If Female Circumcision Is Wrong, Why Not Male?

It's BARBARIC. And puritanical. It legitimizes 'trans' genital surgery today. We need a moratorium on child genital mutilation, period.

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 photo by Mik Scheper on Flickr

We’ve got to stop the millennia-long War on Children’s Genitals. It’s non-partisan. It’s as areligious as religious. It’s multicultural. It’s also sexist and misandrist, when we condemn other cultures for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) but turn a blind eye (and a deaf ear to the screams) of Male Genital Mutilation (MGM).

I know—it’s a sacred ‘religious tradition’ for Muslims and Jews. Lots of bad ideas are ‘sacred religious traditions’, which are carte blanche for abusing others and attributing it to some divine being. Like child sacrifice in the ancient pagan days. And murdering heretics and witches in the Middle Ages. Enshrining abuse and submission of women. Blowing up nonbelievers—all very, very bad ideas rooted in spiritual mythology.

There are almost zero good reasons for child genital mutilation. Any of it. Especially FGM for which there are simply no health benefits at all. It’s performed exclusively to remove sexual pleasure from the female body.

The one convincing MGM health benefit that I can find:

• Phimosis: The inability of the natural foreskin of the penis to retract properly. This can cause genuine medical problems for males and often justifies medical removal of the foreskin. That’s when one needs circumcision.

Uh, that’s about it.

Here are some of the alleged benefits that strike me as, frankly, not very persuasive. I drew this from The Canadian Paediatric Society’s 2015 position on MGM, reaffirmed in January of this year:

• UTI (Urinary tract infection) reduction. Supposedly the foreskin makes a male (especially babies) a bit more susceptible to UTIs, which are painful and sometimes itchy but penicillin handles it.

• STI (Sexually transmitted infection) reduction. Uncircumcised men may be at higher risk for infection, as HIV targets particular cells on the inner surface of the foreskin, but not if the man wears a condom. Which every woman should insist on, no matter how much he whines.

• Cancer reduction. Medical professionals love to tout how it prevents penile cancer, a condition rare in developed countries, about 1 in 100,000. It occurs almost exclusively in unshaven schvantzes. It also reduces cervical cancer risk in female partners. However, HPV infection raises the penile cancer risk in both the shorn and the unshorn by 80%. But the HPV vaccination in females of all ages greatly reduces the cancer risk, and it likely reduces the risk of penile cancer in men, if enough dudes would take it so that we could get some hard data.

• Cleanliness. One can get an infection if the prepuce isn’t cleaned. Which is easy enough to do in the shower, just as a woman can scrub her nether regions with water (Don’t use soap! I learned that lesson the hard way when I was four!).

Opinions will vary but it strikes me there’s only one good reason for whacking away at a kid’s dick and I seek to challenge those who argue we should. What’s really going on with all those religious and cultural groups who argue MGM is a ‘sacred tradition’? I’m squinting judgmentally at you, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Americans, Africans, Filipinos, South Koreans and Oceanians. What is your problem with male genitalia?

The downsides to MGM include, not surprisingly, a great loss of erogenous cells, although sex is still more enjoyable for the genitally mutilated male than it is for the GM’ed female, from whom the clitoris is excised and sometimes the labia as well. MGM is painful, even when an analgesic is applied—including post-operatively. There can be minor bleeding, permanent damage to the penis and cosmetic issues, and a very rare possibility of sepsis. Complication rates are about 1.5% for babies and 6% for older children. ‘Partial re-adherence to the glans,’ is also a possibility, and can resolve itself in puberty, but occasionally needs further treatment.

Doctors claim there isn’t much difference in sexual satisfaction and enjoyment from MGM, but some males who were circumcised after becoming sexually active report otherwise. A National Institutes of Health study in 2013 found ‘decreased penile sensitivity’.

All this kerfuffle over a ring of skin evolutionarily granted all male mammals for reasons doctors are unsure about, whether it was to enhance sexual pleasure or if there are other protective elements, or whether it’s kind of a penile appendix.

All this mischigoss so Jews could establish their covenant with God, as laid down by His Holiness with Abraham in Genesis.

