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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	isa 2007-01-10 03:32 am UTC (link)
	OF COURSE they don't think they're MISSING anything, they've had the nerves with which they could COMPARE removed! I cannot EMPHASIZE enOUGH how STUPID THat iS! (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

altoidsaddict
2007-01-10 04:34 am UTC (link)

In my anthropology courses, every single circumcised woman with whom I conducted field interviews expressed sorrow that they could not enjoy sex. They resented their children on some level for the extreme danger childbirth represented and their husbands for escaping this fate, and then felt guilty for that resentment. Their periods were incredibly painful and carried significant risk of infection. Every one who was circumcised in girlhood experienced mild PTSD relating to the incident, and a few said they revisited the actual circumcision in flashbacks and nightmares frequently. But, they said, though these feelings were common where they lived, an uncircumcised woman was an unmarriageable whore - men would rather have a dead, chaste daughter or wife than a live, intact financial and social liability.

'Course, that doesn't mean male circumcision carries even remotely the same trauma. Men don't usually die from circumcision, and the sex organ is not completely removed as it is in female circumcision. Heck, circumcised men even get to enjoy sex without suffering major physical trauma.

*towels off*

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	isa 2007-01-10 08:11 am UTC (link)
	I. Hate. Humans. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	thekiwiwhoflew 2007-01-10 09:03 am UTC (link)
	Oh go marry a horse! ~~I am so sorry for that, but I just couldn't help myself.~~ (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	isa 2007-01-11 03:30 am UTC (link)
	~~That's okay. Just understand that now I will have to kill you. Mmmkay?~~ (Reply to this)(Parent)

	rowleyorama 2007-01-10 08:54 am UTC (link)
	From what I've read about it, don't they do the cutting then tie the girls legs together for a few weeks while it heals? So that they have to hobble around and, uhm, piss all over themselves? Because after finding that out, I've been thankful for every crappy day my life has ever had. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	napalmnacey 2007-01-10 12:43 pm UTC (link)
	Excuse me while I go draw cartoons of those people having their genitals cut off. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	pariforma 2007-01-10 05:03 pm UTC (link)
	DRAWING CARTOONS OF IT IS NOT ENOUGH. sorry about capslock of rage (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	napalmnacey 2007-01-11 05:40 am UTC (link)
	I KNOW BUT I'M NOT GOD!!! lol (Reply to this)(Parent)

	rosehiptea 2007-01-10 06:46 pm UTC (link)
	Thank you. That confirms some things I'd always thought. (Reply to this)(Parent)

tehrin
2007-01-10 07:31 pm UTC (link)

I wrote a paper in my cultural anthropology course on it off an article in the yearly Anthropology Review (?) in 2004. I try to understand why someone would want to do it but in some cultures, its because the vagina is viewed as ugly and they want to remove aspects that make it male-looking- which I don't agree with at all.

I couldn't imagine having to interview people about it. I don't have the courage. So props to you on that.

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altoidsaddict
2007-01-10 07:45 pm UTC (link)

The sheer amount of physical mutilation and abuse that people go through - in the name of gender, or politics, or war - is a large part of what caused me to be burned out of the field. I admire the people who can stick with it and hear these things day in and day out for more than five years. It's one thing to see it on CNN, and another to sit down to lunch with a group of women and they all pull out pictures of their kids, and every one of 'em's got at least one limb missing thanks to an old land mine planted in some field. It's really hard to reconcile the life you lead as an American, and the sheer power that lends you, with the things you hear day in and day out from people you eat lunch with. I like to say I got out of the work because everybody drank too much and I wanted to keep my liver, but really it's that everybody has a limit to the amount of secondhand atrocity and guilt of privilege they're able to absorb emotionally.

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	indis_earfalas 2007-01-12 01:08 pm UTC (link)
	Semi-related thought: I read somewhere, and I can't for the life of me remember where, that part of the reason the clitoris is removed is because its purely there for pleasure and doesn't have any other use at all ... whereas all the male sex organs have other uses. Anyway, ugh. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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