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Mechanics of Brutality
Now let's examine how a typical medical circumcision is performed.
First the child, after 9 months in the fetal position, is tied down
spreadeagled and straight-backed in a circumstraint, a plastic
board molded to the outline of an infant's body, which is equipped
with velcro straps. Next he is covered with a sheet which has a
hole through which his penis is threaded. Then his penis is thoroughly
swabbed with sterilizing solution. Naturally, this frequently
provokes an erection. Some physicians deliberately provoke erections
in order to judge the "cutoff line" and to aid in the surgery
itself. In other words, in the infant's brand new, wide-open,
pre-verbal consciousness, this is his first sexual experience: a
torturous nightmare.[50 , 51, 52, 53, 54] Because the foreskin of
an infant is attached to the head of the penis by the same tissue
that bonds a fingernail to a finger, it must be skinned away before
it can be cut off. So the doctor forces a metal probe between the
foreskin and the head and tears apart this flesh (called synechia)
which bonds them together. Next, the doctor has several options
for the actual amputation. One commonly used device for this step
is called a gomco clamp. This essentially functions as a thumbscrew
for the foreskin. I am not making this up. By positioning the clamp
and tightening a screw, the foreskin, one of the most densely
innervated tissues of the body, is simultaneously crushed along
two lines (inner and outer foreskin) around its circumference.
The clamp is left on for a few minutes to promote blood clotting,
then the foreskin is cut off at the crush line.[55 , 56, 57]
Afterwards, the raw, bleeding, formerly internal organ is wrapped
in bandages and a diaper, and then repeatedly burned with urine
and its breakdown product, ammonia, and exposed to infectious fecal
matter while healing.
For many years the mainstream medical orthodoxy, put forth after
it was no longer acceptable to torture children in the name of
"moral hygiene," was that babies don't feel pain. It wasn't until
1978 that researchers even suggested using anesthetic during
circumcision, and even today, most medical circumcisions are
performed without anesthesia, according to the AMA.[58 ] This is
in stark contrast to what is known about infant pain perception
and its profound and lasting effects on the victim, as well as the
plainly obvious reaction of the infant boy, who forcefully communicates
his torment to anyone who will look and listen. Choking and breathing
problems arise due to the continuous screaming. Surges in adrenaline
and cortisol and large increases in heart rate, all established
physiological indicators of torture, have been measured.[59 ] Some
babies appear to go into shock.[41 ] Later, problems with sleep,
mother-child bonding and breastfeeding, and increased sensitivity
to stress and pain are all commonly seen after MGM.[60 , 61, 62]
To all appearances, the infant is left in a state of post-traumatic
stress. Sometimes older boys have recurring flashbacks of their
circumcision, a classic sign of PTS.
Impaired bonding at this critical stage is well correlated with
social dysfunction and even criminality later in life, while breast
feeding is known to have many health and psychological benefits
for both the mother and the baby,[63 , 51, 52, 64] contrary to
American medical doctrine of only a few years ago.
In a definitive study of neonatal pain perception published in the
New England Journal of Medicine in 1987, the authors wrote:
"Numerous lines of evidence suggest that even in the human fetus,
pain pathways as well as cortical and subcortical centers necessary
for pain perception are well developed late in gestation, and the
neurochemical systems now known to be associated with pain transmission
are intact and functional."[65 ] Research for a study on the efficacy
of various types of pain relief during circumcision, published in
the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1997, was halted
early because researchers began to question the ethics of subjecting
their placebo group to MGM without anesthesia.
Of 11 infants in the placebo group, two experienced prolonged
periods of apnea, and one infant had an episode of projectile
vomiting and a sudden "lack of tone in limbs".[66 ] Other immediate
pain-related complications of infant MGM include heart injury,
pneumothorax (a stress-caused life-threatening condition involving
the introduction of air into the chest cavity), and gastric
rupture.[59 ]
"I have assisted with about 200 [circumcisions] [...] Babies scream
so hard that they end up with their faces red and mouths wide open
with no sound coming out. I had to hold their heads to the side
because some vomit from the pain. I always had to get close to
their faces and stroke their cheeks because they would stop breathing.
