While mounds of resources and money have been invested worldwide to end Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation or FGC/M,  by and large FGC is on the increase, not on the decrease. In 1990, it was estimated that 168,000 women were cut or in danger of being cut by the CDC in the United States.

Today the CDC estimates we have three times that amount at risk with now more than 513,000 little girls threatened by FGC. (3) In the Western world, as FGC cultures increase migration into Western societies, FGC practices will continue to increase, unless we create effective educational outreach programs, pass powerful, punitive laws that are pursued to the fullest extent, and our society comes clean about our own form of genital mutilation, the Western form of Child Genital Cutting (CGC), the mutilation of male babies (MGC).

I must restate that last part of the thesis because it’s the part OUR CULTURE needs to hear. Western culture cannot end the CGC of another culture while denying the facts of our own form of CGC.

Girls and Boys as Victims: Asymmetries and dynamics in European public discourses on genital modifications in children Brian Earp PhD, Yale Hastings Institute

https://www.academia.edu/35343412/Girls_and_Boys_as_Victims_Asymmetries_and_dynamics_in_European_public_discourses_on_genital_modifications_in_children?email_work_card=title

FGM promoters are NOT dumb. They know if Americans allow our own version of genital mutilation, we are in no moral position to tell them to end their cherished form of CGC. Hypocrisy does not work and FGM promoters know this. FGC advocates have already pointed this out and are using our ‘medical’ excuses and ethical hypocrisy to justify FGC.

Alan Dershowitz, friend and lawyer of convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein, who successfully allowed Epstein 30 additional years of unfettered raping and abusing of little girls has joined Dr. Nagawala’s case defense team.  She was charged with Female Genital Mutilation in Michigan.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2017/06/01/dershowitz-genital-mutilation-case/102378354/

Doctor Nagawala despite abundant evidence, was acquitted of mutilating hundreds of girls.  This the most glaring example of Female Genital Cutters getting off specifically because of the hypocrisy of American Medicalized Child Genital Cutting (AM-CGC). American media won’t tell you this, and in fact hasn’t told us much about this case at all.  Feminist groups are strangely quiet. In addition, the judge has a personal bias as a part of a CGC culture and himself, a victim in denial.

Judge dismisses most serious remaining charge against doctor accused of genital mutilation

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/03/05/judge-dismisses-charge-against-doctor-female-genital-mutilation/4960323002/

Without understanding the failures of past efforts to end FGC, the inability of our legal system to prosecute FGC effectively, and how these failures are influenced by our own form of CGC, Americans will repeat the same mistakes with the end results being, FGC massively increasing in the Western world!

Hypocrisy doesn’t work America!

By NOT dealing with genital mutilation as a violation done to HUMANS, regardless of gender, it has left open the possibility that under the equal protection clause the law singling out female victims would be struck down. And, that is exactly what happened.
James Ketter

American Myths on CGC

Mostly all Americans have been told about FGC are partial truths, myths and exaggerations that are sadly true in too many cases and which justifiably provoke strong feelings. However, this lack of awareness has severely hampered our ability to effectively reduce FGC around the world. When our expectations are vastly different then real world and we have very little awareness of the facts, we are unable to create effective outreach programs.

We have been told all FGC is the worst form of FGC (the combination of FGC types I to III email 3). FGC is carried about by a heartless, evil man with no medical training, with a past around old, rusty razor blade, in a dirt hut. We are told the father forces this on their helpless daughter against her wishes so he can sell her for a higher bride price. We believe that their form of cutting is done with hateful purpose to harm and strip a woman of any form of pleasure, for the control and domination of the men of their society.

Degrees of Harm of FGC

The truth about FGC is that there are many forms with wildly differing degrees of harm from the ritual nick to draw blood up to a combination of clitoridectomy and hoodectomy, with labia majora and minora amputation followed by infibulation, or sewing shut the two incised sides (a combination of FGC Types I through III). This is a horrific act no child should experience. Although still way too high, and absolutely barbaric, thankfully the worst kind of FGC constitutes only 10-15% of FGC cases worldwide.

What that means is 85% of what we call FGC is equivalent to or less harmful and less invasive then what we do to our own male children.

We never acknowledge there are forms of FGC that are less harmful and damaging then our form of Child Genital Cutting or CGC. It’s easier to believe the exaggerations if they make it easy to ignore the painful truth about our own CGC.

We tell fantastical self-lies like; children sleep through it, it’s just a flap of skin that has no real value nor any function as if nature just made another mistake, no real harm happens since an infant will never remember it, he’s better off that way. Mothers imagine his future partners will thank her and he will have far less shower time and won’t miss this non-essential left over flap of evolutionary mistake that so routinely turns diseased any chance it gets. 

Strangely, within this weird set of contradictory beliefs, if not done as a child, this sensation lacking, bland, nerve-less skin suddenly becomes extremely painful to remove as an adult necessitating this done to a child before he can choose. Yet somehow this now extremely sensitive skin that once comprised of the middle HALF of our genital surface area has no influence whatsoever on the quality of neural input from the organ itself in violation of math we learned in the 3rd grade.  

Female genital mutilation (FGM) and male circumcision: should there be a separate ethical discourse?
Yale Bioethisist, Brian D. Earp, Ph.D.

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/02/female-genital-mutilation-and-male-circumcision-time-to-confront-the-double-standard/

We exaggerate what they do and vastly minimize what we do. Our expectations do not match reality, and as a result our efforts to curtail FGC have fallen flat despite a massive budget by international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), millions of dollars in donations being funneled to anti-FGM groups and laws enacted in numerous countries.

What if we are talking about a country like Malaysia were a female child is cut in a modern hospital by a trained surgeon with antiseptic procedures and just the lessor forms of cutting such as FGC types I-IIa are preformed? What if the doctors and the parents believe there are some medical and social benefits? Does this make it better? Does this legitimize FGC?

What if we go telling these woman, many who’s cutting was less severe than what is done to the men, that they are suffering tremendously, and it is imperative that they stop cutting the girls, but also good that they cut the boys for the health benefits? Do we think these people are idiots? All cultures who cut girls also cut boys. There is not one CGC society that exclusively cuts girls, however many single out boys for genital cutting such as our own.  

