CIN (Circumcision Information Network) 2:8

CIN CompuBulletin
Circumcision Information Network 
Volume 2, Number 8, 4 March 1995

FEMINISM AND THE CIRCUMCISION ISSUE
An essay contributed by Karl Emmerson

These are amazing days!  Feminists are in a panic stricken flight from
plain truth about male circumcision in our culture.  This one issue alone
can blow their cover to smithereens: what desperate lengths they will go
to, what denial of reality, to avoid sharing their sacred victim status
with anyone, even for a moment!  I watch with much anticipation to see how
feminists handle this most explosive revealing, and repressed issue, as it
begins to hit the fringes of the media.  See how they run!  Circumcision
is the nuclear weapon of the men's movement, so much more powerful than
anything that has been launched at us, or ever will be.  The women's
movement is now morally bankrupt, as we see the likes of the Bobbit case. 
As it goes to increasingly ridiculous lengths to maintain its claims to
victim status, I can see that it has lost its grip on any kind of solid
ethical integrity. (Feminism has run its course, and as with many other
diseases, those of us who have experienced it have developed a permanent
immunity to it.)
        
After thirty years of feminists pumping images of their own victim status
into every nook and cranny of our cultures, Lo and Behold, a closer look
reveals that right here at home in good old feminist infected North
America it is obviously men who have suffered from the most terrible forms
of institutionalized child abuse all along!  Even a cursory glance at the
simple facts leaves them no wiggle room whatsoever.  Anyone who lives in
the real world can see it. 
        
But what do they do?  Do they react with dignity and humility?  You would
think they would feel rather embarrassed to have hogged the spotlight for
3 decades, blaming men, and obsessing over their own exquisite
"sufferings", only to discover that their audience included millions of
men who have undergone far greater abuse--and that so many of these men
stood silently by and ever shouldered the blame.  NO, instead they deal
with the issue of circumcision by tripping over themselves fleeing to
Africa. That is, they quickly start babbling statistics of clitorectomy
among women in Africa and other countries, even though the rate is
statistically so much smaller than the rate of circumcision in North
America.  It's like a mass exercise out of Reality; they trample each
other to death in the doorway trying to squirm out of it.  As if by
distracting us, by pointing to additional (less frequent) atrocities in
foreign countries, as an argument in favor of continuing genital
mutilation of North American males!  WOW. Anything to get that god-awful
issue of institutionalized male child abuse out of people's minds and off
the backs of the feminist power-trippers: their spot light must be averted
at all cost from male circumcision in North America, or else feminist
logic is dead meat.  The issue invalidates so much of what they've
invested the last 30 years of their lives in, so much of what they've
assumed to be true from the start.  Is it no wonder that they are so
deeply threatened by the topic. 
        
It can be vicariously painful for a man to watch feminists jump ship when
the subject of circumcision comes up: we see their true colors - the lack
of intellectual or ethical integrity, the lack of basic human empathy, the
self-serving nature of their crusade, the inability to take a back seat
even for a minute, the Limelight addiction.  For me personally, after the
support I've given to their movement in my life, all of this feels so
disappointing, and a little heart breaking. I just can't believe I'm
seeing fellow human beings so narcissistically blinded to everything but
their own cause, that they try to abandon the obvious truth about male
circumcision. Watching them can be a bit like getting your heart ripped
out--or your foreskin. 
        
Of all the inanities and insanities and hypocrisies that the woman's
movement has become, this is perhaps the worst: that people can still
cling to their faulty old pre-1980's clicheed complaint that men are
"insensitive" and "unfeeling" or "less feeling" than women (the "ice man",
..."men just don't get it.", "men or less intuitive". ... blah, blah,
blah...) and yet these very same people cannot find it in their hearts to
tolerate an honest sensitive discussion of how we had a portion of our
capacity for "sensitivity" and "feeling" (literally) surgically removed at
birth!  Not only do they offer no empathy for our feelings about our own
circumcision in general but they offer no support in opposing its
practice. The obvious bodily scars that we carry around have no place in
their world view.  The topic is simply ignored, repressed forbidden,
banned from the table, excised, cut off, amputated and thrown in the
hospital dumpster.  Now, at last, we see bitter truth about the women's
movement in our lifetime: Despite what they say, they do not really want
our sensitivity or our capacity or for feeling except of course when they
approve of it and it serves their goals.  After all, as long as the world
keeps us unaware of our full capacity for feeling, as long as we can be
kept unconscious of the fact that our full capacity for feeling was
permanently taken from us by circumcision, then we well be more likely to
remain "safe" feminist-supporting males who never go off seeking our own
rights, questioning our own roles, staging our OWN rebellions, getting in
touch with our OWN feelings. 
        
The perverse truth is that the feminist revenge on "keep them barefoot and
pregnant"  (that paranoid exaggeration of the '50's and '60's) has
actually gone full circle and become "keep them circumcised and
insensitive". 

Editor's note:  Some of the greatest members, supporters, and allies of
the movement to abolish male and female genital mutilation alike (e.g. the
Santa Fe Nurses) are men and women who call themselves feminists. 

NOHARMM FORUM LAUNCHED
National Organization to Halt the Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males
NOHARMM and its MISSION:  We are a national, non-violent, direct-action
network of men and women organized against routine infant circumcision. We
educate men about the function and value of normal male genitalia and the
deception behind circumcision to help Americans recognize its impact on
human rights. We support and empower men to voice their concerns by
involvement in local and national efforts to end infant circumcision. 

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Comments or questions should be sent to:  Gary Burlingame
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