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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About me: I am originally from New York City and now live near the Finger Lakes region of New York. I am a licensed physical therapist and I write about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics. I currently serve 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.
 

 

 

Charlottesville, Trump, Republican Hypocrisy and the Art of the False Equivalence

by David Balashinsky

The right-wing propaganda machine - Fox, Breitbart, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Steve Bannon, and their ilk - as well as the vast majority of the Republican Party, by supporting the campaign and presidency of Donald J. Trump, bear a moral responsibility for the horrendous display of radical anti-Americanism that occurred in Charlottesville this weekend.  They are responsible either by having actively supported Trump's bigotry with their words and their votes or by having tacitly supported it with their silence when they had the chance to speak up and chose not to.   Let's not forget that Trump ran on a campaign of bigotry and nativism in which he exhorted his followers to thuggery and mob violence.  Even now, Trump refuses to unambiguously disclaim and repudiate the neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and white nationalists who proudly marched in his name this weekend.  Instead, Trump seems to have taken pains to avoid alienating the white-nationalist segment of his base by refusing to explicitly identify them and by creating a false equivalence between them and those who oppose them.  This was Trump's mealy-mouthed and winking statement about the violence, as reported in the Washington Post: "The hate and division must stop and must stop right now.  We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.  On many sides."  Note how Trump goes out of his way to emphasize, with the rhetorical technique of repetition, the false narrative that the white nationalists and those who oppose them are morally equivalent.  That neo-Nazis, white nationalists and anti-Semites and those other Americans who happen to believe in the ideals on which this nation was founded - that all people are created equal - are all equally to blame.  As the Post reported, "Asked by a reporter whether he wanted the support of white nationalists, dozens of whom wore red Make America Great Again hats during the Charlottesville riots, Trump did not respond."  Let that sink in: Trump was lobbed the easiest sort of softball question in which he was offered the easiest of opportunities to explicitly repudiate white nationalists.  Yet this pretender to the Oval Office, who never shies away from criticizing or condemning anyone else, could not bring himself to repudiate the political support of white nationalists.


In a way, Trump's false equivalence here is perfectly fitting, given that the ostensible reason for this gathering of racist groups from around the United States in Charlottesville was to protest the impending removal  of the statue of Robert E. Lee from what is now known as Emancipation Park.  (One concise history of the efforts to remove this statue can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/charlottesville-rally-protest-statue.html.)  After all, those who defend the preservation of monuments to the Confederacy in public spaces seldom if ever do so on the basis of a defense of the enslavement of millions of black people.  Rather, they seek to create an alternative meaning for these monuments:  They represent the sacrifice of people who sincerely believed in the cause for which they gave their lives.  Or they represent the neutral and abstract principle of "states' rights."  Or, conversely, the campaign to have them removed from public spaces constitutes a misguided attempt to negate or rewrite history.  What all of these formulations have in common is that they disingenuously attempt to deny the actual meaning of these monuments: that the enslavement of millions of black people is a part of our nation's history that deserves to be honored and that the effort to preserve slavery by Confederate heroes such as Robert E. Lee was honorable.  By avoiding the real significance of these monuments, the monuments'  defenders attempt to position themselves and their opponents on the same moral plane.  This is the technique that has become fashionable in right-wing circles and that has been elevated to high art by the right-wing media as epitomized by Fox and Breitbart.  Thus, the moral distinction between supporting and opposing a monument to slavery itself becomes blurred or even effaced. Similarly, in Trump's version of what occurred this weekend, it was not specifically white-nationalist hatred, racism, bigotry and violence that were on display in Charlottesville but a generic, non-specific "hatred, bigotry, and violence," and there is enough culpability for that to go around -  isn't there? - "on many sides - On many sides."


But hatred of "non-whites" is not the moral equivalent of hatred of racists and racism.   And so back to Trump and the outbreak of violence over the significance of the Robert E. Lee statue in Emancipation Park.