“By collapsing all of the many different types of procedures performed into a single set for each sex, categories are created that do not accurately describe any situation that actually occurs anywhere in the world”.
Zachary Androus, an anthropologist who specializes in cross-cultural comparisons of genital cutting

We claim that there are no ‘medical benefits’ to FGC as if some lack of flimsy medical benefits is the reason we shouldn’t strap down little girls and slice and dice their genitals. The real reason nearly every anti-FGC website’s favorite common excuse to not mutilate girls is the lack of medical acceptance of medical benefits is the effort to legitimize our Western accepted forms of CGC while exposing the facts of their form of CGC. The irony is the harm they are trying to protect one child from is the very harm they are excusing for another child, and the very reason they are impotent to protect their favored children.

Of course this lack of consistency, mixed messages and declarations of severe harm that does not match the experience of most FGM victims, combined with a lack of cultural awareness by the activists, have squandered large amounts of resources, while doing very little to protect children.

The myths we tell ourselves are nothing more then confirmational biases that serve to lessen the impact of recognizing the damage of our own CGC while pointing fingers at other cultures for their forms of CGC that we disagree with. It’s always easier to point the finger, than take our own medicine.

How about we say “no” to both FGM and MGM? Protecting both genders is called human rights. Protecting one while ignoring the other is call sexism.
Trenton Tan

Not Medicine

First off, are their really medical benefits to amputating portions of healthy children’s sex organs? The ‘science’ that tells us the foreskin is a moist, dark bacteria filled dangerous ewwwy part of our bodies that harbors bacteria and is a vector for STIs, UTIs, HPV, and HIV, if we believe it, says the same about females. Of course if you cut any body part off you can no longer develop problems with that body part. You can prevent 100% of stubbed toes by cutting off your feet.

If dark moist spaces are a source of bacteria and potential diseases, female genital anatomy would be more disease prone, not less, and in fact, they are. It is obvious that the female parts are more likely to develop a medical condition by their very nature and this is proven by epidemiology. This is not a value judgment, or an attempt to shame someone’s body, this is just biology. There is no physiological difference that would make a male more susceptible to disease that doesn’t apply to females. Females have far more UTIs then men, yet we do not do labiaectomies on little girls to prevent UTIs. We give them legit medical treatments.

Children are not at risk for HIV or STIs. Other excuses such as UTIs, Penile Cancer, HPV, Balanitis, and Phimosis or Paraphimosis are rare and easily treated with far less harmful treatments that do not include amputation of the primary sensory and mechanically functioning tissue of a child’s genitals.

The same health reasons are claimed – and they aren’t entirely without merit – there’s two observational studies out of Africa that found an even bigger difference in women based on their FGM status, and cutting away the moist folds of flesh that the labia create would reduce the 7x higher than all boys rate of UTI by much more than circumcision does – The reasons are the exact same, most aren’t medical, and most of the medical reasons are garbage for both. The WHO claims there are no health benefits and touts minor and disputed gross health benefits for circumcision of boys, but the truth is they search for health benefits of male circumcision, they look for harms of FGM, and the studies they do tend to be biased enough they always find what they look for and ignore everything that does not agree.
Reyos Blackwood

The only legit medical reasons for such a dramatic procedure as amputation of the primary skin of the penis include:

• Gangrene
• Advanced Cancer
• Frost Bite
• Advanced Diabetic Neuropathy and Peripheral Artery Disease
• Advanced Painful Lichen Schlerosis (BXO)

They are as common as medically necessary labiaectomies. 30 year veterinarian surgeons have never heard of a medically necessary penile sheath amputations in any of the other 5,488 mammal species with a prepuce.

This isn’t medicine and it never was

In future emails we will discuss the lucrative profits of medical cannibalism of the genitals of small children in America’s most common and most shameful surgery. In another email we will discuss the sordid history and how such an aberration of good ethics and common sense crept into our ‘free’ society.

So what if there was some grasping benefit to justify FGC? Who cares if there is some minuscule trivial ‘medical benefit’ wrapped up in jargon? No chintzy, mostly imagined benefits would justify cutting off any parts off any child. Yet the main claim to differentiate FGC from MGC is that FGC has no medical benefits implying that MGC does have legit medical benefits, while nothing could be further from the truth.

What if there were “studies” that said the kind of circumcision performed in say, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, “reduced” the likelihood of some disease? What if “studies showed” that female circumcision “reduced the risk of HIV transmission?” Would that make female circumcision in baby girls OK? Because there are few studies that show precisely this:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1442755

This study showed that FGM may protect against AIDS. Why don’t we hear about it? https://web.archive.org/web/20130417020935/http://www.iasociety.org/Default.aspx?pageId=11&abstractId=2177677

It is just another lie we tell ourselves and yet another reason we are impotent to stop FGC even in our own country!

Our CGC good, their CGC BAD!

It hurts to be honest with ourselves about what our parents and medical doctors have done to us and what we have done to our children. It’s easy to pretend nothing happened as the crowd waves to a naked emperor. However, no matter how difficult reality is to our adult egos, this harms children. A child doesn’t understand our adult cultural biases. A child is not sexually or culturally aware. They don’t realize that their torture and mutilation shouldn’t be painful and mind altering and forever damaging to their psychology and genitalia because of our ‘opinions’, biases and false beliefs.

I am very anti mutilation of boys and girls .. I nursed baby boys in the recovery after being genitally mutilated and it’s terrible the babies are in agonising pain .. get given no pain relief .. there is blood everywhere … torture pure and simple .. totally not necessary except that big pharma uses baby foreskins as well as some cosmetic companies.
Eleanor Sagginelli

Every day in America, 3,000 babies are sexually assaulted, tortured and crippled for life for trivial, ridiculous made-up benefits, that when properly researched, amount to nothing but a weak excuses to shield the medical industry from massive liability while keeping the gravy train going. No serious medical professional nor scientist could scientifically justify CGC based off some far fetched, puny medical benefits that amount to cutting of a foot to prevent a stubbed toe.

