Remember when we were talking about vaginas?

This whole thing is probably not safe for work.

Over at Metafilter, a post about a doctor getting away with performing Female Genital Mutilations gets derailed by some of the guys coming in wanting to talk about their circumcisions and how traumatizing the practice is. There's complaining in thread about this, and we all troop over to Metatalk to bitch at length about everyone's penis.

Then the user spacediver comes in and... Oh hell, I'll just give you a sample of his comments.

"Quite simply, we do not accord even close to the same respect to male sexual anatomy, as we do to female sexual anatomy." That's right. It's all about the vaginas!

"In fact, i'd say that male genital cutting is more relevant to this case than is female genital cutting, since the medical establishment plays a much bigger role in the former." Okay, let's think about this. Male circumcision is more relevant to a case about female genital mutilation how?

"...many women who are circumcised feel exactly the same way about their bodies. They don't think they're missing anything..." It's like those old coffee commercials. Today we've replaced her vagina with Folger's Crystals. Let's see if she can tell the difference.

The regulars respond in their usual way.

"I've also heard that intact males can actually hear the choruses of Angels singing in Heaven and that their stools are gigantic and have no more odor than a hot biscuit." - Divine_Wino

"[T]hey can also fly to Spain using their foreskins as hot air balloons and only the flatulence of the Gods to stay aloft." - jonmc

Indeed.

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nam_jai
2007-01-10 01:13 am UTC (link)

When I saw this post on the flist, I was sure that you were going to be reporting on this article on Salon. The summary: "When our son was born, my wife decided circumcision was barbaric, but my parents insisted it was an essential Jewish tradition. Behold the sad tale of how one foreskin tore a family apart."

Cue 41 pages and counting of letters wank over circumcision, Judaism, meddling mothers and neurotic sons, etc., etc.

Must be the week for it!

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	scourgemonkey 2007-01-10 06:34 am UTC (link)
	Oh god--it's up to 41 now? I read through 25 this morning, and that was all I could take. They just never ever shut up. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	nam_jai 2007-01-10 07:12 am UTC (link)
	They just never ever shut up. Indeed. Up to 49 now! I gave up reading around the same time you did, but I notice that among the newest posts, one Jonathan has jumped in to scold people and re-post his letters about Iraq (written in response to a different article) in an effort to get them to flame each other about something more important. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	shaysdays 2007-01-10 07:14 am UTC (link)
	Wait- has he ever seen a mass grave? (Reply to this)(Parent)

scourgemonkey
2007-01-10 07:24 am UTC (link)

It's so predictable, isn't it? For any given article, there's 5-10 comments actually on topic, at least one from Rob Anderson decrying how Salon SUXXORZ SO MUCH NOW OMG, a bunch of people telling him to go away, someone decrying the attention paid to the subject at hand and asking everyone to bitch about Iraq/global warming/the Republican Menace (TM), and then maybe someone comes in at the end and tries desperately to bring them back on the actual topic. This article today (and the Debra J. Dickerson ones) actually managed to be really flamey and somewhat on topic all the way through the letters--I was impressed, until my brain went all dribbley and I found myself really, really tired of hearing about penis. (Also, there was too much employment of the word 'smegma.' I'm familiar with the concept, I just... dun wanna hear your lifelong dilemna with not washing right, kthnx.)

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