Being Allies Against Male Circumcision

memymineown · 2011-06-30T16:36:28+00:00

I was just wondering what r/mensrights thinks of feministing's stance on Male Genital Mutilation.

Is it just more appropriation or is there actually some use to be gained from them?

hopeless_case · 2011-06-30T17:32:24+00:00

That was a heartfelt call to action, without any cover-your-ass waffling on the victimhood of circumcised men. Well done feministing.

Well done elanafulana for writing the article, and well done to the discussion participants like TD who answered the comments trying to minimize the issue.

2011-06-30T18:20:36+00:00

A good article.

And I'm happy to accept any aid when opposing male genital mutilation. Lets face it we can use all the help we can get on that front.

2011-06-30T19:22:37+00:00

If they do wish to be allies, then good, fine, we shall welcome them, without criticising, nor picking any fights.

HOWEVER.

That alliance extends to being against male circumcision and no further.

No 'male circumcision only happens because of patriarchy' arguments shall be tolerated.

The alliance shall be single issue.

And in so far as this is the case there should be no disputes between feminists and MRAs.

TheBananaKing · 2011-07-01T01:11:57+00:00

Posted this, let's see if it passes moderation.

Dammit, you made me sign up to post this.

First up, I’m a rabid intactivist, so I wholeheartedly approve the sentiment of this post.

However, I’ve got qualms about the approach taken to discussing it here. The OP suggests that the pro-circumcision advocates have their views censored and silenced out of discourse on the subject. This… seems highly counterproductive. It’s easy, after all, to ‘win’ (and this is a battle of ideas, after all, where the only victory is persuasion) by simply removing all sign of dissent.

However, outside of the crudest tracts and propaganda, this is not an effective technique for winning hearts and minds. All you do is leave people’s objections unaddressed, and unchallenged, coming across as dogmatic and unable to defend your position – and as such, blindly holding to indefensible assertions for the sake it.

Well, it’s not indefensible, dammit. An entirely bulletproof case can be made that routine infant circumcision is child abuse, and arguments to the contrary can be conclusively shown to be fallacious.

IMHO, doing so is far more effective and important than woodenly stating your position. It is, after all, the pro-circ crowd that need convincing in the first place, and in my experience, you can’t convince anyone while denying them their voice. People want to defend the practice? Bring them on, I’ll counter them on every single point.

Now granted it’s abuse and defense of abuse can be ‘triggering’. But I have two points to make in response:

First, I think we have to look for the least harm here. Yes, there’s a chance that debating the merits could set badly-affected people off. But again IMHO, the alternative is losing the battle by default (in the eyes of those we must convince) and in so doing allowing more children to be abused. I for one consider this outcome to be a lot more probable, and a lot more severe – and so I just can’t condone this approach to the topic.

Second… look, if you will, at waterwithoutfish’s objection – one extremely common in all discussion on the topic: that by allowing terms such as ‘mutilation’ into the discussion, we are making victims feel bad about themselves.

While I can do sympathize, I simply cannot agree. To my mind, this is an extremely counterproductive tactic, one that only serves to continue the cycle of abuse.

If we are forbidden to say that circumcised genitals are damaged genitals, then we must tacitly state that circumcision is not damaging, that being circumcised is just as good, no big deal – that circumcision is harmless and trivial.

And that is a position that I cannot and will not abide.

Again, yes, it’s bad to make people feel bad, if you can avoid it. Certainly, victims should not be further victimized by any kind of inferred denigration. (though I’d note that every time the issue has come up, denigrating victims was as far from the intent as humanly possible). But when the alternative is trivializing child sexual abuse, then I’m sorry, but wounded pride is going to have to take a bak seat to wounded genitals.

After all, many forms of abuse can impact the victim’s self-esteem. It would not do, after all, to trivialze the impact of FGM, emotional abuse or sexual molestation down to almost a matter of whim, in order to protect victims from feeling victimized. Not when the process of abuse that caused it is rife within the society, condoned and even celebrated ffs.

Sorry, no. That will not do. The need to trivialize the abuse quietly transforms into the need to perpetuate the abuse, in order to prove how harmless it really is – and that makes my blood boil.

