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Dec. 2nd, 2001
Cuedus just brought up circumcision in his journal and thereby reminded me that it's been almost a month since I last gave my "Stop Assaulting Male Babies" speech to anyone, and even longer than that since I last gave it here on LiveJournal. So it's time to repeat it.
The vast majority of circumcisions are performed without anaesthetic, upon defenseless babies, without consent.
"Parents should be wary of anyone who tries to retract their child's foreskin, and especially wary of anyone who wants to cut it off. Human foreskins are in great demand for any number of commercial enterprises, and the marketing of purloined baby foreskins is a multimillion-dollar-a-year industry. . . .Also see plenty of other websites on the subject.
The after market for human foreskin is where the real money is made. Foreskins are sold to biomedical companies, which use them in the manufacture of insulin. They're also sold to middlemen, who package them for sale to research companies that in turn use them for biochemical analysis. Corporations such as Advanced Tissue Sciences (ATS), Organogenesis, BioSurface Technology, Genzyme, and Ortec International are taking cells from amputated foreskins and experimenting with artificial skin. Products like Dermagraft-TC, which sells for about $3,000 per square foot, are grown from the cells in infant foreskins and used as a temporary wound covering for burn patients. One foreskin contains enough genetic material to grow 250,000 square feet of skin."from "Foreskins for Sale"
The vast majority of circumcisions are performed without anaesthetic, upon defenseless babies, without consent.
"Are parents told that their baby's foreskin will be sold? Are they asked if their baby's foreskin may be sold?To cut off a person's body part without their permission should not be legal. It's illegal in the United States for a parent to lick or suck a baby boy's foreskin, yet it's perfectly legal for the same parent to CHOP IT OFF. Think that reasoning over a while.
Who is the legal owner of a baby's foreskin after it's been cut off? (Who is the legal owner of a baby's foreskin before it's cut off?)
Is it ethical to cut off a baby's foreskin, charge his parents for the operation, sell his foreskin without telling his parents, and keep the money? Is it legal?
Are the foreskins of children and adults being sold too?
Are other parts of people's bodies being cut off -- or out -- and sold without their knowledge or consent?
If someone cuts part of another person's body off -- or out -- and sells it without obtaining signed legal consent from the person cut, and the person who buys it makes money from it, who does that money rightfully belong to?
Do Diane Sawyer and Bill Kurtis (Investigative Reports) know about this?"from "Foreskins for Sale"
Circumcision, Continued
Dec. 2nd, 2001 02:57 pmI find that many circumcised males have a tendency to get huffy when anyone speaks out against the institution of routine nonconsensual unanaesthetised circumcision, feeling that their own dicks are being judged inferior. Considering the fact that most anti-circumcision websites speak of circumcision with words like "male genital mutilation," I do think this reaction is understandable so I wish to address it here.
I do not think it is polite or healthy or civilized to try to convince someone who is happy with their genital configuration that they should start viewing themselves as "mutilated." Just as I would not try to tell a happy post-op MTF transsexual that she had "mutilated" herself, so also I would not try to tell a happy circumcised male that he had been "mutilated." The word "mutilated" is an aesthetic judgment which cannot be objectively justified. Objectively speaking, we can say that a body modification has taken place, and we can say whether it took place with or without consent. But we cannot judge, objectively speaking, whether that body modification is aesthetically pleasing or not, "mutilation" or "art" (and yes, even art can be unwanted, painted upon someone who did not consent to be a canvas for it). And it does not make good sense to me for a movement supposedly aimed at "helping" the victims of forced circumcision to promote derogatory aesthetic judgments about the victims of such violence.
So it was not by accident that in my last post I used the phrase "sexual assault" rather than "mutilation." A person who has been sexually assaulted does not become an inherently uglier, less attractive person for having been assaulted. They are not doomed to live a "mutilated" life of inferiority and incompleteness. They are simply a person who has had something done to them without their consent, and when I speak out to say that they should have been asked for consent, that does not imply that they are now ugly because they were not asked. I have a much deeper and more complex sense of aesthetics than that. Often it is precisely though surviving victimization that people become most beautiful.
I do not think it is polite or healthy or civilized to try to convince someone who is happy with their genital configuration that they should start viewing themselves as "mutilated." Just as I would not try to tell a happy post-op MTF transsexual that she had "mutilated" herself, so also I would not try to tell a happy circumcised male that he had been "mutilated." The word "mutilated" is an aesthetic judgment which cannot be objectively justified. Objectively speaking, we can say that a body modification has taken place, and we can say whether it took place with or without consent. But we cannot judge, objectively speaking, whether that body modification is aesthetically pleasing or not, "mutilation" or "art" (and yes, even art can be unwanted, painted upon someone who did not consent to be a canvas for it). And it does not make good sense to me for a movement supposedly aimed at "helping" the victims of forced circumcision to promote derogatory aesthetic judgments about the victims of such violence.
So it was not by accident that in my last post I used the phrase "sexual assault" rather than "mutilation." A person who has been sexually assaulted does not become an inherently uglier, less attractive person for having been assaulted. They are not doomed to live a "mutilated" life of inferiority and incompleteness. They are simply a person who has had something done to them without their consent, and when I speak out to say that they should have been asked for consent, that does not imply that they are now ugly because they were not asked. I have a much deeper and more complex sense of aesthetics than that. Often it is precisely though surviving victimization that people become most beautiful.