If there were any doubt that a direct link exists between Trump's candidacy, his campaign rhetoric, his presidency and the full flowering of the neo-Nazi, white-nationalist movement that was on display yesterday in Charlottesville, the presence of all those MAGA hats should dispel it once and for all.  The neo-fascists, after all, make no bones about their explicit intentions "to take our country back" and they plainly have hitched their wagon to Trump the candidate and now Trump the president.   Here is what one self-identified Nazi, Michael Von Kotch, interviewed by the Post in Charlottesville yesterday, had to say.  The rally made him "proud to be white."  The Post article continues: "[Von Kotch] said that he's long held white supremacist views and that Trump's election has 'emboldened' him and the members of his own Nazi group.  'We are assembled to defend our history, our heritage, and to protect our race to the last man.'"   David Duke - ardent Trump supporter, white nationalist, and former head of the KKK -  responded to Trump's faux condemnation of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville by publicly reminding Trump of the debt tht he owes to his white-nationalist base.  Addressing Trump directly, Duke wrote, “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.” 


Trump and his fellow opportunistic Republican politicians are perfectly happy to exploit the strain of bigotry that, sadly, still runs through part of the nation's electorate when doing so assures them a win at the ballot box, in the state house or in congress.   But by doing so, they have opened a Pandora's Box of racism, white nationalism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia and everything else that the "alt-right" stands for.  They cannot have it both ways.  They could have taken - as a few did - a moral stand against Trump last year, but chose not to.  Now they must acknowledge their own moral culpability in this national disgrace.  For Republicans - who acquiesced in Trump's candidacy last year and acquiesce in his presidency now - to shed crocodile tears about what happened yesterday in Charlottesville constitutes the height of hypocrisy.

Response to Ej Dickson: A Plea for Reason from a Jewish Man to a Jewish Woman

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Bill Maher, racist epithets, contextual meaning, free speech, 'free speech,' and the confederate flag

by David Balashinsky

First, a trigger warning: this essay uses the n word frequently.  I believe that the brouhaha surrounding Bill Maher's use of the phrase house nigger provides an appropriate context for a frank discussion of these two terms (the phrase in its entirety and the racist noun itself which is modified by house when used in that phrase).  Sometimes, painful topics need to be discussed and discussed frankly.  This is one of those times.

While it's always risky to use any word that can be perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a racist epithet, there is a fundamental difference between nigger and house nigger.   Use of the word nigger situates the user himself in the present context as a racist (unless the word is being used by a Black person, which I discuss below).  In contrast, use of the phrase house nigger situates the word nigger in the historical context of the South's enslavement and exploitation of Black people.  One is a 'real time,' actual use of an epithet that is demeaning to Blacks as human beings.  The other has almost the opposite meaning: it refers to a quasi-caste system in which some enslaved Black Americans were permitted the relative 'comfort' of  serving their White oppressors by performing domestic, indoor work as opposed to the far more brutal and difficult labor of field work.  That is how Maher used the term. 

Temporally removed, as we are, from the legalized enslavement of human beings based on their genotype (though not so removed that the wounds are not still open and not so removed that positive, concrete steps do not still need to be taken to at least ameliorate the lasting effects of the African diaspora and enslavement of millions of Blacks, including some sort of reparations), invoking the term house nigger constitutes a critique of that system of organized enslavement.  The term, to my ears and, I think, to the ears of the majority of people who are familiar with it, refers to the system under which Blacks were enslaved, exploited, raped, tortured and murdered.  There is a fundamental difference between using a term that refers to one element of a system that was based upon racism and using a term that is itself racist.  House nigger is an example of the former and nigger is an example of the latter.

Obviously, racism still exists and the existence of the n-word both reflects and sustains that awful reality.  Thus, to use the word by itself is to participate in the perpetuation of racism.  But to situate the term within the historical context of the racist and economic system of enslavement of African-, Afro-Caribbean and African-American black people by the slave-holding states of the United States prior to the Emancipation Proclamation and the victory of the Union over the Confederacy, serves to remind us that the ultimate purpose of enslavement was simply to enable one group of human beings to enrich themselves at the expense of the rights and the very lives of another group of human beings.  It reminds us that slavery thrived here and that the system was based on racism.

Now, having said all this, and even if one accepts my reasoning, can it be assumed that everyone is familiar with the full meaning and significance of the phrase that Maher used?  I would say no.  That is one reason why Maher probably should not have used it and why his apology for having used it is appropriate.