CUTure

Culture will brainwash the most basic of ethics and common sense smooth out of someone’s mind, no matter what education level, apparently. We are NOT rational creatures with compassion and empathy who place our children above ourselves. Our medical professionals are not benevolent, unbiased, evidence based patient advocates with an extreme knowledge of all parts of the human body who work hard for the health of their patients and humanity.

We care so much about our egos and protecting our own self-lies to the point we will strip little children naked, strap down their arms and legs spread eagle to a board and mercilessly hack away at the most nerve dense part of their anatomy while they scream in torturous pain, all to deny our own crippled penises and to validate our the lies we tell ourselves about our own sexual prowess.

Little boys suffer so Daddy doesn’t have to admit the truth of what happened to him, and Mommy can tell herself she is a good Mother. All for our pathetic little egos.  We all play our part in the big obvious yet hidden, and taboo to even discus, lie.  The lie that violates everything we tell our children about who we are. The elephant just sat on the couch and if you haven’t seen the “Elephant in the Hospital” please click, here.

Boys and girls alike
An un-consenting child, an unnecessary, invasive surgery: is there any moral difference between male and female circumcision?
Brian D Earp PhD, Associate director of the Yale-Hastings program in ethics and health policy at Yale University and a research fellow in the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford.
https://aeon.co/essays/are-male-and-female-circumcision-morally-equivalent

We are not good people who put our children first. We care far more about our position within our social groups. We want bigger houses, nicer cars, more expensive shoes, all for the opinions and approvals of others. We work endless hours barely seeing our children, letting strangers raise them, we feed them low nutrition toxic garbage destroying their future health and life experiences while telling ourselves we are selflessly slaving away all for our children we hardly know.

America is a Mirage. A facade. A fraud. We look good on the outside, since we control the dominant narrative.  Appearance is everything. We do horrible, psychotic things to our children, after all, we don’t want children with nasty, EWWWY sex organs. GROSS! A child’s normal body is so offensive to us we can’t wait until he grows into a man to decide if he want a penis reduction surgery. All for a hotly contested, minuscule reduction in rare diseases and culturally ingrained body shaming!

We tell ourselves it’s a parental choice about how much of just our male children’s sex organs they get to keep. Although, not the female child, because that is horrifically disgusting and illegal (up for grabs now thanks to MGC). Sex shaming the normal bodies of male infants is seen as rational thinking and not in fact utterly disgusting potty-stage-level immaturity. I’m literally embarrassed to be American because of this. I used to be so proud to be American.

America’s hypocrisy trumps it’s own boisterous claims of freedom and human rights.  We massively, disgustingly, perversely and embarrassingly violate the sex organs of our most vulnerable who do not have a voice to fight back for immature body shaming and to perpetuate our own self-lies. This fact is obvious to anyone who thinks about it. 

The USA is the only nation in the world who cuts children for non-religious reasons. We claim weak medical benefits as an excuse, but this has nothing to do with medicine. Our cherished form of Child Genital Cutting (CGC) is the real reason the US has not ratified the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet we routinely cast judgment on other cultures for their human rights abuses in such blatant hypocrisy from our lofty, head in the cloud, pedestal.

“Interesting how men aren’t supposed to have any psychological complications pertaining to male genital mutilation [circumcision] whatsoever. However, if we so much as pinprick a little girl, it can be expected that she’ll have ongoing psychological problems from the harm that FGM caused her. Females are expected to have psychological issues about FGM. Males aren’t allowed to have any psychological issues about MGM. Indeed, they’ll often be laughed at.”
~ Zuditaka, Youtube comment

You can and should judge a society on how it treats its children. That doesn’t make one a racist or a bigot, that makes one authentic, self aware, true to one’s convictions, and not swayed by the herd! Judging one by their actions is the opposite of bigotry. I’m Jewish by-the-way, if undeserved thoughts of antisemitism blaming fluttered through your mind as a tool to disregard the truth in these words and redirect the mirror pointed our way. This has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with CUTure. Jewish boys like myself, like every other human, OWN OUR OWN BODIES!

Who owns your bodies, ladies? It is your parents? Is it your Mother’s clitoris? Your Dad’s vulva? Is it the whims and sexual desires of men of society? Or do you own your body? Is your body an item for ridicule by society? Do you have ‘EWWWY’ body parts too? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. This is not an ethically complex conundrum, it’s simply applying basic concepts of human rights we claim to understand….equally.

FGM still enjoys support in large sections of the community, notably among members of secret “Bondo” societies, made up exclusively of women, which use the practice to initiate girls into womanhood — alongside teaching them various domestic skills (15).

Why Are We Cutting The Sex Organs of Healthy Children, America?

Is it to appease parental insecurities with the natural body we were born with, due to culturally ingrained male body shaming? To help brainwashed, uneducated, negligent at best, completely incompetent QUACKS to make their Tesla payments? For rich old wrinkled face women to have less wrinkles? (yes the hospitals sell the tissue to cosmetic companies, see Oprah)

Whether this happens to boys or girls, this is WRONG AMERICA! It is shameful, disgusting and the truth of this issue is being exposed in our society whether we want to recognize reality or not.

No matter how many adults believe our cultural myths about this issue, the truth is the truth, and the harm is undeniable. This fact is literally common sense and it is clear that anyone who denies harm to a child places their own egos and ridiculous self-lies before the rights, body and protection of children. Cultural norms harm children, not legit medicine.

No one would argue that boys and girls don’t feel pain the same ways. No one would agree that you could punch a boy in the face and he won’t feel it or mind, but you punch a girl and she’ll be in pain, bruised and bloodied. No one would agree that you could cut a boys ear off with no consequences, but a girl would have major, irreparable damage to her hearing.

How can we believe that any part of a human body is that vastly different, that cutting it doesn’t have any of the same effects in boys as it does in girls? How are people so ignorant that common sense doesn’t click and say that makes no sense, that they are both human flesh being cut from a non consenting child’s most sensitive parts?

