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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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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