Male Genital Cutting and the Masculinization of Boys

by David Balashinsky

Several years ago,* the following comment appeared in my news feed on Facebook.  It was written by Rosemary Romberg,  author of Circumcision: The Painful Dilemma (Bergin & Garvey; 1985).

I've wondered if for some there's this male, macho idea of, "He's a boy so he can take it" mentality that comes into play with infant male genital cutting/mutilation. "Toughen him up from day one 'cause he's a boy and has to face a tough world."  (Ironically this is usually said by men who are total cowards about adult circumcision but think babies' feelings don't matter.)

Coincidentally, not long after seeing Ms. Romberg's post, I came across this column in the New York Times: Talking to Boys the Way We Talk to Girls, by Andrew Reiner.  In it, Mr. Reiner discusses the phenomenon in which parents shape their male children's behavior through often unconscious words and gestures that are intended to toughen them up (to use Ms. Romberg's phrase), a process to which Mr. Reiner himself refers as the "manning up of infant boys." The essay points out that studies show that this process begins in infancy:

For three decades, the research of Edward Tronick explored the interplay between infants and their mothers.  He and his colleagues in the department of newborn medicine at Harvard Medical School discovered that mothers unconsciously interacted with their infant sons more attentively and vigilantly than they did with their infant daughters because the sons needed more support for controlling their emotions.  Some of their research found that boys' emotional reactivity was eventually "restricted or perhaps more change-worthy than the reactivity of girls," Dr. Tronick noted in an email.  Mothers initiated this - through physical withdrawal.

So the "manning up" of infant boys begins early on in their typical interactions . . . and long before language plays its role.

Reiner also cites several studies that clearly suggest the extent to which gender - in this case, masculinity - is molded (if not created out of whole cloth) by the different ways that parents speak to their daughters and sons during their childhoods:

A 2014 study in Pediatrics found that mothers interacted vocally more often with their infant daughters than they did their infant sons. In a different study, a team of British researchers found that Spanish mothers were more likely to use emotional words and emotional topics when speaking with their 4-year-old daughters than with their 4-year-old sons. . . .

[A]  2017 study led by Emory University researchers discovered, among other things, that fathers also sing and smile more to their daughters, and they use language that is more “analytical” and that acknowledges their sadness far more than they do with their sons. The words they use with sons are more focused on achievement — such as “win” and “proud" . . . .

 After visits to the emergency room for accidental injuries, another study found, parents of both genders talk differently to sons than they do to daughters. They are nearly four times more likely to tell girls than boys to be more careful if undertaking the same activity again. . . .

Even boys’ literacy skills seem to be impacted by the taciturn way we expect them to speak. In his book “Manhood in America,” Michael Kimmel, the masculine studies researcher and author, maintains that “the traditional liberal arts curriculum is seen as feminizing by boys.” Nowhere is this truer than in English classes where . . . boys and young men police each other when other guys display overt interest in literature or creative writing assignments. Typically, nonfiction reading and writing passes muster because it poses little threat for boys. But literary fiction, and especially poetry, are mediums to fear. Why? They’re the language of emotional exposure, purported feminine “weakness” — the very thing our scripting has taught them to avoid at best, suppress, at worst.

As boys mature into men, stoicism and reticence - two of the cardinal virtues of masculinity - are typically reinforced by their interactions not only with other boys and men but with girls and women.  I can speak to this from my own experience.  On more than one occasion I have been told - by a girl, when I was a boy, and by women when I was an adult -  to "stop acting like a girl" if I seemed to be expressing myself in too emotionally demonstrative a way, or to stop being "so mushy" for talking too candidly about my feelings.  While men in our society face a relentless barrage from all sides - institutionally and in their personal relations - of gender construction in which they are subtly and not-so-subtly told to "be a man" and to comport themselves in the many ways in which men are expected to behave as men, rather than as just people, this messaging often comes from women themselves.  As Reiner points out,

Women often say they want men to be emotionally transparent with them. But as the vulnerability and shame expert Brené Brown reveals in her book, “Daring Greatly,” many grow uneasy or even recoil if men take them up on their offer.

Indeed, a Canadian study found that college-aged female respondents considered men more attractive if they used shorter words and sentences and spoke less. 

This finding seems to jibe with Dr. Brown’s research, suggesting that the less men risk emoting verbally, the more appealing they appear.

The connection of all this "toughening-" or "manning up" of boys and men to the phenomenon of male genital cutting as practiced in traditionally patriarchal cultures seems inescapable.  The ways in which masculinity is constructed in male psyches and inscribed on male bodies are but different aspects of the same phenomenon.  Reiner's focus is specifically on the ways in which boys are taught not to communicate their feelings.  But even aside from its symbolic and physical role in masculinizing male bodies, it does not seem implausible to suggest that the physical act of genital cutting itself plays a role in altering the male psyche in ways that could make boys and men less emotionally available.  The pain alone that the infant must endure is now known to produce significant and lasting changes in neural pathways in the developing infant central nervous system.  The American Academy of Pediatrics has expressed concern about these "adverse sequelae" which result from exposure to "repeated painful stimuli early in life."  