Vee Savage

The Harm of Genital Cutting of ANY Child

All a child being cut knows, regardless of male or female, is tremendous pain and literal torture as their most sensitive personal areas, we tell them no one should touch, are violated on a massive and disgusting scale. All genitally mutilated children are psychologically shattered by this horrific, cowardly, disgusting, devastating assault on their genitals (learn more about the psychological harm) no matter what they believe in when they grow up and how influential their culture is at convincing them this was good for them. This damage and harm influences entire societies. We live in a different world because of it. This damage is a primary cause of mental health problems that last a lifetime. Is this psychological damage the reason cutting cultures are far more violent then intact cultures?

Psychological Effects of Circumcision

by Gocke Cansever
http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/cansever/

“Following circumcision, there was a remarkable decrease in the I. Q. obtained by this test and in the size of the drawing itself (Table 1). From the decrease in I. Q. we can assume that circumcision hampers smooth, spontaneous and efficient functioning by the child”

Children drawl self

After the mutilation….“the children feel ‘smaller’. The body image shows a tendency to shrink, most probably this results from the feeling of ‘being cut’. By depicting a smaller image of himself, the child may also be expressing his feeling of insecurity, inadequacy, inferiority under the impact of the outside world’s attack on him”

Somehow, on this one issue, everyone is an expert, yet not even the doctors doing the mutilation know the 101 level anatomy we are amputating off children. In fact, no one seems to know. Not even medical professionals from cultures that do not cut boys, with the body part themselves, who study anatomy, seem to know a thing about this area of their own body. Not even sexologists, with PhDs, with popular talk radio shows, seem to know much about the anatomy, structure and function of the male genitals. 

Somehow the whole world is convinced that half the surface area of a man’s genitals is an evolutionary mistake, that violates natural selection, and has no real purpose despite 80% of the world’s men experiencing the amazing sensations of the tissue in question.

We literally have a taboo body part that NO ONE MUST KNOW! In a future email we will discuss in detail the final frontier in human anatomy, the male genitals, and explode this juicy bit of taboo information and expose the fact that the foreskin is the primary sensory and mechanical functioning tissue comprising 1/3 to ½ of the total surface area containing 75% of the nerve endings including both male ‘G-Spots’ the frenulum and the ridged band.

If they knew how valuable the primary skin of the penis is, would they still do it? If they knew the function they were destroying would they stop? Is it not medical fraud and malpractice to cut parts off other people for less then perfectly ethical reasons? These quacks are negligence for operating on body parts they are not even educated about. What if an eye surgeon didn’t know the anatomy of your eyeball and wanted to do surgery on you?

Even without this basic knowledge, there really is no excuse. We learned enough science to debunk the notion of this being medicine in the 5th grade. Natural selection doesn’t create tissue with no function and no value in 5,488 mammal species over 150 million years of evolution that is inherently diseased or disease causing. That would defy fundamental biology we are teaching 5th graders. This is literally the last hold over of 19th Century quackery from before germ theory. This was started to prevent masturbation, when it was thought sin caused disease. That’s why we started doing it.

How are TENS OF THOUSANDS of AMERICAN DOCTORS still blindly doing this without question?

Our professionals deny the 101 level anatomy, structure and function of an essential body part.  As if learning about one of the most magnificent body parts  of our DNA, created by 150 million years of natural selection and integral to health and reproduction is totally uninteresting. They ignore obvious changes in decibel levels as screams intensify far beyond the ‘I’m strapped spread eagle to a board naked and uncomfortable’ type of screams, into the ‘a wolf is gnawing at my leg, where the fuck is my mother’ kind of scream.

They insult our intelligence by claiming the children are screaming, not from having their genitals flayed by Edward Scissorhands, but because they are strapped to a board, or because the knife is cold. Seriously, these are common excuses among these well paid quacks.

Not only are they doing them, the are UP-SELLING THEM! That’s right, new research by Intact America showed American mothers are solicited on average 8 times to cut the genitals of their male children. Solicited mothers circumcise 78% of the time compared to 45% of new mothers not solicited. The doctor’s authority gives them credibility as no doctor would solicit to harm your child, right? If your doctor is pushing it, it must be normal, right? These quacks took the sales training, they know most sales happen after the 6th no. (16)

“Doctors Tell Us They Circumcise Boys Only Because Parents Want It. This Survey Proves Otherwise”— Georganne Chapin, Executive Director, Intact America

https://intactamerica.org/press-release-having-a-baby-boy-get-ready-for-the-circumcision-sellers/

They tell us when they go into shock and shut down that this more extreme sign of trauma is them ‘falling asleep’. Is their lie so convincing they have themselves fooled? It is obvious to anyone worthy of basic logic that these are nothing more then self delusions on a massive scale that create untold psychological damage to our men by those we should be able to trust and who claim to be the ‘experts’.

The emperor is so obviously naked and no one says a thing, except for the screaming children.

Somehow these ‘medically trained’ professionals ignore obvious changes in sound of the screams, facial expressions, muscle tone, skin color changes, breathing rate changes, heart rate elevations, signs of withdrawal, signs of shock, and signs of extreme torture (it’s nothing less than).

All sorts of horrific signs of torture are common place in the circumcision chamber. Children routinely vomit while being mutilated.  The circumcision crew keeps a syringe nearby to suction the vomit out of the baby’s throat. There are some reports that babies have choked to death on their own vomit. Children have burst lungs from screaming so loud, and even damaged their hearts. It is estimated that over 117 children die a year from this unnecessary, optional baby genital customization.

