Slow down Thor - you are putting positions I don't hold on my plate. I posted the link as a starting point, and as I said, the comments after the article carry on the debate, and raise many of the same points you did.
The latest thread at science base medicine is usually a good place to start. I'd like to see this topic updated there.
Slow down Thor - you are putting positions I don't hold on my plate. I posted the link as a starting point, and as I said, the comments after the article carry on the debate, and raise many of the same points you did.
The latest thread at science base medicine is usually a good place to start. I'd like to see this topic updated there.
That thread is linked to my friend Dr. Harriet Hall, and it is as out of date and beyond science-based logic when I met her and brought her to Iceland to do skeptics in the Pub in 2014.
I, in fact, sent her a message on FB recently and she still says she thinks that CC of boys is a neutral position, and I think this is a deeply flawed idea as a humanist, and on ethical grounds.
I have not put anything on your plate Trout, you have for as long as I have been here at CP a skeptic, a logical person.
There is no logical or ethical reason to support circumcision of boys. Even if those who have been CCed like to take the default position of defending it and even joking about it, there is really no reason why we should be shocked at the mutilation of girls genitals or boys genitals equally.
Tradition is not an excuse, and those parents who have chosen to CC are not monsters, it is just time we all recognized it is time to stop this for our future generations.
I think some of my family reads this so warning, I'm about to talk about my wiener:
I don't remember mine, it caused me no pain that I was consciously aware of, and it doesn't traumatize me or cause me to think that my parents mutilated me. In my opinion the "inhumane" argument not really a realistic argument. It's all I've ever known so it's not like I know what I'm missing out on, and it still works just fine. I don't know anyone who has been caused anguish one way or the other about it.
Chop it off or don't, who cares? I don't think it's nearly as evil as some of you do.
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Well, from what I know about female genital mutilation it causes a glut of health problems that circumcision doesn't. So I think it's a false equivalency and I am quite against FGM.
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Well, from what I know about female genital mutilation it causes a glut of health problems that circumcision doesn't. So I think it's a false equivalency and I am quite against FGM.
A common belief, do give this article a read over.
In the 1990s, when the Canadian ethicist Margaret Somerville began to speak and write critically about the non-therapeutic circumcision of infant boys, she was attacked for even addressing the subject in public. In her book The Ethical Canary, she says her critics accused her of ‘detracting from the horror of female genital mutilation and weakening the case against it by speaking about it and infant male circumcision in the same context and pointing out that the same ethical and legal principles applied to both’.
She wasn’t alone. The anthropologist Kirsten Bell has advanced similar arguments in her university lectures, provoking a reaction that was ‘immediate and hostile … How dare I mention these two entirely different operations in the same breath! How dare I compare the innocuous and beneficial removal of the foreskin with the extreme mutilations enacted against females in other societies!’
There’s a problem with these claims. Almost every one of them is untrue or severely misleading
It’s easy to see where these reactions are coming from. One frequent claim is that FGM is analogous to ‘castration’ or a ‘total penectomy’. Put that way, anyone who tried to compare the two on ethical (or other) grounds would be making a serious mistake – anatomically, at the very least.
You often hear that genital mutilation and male circumcision are very different. FGM is barbaric and crippling (‘always torture’, as the Guardian columnist Tanya Gold wrote recently), whereas male circumcision is comparatively inconsequential. Male circumcision is a ‘minor’ intervention that might even confer health benefits, whereas FGM is a drastic intervention with no health benefits, and only causes harm. The ‘prime motive’ for FGM is to control women’s sexuality; it is inherently sexist and discriminatory and is an expression of male power and domination. That’s just not true for male circumcision.
Unfortunately, there’s a problem with these claims. Almost every one of them is untrue, or severely misleading. They derive from a superficial understanding of both FGM and male circumcision; and they are inconsistent with what scholars have known about these practices for well over a decade. It’s time to re-examine what we ‘know’ about these controversial customs.
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I don't mind talking about it because I think too many people are squeamish, and many new parents are seeking good information. My father is uncircumcised, as am I, and my two sons. One son had to be circumcised at 16 because he had a rare condition where his foreskin would not retract. My other son may also have this problem, but it seems to be improving with a steroid cream. My foreskin does not retract when erect, but causes me no discomfort.