[...] Consoling is impossible. They shake and their eyes are wide
open with panic. [...] Many of my consults are a result of trauma
from the circs. The babies' state of homeostasis is so messed up
from the stress that they are no longer able to suck. Every IBCLC
(lactation consultant) that I know will tell you how circumcision
is a major source of feeding problems in the days following."[67
]
Federal law provides more protection from suffering to laboratory
animals than to male infants. Lab researchers must adhere to an
elaborate set of humanitarian guidelines when experimenting on
animals, or risk fines and license forfeiture. Needless suffering
is to be avoided, and anesthesia is an absolute necessity for
surgical procedures.[68 ] A veterinarian would probably go to jail
for circumcising a dog without cause, with or without anesthesia.
"Performing this extremely painful procedure without anesthetic
has allowed researchers to study the parameters of extreme pain in
experiments that would not have been allowed on laboratory animals.
Using routine, unanesthetized circumcision as a model of stress,
Porter et al. were able to examine the relation between cry acoustics
and vagal tone in 49 (32 experimental; 17 control) 1 to 2-day-old,
full-term normal, healthy newborns during the preoperative, surgical,
and postoperative periods. Vagal tone was significantly reduced
during the severe stress of circumcision. These reductions were
paralleled by significant increases in the pitch of the infants'
cries."
Male Circumcision: A Legal Affront. Christopher Price 1996[69 ,
70, 71]
The immediate psychological consequences of MGM are more readily
discernable in older boys than in infants. The older child perceives
the (usually anesthetized) operation as a sexual assault, and
displays of grief, rage, aggression, "castration anxiety," altered
sexual identification, emotional withdrawl, reduction in intelligence
test scores and regression to "more primitive modes of expression"[72
] are all commonly seen in recently GM'd boys.[73 , 41] The long
term psychological impact of birth-related trauma is also relevant
to the issue of MGM. Recent studies have found striking connections
between birth trauma and adult post traumatic stress and suicide,[74
, 75, 76, 41, 52, 62, 77] and adult victims of infant MGM often
exhibit a spectrum of symptoms including:
o a sense of personal powerlessness
o lack of trust in others and life
o a sense of vulnerability to violent attack by others
o irrational rage reactions
o addictions and dependencies
o difficulties in establishing intimate relationships
o emotional numbing
o reluctance to be in relationships with women
o anger and violence toward women[78 ]
Neurologically speaking, the life-long sexual sensory deprivation
which results from circumcision has a profound effect on the neural
organization of the brain, similar to that found in any amputee:
corresponding neurons associated with states of sexual and emotional
ecstasy die, and adjacent neural regions grow chaotically into the
dead zone.[79 ] Furthermore, childhood victims of traumatic abuse
tend to have a variety of brain abnormalities, reflecting a
generalized rewiring of the brain to adapt to a hostile environment.[80
] The psychological impact of such brain damage is likely to be
far reaching.
"The phenomenon of circumcision [...] serves a practical function
of lowering excitability and distractibility quotients-sexual
arousal-of pubescent males, i.e. biasing young males toward increased
tractability which would enhance group efforts and less toward
individual goals of amorous exchanges. Neurological data suggest
that early lesions of the prepuce/foreskin tissues would generate
a reorganization/atrophy of the brain circuitry. This
re-organization/atrophy, in turn, is suggested to lower sexual
excitability. [...] Inferential data support the hypothesis that
a practical consequence of circumcision, complementary to any
religious-symbolic function, is to make a circumcised male less
excitable and distractible, and, hence, more amenable to his group's
authority figures." Abstract: A Biocultural Analysis of Circumcision.