BABY SCREAMED HIMSELF CATATONIC “My daughter had jaundice as a newborn and ended up in the nicu for a couple of days. Her bed was right next to the “procedure” room. One day, I was nursing her and they hadn’t pulled the curtain all the way closed over the window on the procedure room’s door. I was hearing a baby scream, so I looked through the hole in the curtains and witnessed a circumcision being performed. The baby was strapped down to one of those plastic boards and literally screamed himself catatonic. At first he was just gasping and screaming, then he got totally quiet and was just shaking silently. I was bawling. Before that, I didn’t really see a reason for circumcising, but, I figured I’d leave the decision up to my husband since he must know more about it than me. After that, I absolutely refused to have one done on any of my sons. I now have 4 completely intact boys who have never had any problems due to not being circumcised.”
~A Washington state mom

What amounts to obvious scientific evidence of extreme psychological damage, trauma and even shock, right in front of these doctors, is completely ignored as if their senses somehow stopped sending input. How do you have tens of thousands of educated medical professionals violate their oath and all medical ethics to do an optional surgery on children’s genitals on body parts they are completely oblivious to the anatomy form and function for over 100 years?!?!

There is no ethical, evidence based medicine that cuts the genitals of small healthy children. The notion is fantastically erroneous to the point of sick psychosis.  We will demolish the flimsy medical excuses in future emails as well as share how essential to full FUNction the fore (primary) skin of the penis really is.

The foreskin comprises ½ the total surface area, on average 15 square inches, and contains 75% of the nerve endings, including both male ‘G’ spots the frenulum and the ridged band. The frenulum, the frenuluar delta and the ridged band, the male ‘G’ spots are full of the most sensitive nerves in the body, Meissner’s Corpuscle. These are the same nerves which make touching so sensitive to your finger tips and why kissing feels so amazing to your lips (truth about male genital anatomy here).

The primary (fore)skin includes miles of nerves, blood vessels, the dartos facia smooth muscle full of stretch receptors that provides exquisite pleasure to the owner. This magnificent complex system created over 150 million years of natural selection provides a mechanical function that rolls and unrolls reducing abrasive friction while maintaining moisture and creating tremendous pleasure and sensation for both partners that is impossible without. It is not the candy wrapper, it is the candy. The foreskin is the main event. It is the primary sensory tissue of the penis. It also has a mechanical function during sex that cannot be compensated for.

It could be argued that the fore(primary)skin evolved as much for the experience of the receiver as the giver. Many women will be shocked to know their sex lives have forever been altered as well by this abomination of common sense and damage to their men’s sex organs (in another fascinating future email we will discus in detail how male genital cutting harms the female during intercourse). Is this the reason 70% of American women struggle to have vaginal orgasms? Is this why European and Latino men are rumored by American women to be expert lovers? Does not biology and common sense teach us nature made our bodies to fit perfectly, together? How would massively altering the organs of one sex not influence the other? My God….how is this not obvious? This is common sense (sex as nature intended it).

FGM Laws Are Being Sacrificed To Protect Male Circumcision Warns Yale Scholar Brian Earp Ph.D.
http://pressepuce.com/2019/07/fgm-laws-are-being-sacrificed-to-protect-male-circumcision-argues-yale-scholar-brian-earp/

Real Activists Protect All Children

Now, this is not an us vs them type of campaign. It’s harmful to children to choose a ‘side’ and throw the other side under the bus, as is the dominant message of Western FGC activists. Real activists protect all children who are subjected to CGC, not just the one’s that share their sex organs, or that is popular in our current culture to protect. The truth is all children deserve protection from harmful cultural practices. All children deserve to grow to full adulthood with all the body parts their DNA created for them. I should not even have to tell any adult this ever, but I do.

It is very common among FGC activists to actively argue in support of MGC by claiming FGC is so much worse than MGC and that FGC has no medical benefits while MGC has ‘benefits’. In doing so they give ammunition to the FGC supporters and make it hard to effectively prevent any forms of CGC. This is Twilight Zone psychotic. How can you recognize the pain and torture in one child and deny the same to another child?

Of course, not all FGC activists are like this. Soraya Mire and Ayann Hirsi Ali, both powerful and influential FGC activists, both victims of FGC themselves, recognize the harm and damage of MGC and routinely publicly support keeping all children intact and whole. Soraya Mire is featured in the award winning documentary, American Circumcision once on Netflix and now on Amazon Prime. Sadly these amazing human rights activists are the exception and not the rule.

MGM is worse than some FGM Ayaan Hirisi Ali
https://youtu.be/NaEoQVZnN8I

Soraya Mire human rights activist on FGM and MGM
https://youtu.be/Ggqa6CCTR-4

Let’s be honest, moral relativity as a social theory in Sociology does not justify political legitimacy of one group to accept the harm another group does to it’s children. Of course diversity of beliefs, music, food, dancing, art, political systems, language, values, philosophies and many other beautiful aspects of human diversity should be celebrated and past down and studied for future knowledge. 

Reverence for culture must end where the body, life and sanctity of a child is violated

No cultural authority deserves to be granted the green light by members of any other group to scarify, bleed, amputate parts, tattoo, pierce, stretch their necks with rings, place plates in their lips, burn, foot bind, water board, or any way cause extreme pain or permanent loss in function to children. Protection of the rights of a child to freedom of happiness, expression and safety from physical and mental trauma that limits or reduces their future to a happy, fulfilling life is an essential cross cultural goal of humans of all worthy nations of the world. This is the foundation of any healthy society.

Ethically, there is NO acceptable degree of CGC of any child! No matter the degree of cutting, the moment a child’s genital tissue is pierced with a knife, a grave violation of that child’s body and human rights have been committed.

It matters not the cultural context, or the social pressures, no matter what excuses such a person could imagine, no matter how brainwashed, no matter what contradictory religious texts say, this should NEVER happen to a CHILD, EVER!

This is barbaric and HARMFUL TO CHILDREN! Humanity should be ashamed for letting this continue in 2021! We should be ashamed it ever happened in human history, let alone doing it blindly, without question, in violations of our own principles.

Celebrated the new year with my beloved mentor, the woman who challenges me to be as unapologetically African as possible, Dr. Fuambai Ahmadu (medical anthropologist/pro-female circumcision activist). Being able to stand firmly in one’s truth is always a commendable trait, even if it means going against the grain in Western academia.
Diamond Bennah with Dr. Fuambai Sia Ahmadu

We have quantum computers and AI looming on the horizon, yet our scientist and doctors are completely clueless to the basic anatomy and function of essential to life body part.  Doctors are unable to give proper informed consent on body parts they are uneducated on and are missing themselves.

