{"id":17703,"date":"2013-09-21T07:54:50","date_gmt":"2013-09-21T14:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=17703"},"modified":"2013-09-21T07:58:33","modified_gmt":"2013-09-21T14:58:33","slug":"whats-so-often-missing-from-debates-about-routine-infant-penile-circumcision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=17703","title":{"rendered":"What’s So Often Missing from Debates about Routine Infant Penile Circumcision"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Feministe, Jill has written a post called “How Intactivists Are Ruining the Debate on Circumcision<\/a>” in which she complains, quite reasonably, that “Every time female genital cutting is mentioned on Feministe \u2014\u00a0every time<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 someone from the ‘intactivist’ community shows up to derail the conversation and make it all about the alleged horrors of male circumcision.” This is, of course, not a new phenomenon, nor is it limited to the issue of circumcision; there are men who show up in conversations about rape and other forms of sexual violence against women whose sole purpose is to turn the conversation into a discussion of rape and sexual violence when it is committed against men; and of course rape and sexual violence are<\/em> committed against men–I am myself a survivor, as anyone who’s been reading me for a while knows–and of course that phenomenon needs to be discussed, analyzed, and understood not just on its own terms, but also in terms that explore its relationship in a broader context to sexual violence against women. However, just as the very real differences between the social, cultural, and political practices and beliefs informing these two instances of sexual violence make it necessary for any conversation about how they are related to be extremely nuanced, so, too, the profound social, cultural, and political differences between the genital cutting of people born with vaginas and the genital cutting of those born with penises mean that any discussion of them as comparable practices needs to account for those differences in ways that do justice to the full complexity of the issue.<\/p>\n

Sadly, as is evident from the now-closed Feministe thread, that kind of nuance is rarely present. People on both sides of the debate end up feeling (too often not unreasonably) denied and trivialized, and what might have been a useful discussion inevitably devolves into accusation and name-calling. In my experience, this devolution has almost always been precisely as Jill describes it, the fault of men who are militantly opposed to penile circumcision, whose anger (often over their own circumcisions), whose conviction that they are standing up for the human rights of all people born with penises, and (at least when then they are men) whose sense of male entitlement, lead to them believe that they have the authority to run roughshod over anything anyone else has to say. Yet it’s not that people on the other side, the ones who tend to see these two kinds of genital cutting as more or less distinct phenomenon and who want therefore to keep discussion of them pretty much separate, don’t have blind spots of their own. These people, who quite rightly understand the genital cutting of people born with vaginas as part of the practice of women’s oppression, as connected therefore to beliefs about gender and sexuality that are larger than the act of cutting itself, nonetheless reduce routine infant penile circumcision to the facts of its status as a medical procedure, as if medical practice were not itself both shaped by and shaping of our ideas of gender and sexuality. ((I am limiting what I have to say here to a discussion of routine infant penile circumcision for two reasons. First, because this is almost always the kind of penile circumcision that is at stake in the discussions that Jill is talking about in her post; and, second, because there is no question that adolescent rites of passage that include penile circumcision are, by definition, about gender and sexuality. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a broader discussion to be had, or that important parallels can’t be found between adolescent penile circumcision and the genital cutting of people born with vaginas–see this comment<\/a>\u00a0and subsequent replies in Jill’s thread–it’s just that I’m not prepared to have that kind of discussion here.))<\/p>\n

In 2010, I wrote a series of posts about penile circumcision, both medical and Jewish. (Here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.) I was, at the time, for reasons that I talk about in the pieces, quite angry about my own circumcision, and so some of the language I used then is more strident than I would use now, and there is new medical research that I would need to take into account were I writing about this now, but writing those posts convinced me that trying to talk about routine infant penile circumcision–medical or religious–without also talking about how they are connected to our ideas about what it means to be a man and to have male sexuality is to overlook perhaps the most significant aspect of the practice. I’m not going to recap everything I wrote in those pieces, but I thought I would excerpt some of it, and if people wanted to go back and read the original posts, they could do so. Also, I am only going to excerpt from the pieces that deal with medical penile circumcision, because one thing I have come to understand is that trying to talk about medical and religious circumcision at the same time, without first having done the work to deal with them separately, leads to more confusion than anything else. So here are a few excerpts. Citations are in the original posts.<\/p>\n

This is from\u00a0Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Do You Like Your Body 3 (Preliminary Notes On the Expendability of the Foreskin)<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A widely pub\u00adlished and influ\u00aden\u00adtial physi\u00adcian and pub\u00adlic health offi\u00adcial, [Peter Charles] Remondino pub\u00adlished in 1891 a book called\u00a0His\u00adtory of Cir\u00adcum\u00adci\u00adsion from the Ear\u00adli\u00adest Times to the Present: Moral and Phys\u00adi\u00adcal Rea\u00adsons for Its Per\u00adfor\u00admance<\/em>. In it he\u00a0wrote:<\/p>\n