But, far more significant, it seems to me, is what Maher's easy dropping of the n word says about the state of our society, even allowing that Maher used it in a phrase in which its use conveys a different meaning than the word does by itself.  If we are to have a frank discussion about the n word, such a discussion cannot be profitable without acknowledging the fact that, thanks primarily to Donald Trump, we are living in a social and historical context in which the lid that had been kept on covert bigotry has been torn away.  We are living in an age when the use of insulting, demeaning and marginalizing language is more and more defended, thanks largely to Trump's repeated rejection throughout the campaign of 'political correctness' in tandem with his scapegoating and vilifying of primarily non-White people, on the specious grounds of 'free speech.'  It is no coincidence that this very day a 'free speech' rally is to be held in Portland, Oregon by alt-righters (white nationalists and neo-Nazis), including such notable hate groups as the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Alt-Knights, ostensibly to defend the principle of free speech.  This is in the wake of several notorious instances this year in which racist, misogynistic and bigoted charlatans such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter and Charles Murray were shouted down or otherwise prevented from speaking on several college campuses.  Obviously, someone has to create a 'safe space' where bigots can promote their racist and xenophobic worldviews and far-right hate groups are only too happy to answer the call.  Hence today's demonstration in Portland.

Trump has egregiously damaged the social fabric of the United States and it will certainly take generations to repair it, if it even can be repaired.  I wonder whether Maher's gaffe does not in fact reflect this new reality.  As the old-fashioned notion of concerning oneself with the feelings of others and moderating one's speech lest it cause needless pain and offense (quaint by today's standards) is increasingly discarded and dismissed as 'political correctness,'  a general coarsening of public speech and a breakdown in propriety - a shift in the border between what is permissible to say publicly and what is not (a shift in the Overton window, in other words) - seems to be the inevitable result.  Trump didn't create bigotry but he certainly made it far more socially acceptable to give voice to it - whether through a careless and arrogant disregard for the feelings of others or whether because of an overtly militant bigotry which seeks to proclaim itself publicly, defiantly, and proudly. Again, in this context, claims of 'political correctness' and 'free speech' are disingenuous: it is no coincidence that the neo-right, white nationalist movement has taken to dismissing as 'snowflakes' those who, inexplicably, object to being subjected to hate speech and thereby demeaned and marginalized.

Maher, of course, has always been about rejecting 'political correctness.'  His previous show, after all, was called "Politically Incorrect."   But, as always, context provides the key to determining when a term is meant or used disparagingly and when it isn't.  What was Maher talking about when he used the phrase for which he has drawn so much outrage (much of it faux outrage, as all of the outrage coming from the right is in this case)?  He certainly wasn't talking about the institution of slavery and the relegation of some enslaved people to field work and others to domestic work.  He just used the phrase metaphorically to explain his own unsuitability to the hard physical labor of field work.  But, other than the fact that his interviewee, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, had made this comment to Maher - "We'd love to have you work in the fields with us" - there was absolutely no reason for Maher to invoke the phenomenon of the 'house nigger' as opposed to an enslaved person consigned to field labor.  Field work has always existed, with or without enslaved people to do it.  Moreover, it is honorable and valuable work and, without it, most of us would have to do without much of what is grown and harvested on farms.  There was absolutely no reason for Maher to tie working in a field to slave labor.  This is why it was jarring and disconcerting to hear Maher use it, even leaving aside the question of whether the phrase house nigger is racist in and of itself.  It had absolutely nothing to do with the conversation.  So why did this particular phrase come so readily to him?  Given that there was virtually no contextual justification for him to use that phrase, does his having done so reflect his own latent or covert racism?  Does it reflect the coarsened, anything-goes tenor of today's public discourse?  Perhaps some of both - only Maher can answer the first question.  My sense is that it was thoughtlessness and insensitivity on Maher's part.