This is absolutely mind blowing that is happening in our culture right under our noses. This is too ignorant to be true, yet it is. Many victims of CGC, such as myself, can not even fathom how such sickness is perpetuated, and how educated grown-ups (term used loosely) have not intellectually and morally revolted against the idea of mass mutilation of the genitals of children. This is embarrassing, America. We are blindly sexually assaulting children for the most ridiculous medical lies and parental insecurities with the normal bodies we are born with.

In Sudan, the Arabic word “tahur”, which means purity, is often used for FGC/C. “If a baby is sick, cutting helps,” added Jibril. “For example if a baby has duda [fever] and weight loss, the cut helps the child to grow better and gain weight.” Most girls undergo FGC/C at about six years old in the state.

My body was damaged by my own family and by the medical profession, both of whom should have known better, especially the doctors who claim to be experts in these areas.

The notion of an optional surgery on the genitals of children should be foreign and, in fact, repulsive to any human who entertains even the most basics of morality. Mutilating the genitals of a person is one of the worst things you could do to a person. I would have never chosen this for myself….EVER!  

I do know that if my parents did have an opportunity for the truth, both would have protected me, which is why this messages is so IMPORTANT! 

Imagine what you would think of a person who strapped down an adult and did this to them with no consent.  

ITS WORSE TO DO IT TO CHILDREN!
IT’S OKAY BECAUSE THEY WON’T REMEMBER IT?
THIS IS WHY THE ALIENS WON’T HELP US!

A five year old recognizes this as evil. Show a circumcision to a five year old with the volume turned on if you want to know what a normal, authentic human reaction SHOULD be to a violent sexual assault on a child without years of cultural brainwashing. Watch a video of a circumcision yourself. If your stomach doesn’t turn, your heart broken, your instincts alarmed and your teeth clenched, you might be a sociopath. If that child’s scream doesn’t haunt you in your dreams at night and propel you to protect children at all costs, the problem lies within you, not that child. Something is very seriously wrong with a society that institutionalizes such a disgusting, barbaric, psychotic, embarrassing form of child abuse.

It is time we STOP pretending we are better simply because we don’t cut females. We cut children. We are a child genital mutilation society whether we want to admit it or not. We are the biggest hypocrites of humanity. The land of the free, home of the brave. The most fundamental human right is self ownership. Cutting the sex organs of your children because everyone is doing it is the most cowardly thing you could do. If slavery and woman’s rights movements taught us nothing, it taught us we all own our bodies, at least that’s why I thought I learn from it. Do we really need to learn the same lesson from a different extreme to fully wrap our brains around self ownership?

“Just about the most glaring example of cultural bias I can think of is the fact that most Americans view the genital mutilation of young girls practiced in other countries as heinously evil and barbaric (which it is), but view male “circumcision” as just fine. The ONLY reason they think that is because one type of genital mutilation (but not the other) is still common and familiar in this country. “It’s tradition, that makes it okay!”* Well guess what: that is the SAME reason that people in those other countries engage in THEIR barbaric bullshit. Either way, it constitutes the physical torture of young children. If you’re trying to fabricate a fundamental difference, it’s because you don’t want to question the crap your OWN culture preaches and does; you just want to focus on how bad other cultures are.”
Larken Rose

We cut the genitals of small, helpless, screaming children for dubious, trivial medical benefits that even a cursory review of the supporting literature would expose as a cruel joke. Any human who claims medical benefits of cutting the genitals of healthy children has not done any sort of reasonable or legitimate research whatsoever, yet, strangely, they always have an opinion. The medical literature touted to support this crime against children is incredibly weak and would be laughed at were such rubbish used as an excuse for any other medical procedure.

With this one issue, every drop of common sense goes out the window. With one act, everything we tell ourselves about whom we are becomes a lie. With one act, we violate everything we stand for on any other issue. The reasons you are against everything you are already against are the same reasons you should be against this.

The TRUTH is, we are the land of the hypocrites, home of the baby mutilators. Our entire country is a fraud where no male child is free, where every male child’s most fundamental rights are up for grab by profit driven doctors and insecure, self-lying, body-shaming parents. Not only is it open season on little boys genitals, we have no recourse to even fight back against the crime committed against us. How can we call ourselves free when other people decide how much of our body parts we are allowed to keep?

Social Norms that Perpetuate FGC

One harmful myth Americans tell ourselves about FGC is that it is done by the fathers as a form of sexual control passed down to the husband. First off, every culture that mutilates girls, also mutilates boys and for similar reasons. There are no cultures that mutilate boys for good and benevolent reasons while mutilating girls for sadistic harmful reasons. The idea is ludicrous.

Which Social Roles Dominate The Issue?

For the large majority of CGC cultures it is the same sex which is required to perform the ceremonies, although in America mother’s often have a big influence on cutting their son/s. In FGC cultures it is the women who are the main influence in a female being cut. In particular it is the elder women of the tribe or the grandmothers who have the cultural authority to cut or not.

“Much of the time, grandmothers will take the initiative to have a girl cut. They can override the views of other family members, including fathers, and may take the girl to be cut without the parents’ knowledge. Grandmothers can also exert influence from a considerable distance; those in Africa can even shape the views of parents in the diaspora. Some of the other older women told me their fathers had told them that they should not be circumcised, and it was the mother, grandmother, aunts, or other female relatives who overruled the father. Female elders are often the staunchest supporters of the practice and those most likely to resist campaigns to eradicate it.(14)”

 

Happily Mutilated

Most FGC victims support their own genital cutting, just like American men. Not surprisingly, it is not only mutilated men that have insecure egos they must lie to to feel good about themselves, but woman also hate to admit they were sexually harmed by amputations of portions of their genitals and that their parents and their society did something harmful to them.

