Discharge on Your Circumcision!

Quick links to products available in the Campaign for Genital Integrity . . .

     INFORMATIVE VIDEOS:
     Facing Circumcision Eight Physicians Tell Their Stories
     Restoration in Focus   Instructional Video for Foreskin Restoration
     They Cut Babies, Don't They?   One Man's Struggle Against Circumcision
     Whose Body, Whose Rights?   Award-winning documentary seen on PBS!

THE BOOK THAT EXPOSES IT ALL:
     Circumcision Exposed
Rethinking a Medical and
Cultural Tradition

FORESKIN RESTORATION with:
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Discharge on your circumcision!

Dale Bennett - Metaline Falls, WA
M.E.N., no. 4, p. 23, 1989

I am surprised, in the discussion of men's oppression, to note the absence of circumcision as a specific part of the oppression. If we are going to define oppression as the systematic mistreatment of the members of a group because they are group members, then what else can we call the routine mutilation of men's sexual organs at birth? Especially when this is (at least in the U.S.) a routine procedure, not limited to any race, religion, or class, but applied to all boys unless their parents intervene?

None of our feelings about respecting other people's cultural practices
need stand in our way of discharging our own distress, and arriving at sensible theory.

My own counseling on circumcision has uncovered great feelings of helplessness and despair. I seem to have concluded that painful things could be done to me, that there was nothing I could do to prevent them, and that no allies were present. This set of feelings - isolation and powerlessness - fits right in with keeping men divided and obedient.

It has also seemed difficult to persist in working on this subject. Of course, it's not a clear memory for most of us, and there are plenty of clear memories of distress to work on. But there is also a feeling - rising out of despair, I suspect, - that the whole thing is rather trivial. Too far in the past - I got over it, after all. Maybe it was my fault. In other words, a rich subject for contradicting a great deal of my material. I think it's time for all of us men to reclaim this as an important issue. None of our feelings about respecting other people's cultural practices need stand in our way of discharging our own distress, and arriving at sensible theory.