CIN (Circumcision Information Network) 2:40

Introduction
This weekly bulletin is a project of CIN, the Circumcision Information Network (formerly CIN CompuBulletin). The purpose of this weekly bulletin is to educate the public about and to protect children and other non-consenting persons from genital mutilation. Readers are encouraged to copy and redistribute it, and to contribute written material.
--Rich Angell, Editor.

AMERICA, WAKE UP:  CARE OF THE INTACT
Contributed by rverner@dds.nl (Robin Verner) 

[Re] circumcision myths that so abound in your country[:]  It is not terribly
unusual for a six year-old boy's foreskin to balloon when he urinates.  This
is no reason to rush him off to surgery!

Let me give you a personal experience as an example of how to handle this in
the European way.

Several years ago a single mother friend of mine had a six year-old boy whose
ballooning foreskin was quite impressive.  His foreskin seemed absolutely
closed and totally unretractable.  One day when he and I stood at the toilet
together, I told him to work on stretching his foreskin by always pushing it
back as far as he could when urinating.  I demonstrated on myself what I
meant by this.  It was only three weeks later that we stood at the toilet
again, and he proudly showed me how he could now push it all the way back,
just as he had seen me do!

All this fatherless boy needed was a father or older brother or friend to
teach him how to handle himself, and a few weeks of stretching time.  In
America you would have ordered surgery for this boy!  Astounding! 

Would this boy have gotten the information he needed if he lived in America?
 Can a boy even see how to urinate in your country?  This is just one example
of how the various sexual phobias in your country interfere with the normal
transfer of sexual information to young boys.  Your culture and your bodies
are being cut by the same knife.  You cannot rescue the bodies in your
country until you rescue your culture from the puritan heritage.

Are Americans ready to change their behavior, defy the local social
conventions, and actively work against the sexual phobias that have become
established there?  I hope so, because it is a mistake for advocates against
sexual mutilation to think they can avoid dealing with this problem. 

The efforts aimed at stopping routine neonatal circumcision in the US will
have only limited success as long as you continue to cut boys like the one in
this example.  The 5% to 10% circumcision rate of intact boys in the US is a
major (and in a twisted way, valid) justification for the continuation of
routine neonatal circumcision.  Fewer than one percent of boys ever get cut
for medical reasons in Continental Europe.  Even so, in a large number of
these cases the reasons are questionable.

Fathering Magazine has set up a WWW page on stretching techniques that may be
of particular interest for American readers.  It can be found under the "Care
of Intact Boys" section in the Circumcision section of Fathering Magazine.

Good luck to your young American boys with their new foreskins.  Now they
just have to learn how to keep them!

--Robin Verner, editor
The Fathering HomePage - Fathering Magazine
http://www.xs4all.nl/~sheldon/fathering.html

SHAME ON U.S.
Contributed by Patrick Hublou (phublou@innet.be), Proponent and co-moderator
of Sci.med.midwifery.

I'm a Flemish midwife presently working in a birth center in Bend, Oregon.
 I'm really shocked about the number of circumcisions performed in such a
civilized country as the U.S.A.  Even more shocking is the fact that male
genital mutilation seems here to be mainly just an option to check off on the
post partum form like 'breastfeeding of formula.'  The latter subject is
otherwise covered very well during all prenatal visits.

In Belgium luckily this barbaric practice isn't common.  As far as I know,
only Muslim and Jews have their boys circumcised.  

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION BY IMMIGRANTS IS CAUSE FOR CONCERN IN U.S.
The New York Times, 10 December 1995
By Barbara Crosette 
Contributed by Barry Ellsworth (BarryBE@aol.com)
[Editor's note:  Below are excerpts, some of which are especially relevant to
the issue of male genital mutilation (MGM).  The activist in question Meserak
("Mimi") Ramsey is opposed to MGM as well as FGM.  She has been quoted in a
previous issue of the CIN as saying, "Cut is cut, mutilation is mutilation."]

A couple of years ago, Meserak Ramsey dropped in on a birthday party in
California and saw a little girl huddled in a corner. 

Ms. Ramsey, an immigrant from Ethiopia and a nurse, wondered what was wrong.
 She was stunned when the girl's Ethiopian-American mother said that her
daughter, barely 18 months old, was recovering from the removal of her
clitoris and that the painful procedure had been done in Washington, D.C. 

"For this to happen to a girl in the most civilized country in the world, for
a child to go through this torture -- I was enraged!" Ms. Ramsey said in an
interview. She turned her anger into a national campaign. 

Worldwide, it is estimated that more than 100 million girls and women are
living with the results of the procedure, which is done, usually without
anesthesia, in the name of destroying sexual sensation.  It is sometimes
fatal. 

In strong family settings, women -- often grandmothers -- have been the
enforcers of the practice, exerting tremendous pressures on succeeding
generations of mothers and daughters. 

In Egypt, experts on the issue say, even well-educated parents are led to
believe that a girl has to undergo the procedure to be socially acceptable
and marriageable. 

"How could [one] do this? [Referring to FGM to prevent promiscuity]" Ms.
Ramsey said.  "Do you cut off the hand of a boy because you are afraid he
might grow up a thief?  Our brains are in our heads, not between our legs."

Ms. Ramsey, who says she underwent an excruciatingly painful mutilation at
the age of 6, says that African families in the U.S. often send girls home to
Ethiopia or other countries to have their genitals removed in crude
operations.  Other communities raise money collectively to bring a
practitioner here. 

The pain of seeing the practice continue often becomes unbearable for Ms.
Ramsey, she said, because at 42 she is forced to relive almost daily her own
slow progression to a full understanding of what was done to her. 

Psychologically, she is tormented by the thought of sensual experiences she
has missed, and she searches for a doctor who may be able to rebuild her.  "I
want to feel how American women feel, she said. 

She tells a story of inviting a young American couple to stay with her some
years ago.  When the woman screamed one night, Ms. Ramsey ran to their room
to help, only to be told kindly that her friends were just making love and
that the woman had had an orgasm. 

"I didn't understand, she said.  "I thought there must be something wrong
with American girls.  But now I know that there is something wrong with me."

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION call NOCIRC, the National Organization of
Circumcision Information Resource Centers at (415) 488-9883, fax (415)
488-9660.  Ask about the resource provider nearest you.  For written
information, write NOCIRC, PO Box 2512, San Anselmo, CA 94979, with SASE
and/or donation if possible.

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