“I have been circumcised, and my daughters will be circumcised too. This is our custom and tradition!” See how one woman responded to DW’s Jaafar Abdul Karim in the Sudan where 88% of women are genitally mutilated.
https://www.facebook.com/dw.stories/videos/1349429331835468/

Unfortunately a man mutilated at birth has no clue what he is missing, nor how it will affect his son. Add this the doctor’s ignorance on basic penile anatomy and we have a repeating cycle. Hurt people hurt people. The abused becomes the abuser and is often strangely psychologically compelled to perpetuate the cycle.

This is why when given information about the harm of CGC many parents, and others involved in the cycle such as medical professionals and religious leaders, instead of being receptive to new information, will search high and low for any confirmational bias to support them harming their child. This is when you know its about the parent, not the child. The parent does not want to accept that cutting is harmful so they are compelled to cut their child, a form of denial of their own loss. Normally, a healthy parent would do the opposite and look for any option to lessen the pain and harm their child experiences. This is another overt sign of significant damage to our entire society. We live in a different world because of CGC. Our entire society, from wars, to relationships we are far worse of with CGC then without it.

Two examples of cultural ignorance. One in Somalia. The other in North Dakota. Same biases, different cultures.
https://youtu.be/wcJNAtn-c6I

Adults and their Egos

No one, especially men, want to admit their sexual prowess has been diminished. Of course our egos are so wrapped up in our genitals, no man wants to acknowledge that other men have something he is missing. No wife wants to accept the fact that her husband is sexually damaged and she might be missing out on something too. It’s so easy to go alone to get alone. To accept the lies, however ridiculous. It’s hard to stand alone with truth when everyone wants you to join in on the big lie.

This is why it is so hard to end CGC once it starts. Our egos, our social status, the very function of our society depends on the perpetuation of the lie. In our culture, men deny they are missing something and our women deny their own experience has been somehow muted. Its hard for people to admit they fell for a lie. Its hard for a parent to admit they harmed their child. It’s hard for men to accept they are damaged. It’s hard for woman to admit their husbands are sexually damaged.

“Many women claim that their lives have not been affected by FGC. But that’s not the point,” she said. “We all were minors and unable to make our own choice. How can anyone say that her sexual life couldn’t have been more pleasurable? Nobody can give me that guarantee and that’s what frustrates me.”
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/mar/06/study-reveals-FGC-india-female-genital-mutilation

So rather than admit we were duped, that we harmed a child, that our parents harmed us, that our society is sick, that our doctors are at best massively incompetent and/or negligent and at worst psychotic quacks. It’s much easier for US to let our children be violently sexually assaulted and forever mentally and physically harmed than for the US to question the dominant paradigm.

Circumcised women uncritical of the ritual just like American Men
Women who have been subjected to genital cutting are too rarely critical of what they have undergone.
Linda Karoline Ringstad
https://sciencenorway.no/culture-forskningno-norway/circumcised-women-uncritical-of-the-ritual/1387805

It’s always easy for the coward who doesn’t have to pay the true cost to just let it happen rather then face the truth, fight against family members, and risk being ostracized and shamed than break the cycle and be a real parent who protects their children from harm.

Why would ANYONE Mutilate Children?

CULTure is a strange thing. Social status, marriageability and avoidance of sanctions are powerful CULTural forces that keep CGC alive. Human’s are social creatures. We crave and need connections with other people. Through our adherence to our cultural norms we develop a sense of belonging, a sense of pride, honor, respect and acceptance from our peer group. Any human who made it through puberty recognizes this powerful need.

Often cutting is a sign of marriageability and marks one’s status as an adult. Celebrations ensue and gifts are given. A circumcised women often brings a higher pride price.

If cultural norms are violated, social sanctions are levied against non-conformists. They may find it difficult to find a willing husband and shamed and stigmatized by their peers. Social status is downgraded and even the whole family may be excluded from the community.

People with positions of power often use their social influence to pressure families into conforming. Everyone wants to be part of a group. Joe Rogan once mentioned how one of the worst things you could do to a prisoner is to put them in solitary confinement. Think about that. Rather then be alone, most people would rather be around rapist, murderers and criminals. This is how powerful our drive for social connection is.

We are social creatures who need connection with others. This is what gives so much power to something so harmful and as CGC. CGC is often seen as a means to other social ends. For instance, in these religious communities chastity and sexual conservatism is highly valued. Cutting is believed to delay loss of virginity and is thought to help a woman by reducing her sexual desires.

Solutions

Education and Outreach

The main reason for our collective failure to even curtail FGC is assumed by 28toomany, an FGC activist organization, to be the results of very little effort to understanding the cultural context behind FGC and therefore very little has been done to reduce positive perceptions of the cultural value of the ritual in the eyes of those that preform these rituals.

“Many programs have failed because they have ignored key decision-makers and focused on ‘positive deviants’ (i.e. people who oppose the practice) to convert the rest of their community, without realizing that the positive deviants chosen do not necessarily have the customary authority to lead behavior change.”

Rarely do policy makers, campaigners and activists seek to understand the cultural context behind FGC. It seems rather the ethnocentrism of the myths and biases, they themselves have grown up with, create an emotional resistance to understanding this issue on a rational level.  This is massively compounded by our need to maintain our own ignorance about the harm of our form of CGC. This truth is the main reason why these half hearted efforts are largely wasted and have produced so little results.

Hypocrisy doesn’t work, America!

First, we must be honest with ourselves about the facts of CGC. Hypocrisy is not a powerful platform to elicit change in human rights. How can we tell Africans to stop cutting females when we cut males? These cultures do not share our biases and with simple research our hypocrisy is exposed. Pro-cutters exploit our own inconsistencies we offer them on a platter.

We must be honest with the harms and damages to ALL children from CGC. This is essential as EDUCATION is the most important stage of ending CGC. In fact, this email is part of an Educational Outreach Program of Intactivists, activist who protect children from CGC, to expose the facts of CGC so our world can finally move past this sad fact of human history. 

As long as we are not able or willing to protect boys from genital cutting, girls will never be safe as we leave the ethical backdoor wide open for girl cutters.
Johannes Busch

What we need are culturally sensitive approaches to ending all CGC. Until we come clean with our CGC, we will never have much influence to stop their forms of CGC. We must create an environment of open debate and dialogue. We need to educate our professional class that has a potential for influence on this issues. In FGC cultures this must include tribal elders.