Ronald Immerman, Department of Psychiatry, MetroHealth Medical
Centre, Case Western Reserve University, and W.C Mackey. SOCIAL
BIOLOGY 1998, Volume 44, Pages 265-275.[81 ]
Aside from endorsing the sexual lobotomization of children for the
purpose of social control, psychiatrists have also helped to
perpetuate circumcision by branding anti-MGM activists as "mentally
ill,"[82 ] but these orwellian enforcers of "behavioral health"
have managed to overlook two likely and obvious psychological
consequences of MGM:
o The early imprinting of excruciating pain on the pleasure centers
of the brain likely encodes for sado-masochistic behavior in the
adult.[52 , 83]
o Sexual ecstasy isn't localized to a particular part of the brain,
it's a global state of powerful low frequency waves of neural firing
involving the entire brain. There's every reason to believe that
the sex drive is also a generalized property, or at least not
localized to the neurons that the foreskin maps to. As a result,
MGM neurologically blocks the fulfillment of the sex drive without
affecting the drive itself. This is likely a recipe for what
psychiatry calls "obsessive-compulsive disorder."
Is this the kind of men we need in this world? Amenable to authority
figures? Forever longing for possibly unattainable sexual fulfillment?
Imprinted with a tortured, dissociative, objectified and utterly
disempowered model of their own bodies and sexuality?
Unable to lose themselves in the uniquely healing and self-transcending
joy of the most fundamental communication of human intimacy?
Clearly, there is something other than medicine going on here.
>From the Third International Symposium on Circumcision University
of Maryland, May 22-25, 1994:
Look at these hands.
These hands have taken a newborn baby from his mother's safe warm
breast and his father's sheltering arms, and these hands have tied
this baby to a cold hard platter and served him up to the circumciser.
These hands have readied the scalpel, even as they caressed the
brow of the terrified baby as he struggled for freedom and searched
my eyes for compassion he did not find.
A tortured being has sucked frantically on this finger in a hopeless
effort to end the agony as his flesh - his birthright - is ripped
from him and thrown in the garbage.
These hands have removed the diaper painfully adhered to the
feces-covered wound between his chubby legs.
These hands have shielded my ears from his screams.
Nurses of America, I did not become a nurse to hurt babies, and
neither did you.
In 1992, with over 20 other nurses at St. Vincent Hospital in Santa
Fe, New Mexico, I gave notice to my employers and declared I would
no longer be an accomplice in the atrocity that is infant circumcision.
I have reclaimed my tattered soul and begun the process of becoming
whole again.
I am a conscientious objector in the war against our infant brothers
and sons, and it feels wonderful.
Nurses of America, wipe the blood from your hands and join me!
Mary Conant, RN [Mary Conant is one of the 24 heroic Conscientious
Objectors to Circumcision nurses at St. Vincent's Hospital, Santa
Fe, New Mexico, and co-founder of Nurses for the Rights of the
Child][84 ]
The 1999 report of the American Academy of Pediatrics task force
on circumcision said: "Existing scientific evidence demonstrates
potential medical benefits of newborn male circumcision; however
these data are not sufficient to recommend [it]."[85 ] The word
"potential" in this context means "proposed but unproven." But this
is the state of affairs that has existed for decades, ever since
medicine began trying to find a plausible and socially acceptable
rationale for what it had been doing all along. Common sense dictates
that the known, certain and major drawbacks of MGM outweigh the
unknown, potential and slight benefits its advocates could conceivably
claim.
But at least the AAP has finally joined every other major medical
organization in the world by no longer actively promoting MGM.
The AAP goes on to say "to make an informed choice, parents of all
infants should be given unbiased information." But the report itself
is biased in its dismissal of the crucial moral, ethical and legal
question of whether parents have the right to irreversibly alter
their child's sexuality in the absence of clear and compelling
medical justification. Doctors are ethically bound to refuse such
requests from parents in any case. Furthermore, the profound
ignorance of male sexuality which pervades both American medicine[86
] and society at large (a telling measure of the strictly utilitarian
value placed on male lives in this post-modern Victorian Empire)
makes a mockery of informed consent.