So when, if ever, is it okay to use the n word or a phrase that includes it? This leads me to the phenomenon of Black people using 'the n word.'  I understand that, in certain contexts, use of that word is meant to be descriptive of the inferior status of Blacks in a White-dominant culture.  It does not appear to be an act of 'appropriation' or 'reclaiming,' as queer was reclaimed and 're-branded' as a self-designation by gay men back in the '80s as an act of defiance against a heteronormative and homophobic culture.  I think that that is why it is socially permissible for both gays and non-gays alike to use queer but not permissible for both Blacks and non-Blacks to use nigger.  When Blacks use the n word, as I understand it, they are speaking among themselves and within the context of their shared experience in a society in which racism remains entrenched and prevalent.  They are using the term not in order to neuter it or to confer legitimacy upon its use by non-Blacks but the very opposite.  Nigger, when used by Black people themselves, should be understood to be a kind of shibboleth.  That is why the argument by some Whites - "if it's okay for Black people to use the n word then it should be okay for White people to use it" - is false.  It is a deliberately false argument when invoked by those who are actively racist and an ignorantly false argument when invoked by those who are passively racist.  Nigger simply has a different meaning and significance depending upon who is using it and why.

The concept that I have been trying to illustrate through both of these examples - Maher's use of the n word in the phrase house nigger and the use of the n word by Black people - is that the meaning or significance of a word is not strictly immanent but depends on the context in which it is used.  That is equally true of symbols (and words, themselves, after all, are symbols, too).  Just as there is a vast difference between using the n word to reference the history of racism and using it as a pejorative in an act of contemporary racism, there is a vast difference between acknowledging history and celebrating history.  Again, this is why context matters.  This is particularly relevant now, as the movement to do away with the living symbols of Black oppression, such as the confederate flag and monuments to the heroes of the confederacy, gains traction.  The failure - or refusal - to distinguish between the act of remembering and the act of celebrating is a disingenuous way of perpetuating the original harm.  I mention this here because I see an analogy between the controversy regarding the civil-war- and post-civil-war-era symbols of the South and the movement to banish them from the public square on the one hand, and the controversy regarding Maher's use of house nigger and the impulse to banish the n word from the public square, on the other.  If one seeks merely to document and remember history, then the appropriate location for the symbols of the South's rebellion over the issue of slavery is a museum.  If, alternatively, one seeks to perpetuate the legacy, the effects and the worldview of those who enslaved Black people, then the appropriate locations for the confederate flag and monuments to the heroes of the confederacy are flying over state capitols and in public spaces, respectively.   That is the difference between a museum and a public space. A museum creates a context in which its contents are viewed critically.  If it is a historiographical museum, its contents are contextualized as artifacts.  The curator is, in effect, saying, "This is what was"; not "This is what ought to be."  In contrast, a public space presents its contents as a living statement of what is and of what that society aspires to be.  Its curator - the state - is, in effect, saying, "This is who and what we are."

Similarly, if one seeks merely to refer to the phenomenon of the house nigger in service of a larger historiographical and didactic purpose, language, in that context, functions as sort of museum: a repository of a sordid past.  But if, alternatively, one seeks to perpetuate that past, then language functions as a vital and immediate means of conveying racist sentiments.  That, I maintain, is the difference between the phrase that Maher used and the n word.  The problem, here, aside from the fact that Maher had no compelling reason to use the phrase that he did in the first place, is that the contents of his show are much more the stuff of the present-day public square than than they are of a museum.  Indeed, that is why Maher's show is called "Real Time."

 

Revised 29 August 2023

FGM and MGM

by David Balashinsky

FGM has been in the news lately.  This is on account of the arrest and indictment last month of two Michigan physicians (as well as the wife of one of them) for allegedly performing genital-alteration surgery on two 7-year-old girls.  One of the physicians, Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, practices internal medicine and the other, Jumana Nagarwala, is an emergency-department physician.  They, along with Attar's wife, Farida Attar (who is Attar's office manager) have all been charged with the commission of female genital mutilation, conspiracy to commit female genital mutilation, and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.  In addition, the two physicians have also been charged (somewhat perplexingly) with conspiracy to transport a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity. 