Open dialogue and free flow of information is essential to breaking the taboo of discussing these issues. By fostering communication, combined with education we can encourage objectors within groups to share their views, we can break the ice and lower the social resistance to the conversation.

“Because individual behavior is strongly reinforced by social norms and belief systems in their communities, recruiting the larger community and individual norm authorities, who uphold social norms, to question unhealthy norms is critical.”

Culturally sensitive approaches are essential. We must encourage the best parts of one’s culture be preserved and ask that the harmful parts be substituted with less harmful options. An education into the harm of CGC can be part of every person becoming a US citizen as well as prevention strategies taught to students and teachers.

Preserve its positive traditional values
and let its abusive customs disappear.
Amadou Hampâté Ba, Malian intellectual,
in A Letter to the Youth (1985)

Enforce Already Enacted Laws

First, we need to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, so as not to be hypocrites on the world stage. Next, large class action lawsuits similar to the tobacco lawsuits need to be levied against the AAP, ACOG, AAFP and any other medical organizations involved in harming children and perpetuating lies. This includes the medical schools who failed to teach the whole anatomy of the human body as well as teaching doctors to do this heinous act. All doctors who’s negligence created such harm should be sued for every dime they made off their career and their licenses revoked for life.

This large settlement can be invested into regenerative medicine such as what the organization Foregen is trying to do as well as educate competent doctors who can fill the gap till medical schools can produce enough educated, ethical doctors to fill the void left by the new dishwashers at your local restaurant. We need doctors who know all the anatomy they are creating treatments for, and we need to give our men the option to be whole again.

There is no excuse for the doctors who preforms or who preformed these heinous acts.  Following the herd is not an excuse.  It was no excuse for the SS guards in WWII and it is no excuse for American monsters to do this to children.  Lack of anatomical education is not an excuse.  False beliefs such as the child going quiet is him sleeping not following into a disassociated state of shock is not an excuse.  These are barbaric, ethically questionable quacks who should never be left in a room alone with children.

Part of these funds should be directed towards dealing with the mental and psychological damage this has created. All mutilated men should have access to counseling and psychological support. As more and more men become aware of this, we may open a flood gate we are not ready to deal with. Continuing the lie will only exacerbate this adjustment period and make violence more likely. Whether we like it or not the truth of our genital anatomy and the harm we suffered will be exposed in our lifetime. If you think the volcano sitting under yellowstone is dangerous, we need to look at the festering unacknowledged psychological damage of 100 years of genital mutilation causes. We are working hard to accelerate this awakening so we can protect as many children currently in danger as we can.

Laws already exist to prosecute someone who chops off a pinky toe or a wrist or any other body part off children. We do not need new laws for every body part. We already have laws against assault and battery with egregious bodily harm against a child with a whole legal systems set up that just needs to do its job rather. We just need to enforce them and if they are weak, to give them more power.

It is already illegal for medical doctors to perform unnecessary, harmful surgeries under dubious methods without giving proper informed consent. This is called medial malpractice. We just need to enforce these laws to revoke these medical licenses of quacks who continue to cut helpless children.

Maybe one day we can celebrate all of our children growing up whole and complete and we can leave this shameful, embarrassing mistake of history in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

I would like to close with this message from a fellow human rights activist:

FGM and MGM are still the same.

Both are done to “fit in”

Both are done because the parents are cut.

Both remove normal, healthy, erogenous tissue.

Both are human rights violations.

Both are genital mutilation.

Both are child abuse.

Both are unnecessary.

Both reduce the pleasure the person will be able to have.

Both are often done without the person’s consent.

Both are done to babies/children.

Both can decrease sensitivity or take it away entirely.

Both are defended by supposed health benefits.

Both are defended by religion.

Both are defended by custom.

Both are defended by conformity.

Both are defended by what the opposite sex thinks about it.

Both have effects that their supporters try to minimize.

Both are often done without painkillers, so they are extremely painful.

Both almost always cause severe damage.

Both have caused death.

And finally…

I’m strongly against both (and always will be).

Aaron Storm

 

References

FGM protects against HIV
This study showed that FGM may protect against AIDS. Why don’t we hear about it? https://web.archive.org/web/20130417020935/http://www.iasociety.org/Default.aspx?pageId=11&abstractId=2177677

Journal of Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences Stop FGM Mideast
http://www.stopfgmmideast.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/2769-13434-2-PB.pdf

AAP Retracts Controversial Policy on Female Genital Cutting
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/722840

Group backs ritual ‘nick’ an female circumcision option
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/health/policy/07cuts.html?referer=http://m.facebook.com

Australian Court Rules Bohra Practice of Female Circumcision is Not Mutilation
https://www.religiousfreedomnews.com/2018/08/13/australian-court-rules-bohra-practice-of-female-circumcision-is-not-mutilation/

The case itself:
https://www.caselaw.nsw.gov.au/asset/5b6d0731e4b09e9963071a80.pdf

What Works and What Does Not: A Discussion of Popular Approaches for the Abandonment of Female Genital Mutilation
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ogi/2013/348248/

Androus ZT. The United States, FGM, and global rights to bodily Integrity. In: The United States and Global Human Rights. University of Oxford; 2004. p. 1–7.

(14)  SIERRA LEONE: A Women’s Issue That Women Are Wary of Campaining About

https://www.28toomany.org/static/media/uploads/Thematic%20Research%20and%20Resources/Social%20Norms/fgm_and_social_norms_report_v1c_(june_2019).pdf

(15)  FGM AND SOCIAL NORMS: A GUIDE TO DESIGNING CULTURALLY SENSITIVE COMMUNITY PROGRAMMES
June 2019

http://www.fgmnetwork.org/gonews.php?subaction=showfull&id=1186955076&ucat=1&

(16)  Press Release: Having a Baby Boy? Get Ready for the Circumcision Sellers!’

https://intactamerica.org/press-release-having-a-baby-boy-get-ready-for-the-circumcision-sellers/