Circumcision: A Form of Sexual Harassment

                 CIRCUMCISION: A FORM OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT


Sexual harassment made the headlines lately with the Thomas
Supreme Court hearings in which Professor Anita Hill charged
Clarence Thomas with that behavior.

While the nation struggles with a legal definition of the
offense, its victims recognize it easily.  There are some women
who state that what causes one woman to feel sexually harassed
doesn't another, and that it is all easily stopped or controlled
by a witty or stinging comeback.  Fewer in number are the men who
feel sexually harassed by females at work, but they even are more
silent than the women speaking out about the offense.

But there is one tremendous area of sexual harassment that is so
blatant and so widely experienced that male and female columnists
who are making hay over the Senate hearings say nothing about it. 
The president who obviously does not seem to be sensitive to the
women's plight, says nothing about it.

One cannot get more insensitive about sexual harassment than the
women and men who permit out infants to suffer routine
circumcision.  Talk about sexual assault.

Were baby girls in this country taken by fathers to be
circumcised, Linda Ellerbee, Ann Landers, and all the other
female columnists would be yelling sexual harassment in bold
print, but they say nothing, even in fine print about women
taking their babies for foreskin amputation--the greatest sexual
harassment possible.

Just as it's going to take a lot of talk and writing and work to
change this tradition of men making comments and gestures that
sexually offend women in the workplace, so will it take a lot to
cause the women and their mates to understand unconsented
circumcision of infant boys is a social no-no also.

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Printed in the Argus Leader
Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Wednesday, November 6, 1991

A letter to the editor from:
Russell Zangger
The Remain Intact Organization
R.R. #2
Larchwood, Iowa

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