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. noharmm-l Mailing List This mailing list is intended to help support NOHARMM and its mission. It is an open list meaning anyone can subscribe. NOHARMM is an affiliation of NOCIRC. Other affiliations include NORM (National Organization of Restoring Men), and UNCIRC (UNCircumcising Information and Resources Center). To subscribe, send the following (with your email address substituted where shown) in the body of a message to 'majordomo@eskimo.com': SUBSCRIBE noharmm-l To unsubscribe, send the following (with your email address substituted where shown) in the body of a message to 'majordomo@eskimo.com': UNSUBSCRIBE noharmm-l To send a message that everyone subscribed will receive, send email to 'noharmm-l@eskimo.com'. Comments or questions should be sent to: Gary Burlingame