My unscientific opinion is that our foreskins must have evolved for a good reason?
That thread is linked to my friend Dr. Harriet Hall, and it is as out of date and beyond science-based logic when I met her and brought her to Iceland to do skeptics in the Pub in 2014.
I, in fact, sent her a message on FB recently and she still says she thinks that CC of boys is a neutral position, and I think this is a deeply flawed idea as a humanist, and on ethical grounds.
I have not put anything on your plate Trout, you have for as long as I have been here at CP a skeptic, a logical person.
There is no logical or ethical reason to support circumcision of boys. Even if those who have been CCed like to take the default position of defending it and even joking about it, there is really no reason why we should be shocked at the mutilation of girls genitals or boys genitals equally.
Tradition is not an excuse, and those parents who have chosen to CC are not monsters, it is just time we all recognized it is time to stop this for our future generations.
Jim Jefferries has been guilty of this lately using bad jokes about how turtle necks don't get BJs to justify the circumcision of his son. I also found his recent TV bit in Israel to be very disingenuous. Of course the Jews are going to say they like circumcised better, it is all they know!
Interestingly out of all the offensive things he says this is the only time I have really been offended.
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Jim Jefferries has been guilty of this lately using bad jokes about how turtle necks don't get BJs to justify the circumcision of his son. I also found his recent TV bit in Israel to be very disingenuous. Of course the Jews are going to say they like circumcised better, it is all they know!
Interestingly out of all the offensive things he says this is the only time I have really been offended.
I love Jim Jefferies, and he is an excellent example of what most non-religious CC is carried out. He starts from a point of defense, and he is like the USA from Australia which oddly has traditionally circumcised boys.
No body modification should happen unless medically necessary, this includes ritual circumcision of boys and girls, as well as decisions made on infants with unclear sexual organs.
I'll end with this...
Quote:
I circumsised my daughter because it's part of our tradition, after all, my mother and grandmother were circumsised, every woman I know is circumsised, you won't be accepted into society unless you're circunsised.
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Last edited by Thor; 08-07-2018 at 10:22 PM.
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You make the claim, please provide the logical reasoning.
There's no logical reasoning required. You're more than welcome to think male and female circumcision are the same thing. If you can't figure out something that simple on your own you don't deserve to have it spooned to you.
Can you do me a favor and actually read the article, its logic, fact, and science-based.
Then, by all means, make your claim as to why one is ok and the other is not...
HINT, there are varying degrees of female circumcision. Most of the modern versions use the legitimacy of male CC as a justification of CCing of girls. Because if America circumcizes boys, why can't we snip a labia, or remove the labia, or a slight snip of the clitoris, or hell if we remove the clitoris (type 1 female circumcision)
Just search on Facebook the pro-circumcision of girls groups from Arab and African nations, they all point to the legitimacy of their point of view because of the US, Australia, and Isreal promoting CC for boys.
Quote:
Types of FGM
Female genital mutilation is classified into four types:
Type I: Also known as clitoridectomy, this type consists of partial or total removal of the clitoris and/or its prepuce.
Type II: Also known as excision, the clitoris and labia minora are partially or totally removed, with or without excision of the labia majora.
Type III: The most severe form, it is also known as infibulation or pharaonic type. The procedure consists of narrowing the vaginal orifice with creation of a covering seal by cutting and appositioning the labia minora and/or labia majora, with or without removal of the clitoris. The appositioning of the wound edges consists of stitching or holding the cut areas together for a certain period of time (for example, girls’ legs are bound together), to create the covering seal. A small opening is left for urine and menstrual blood to escape. An infibulation must be opened either through penetrative sexual intercourse or surgery.
Type IV: This type consists of all other procedures to the genitalia of women for non-medical purposes, such as pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization.
Given that both male and female forms of genital cutting express different cultural norms depending upon the context, and are performed for different reasons in different cultures, and even in different communities or individual families, how shall we assess the permissibility of either? Do we need to interview each set of parents to make sure that their proposed act of cutting is intended as an expression of acceptable norms? If they promise that it isn’t about ‘sexual control’ in their specific case, but rather about ‘hygiene’ or ‘aesthetics’ or something less symbolically problematic, should they be permitted to go ahead?