Legal Issues
The practice of MGM in this country violates numerous laws and
international treaties, including the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights,[87 ] the Convention on the Rights of the Child[88 ]
and the UN Convention Against Torture,[89 ] not to mention the
prime dictum of medicine: "first, do no harm." Furthermore, proxy
consent of the parents is likely not legally applicable to an
irreversible procedure which has no known medical purpose.[90 ,
91, 19, 92] The current state of federal law with respect to genital
mutilation is in clear violation of the 14th Amendment to the US
Constitution, which guarantees equal protection for both girls AND
boys under the law.[93 ] The fact that this unsustainable legal
state of affairs has never been reviewed in a court of law should
be of small comfort to physicians, as more men become aware of what
has been taken from them in the name of medicine, and pursue legal
actions against their mutilators.[94 ]
Conflict of Interest
Aside from American medicine's apparently pathological hatred of
male sexuality and contempt for men's human rights, the medical
establishment has a huge conflict of interest with regard to MGM.
It has painted itself into a corner, first by profiting from the
brutal enforcement of Victorian sexual oppression, and later by
refusing to abolish this flagrant violation of human rights for
fear of provoking public suspicion and legal liability. When the
facts about the anti-sexual origins of this practice, and its
explicitly targeted injury to male sexuality become widely known,
the legal consequences will be devastating for the medical
establishment. But in the process of protecting its institutional
self interest, medicine has systematically undermined the basic
social unit of society, the family, by cutting away much of the
physiological basis for the emotional bonding that parents feel
for each other. The consequences of this massive experiment in
infant sexual molestation, torture, brain damage, sensory and
ecstacy deprivation and sexual and emotional oppression can hardly
be overestimated. Plausible connections with impotence, divorce,
domestic violence, male criminality, drug addiction and suicide,
and the general state of inter-gender alienation are obvious subjects
for future research.
MGM is also a lucrative practice for US medicine, which charges,
first, for the amputation and clinical facilities, and then profits
from the sale of the baby's purloined sexuality to biotechnology
and cosmetics companies. This provides an economic incentive for
the withholding of anesthetic: the MGM aftermarket requires a
pristine product for tissue culture and research.[95 , 96] In short,
parents would be ill-advised to rely solely on medical advice in
reaching a decision on circumcision. Don't expect to be reading
about this impending social explosion in an AMA press release.
There's far too much money involved. As in politics, if you are
not armed with the facts, you will become an instrument of other
people's interests.
Human Rights Context
Human rights is not a zero-sum game. The recognition of the harm
of MGM in no way trivializes FGM. It is clear that the most extreme
forms of FGM practiced in the world today are more brutalizing,
invasive and dangerous than the sterile, technologically sophisticated
and surgically simpler practice of western medical circumcision.
But the cultural and power dynamic, the disregard for the rights
of the victim, and the senseless barbarity are the same, as is the
unconscious social objective: the control and forcible diminution
of young people's sexuality. FGM is committed by older women against
younger women, MGM is committed by older men against younger men.
Genital mutilation is an equal opportunity, self-perpetuating,
intergenerational form of sexual abuse.[97 , 98, 99, 100] Human
rights groups which claim to speak for the rights of children have
a responsibility to research this issue carefully, apply the same
principles of self-determination, bodily integrity and freedom from
violence to boys as they would to girls, and add their voices to
the campaign to put an end to this profoundly destructive hidden
atrocity.
While some women's rights groups have trivialized the issue of
forcible genital mutilation as applied to male children, it is
clearly not in the interests of women for males to be sexually
molested, traumatized and handicapped at a pre-verbal age and on
a wholesale basis.
The Challenge
"Persons who have lost body parts must grieve their loss.