The pre\u00adpuce seems to exer\u00adcise a malign influ\u00adence in the most dis\u00adtant and appar\u00adently uncon\u00adnected man\u00adner; where, like some of the evil genii or sprites in the Ara\u00adbian tales, it can reach from afar the object of its malig\u00adnity, strik\u00ading him down unawares in the most unac\u00adcount\u00adable man\u00adner; mak\u00ading him a vic\u00adtim to all man\u00adner of ills, suf\u00adfer\u00adings, and tribu\u00adla\u00adtions; unfit\u00adting him for mar\u00adriage or the cares of busi\u00adness, mak\u00ading him mis\u00ader\u00adable and an object of con\u00adtin\u00adual scold\u00ading and pun\u00adish\u00adment in child\u00adhood, through its wor\u00adri\u00adments and noc\u00adtur\u00adnal enure\u00adsis [invol\u00adun\u00adtary uri\u00adna\u00adtion]; later on, begin\u00adning to affect him with all kinds of phys\u00adi\u00adcal dis\u00adtor\u00adtions and ail\u00adments, noc\u00adtur\u00adnal pol\u00adlu\u00adtions, and other con\u00addi\u00adtions cal\u00adcu\u00adlated to weaken him phys\u00adi\u00adcally, men\u00adtally, and morally; to land him, per\u00adchance, in jail or even in a lunatic asy\u00adlum. Man\u2019s whole life is sub\u00adject to the capri\u00adcious dis\u00adpen\u00adsa\u00adtions and whims of this Job\u2019s-comforts-dispensing enemy of man.<\/p>\n

Note [that while people had previously] seen cir\u00adcum\u00adci\u00adsion as a kind of pun\u00adish\u00adment for mas\u00adtur\u00adba\u00adtion, a view in which the mas\u00adtur\u00adba\u00adtor and not his fore\u00adskin was the prob\u00adlem, Remondino saw the fore\u00adskin itself as patho\u00adlog\u00adi\u00adcal, as if the male body were born dis\u00adeased; and while no one seri\u00adously believes any\u00admore that the fore\u00adskin is the root of all evil in men, it\u2019s hard not to see Remondino\u2019s rhetoric as one root of the idea that a healthy fore\u00adskin, a nor\u00admal part of the body with which a boy is born, is not merely dis\u00adpos\u00adable, remov\u00adable, like the flip top on a can, but also so poten\u00adtially harm\u00adful that doc\u00adtors are will\u00ading to per\u00adform an oper\u00ada\u00adtion to save boys from its per\u00adceived dan\u00adgers that would oth\u00ader\u00adwise seem to vio\u00adlate a cen\u00adtral tenet of the med\u00adical pro\u00adfes\u00adsion: not to do surgery on an oth\u00ader\u00adwise healthy patient.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here is some more from the same post:<\/p>\n

The fore\u00adskin of an adult human male rep\u00adre\u00adsents 50% to 80% of the penile skin. (Details about the fore\u00adskin in this and the fol\u00adlow\u00ading para\u00adgraphs are taken from \u201cThe Pre\u00adpuce,\u201d by C. J. Cold and J. R. Tay\u00adlor and \u201cA Pre\u00adlim\u00adi\u00adnary Poll of Men Cir\u00adcum\u00adcised in Infancy of Child\u00adhood,\u201d by Tim Ham\u00admond.) Unfolded, it would mea\u00adsure between twenty and thirty square inches. The glans penis of an intact man is only a few cell lay\u00aders thick. The skin is smooth, red, and glis\u00adten\u00ading, just like the inside of the mouth. The glans of a cir\u00adcum\u00adcised penis, on the other hand, is up to ten times thicker than its uncir\u00adcum\u00adcised coun\u00adter\u00adpart, the result of a process called ker\u00ada\u00adtiniza\u00adtion. Ker\u00adatin, a tough, insol\u00adu\u00adble pro\u00adtein which the body pro\u00adduces in response to fric\u00adtion or pres\u00adsure, is the pri\u00admary mate\u00adr\u00adial in hair, nails, and the out\u00ader\u00admost layer of skin. Its for\u00adma\u00adtion on the head of a cir\u00adcum\u00adcised penis, while nec\u00ades\u00adsary to com\u00adpen\u00adsate for the loss of the foreskin\u2019s pro\u00adtec\u00adtive cov\u00ader\u00ading\u2009\u2014\u2009imag\u00adine what your tongue would feel like if you didn\u2019t have cheeks or your eyes with\u00adout eye\u00adlids\u2009\u2014\u2009sig\u00adnif\u00adi\u00adcantly dulls what a man will be able to feel through the head of his penis. In addi\u00adtion, cir\u00adcum\u00adci\u00adsion excises the tremen\u00addous sex\u00adual sen\u00adsi\u00adtiv\u00adity that is located in the fore\u00adskin itself, including:<\/p>\n