All this kalam farghi so Muslims can also express their solidarity of religious community, too.

Geez, can’t you all just get a tattoo or something?

All this bunkum for Christians who just don’t want to be left out of the sexual hostility, I guess. Christianity has long had a real hate-on for human sexuality and sexual pleasure. Their offered reasons harken back to the Genesis edict and also going in for the alleged health benefits, but also so that ‘Bobby looks like Daddy’, imagining that he’ll be scarred for life if his junior johnson doesn’t resemble Daddy’s pruned pecker.

What is this hate-on humanity bears for male sexuality, too?

Much hay is made in the human rights world over the unquestionable barbarism of FGM. FGM is a far starker demonstration of humanity’s hate-on for the female orgasm. MGM isn’t nearly as harsh but we really need to examine just how hostile to male genitals we still are, especially in light of what has emerged with this year’s revelations of the medical and scientific bankruptcy behind sex change operations for children—including full castration.

If you weren’t horrified already at Jazz Jennings’ perfectly healthy, and, as far as anyone could tell at his early age, properly-functioning penis transmogrified into a fake vagina incapable of orgasm, the divulgence that WPATH’s Standards of Care 8 guidelines included a recognition of the ‘eunuch identity’ for children acknowledging the ‘need’ for castration should be enough to send you directly to the liquor cabinet or to blaze up a massive doobie.

Several WPATH members were, it was acknowledged, in connection with a horrific sexual fetishist community of pedophiles who fantasized about castrating little boys.

What strikes me as deeply weird about the ‘male circumcision’ debate is just how wedded to the idea of harming genitals so many are. Especially Americans, who can’t seem to shake the spanked MGM monkey off their backs, often arguing for father-and-son Matching Mandingoes or just reverting to the lame argument that ‘everyone else is doing it, so we should attack our baby’s penis too’.

Human beings really do have some weird near-universal fetish against sexual pleasure, even when it’s done mano-a-pene in the privacy of one’s bedroom. The ancients couldn’t know that each ejaculation contains up to 150 million sperm, and that the average male can experience up to 8,700 ejaculations in a lifetime which, if you do the math, equals 1,305,000,000,000 - over one billion little swimmers, not exactly a birth dearth in the making.

(Oh, go look for the Monty Python song yourself!)

And if 8,700 lifetime spurts sounds awfully low to you, as it did to me, I calculated that, if, on average, a male started yanking it at thirteen and continued until he was 90, that equals 112 ejaculations a year, which seems awfully low. Okay, maybe he loses sexual function at 80, that’s still only just under 130 times a year. What’s he doing the other 235 days? I mean, aren’t they at that thing all day long? Some guys can’t let go of it even on the subway! But, you know, I don’t have a dick so maybe I’m just ignorant. As always, debunk me in the comments if you feel I’m just jerking men around!

(Never let it be said I don’t do the hard research for you!)

(Huh huh huh, Beavis, she said ‘hard research’!)

Trigger warning: Description of a disturbing circumcision research on babies and some ugly descriptions of Victorian ‘preventions’ against masturbation following. You can safely skip down to “The left’s mania for kiddie genital mutilation” which contains only general discussion of bottom surgery and the newer adoption of ‘eunuch’ identity.

Don’t touch that! That’s nasty!

The history of hostile adults terrified of the Unholy Ejaculation is riven with ugly tortures and treatment of boys who play with themselves.

Boys have been threatened historically with ugly operations if they didn’t stop choking the chicken. Victorians devised hideous devices to discourage erections and keep them from nocturnally shining the sheets.

Girls weren’t spared clitoridectomies and occasionally oviarotomies if they discovered their particular joy button, but there was very special torture for boys who couldn’t stop polishing the banister.

This included circumcision without anesthesia or analgesics in order to teach the immoral miscreant an important lesson, and spiked penis rings to discourage erections. It included “bandaging and caging the genitals; tying the hands to prevent touching; sewing up the foreskin with silver wire to prevent erection and create sufficient discomfort to make sexual impulse unwelcome;” and concluded with the aforementioned anesthesia-free circumcision.

