insideMAN

Why it’s rational to say circumcision is worse than FGM

by 22 Comments

Is it rational to compare male circumcision and female genital mutilation and come to the conclusion that one is worse than the other, asks Glen Poole?

If I asked you what’s worse, damaging your arm or damaging your leg what would you say? If you had the most rudimentary skills of rationalization, you’d probably say well that depends what type of damage you’re taking about?

Clearly it’s worse to die of a gangrenous leg wound than to get a small bruise on your arm that disappears after a couple of days. Whereas grazing your knees is not as bad as getting your arm trapped under a rock on a remote mountainside and having to saw it off with a penknife to stay alive.

So which is worse, injuring a leg or injuring an arm?

Well there are so many variables that you can’t simply say that one is worse than the other. It is, however, perfectly reasonable and rational to say that damaging one of your upper limbs is different and sometimes worse than damaging one of your lower limbs—and vice versa. No-one with a sane mind would say otherwise.

And so to ritual circumcision, a practice that’s often viewed as benign and even beneficial, but in reality is a medically unnecessary practice that is both painful and dangerous and can cause discomfort, disease, deformity, disability and sometimes death.

We know that routine circumcision is medically unnecessary because the majority of men and boys all over the world live happily and healthily with their foreskins intact. We know, from research, that it’s painful; that even when performed in a “safe” medical setting that there’s a risk of complications and that in worst case scenarios baby boys and young men die from unnecessary male circumcision every year. We also know that Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is painful and causes many problems and complications including death.

So which is worse male circumcision or FGM?

Many people argue that FGM is worse. Tanya Gold, in the Guardian, for example referred to “the revolting juxtaposition of female genital mutilation, which is always torture, and often murder, with ritual male circumcision, which is neither” (despite the fact that it kills people).

Then there’s Lynne Featherstone who, as the UK’s Junior Minister for International Development, spoke about FGM in way that suggested she was unaware of the practice of male circumcision saying: “Quite frankly if it was boys’ willies that were being cut off without anaesthetic it wouldn’t have lasted four minutes, let alone 4,000 years”.

But aren’t Gold and Featherstone, who both come from communities that cut boys but not girls, simply voicing a view that we all instinctively know to be true—that it’s worse to do it to girls?

It depends what criteria we use to compare

If you look at the scale of the problem, WHO estimates that 125 million women and girls are affected , compared with around one billion men and boys. If you look at the severity of the problem, there seems to be more deaths around the world from male circumcision than FGM, even in a country like the UK where the practices are relatively rare.

If you look at the seriousness with which we, in the West, take the issue, we ban one practice but permit the other. This means that any man who considers himself to be a victim of unnecessary male circumcision, spends a lifetime of secondary victimisation being told that what happened to him wasn’t a crime and he should get over it and move on.

Imagine if the same were true of arms and leg. Imagine if there were many, many more arm injuries in the world; that more people died from arm injuries and that, unlike leg injuries, there was no serious recognition that arm injuries were a problem that deserved equitable attention to leg injuries. If all of these things were true, then it would be rational to argue that arm injuries are worse than leg injuries.

So is the same true of unnecessary male circumcision?

Is it reasonable and rational to argue that it’s worse than FGM? I think that a rational person who cares passionately about the subject could validly make that argument at a superficial level. Taking a deeper perspective, I think, like arms and legs, the rational way to compare the unnecessary removal of healthy tissue from people’s genitals is this:

FGM is different and sometimes worse than unnecessary male circumcision and unnecessary male circumcision is different and sometimes worse than FGM.

If you find this a difficult concept to understand then this 5 minute video explains how the different scales of severity of the two practices overlap with each other—and how one practice is sometimes worse than the other (and vice versa).

Right now, this rational and obvious truth is considered not only a radical view, but often a “revolting” view. I’m sure, in centuries to come, we’ll look back and wonder how rational and intelligent human beings could ever have believed that the practice of FGM was always worse than unnecessary male circumcision, when the practice kills and injures people.