The first stage of grief is denial of the loss. Fitzgerald and
Parkes state that 'Anything that seriously impairs sensory or
cognitive function is bound to have profound psychological effects'
[...] Circumcision causes the loss of a body part and all of its
functions including a drastic loss of erogenous sensory function,
so denial of loss is not uncommon in circumcised males. [...] This
frequently results in circumcised fathers adamantly insisting that
a son be circumcised. [...] Goldman states that some circumcised
male medical doctors misuse the medical literature to support,
rationalize, and justify their own loss; and to defend the practice
of circumcision. Denniston reports that doctors 'who have been cut
themselves may be unable to stop cutting others.' "[62 ]
The emotional, cultural and economic forces marshalled against the
human rights of male children and their future lovers are enormous.
Clearly, the medical institutions which have led us down this garden
path are unlikely to remedy their own pathologies in the foreseeable
future. The sexual rights of future generations will be won by a
small but rapidly growing movement of human rights activists who
brave ignorance, ridicule, a century of conventional wisdom and
their own instinctive need for denial to respond to a human being's
highest calling:
the defense of the powerless.
Please join us.
(See "intact-l" below)
Social Theory and Biocomplexity
Thoughts on the social and human relational implications of MGM
Culturally speaking, male genital mutilation does not happen at
random. It is highly correlated with authoritarian, monotheistic,
patrilineal and militaristic cultures, where children, women and
minorities are devalued, class stratification is high, and in some
cases FGM is practiced as well.[101 , 48] (MGM world-wide is about
7 times more widespread than _ and appears to be a precursor for
_ FGM) It's not difficult to see how genital mutilation could arise
not only as a consequence, but also function as a reinforcer of
such dystopian and hierarchical cultures.
GM is fundamentally different from other kinds of bodily modifications
such as body piercing or foot binding. It is directed specifically
at a highly emotionally-charged sensory organ, as unique and
irreplaceable as the eyes, as critical to human community and
emotional connectedness as the ability to see and be seen, to speak
and to hear speech, to hold and to be held. It is a mutilation and
truncation of one seventh of the dimensionality of one's perceptual
space (sexual and spiritual perception being the sixth and seventh
senses, respectively), and the potential to experience and share
love and ego-transcendent, joyful consciousness and its numerous
psychological benefits. MGM is thus an assault not only on the
individual, but on that individual's future family and friends and,
where widely practiced, on the community's capacity for mutual
goodwill, trust, self organization and local empowerment. A type
of "social fragmentation grenade." Perhaps this is why MGM was
often inflicted on slaves and conquered peoples in biblical times.
Men and women who are denied emotional fulfillment in human
relationships must seek it elsewhere, and frequently channel their
energies into the abstracted and manipulable meanings and rewards
of state-sanctioned institutions such as workaholism/consumerism,
professional sports (often a surrogate for nationalism), socially
disengaged religion, and the ultimate form of state servitude,
soldiering. Interfering with the sexual compatibility and satisfaction
of men and women likely strongly affects mass social organization.
Thus MGM's social utility goes far beyond mere fertility control,
into the realm of generalized social control.
Social control motivations for MGM are implict and explict in
authoritative religious texts:
According to [certain Islamic texts], [...] there are 72 wives for
every believer who is admitted to Heaven, and not only for a martyr.
The proof is a hadith which is collected by at-Tirmidhi in "Sunan"
(volume IV, chapters on "The Features of Heaven as described by
the Messenger of Allah," Chapter 21: "About the Smallest Reward
for the People of Heaven," hadith 2687).
It is also quoted by Ibn Kathir in his Tafsir (Koranic Commentary)
of Surah ar-Rahman (55), ayah (verse) 72:
"It was mentioned by Daraj Ibn Abi Hatim, that Abu al-Haytham
Abdullah Ibn Wahb narrated from Abu Sa'id al-Khudhri, who heard
the Prophet Muhammad (Allah's blessings and peace be upon him)
saying: 'The smallest reward for the people of Heaven is an abode
where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a
dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby, as wide as the
distance from al-Jabiyyah to San'a.' Ibn Kathir explained in
'al-Bidayah wa an-Nihayah' that al-Jabiyyah is the name of a suburb
of Damascus. "That those 72 wives are virgin is proved by the ayah
74 of the same Surah: "No man or jinn has ever touched them before."
