Female Circumcision

Valerie Kelley

This is awful. Personally, I find male circumcision just as atrocious. The only reason I think there are so many people in the Western world who do not see it that way is because for Jews and many Christians, it's part of their religion and has been for too many thousands of years too many. There are many reasons males and females have the body parts they do, and it is sheer stupidity to lop any part of the body off unless death or other very serious consequeces will result if it is not done. (For example, a tonsilectomy or appendectomy can be justified if the person who received the surgery was so seriously ill that the surgery was necessary. That is almost never the case with this circumcision nonsense.)

sirius

The form of female circumcision practiced in Indonesia, where these photographers were taken, is far less damaging than male circumcision, and the sensational captions here are misleading to say the least. Read the article as it appears in the New York Times. Parents in Indonesia clearly don't see this as mutilation: the mother has a genuine smile. The reasons given for circumcision here are the same as for male circumcision: it looks better; it reduces odors; it prevents urinary tract infection and cancer; it's just a flap of skin; it's a parental right; if it were really so bad, it would have died out. After all, it's women who do the cutting, so they would know if they're missing anything. And so on, i.e. the exact same reasons given for male circumcision.

The only people pushing circumcision – female or male – are those who are circumcised, along with their male and female proxies. Circumcision is a powerful cultural practice, because once a man, for example, has lost part of his penis, usually without his consent, he will tend to be either deny it – "I'm not missing anything" – or vehemently insist that all boys be mutilated the same way. Circumcision is psychosexual disease that is passed from one mutilated generation to the next.

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