But this is bound to fail. Every parent who requests a genital-altering surgery for their child – for whatever reason under the sun – thinks that they are acting in the child’s best interests; no one thinks that they are ‘mutilating’ their own offspring (whether female or male). So it is not the reason for the intervention that determines its permissibility, but rather the consequences of the intervention for the person whose genitals are actually on the line.
As the social anthropologist Sara Johnsdotter has pointed out, there is no one-to-one relationship between the amount of genital tissue removed (in males, females, or indeed in intersex people), and either subjective satisfaction while having sex, or a feeling of having been personally harmed because one’s ‘private parts’ were altered before one could effectively resist. Medically unnecessary genital surgeries – of whatever degree of severity – will affect different people differently. This is because each individual’s relationship to their own body is unique, including what they find aesthetically appealing, what degree of risk they feel comfortable taking on when it comes to elective surgeries on their reproductive organs, and even what degree of sexual sensitivity they prefer (for personal or cultural reasons). That’s why ethicists are beginning to argue that individuals should be left to decide what to do with their own genitals when it comes to irreversible surgery, whatever their sex or gender.
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Can you do me a favor and actually read the article, its logic, fact, and science-based.
Then, by all means, make your claim as to why one is ok and the other is not..
The Aeon article was the first one I read and dismissed as bull. And I'm not in anyway saying one is ok and the other is not. I'm clearly saying the two types of circumcision are not at all similar. If you want to fight for your right to foreskin, fill your boots. But the female experience is much much different. A lot of people say they are similar and then list a variety of dumb reasons like they are both not voluntary. They are both not necessary and they both entail risk to the patient. I have no idea why there is even a need to suggest the two are similar in any way. Anyway, here's the actual published paper in the Aeon article...
He's basically giving an opinion that the prevailing research is wrong and that conditions in North America now suggest the risk outweighs any benefit to male circumcision. I disagree. Here's a better article outlining the benefits of male circumcision to both men and women....
All types of FGM are potentially harmful. Immediate complications including bleeding, swelling, urine retention and pain are associated with all types of FGM, regardless of severity.5 In the longer term, women who have undergone FGM are at greater risk of adverse obstetric outcomes, including caesarean section and postpartum haemorrhage. Infants born to mothers who have undergone FGM are more likely to require resuscitation immediately following birth and have higher rates of stillbirth and neonatal mortality.6 The magnitude of both short-term and long-term risks appears to increase with the severity of the cutting performed. FGM can have a profound impact on women’s sexual well-being. Two recent systematic reviews concluded that women who have undergone FGM experience reduced sexual desire and satisfaction and are more likely to experience dyspareunia (painful sexual intercourse).5 7 These practices may negatively affect women’s mental health as well. Three studies suggest that women who have been cut may have elevated rates of post-traumatic stress, anxiety and other mental health disorders.
You can argue that there are harm reduction procedures for women but it's all nonsense. The benefits outweigh the risk in most opinions. There is literally no comparing the male experience to the female here.
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There's no logical reasoning required. You're more than welcome to think male and female circumcision are the same thing. If you can't figure out something that simple on your own you don't deserve to have it spooned to you.
I find this line of thinking abhorrent.
No they are not exactly the same thing. Few things are. They do however, have similarities, especially in the rationale behind each one. They are outdated cultural or religious norms that serve no real purpose and they are a blight on any society that tolerates it. I have zero issues with circumcisions for medical reasons, or an adult who wants to be circumcised or have a labiaplasty at a time of their own choosing. I have big issues with the acceptance and push for this to happen to kids and babies.
We argue for bodily autonomy for everyone yet make a harsh choice for our children for extremely debatable reasons. A permanent decision.
I hope that everyone who is circumcised is happy with that they are, I would hate to think otherwise. There isn't anything wrong with being circumcised. The problem is that many people don't have the choice and are forced into it. Whether that is a girl being forced into a very minor form of FGM, or a boy doing a "routine" circumcision in the states.
And if you think they are extraordinarily different in severity all the time I'd encourage you to go and read up on how some forms of FGM are relatively minor and then watch a video of an african circumcision taking place to mark a boys transition into manhood and tell me that there are no similarities. There is quite the spectrum to both. And both remain horrific things.