Yes, confronting abuse and inequity head-on is uncomfortable and stressful for everyone concerned. It’s hard, harrowing work, and everyone gets their noses out of joint. I more than halfway destroyed my marriage saving my own son from MGM, and I grew to be hated by large sections of several parenting communities for my unrelenting stance on the issue. But in the process, I’ve personally saved over half a dozen children from the scalpel, and for me, that makes it all worth it.

The feminist community has never been shy of controversy, and in-your-face attitudes to unpleasant truths; I really don’t believe it should start now.

Please don’t try to control the discourse and thus win by default – let speech be free and win because you are right.

Please. It’s important.

TheBananaKing · 2011-06-30T16:48:32+00:00

While it's certainly refreshing, and all support is good support... notice how the first order of business is to prohibit dissenting views?

What is it with the feminist movement and the need to censor?

thetrollking · 2011-07-01T11:40:31+00:00

And just a few comments down we get:

The market provides a lot of things, but certain things are serving larger demands than others. It’s a way to look at the way that people vote with their dollars. I’m pretty sure that the sales of clitoral sensitizers far outstrips the sales of labiaplasties and genital piercings. I’m not purporting that that justifies circumcising boys at birth, but that it’s not as pressing an issue as female circumcision. Whereas some men are angry about being circumcised, many many are indifferent, and some choose later in life to be circumcised, there’s not a lot of debate over whether women’s clits matter to them. So the issues are hard to equate. I’m sure that nothing I can say would make you feel okay about the situation.

This article was actually written within a week or so after another article was on feministing about circumcision. I remember both because I got banned from the site, under a different username and even computer, for putting forth arguments like this:

“While there is a male debate over the pros and cons of circumcision, I’m not seeing women standing up and telling us how much sexual pleasure they’re enjoying without a clit.” Umm… except that many women in those cultures actually do say exactly that. As noted by Mhórdha in a 2007 paper: “Perspectives such as that of Hosken maintain that circumcised women can feel no pleasure – a view which may be due to notions of the clitoris as the ‘seat’ of sexual pleasure in a woman. This view fails to take into account the numerous testimonies from circumcised women that they achieve orgasm and have a fulfilling sex life.” I think it’s also a really problematic myth that it is only the men in these cultures that perpetuate female genital cutting. As noted by Abusharaf in a 2001 paper: “However… African women, not men, insist on circumcising their daughters.” And for the love of god, don’t take this to mean that I support involuntary FGC, or as an absurd claim that male circumcision is comparable in severity to infibulation or the removal of a woman’s clitoris, or as an absurd claim that patriarchy is not a primary root cause of FGC in these cultures. I make no such claims, and agree with anyone that challenges such claims. But even just with regards to ending FGC (male circumcision completely aside) I think it’s extremely counter-productive to ignore the realities of women’s experiences and attitudes in these cultures. We come in guns ablaze saying, “You’ve been mutilated and violated! We’ll save you! Rise up!” and they say, “Huh? I haven’t had problems. Don’t you call me mutilated. And I’ve done it to my daughter. Don’t you dare say I’ve mutilated my daughter.” And then we fire a false-consciousness argument at them, basically denying their experience. And perhaps even more problematically, their experience simply isn’t represented to people in western culture at all, so most people don’t even know what these women’s experiences are. We like to selectively show the women that do feel violated and mutilated (which are important, of course!). If we’re really serious about ending FGC (which I am), we can’t just deny the experiences of the actual women in these cultures. And, to bring this round-circle, I find it extremely (though secondarily) problematic when all of this denial and ignorance of the experiences of these women is then also used to make “But it’s not the same as male circ!” arguments to justify male circumcision. First, male circ doesn’t have to be as severe, or have the same cultural context, as FGC to be a violation of my body. So I really don’t get why people keep bringing that up. And second, by silencing the experiences of these women in order to make that argument, you are also harming those women, and harming our ability to properly address FGC to actually end the practice.

jmnzz · 2011-06-30T17:13:18+00:00

I'm not falling for it.

Title	Being Allies Against Male Circumcision
Author	memymineown
Upvotes	13
Comments	13
Date	June 30, 2011 4:35 PM UTC (15 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/iddkb/being_allies_against_male_circumcision/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/being-allies-against-male-circumcision.1037928 https://theredarchive.com/post/1037928

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