The blanket theme over 150 years of all this obsession with junior genitals was masturbation, and preventing the imagined horrors thereof. Refraining from ‘self-abuse’ was a sign of self-control and manliness, of creating stronger men to defend the motherland and harkens back, whether they realized it or not, to ancient beliefs that a woman stole men’s power via his ejaculations.

Theda Bara, the original ‘vamp’, like a vampire, stealing a man’s precious essence with her unholy sexual predations.

What is this hostility to male genitalia and sexual pleasure? Promoted almost exclusively by other men?

I wonder if jealousy plays a role. I had to get circumcised, so everyone should do it!

I wonder about the unrecognized and unaddressed psychological trauma for men circumcised as infants, even if they don’t consciously remember it. A Psychology Today article details the research behind the harmful psychological effects of circumcision, including a hideous experiment with a control group of babies who weren’t given analgesics or a local anesthesia, and they had to stop the experiment because the control group was in incredible pain including some that started choking and one that had a seizure. Post-operative pain for all was described as ‘severe’ and ‘persistent’.

Who the hell approved this experiment, Josef Mengele?

Cortisol, the stress and pain hormone, as the article details, spikes in babies’ brains during circumcision, and while the child may not remember the traumatic event, the body certainly does, and results in greater sensitivity to pain throughout life. Experiments on neonatal animals point to increased anxiety, hyperactivity and attention problems, not to mention a link to mood disorders, which brings into question just how much male behavior considered adverse may be the result of an unnecessary torture when the kid isn’t even ten days old yet.

All this to prevent the extremely unlikely event of penile cancer, STIs and UTIs easily preventable or treatable with antibiotics.

Gee, maybe we should remove appendixes at birth too, as a preventative in the event it becomes infected and has to be removed. After all, better while the kid is conveniently in the hospital, rather than what may prove to be an inconveniently-timed appendectomy that results in lost school or work time, right?

The left’s mania for kiddie genital mutilation

One reason why the left may be as amenable to permanently sterilizing and rendering ‘trans’ children sexually incapable of orgasm is because we already legitimize hostility to children’s genitals, rooted in a historical horror of masturbation.

The left has been groomed, and often groomed itself to never say no to anything, and for what reason can there be to say no to sex change operations for children when we already engage in a practice designed to prevent sexual pleasure in both males and females?

The fact that some transactivists in WPATH are easily persuaded that ‘eunuch’ is a viable ‘identity’ that requires immediate validation should be a massive flapping red flag that there’s something deeply wrong with transactivism, especially aimed at children.

A phimotic foreskin can be easily circumcised, most importantly for a boy or man who consents to the procedure because it causes him enough discomfort. Otherwise, millions of uncircumcised men all over the world function as the normal human beings they’re meant to be, untroubled by penile cancer or UTIs and can easily come to regard their natural penis as cosmetically attractive as circumcised penises have come to be regarded.

One of the most horrifying images to come out of the transactivism movement is the attacks on healthy genitals in children who aren’t gender dysphoric so much as social media-addled; and enforced by an education system that takes one’s child away if the parents don’t cooperate.

The attacks fashioning ridiculous-looking malfunctioning manufactured penises and vaginas, and the removal of healthy breasts in teenage girls, I think is rooted in humanity’s millennia-old hostility to healthy, unobstructed genitals. MGM dates back 8,000 years and FGM 2,200 years, that we know of.

Circumcision should always be consented to, and I personally think there should be laws mandating that one must be 18 years of age. Wait until he’s old enough to have learned to question the value himself.

There are plenty of holy injunctions we no longer permit because we’ve become civilized enough to recognize how barbaric they are, including human slavery, stoning sinners to death and killing children who make fun of bald men. Progressive societies have come to recognize how cruel religious traditions have been to women and homosexuals as well.

So we can afford to tell these groups, ‘No more’. MGM and FGM are relics of barbaric pasts and encourage the modern transactivist barbarians among us.

When I’m not thanking Goddess I was born in America and not certain parts of Africa, I help women and others reclaim their power here on Grow Some Labia. I certainly hope I empower some parents to resist the status quo and just say no to an utterly unnecessary surgical procedure on their baby boys.