Although this story has exploded throughout the media and been the subject of widespread commentary, it is an interview with the anthropologist Fuambai Ahmadu, conducted by Tucker Carlson for Fox "News," that I believe provides a particularly compelling foundation for a brief discussion of the extent to which FGM (female genital mutilation) and MGM (male genital mutilation) are fundamentally the same.  This is, in part, because Dr. Ahmadu touches upon the ethnocentrism, so prevalent here in the United States, that constitutes the conceptual foundation for the double standard that many here maintain with respect to these two practices.  At the same time, Carlson, himself, as he reveals in his comments throughout the interview, perfectly epitomizes that very ethnocentrism, hence, that double standard.

There is actually little or nothing that can be said about FGM that cannot be said with equal validity about MGM.  Both practices are rooted in deeply entrenched cultural beliefs and attitudes about anatomy, sex, sexuality, and gender.  The double standard to which  many Americans  tenaciously cling demonstrates their cultural arrogance.  What they are as much as saying is  "It's okay when we do it but when they do it it's mutilation."

Carlson's refusal to acknowledge the ethical and sociological argument that FGM and MGM are fundamentally the same results largely from the fact that, like many Americans, he views MGM through the distorting lens of his own cultural experience: an experience in which MGM has been normalized while FGM remains alien. But, as Ahmadu notes, in those cultures that practice FGM, it is not viewed as "mutilation." They reject that nomenclature just as vehemently as supporters of MGM here reject the term "mutilation" to refer to what is euphemistically known as "circumcision."

Carlson's inability to bridge the cultural divide also rests in part on a false assumption regarding the facts and in part on faulty reasoning.  First, he states, erroneously, that FGM is only illegal when it removes "an entire portion of the sex organ." That is not true. Even a slight ceremonial nick to any part of the vulva is treated as a felony. Contrast that with the radical prepucectomy to which over 3,000 infant boys are subjected daily in our own genital-cutting culture here in the United States of America.  In fact, The World Health Organization defines and categorizes FGM into four types.  The inclusion of amputation of the prepuce within a subcategory of one of these types means that this particular form of FGM is identical to infant male circumcision.

Carlson's faulty reasoning comes into play when he states that there are no studies that demonstrate any health benefits of FGM in contrast to those that purport to demonstrate the health benefits of MGM.  This is, indeed, one of the most commonly cited alleged distinctions between FGM and MGM.  But absence of proof isn't proof of absence.  As the Oxford bioethicist Brian D. Earp has noted^*, the fact that studies do not support the "benefits" of FGM is due largely to the fact that such studies do not exist. As Earp has pointed out,

any scientist who tried to . . . [conduct such a study] would be arrested under anti-FGM laws (and would never get approval from an ethics review board). . .   As a consequence of this, every time one sees the claim that 'FGM has no health benefits' - a claim that has become something of a mantra for the WHO - one should read this as saying, 'we actually don't know if certain minor, sterilized forms of FGM have health benefits, because it is unethical - and would be illegal - to find out.

Such potential benefits might include a decreased incidence of UTIs, STDs, and vulvar cancer.

In contrast, there remains in the United States a widespread notion that it is perfectly ethical to experiment on baby boys by permanently amputating a major, normal, sensitive, and functional part of their genitals in order to conduct, as Earp writes, "study after well-funded study" in search of the elusive benefits that may result from this amputation. The double standard here occurs because our society approaches both FGM and MGM with a set of a priori assumptions that the former is intrinsically harmful and always performed for malevolent reasons while the latter is intrinsically benign at the very least or positively beneficial. But this set of assumptions is not borne out by the facts and certainly not by controlled, side-by-side scientific studies of the procedures performed under "appropriate" (meaning aseptic) conditions. And in all probability they never will be.  That says much more about our cultural assumptions than it does about scientific hypothesizing.  As Earp writes, "Imagine a report by the CDC referring to the benefits of removing the labia of infant girls, where the only morally relevant drawback to such a procedure was described as the ‘risk of surgical complications.'"

Of course, any amputation of a body part has potential benefits. If you amputate an infant's hand, her chances of getting it crushed in a car door later on in life are reduced to zero. But what about that child's right to grow up with her hand in place? What about her right to decide for herself that the benefits of having her hand - it is hers, after all - outweigh the risks of keeping it, or vice versa?