Why is this? I am convinced that the overriding reason why Westerners believe that FGM is always worse than male circumcision is sexism, because when it comes to helping people of different sexes in the West, we remain collectively more tolerant of any harm that happens to men and boys.

So what do you think? Is one practice worse than the other or are they simply different (and sometimes worse) than each other?

—Photo credit: Flickr/Keoni Cabral

If you liked this article and want to read more, follow us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook

Also on insideMAN:

 

  • Gaius Baltar

    Along with similar levels of damage, male genital mutilation affects 1.2 billion compared to (high estimate) 140 million for FGM. So even if they have the exact same death rate, that’s ten times as many dead boys.

  • Tim Alford

    The employment of logical fallacies and untruths to justify this sexist position of being appalled by FGM whilst excusing MGM is commonplace. My MP, Anna Soubry (I know) argued on a tv debate, that we shouldn’t criminalize male circumcision because it’s not as bad as FGM (untrue AND a logical fallacy), furthermore, whilst admitting she has no idea why people circumcise boys, it’s worse for girls because it’s done precisely to suppress their sexuality. This is also a logical fallacy (she doesn’t know why it’s done to boys) and an untruth: the suppression of male sexuality has been an explicitly stated aim of circumcision, from ancient texts to recent history (the Kellog campaign). That is, the idea of removing of the most sensitive erogenous tissue on the male body was sold to people precisely as a prevention/cure for masturbation, or as a discipline for ‘wayward’ young men. Whilst, of course, sexual suppression may result from some types of FGM, I have never come across it being the stated aim. That Soubry (a barrister) can embrace such torturous logic and wilfull ignorance, points to one motivation only: a misandry so extreme that even male babies must suffer. Disgusting woman.

  • Nigel

    I fully agree Tim. I feel the logical twists used reflects both an undercurrent of misandry and an unwillingness on others part to appear to be “anti semitic” or “anti islam” and so on. Personally I thinks its perfectly fine for adults to consider for themselves. What I can’t get round is the manner in which a procedure which has ,in the main, no medical value to the patient is imposed on a baby.

  • Patrick Smyth

    There are ‘rational and intelligent’ human beings and there are ‘rational and intelligent’ human beings. One person’s ‘rational and intelligent’ human being is not necessarily another person’s ‘rational and intelligent’ human being. How many supposedly ‘rational and intelligent’ human beings believe that there is a wonderful eternal life awaiting them after this one? It seems that many of these ‘rational and intelligent’ human beings feel that it is alright if this life gets wrecked by the actions of other ‘rational and intelligent’ human beings who abuse their position of power over others, because everything will be fine and dandy when they all shuffle off to their immortal afterlife.

  • Tim Alford

    I think I see your point Patrick, but I would not take a relativist stance on this. The belief in an afterlife is something that many have tried admirably to hypothesize. But the intelligent ones do just that; they hypothesize. Those who display an absolute certainty about this are nuts, because it is by definition unknowable. Agnosticism is the only sensible position in such matters. When a rational and intelligent person (such as I believe my MP to be) employs tautologies, non-sequiturs, internal logical inconsistencies, demonstrable untruths, and any number of fallacies to argue a position, then I smell a rat. This isn’t stupidity, this is mal-intent, an aggressive manifestation of some deep-seated sexual insecurities.

  • Cassandra

    Even if FGM is worse that doesn’t make MGM good by default. Having a competition between the two doesn’t solve anything. Evil is still evil even if it is the lesser of the two evil. Why do we have to choose? It’s simple. Ban both. End of story

  • Mac

    The most annoying aspect of this whole comparison is that in debates the worst case FGM is always compared to the best case MGM. This is a problem I’ve come across so many times, it’s infuriating. At the end of the day both MGM and FGM are disgusting archaic practices which should be banned. There is no good reason to take any sharp object near a child’s genitals unless it’s a medically required procedure.

