A man’s point of view on circumcision
September 22, 2013

"A man’s point of view on circumcision.

I truly envy you Ladies. You’re Federally protected from FGM in the USA, I’m not. You have all your bits, I don’t. I wonder what it feels like to be able to feel everything while I struggled to feel anything.

And yet, you can sit there, typing with a straight face, extolling the benefits of male genital mutilation.

Remember that these are only words, and my words at that. They cannot harm you. They cannot change your way of life. These words of mine and cannot make you angry unless you choose to be angry or angered by them. I’m not here to tell you your business. I’m not here to shame you. I really can’t unless you choose to feel shamed. Honestly. Think about it. Again. These are just words. This is my point of view. This what I live with every day as an adult.

I was taught from the third day of life that I have no dominion over my own body. Since I was born male, my prepuce was automatically separated, cut and removed from my body. I don’t remember it per se, at least not like I remember my commute to work today, or that first crush in middle school, or that snail I tried to eat while I played in the garden alongside my mother. But I see the physical scar every day. An angular scar, quite pronounced around the penile shaft and the remainder of the skin forward from that scar looks like it was burned where my prepuce was fused to my glans. It’s ugly. Of course, you may feel genitalia is ugly regardless and of course beauty is subjective, but this appendage I’m left with is truly ugly, mutilated ugly, violated ugly, forever altered to conform to societal norms in these United States ugly. Ugly is refusing to question, ugly is bull headed, ugly is ignorance.

All I want to do is spare this child, maybe even your child from circumcision, a cosmetic procedure that I was subjected to as a neonate simply but for the mere fact that a box was checked on a consent form.

Here are few items to ponder. You can question them all you want but their validity remains unchanged.

1) Every mammal on this Earth has a foreskin
2) Roughly 80% of the world’s men are living today, as I type, with their whole foreskin, just as they were born, and if you’re a woman, just as YOU STILL ARE, intact.
3) Ladies, you too have a foreskin, called the clitoral hood.
4) Female Circumcision was perfectly legal to practice in the United States until 1997, just 16 years ago. (see HR 941 from the 104th congress)

Circumcision is often debated on Facebook. Some of the many venues are maternity groups and in that context many women will argue that they alone as parents enjoy the right to decide on circumcision of their children. Eddy is one of many intactivists who frequently join in on the debates. He has the courage to share his own personal story of genital mutilation in order to help prevent children of today from suffering the way he does."
http://justasnip.wordpress.com/2013/09/22/a-mans-point-of-view-on-circumcision/