These sequelae include physiologic instability, altered brain development, and abnormal neurodevelopment, somatosensory, and stress response systems, which can persist into childhood.  Nociceptive pathways are active and functional as early as 25 weeks’ gestation and may elicit a generalized or exaggerated response to noxious stimuli in immature newborn infants.

Moreover, the physical trauma of neonatal penile circumcision typically occurs in the context of bonding between mother and infant.  Thus, the  infant is taken from the warmth, the nourishment, the scent and the embrace of his mother only to be strapped into a hard circumstraint board so that the most sensitive part of his penis may be pried away and cut off.  Is it reasonable to assume that this neonatal trauma is unlikely to affect that child's subsequent capacity for emotional bonding and communication?  

Given that there is wide unanimity of opinion within the medical profession that penile circumcision is medically unnecessary and that what modest medical benefits it can produce can easily be achieved through non-invasive means, it is difficult not to conclude that cultures that still subject their male neonates and children to this sort of trauma do so because male genital cutting continues to be highly valued as an essential part of gender construction in which a male must pass through an ordeal of unnecessary pain and sacrifice in order to prepare him to take on his role - in childhood and as an adult - as a fighter and a competitor.  

Reiner, himself, makes this point about how we masculinize our sons in order to prepare them for what lies ahead:

Why do we limit the emotional vocabulary of boys?

We tell ourselves we are preparing our sons to fight (literally and figuratively), to compete in a world and economy that’s brutish and callous. The sooner we can groom them for this dystopian future, the better off they’ll be.

Reiner's thesis echoes, uncannily, Romberg's observations about the role of male genital cutting in "toughening up" the infant male in order to begin preparing him to face "a tough world."  

The language that parents often use to describe their sons' reaction to the circumcision surgery is also highly revealing of the way in which they - whether consciously or unconsciously - are apt to regard the masculinizing ordeal of genital cutting through which their infant sons must pass.  It is not uncommon to hear parents who have subjected their infant sons to circumcision speak in glowing terms about "how tough" their "little guy" was throughout the ordeal.  It is also no coincidence that parents will often refer to their infant in this context as a "little guy" or a "little man."  (Besides the incongruent age-inappropriateness of such terms as these and the act of masculinization that is patently going on here, surely this is also because it is easier for such parents to live with the idea of causing bodily harm and suffering to a "guy" or a "man" than it is to a baby, especially when it is their baby.)

In the Phillipines, where male genital cutting (known there as tuli) is practiced at later stages of childhood development, the appeal to traditional notions of masculinity is regarded as a strong selling point.  Consider, as examples, the following advertisements:

 

 

 

The messaging in these ads is unambiguous: circumcision is not just a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood but from the inchoate masculinity of boyhood to the literal embodiment of masculinity to which every child born with a penis is assumed and expected to aspire.  The messaging is both subliminal, as the way in which the boys' shadows form the silhouettes of fully grown men (in the first two examples, the boys become body builders or "muscle men" and, in the third, the boy becomes a solid professional man), and explicit, with phrases such as "be man enough," "turning boys to men," "passage to manhood" and "boys don't cry."  (In this last example, "boys don't cry" is intended to convey two opposite meanings, on the one hand, playing on traditional masculine stoicism while, on the other, soft-selling the surgery as painless.)

Beyond literally "toughening up" the glans penis (thereby making it more "masculine"), there can be little doubt that, again, whether consciously or unconsciously, the primary purpose of male genital cutting is the "toughening up" of the boy himself.  That deeply entrenched notions of gender and masculinity are intrinsic to this custom are, if anything, demonstrated all the more by the ridicule and scorn - the gender policing - to which men who publicly express their resentment about having had part of their genitals removed without their consent frequently are subjected.  They are told to "stop whining."  They are told to "get over it."  (I can speak to this, as well, having been - to cite one example - exhorted by a young woman on Facebook, in response to one of my posts critical of genital cutting, to "Quit fucking whining."  She followed that up with "Check your bullshit, you whiny bitch.")  One is hard-pressed to imagine a woman who voices her objection to having been subjected to genital cutting being spoken to in this manner.  Indeed, that women who speak out in opposition to their genital cutting are usually considered courageous whereas men who speak out in opposition to theirs are often ridiculed and called "whiny bitches" (and sometimes accused of that cardinal sin, whataboutism), tells us everything we need to know about the role of gender-construction in these practices.   

This double standard has been pointed out by the feminist political scientist Rebecca Steinfeld:

[N]ot challenging [male genital cutting] while condemning [female genital cutting] reinforces sexist attitudes about female and male bodies.  It perpetuates the idea that male bodies are resistant to harm or even in need of being tested by painful ordeals, whereas female bodies are highly vulnerable and in need of protection, and as such propagates the notion that vulnerability is gendered.

The double standard in the consideration that we accord victims of genital cutting based upon the sex of the victim goes to the very heart of the issues articulated in Reiner's essay and Romberg's observations. 

Reiner's thesis is essentially that boys and men must be allowed to own their emotions.  I would argue that they must also be allowed to own their bodies.  That starts at birth.

*This essay was originally published on 16 October 2017 and was revised on 2 May 2022.

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David Balashinsky is originally from New York City and now lives near the Finger Lakes region of New York. He is a licensed physical therapist and writes about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics.  He currently serves on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.