  • Mac

    P.s. Meant to add, it’s not a competition between MGM and FGM to see which is worse. They are both vile. A ban on genital mutilation should not be gender specific, it should be universal.

  • Edward von Roy

    Basic Human Genital Anatomy

    Neurologically, the most specialized pressure-sensitive cells in the human body are Meissner’s corpuscles for localized light touch and fast touch, Merkel’s disc cells for light pressure and tactile form and texture, Ruffini’s corpuscles for slow sustained pressure, deep skin tension, stretch, flutter and slip, and Pacinian corpuscles for deep touch and detection of rapid external vibrations. They are found only in the tongue, lips, palms, fingertips, nipples, and the clitoris and the crests of the ridged band at the tip of the male foreskin. These remarkable cells process tens of thousands of information impulses per second and can sense texture, stretch, and vibration/movement at the micrometre level. These are the cells that allow blind people to “see” Braille with their fingertips. Cut them off and, male or female, it’s like trying to read Braille with your elbow.

    Physiologically, the clitoris is richly endowed with thousands of these specialized pressure-sensitive nerves and the clitoral foreskin is virtually bereft of them. The ridged band at the tip of the the penile foreskin is richly endowed with thousands of these same specialized pressure-sensitive nerves and the glans is virtually bereft of them. Lightening speed feedback by somatosensory transduction from such tactile sensitivity gives humans intense pleasure, environmental awareness, and control. Cut off these super-sensitive cells and with lack of awareness comes lack of control. To say that amputation of the clitoris or amputation of the mobile roller-bearing-like portion of the natural penis, and consequently thousands of these specialized nerve cell interfaces, does not permanently sub-normalize a woman’s or a man’s natural capabilities and partially devitalize their innate capacity for gliding action tactile pleasure is grossly illogical denial of the bio-mechanical and the somatosensory facts of human genital anatomy.

    Mechanically, the natural vaginal and penile lubricants are kept inside the vagina during male/female intercourse by the organic seal effect of the mobile penile foreskin. The mechanoreceptors in the buried legs of the intact clitoris straddle the entroitus of the vagina and are stimulated by the identical mechanoreceptors in the thick bunching accordion folds of the mobile penile foreskin. The clitoris and the penile foreskin are also intensely vascular – thickening when stimulated. Millions of years of trial and error evolutionary forces have synchronously engineered the human sex organs to function synergistically. We can be sure Nature has evolved (if you prefer, God has created) these differences and duplications for a reason. The brilliantly engineered unaltered female body is the perfect match for the equally brilliantly engineered design of the natural penis; they evolved together to compliment each other and they function collaboratively to achieve two common goals – mutual pleasure and insemination.

    A woman can live without the sensitivity of the visible part of her clitoris. A man can live without the mobile and most sensitive part of his penis. But, both men and women are better off with their natural fine-touch parts intact – all of them. And so are their sexual partners.

    Gary Harryman

  • Angie

    Your seriously an idiot. Go actually read and watch videos how these are both done and the reasons they do them before posting such a retarded article. Thanks.

    • Inside MAN

      Hi Angie

      The key point that I’d like people to take away here is that male circumcision is different and sometimes worse that FGM (and that FGM is different and sometimes worse that male circumcision).

      I came to this conclusion only after studying both practices extensively—and I continue to do so.

      For example, I read about the Seattle Compromise whereby medics explored the possibility of providing Somali parents with a sanitized version of FGM which would have involved a small nick. I also read about the sanitized approach to FGM in Indonesia where, again, the procedure can take place in clinics and involves the removal of a tiny amount of skin.

      I don’t support either of these versions of FGM but if you want to understand genital mutilation in all its forms, it is important to study the many different forms of FGM.

      I also read extensively about incidents of boys and young men dying from circumcision all over the world —- including my own country (the UK)— and notably in Africa.