Naomi Ragen, Jerusalem Post Sept 20, 2001[102 ]
Combining such religious teachings with the sexual frustration
likely experienced by traditionally circumcised and sexually
repressed Islamic men has obvious utility for mass social control
and manipulation.
In Judaism, MGM has been endorsed as a wedge between married couples,
where the socializing influences of "civilization" can be brought
to bear on people's most private and sacred lives:
[...] Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), better known as the "Rambam",
was a medieval Jewish rabbi, physician and philosopher. He wrote:
"[...] man should not be hard and rough, but responsive, obedient,
acquiescent, and docile. You know already His commandment...
"Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more
stiffnecked. Be silent, and hearken, O Israel. If ye be willing
and obedient."
"[...] one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to
bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of
the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the
organ be in as quiet a state as possible."
"[...] The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose
of circumcision. None of the activities necessary for the preservation
of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered
impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that goes beyond
what is needed are diminished. The fact that circumcision weakens
the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes
the pleasure is indubitable. For if at birth this member has been
made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must
indubitably be weakened. The Sages, may their memory be blessed,
have explicitly stated: It is hard for a woman with whom an
uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him.
In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision."[103
]
In the sex-obsessed and -repressed USA, we find beautiful, often
scantily-clad saleswomen marketing everything from cars to army
careers, to circumcised men. No doubt a powerful engine of economic
progress.
These tendencies to social fragmentation, emotional alienation,
deference to authority figures and compulsive economic production
and consumption accrue many benefits to the state, while simultaneously
impoverishing and disrupting community and family structures,
contributing to a social context in which, for instance, authority
figures in white coats routinely bypass the most primordial,
protective parental instincts in order to cut into the genitals of
healthy newborn boys, a remarkable feat of mass indoctrination and
social regimentation.
The disruption of social cohesion, combined with sex-driven religious
fervor, MGM-imposed sexual ignorance and the mechanisms of denial
and (in the USA) medical self-interest, help to make MGM a powerful
promoter of its own perpetuation. It is a node in a complex network
of self-perpetuating causality which comprises a causality loop in
the social plane. In the chemical plane, analogous structures are
often referred to as metabolic cycles.
In short, MGM is an important component of one of many spontaneously
arising, self-reinforcing social processes which facilitate the
disempowerment, dissociation, reorganization and absorption (i.e.
digestion) of the human community into the body of the state.
George Orwell could not have devised a more cost-effective instrument
of social control. Such is the natural genius of self-organizing
complex adaptive systems, when left to their own devices.
The emerging science of biocomplexity is a recognition of the
universality of self-organizing, life-like processes in the chemical,
multicellular, neural-net, social and economic spheres. Understanding
the profound implications of spontaneous self-organization _ and
its role in human relations, gender-specific oppression, the creation
of social and economic hierarchies and the origins of consciousness
and life itself _ is of vital importance if we are to retrieve the
reins of power from our own accidental creations, and ensure that
society serves human needs, rather than the reverse. [104 , 105,
106]
The Future
If you really want to change the world, you have to change men.
Male socialization is the key to the entire unsustainable system
of global ecological destruction, oppression and murder which
markets itself as civilization. But you can't change men if you
don't recognize their oppression. Being conditioned by our ancient,
unconsciously self-organized social system as its instruments and
conduits of social/structural power, males are subjected to a
different set of carrots and sticks than females, but they are no
more in charge of their own socialization than women are. Men's
oppression is in some ways more subtle and psychological than
women's, and in other ways more brutalizing, but in any case no
less pervasive or destructive of the capacity for self-determination
or self-fulfillment.