There is no rational or ethical basis for treating the male prepuce any differently from a hand or - more to the point - from a female prepuce. A prepuce is a prepuce. But there is a difference in how male and female prepuces are treated and this is due entirely, as Earp (and others) have observed, to a culturally determined valuation of the male prepuce as essentially vestigial and worthless, even a noxious and harmful structure. The putative innocuousness and even salubriousness of male "circumcision" in the United States therefore rests entirely on the completely arbitrary social construct of the male prepuce, in contrast to the female prepuce, as serving no purpose, having no function, having no value and, therefore, having no legitimacy.  But that is not how the majority of intact men feel about it.  And it is certainly not how many victims of MGM feel about it.

No one - female, male, or intersex - should ever be deprived of the right to own and control her, his, or their body and to decide, for herself, himself, or theirself, which parts he, she, or they get to keep and which parts get cut off.
___________________________________________________________

* See, in particular, Brian D. Earp: "Boys and girls alike," in Aeon, 13 January 2015, or the longer essay from which it was was adapted, Earp, B. D. (2014). "Female genital mutilation (FGM) and male circumcision: Should there be a separate ethical discourse?"
Practical Ethics. University of Oxford. Available at:
https://www.academia.edu/…/Female_genital_mutilation_FGM_an…. DOI: 10.13140/2.1.3530.4967.

Here is a link to one of many YouTube videos of the interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZdsSYQ3Mik

Here are links to some other worthwhile commentaries:

http://www.arclaw.org/resources/articles/is-circumcision-legal-peter-w-adler

https://mosaicscience.com/story/troubled-history-foreskin

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/americas-infuriating-double-standard-on-cutting-childrens_us_5908fef7e4b03b105b44bd0e

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/morten-frisch/time-for-us-parents-to-reconsider-the-acceptability-of-infant-male-circumcision_b_7031972.html?utm_hp_ref=science

My Response to the White House "Joint Address Issues Survey"

by David Balashinsky

Out of the blue I received an email from Trump's White House inviting me to take part in a "Joint Address Issues Survey." It states, in part, "Now is your chance to give your input. Let us know what issues you want President Trump to focus on and your ideas for the future of our country. Take the survey and share your thoughts."

The survey includes the usual heavily slanted and loaded questions, such as this: "Which accomplishment(s) do you consider the most significant of the Trump Administration so far?" It then lists a host of "accomplishments" (these, of course, are the "alternative-fact" sort of accomplishments) that one may acknowledge with a mouse click. Given that none of Trump's nefarious accomplishments (it would be more apt to call them misdeeds) was listed or at least credited properly (as a misdeed rather than an accomplishment) and that those that were do not in fact constitute accomplishments by any rational definition of the word, I left all these blank.

Fortunately, there was also a free-text area where one may contribute one's "Ideas to make America great again." Since they asked, this is what I wrote:

1. Trump should immediately stop lying and apologize to the American people for having done so.
2. Trump should issue a strongly worded statement to the effect that a free press is the cornerstone of a free and democratic society and that he fully respects the integrity of the news organizations that he has libeled with the false charge of presenting "fake news."
3. Trump should withdraw Neil Gorsuch as the nominee to fill the seat on the SCOTUS that was stolen by the Republicans and renominate Merrick Garland. 
4. Trump should replace his cabinet with people who are actually qualified and who actually believe in the missions of the departments they will be leading. 
5. Trump should direct his attorney general to immediately appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Trump campaign's connections to the Russian government including any possible collusion to subvert the United States elections last November. 
6. Trump should stop ripping off the tax payers and pay for his own travel and security, as well as that of his family. 
7. Trump should immediately fire Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and denounce them for the neo-Nazi white nationalists that they are. 
8. Trump should issue an apology to the American people for being one of the most divisive and destructive public figures in our nation's history; he should also apologize to the American people for making the United States a laughing stock before the rest of the world. 
9. Trump should rescind his executive order banning refugees and Muslims from entering the United States. 
10. Trump should rescind his executive order scaling back equal-access protections for transgender persons. 
11. Trump should pursue comprehensive, rational, and humane immigration reform that doesn't destroy families and that doesn't deport productive and assimilated undocumented Americans, and he should publicly renounce his intention to waste billions of tax dollars on a wall across our border with Mexico. 
12. Trump should immediately renounce his calls for repeal of the ACA and instead urge congress to improve it by guaranteeing coverage for all Americans; this should include a not-for-profit, government-administered public option (a Medicare-for-all approach). 
13. Trump should direct the attorney general and the department of Justice to immediately step up monitoring and tracking of domestic white nationalist hate groups, including the KKK and neo-Nazi groups. 
14. Trump should issue a statement apologizing for his office's recent Holocaust commemoration statement that failed to make any mention of the 6 million Jews who died in the attempted genocide of the Jewish people and which, through this very omission, served to advance the narrative of Holocaust deniers that the Jewish people were not singled out for extermination by the Nazis because they were Jews. 
15. Trump should issue a strongly worded statement in support of a constitutional amendment reversing the Citizens United SCOTUS decision that has opened the floodgates of corporate money corrupting our democracy. 
16. Trump should issue a strongly worded statement acknowledging that Roe v. Wade is settled law and acknowledging a woman's right to obtain a safe and legal abortion. 
17. Trump should urge Congress to increase funding for Planned Parenthood because, besides providing cancer screenings and other important preventative health measures, Planned Parenthood actually prevents abortions by providing contraceptives. 
18. Trump should commit the United States to getting off of fossil fuels and instead pursuing the development of renewable and "green" energy technologies; and he should recommit the United States to the Paris Climate Agreement. 
19. Trump should urge Congress to enact real tax reform so that corporations, millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes. This should include an end to such gimmicks as taxing earned income at a higher rate than capital gains whereby Warren Buffet, for example, pays a lower tax rate, as a percent of his income, than his secretary does. It should also include cracking down on corporations and individuals who hide their wealth offshore in order to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. 
20. Trump should greatly expand and urge Congress to fund improved benefits and services for our nation's veterans. 
21. Trump should issue a public endorsement of increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour and he should use his executive-order powers to further that goal in all federal hiring and government-awarded contracts. 
22. Trump should issue a proclamation rededicating the United States of America as a beacon of liberty and equal opportunity for all and stating unequivocally our nation's opposition to bigotry and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identification, sex, ability or disability, race, age, ethnicity, religion or lack of religion and nationality. 
23. Trump should immediately make public his tax returns from the past ten years. 
24. Trump and his immediate family should divest themselves of and liquidate any holdings or assets that may create a conflict of interest between their personal gain and their public service. 
25. Trump should urge Congress to enact commonsense gun reform including mandatory background checks and the banning of high-powered military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. 
26. Trump should convene a national conference on demilitarizing our nation's police forces and working toward fostering trust and mutual respect between police and the citizens they take an oath to protect and serve. 
27. Trump should urge Congress - and should use his executive-order powers - to eliminate private, for-profit prisons. 
28. Trump should issue an executive order banning all drilling and mining on federally owned wilderness areas and national parks. 
29. Trump should urge Congress to increase funding for infrastructure, the arts and humanities, education, public transportation, and early childhood nutrition and wellness programs (this should include parenting programs for new parents). 
30. Trump should direct the relevant federal agencies within the executive branch to step up enforcement of basic animal welfare regulations including (but not limited to) the elimination of gestation crates, forced crowding and confinement of livestock and poultry and other inhumane factory-farm practices, the elimination of puppy mills and animal-fighting enterprises and putting other unscrupulous breeders out of business, and the strict enforcement of laws banning the trafficking of wildlife. 
31. Trump should issue a statement in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. 
32. And, last but not least, Trump should urge Congress to expand the 1996 federal anti-FGM bill to include all Americans - girls, boys, and intersex - because every child and every human being has a right to grow up with his genitals intact and to decide for himself which parts of his body he gets to keep.

Perhaps I should have stopped there but, gluttons for punishment that they are, they actually asked me if I had any additional comments. So I concluded by saying this:

Trump lied to the American people when he promised to "drain the swamp." Instead he packed his cabinet with Wall Street insiders. You're not fooling the majority of the American people, Trump. You're a liar and a fraud and we know it.