is common but not universal among both Christian and Muslim women; when I asked Ethiopian men whether they preferred sex with circumcised or uncircumcised women they appeared not to know. They could not say for certain whether the women in their own families were circumcised or not. Circumcised women in Sudan told me that it was 'no problem for the sex' but 'a big problem with the childbirth'. They thought they might not have it done for their daughters, because it was going out of fashion, but when their mothers became agitated and said that their granddaughters would be considered ugly and unmarriageable, they said maybe they would do it anyway. These Sudanese women were very sensual and up front about their erotic interests; it is impossible to think of them as having no notion of their own sexual pleasure.
There is also a pronounced cosmetic element in the way women talk of their own circumcision. Many women who are circumcised or infibulated also remove absolutely all their body hair; the depilated, infibulated genitalia become virtually invisible — as they were in all western painting and sculpture very recently. Certainly FGM represents a significant health risk but it must also be a procedure with considerable cultural value because it has survived fifty years of criminalization and concerted propaganda campaigns. The fact that it is both painful and dangerous adds to its undeniable function as ideal in the rite of passage from child to woman. As UN workers in Eastern Uganda found, women would not abandon female circumcision until some similarly significant procedure could take its place.
Though I was among the feminists at Mexico City in 1985 who first raised the problem of FGM in an international forum, I am loath now to pronounce upon its significance as a cultural phenomenon given the occult attachment to self-mutilation that can be discerned in our own culture. This can perhaps be explained as partly an angered response to being defined as our bodies. The woman who cuts her body asserts undeniably and emphatically that there is a self that has power over that body. Time and again we are told by young women who cut themselves that they find release in watching their own blood flow. Self-harming of this kind is not a cry for help nor is it clamouring for attention, because it is secret. It is a genuine attack by the self upon the body, by which mental anguish swapped for bodily pain. Self-harming is older than Christendom, embedded in contrition, penance and expiation and rotten with guilt.
Piercing is no less mysterious to a non-piercer than cutting, but the underlying dynamic is similar. Perhaps we should be considering the possibility that FGM acts in a similar way to assert the individual woman's control over her genitals and to customize them to her specification, which may also be the hallmark of the group to which she wishes to signify her allegiance. If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?
We ought at least to entertain the notion that the African woman is having FGM done for herself and allow her the same access to professional assistance as jen angel can expect. Instead of prescribing improved operating techniques and antisepsis, westernized governments have criminalized FGM and driven it underground, so that the painfulness of the procedure and the attendant health hazards are much magnified. In our own culture girls too young to qualify for professional piercings have been known to do it themselves. I used to teach at a school where bad girls carved their own tattoos with steel pen-nibs and coloured them with school-issue ink.
Thirty years ago parents were not fighting with their sons and daughters over piercings and tattoos. No teeny-hopper heroine sported a stud through her tongue as Scary Spice does and sticks her tongue out ostentatiously to prove it. The tongue stud is supposed to have an erotic function in stimulating the underside of the penis during fellatio. What the Spice Girls' eight-year-old girl fans make of this is anybody's guess. Mothers know that their daughters' insistence on having a nose stud or a navel piercing or a bracelet of barbed wire tattooed around an arm is an act of hostility towards them. The child is asserting her right to alter irrevocably, even to damage and destroy, the body that her mother grew for her out of her own substance. The child thinks she is claiming her own body, wiling her autonomy; the mother sees it as mindless tribal behaviour, pretty much as the 'first' world sees FGM. The mother wants the tattoo parlours closed down, and piercing banned. The law capitulates only so far as to impose an age limit, thus presenting the mutilation even more effectively as a privilege, a goal to be fought for, a sign of adulthood, a rite of passage. Though we might suspect that the child who thinks she needs a nose-ring might be afraid that her face is a blank in need of illustration, that she becomes a piercer and tattooer because rings and tattoos make her visible to herself, we have got to see that this is no more than a continuation of the incessantly stimulated desire in the little girl to bedizen herself, to change her hair colour, to paint her face, and her nails. All these are ways of making herself visible. Or invisible, depending how she sees it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