Society's systematic oppression and trivialization of men's rights
and emotional lives is crucial to the alienation and diversion of
their energy and creativity from family and community into
prefabricated establishment-sanctioned masculine roles. Indeed,
authoritarian cultures have a vested interest in the routine
brutalization and emotional circumcision of males for the purpose
of conditioning them as soldiers and other enforcers of state
power.* The colonization and recruitment of men's bodies and minds
begins with MGM.
If you want to change men, help them come to terms with their own
victimization.
Three Experiments for the Reader
The first is a thought experiment. Suppose an adult man was kidnapped
off the street, tied down kicking and screaming to a board and
forcibly sexually mutilated. Would this be a crime? If so, why is
it not a crime when inflicted on an infant boy? At what age do
males graduate from "aesthetically" judged meat sculptures to human
beings?
The second is a social experiment. Try discussing this issue with
others. You may find a great resistance, even among human rights
activists of both genders, to the notion that males have rights
which are being violated in this country. Who's (or rather, what)
interest continues to be served by trivializing the human rights
of one half of the population? From the standpoint of biocomplexity,
division is the first step towards reorganization and assimilation.
The tiresome reenactment of the divide-and-conquer strategy will
continue until conscious people transcend it.
The last experiment can only be carried out by a circumcised man.
Get yourself hard by whatever means. Run your fingers lightly along
the length of your penis. Where does it feel best? Right behind
the head? Guess what: that's all that's left of your foreskin, and
it's not even the best part. Think about it: if sexual ecstasy is
nature's inducement to reproduce, where is the sensible place to
put the most erogenous nerves? On the bottom of the feet? Behind
the ears? At the back end of the penis? No, it would be at the
front end of the penis, the part that would go inside the vagina.
____________________________ *Emotions are inherently self-referential.
They provide our primary self- perception of our own well being.
What is the social/structural purpose of the systematic suppression
of men's awareness of their own well being?
Thankfully, mutilated men can greatly improve their sexual lives
via "foreskin restoration", a non-surgical skin-stretching process
which is widely practiced in the USA. See the links below.
For More Information
"The Case Against Circumcision"
http://www.cirp.org/news/1997:Mothering "Infant Circumcision: "What
I Wish I Had Known"
http://www.nocirc.org/articles/known.html "The Unkindest Cut of
All"
http://www.cirp.org/news/1966.07:Foley/ "From Ritual to Science:
The Medical Transformation of Circumcision in America"
http://www.nocirc.org/articles/gollaher.html Sex As Nature Intended
It http://www.SexAsNatureIntendedIt.com Circumcision Information
and Resource Pages http://www.cirp.org In Memory of the Sexually
Mutilated Child http://www.SexuallyMutilatedChild.org Mothers
Against Circumcision http://www.mothersagainstcirc.org Intact Canada
http://www.intactcanada.org Stop Infant Circumcision Society
http://www.stopinfantcircumcision.org National Organization to Halt
the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males (NOHARMM) http://www.noharmm.org
National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers
(NOCIRC) http://www.nocirc.org D.O.C. (Doctors Opposing Circumcision)
http://faculty.washington.edu/gcd/DOC/ National Organization of
Restoring Men (NORM) http://www.norm.org/ National Organization of
Restoring Men (South California branch) http://www.norm-socal.org
Nurses for the Rights of the Child http://www.cirp.org/nrc/ Attorneys
for the Rights of the Child http://www.arclaw.org Organizing
Resources http://www.nocirc.org/resources/ Videos from Nurses for
the Rights of the Child:
"Facing Circumcision-Eight Physicians Tell Their Stories" and
"Nurses of St. Vincent-Saying No to Circumcision"
Cost: $25 each, order from: Nurses for the Rights of the Child 369
Montezuma #354, Santa Fe New Mexico 87501
Mailing Lists
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Foreskin restorer's support list (to
subscribe: email with subject line "subscribe" to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Intactivist's
list (to subscribe: email with body "subscribe intact-l your name"
to [EMAIL PROTECTED])
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