      Comparing the death of a baby boy who bleeds to death out of the end of his penis with the type of FGM proposed in Seattle and practised in Indonesia provides a clear example of male circumcision being different and sometimes worse than FGM (as opposed to FGM always being worse than circumcision as too many people claim)

      The same logic can be applied in the other direction with the most harmful cases of FGM being compared with the least harmful cases of male circumcision—-doing so would prove the point that FGM is different and sometimes worse than male circumcision.

      Glen Poole

    • David J. Bernstein

      Angie said: “Your seriously an idiot.”

      Says the person that used the word “your” instead of “YOU’RE / YOU ARE”.

      FAIL. So much FAIL.

      Angie, male circumcision MAIMS and KILLS infants and young boys in America, Israel, Africa, The Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, The Middle East etc. That’s the REALITY of male circumcision.

      It MAIMS and KILLS.

      Male circumcision removes the foreskin. An ORGAN with 16 FUNCTIONS that is definitely not an “extra useless body part” as so many circumcisers like to claim.

      Oh, and the most common form of female genital cutting involves pricking the clitoris or nicking a small piece off it with a scalpel or knife. This is practiced in Malaysia, Indonesia and in some Muslim countries like Egypt. The most extreme form that you have in mind is “thankfully” the least common form and pretty much confined to the Sub-Saharan region of Africa.

      You’re ignorant about both male and female circumcision. Shut up if you don’t have anything intelligent to add to this serious human rights violation on BOTH males and females.

    • Lawrence Newman

      As someone who was circumcised at 14 without my informed consent, I can tell you that circumcision destroys sexual pleasure. Almost all sexual pleasure comes from the foreskin. It’s worse than type 2 FGM, which is the most common form of FGM.

      You do not know what you are talking about.

  • Anita

    FGM and MGM are both bad and is an traumatic experience for both genders and totally unnecessary. But when we look at the why they are doing it… there is a difference. The reasons for boys is religion, tradition and health, for girls it’s about control and power and this is much worse. While men can still enjoy sex, female don’t feel anything as their sensitive parts have been cut away. If you would listen to interviews in Africa, Indonesia etc. would would now that. Many men really believe it because they are not informed correctly, they say: We need to cut the female genitalia because unlike men women are unable to control their sexuality, so we need to cut them. Are we talking about humans here or about straying cats…? So don’t tell me it is the same !

    • Inside MAN

      Hi Anita

      We agree that both are unnecessary.

      The key point that I’d like people to take away here is that male circumcision is different and sometimes worse that FGM (and that FGM is different and sometimes worse that male circumcision).

      What people do—and what you are doing—is take the most harmful examples of FGM and compare them to the least harmful examples of male circumcision.

      The idea that FGM is alway about control and power is a lie. Like male circumcision there are many reasons. Today, the most common reason evoked for supporting FGM is the belief that the practice is a “good tradition”. Other reasons include religious requirement(s); rite of passage to womanhood; cleanliness; prevention of promiscuity among girls; preservation of virginity; better marriage prospects; enhancement of male sexuality; prevention of excessive clitoral growth; and facilitation of childbirth by widening the birth canal.

      http://www.path.org/files/FGM-The-Facts.htm

      Many of these reasons (tradition, right of passage, cleanliness, better marriage prospects, enhancement of female sexuality) also apply to male circumcision. If you read the stories of men on non circumcising tribes in Kenya being chased through the streets and forcibly circumcised, you are seeing power and control—boys born into circumcising communities have no choice but to succumb to their parents power and control (and parents often feel they have no choice but to succumb to the power and control of their community/religion)

      In terms of controlling sexuality this also applies to boys. The famed medieval Jewish rabbi, physician and philosopher Moses Maimonides said:

      Similarly with regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible. It has been thought that circumcision perfects what is defective congenitally. This gave the possibility to everyone to raise an objection and to say: How can natural things be defective so that they need to be perfected from outside, all the more because we know how useful the foreskin is for that member? In fact this commandment has not been prescribed with a view to perfecting what is defective congenitally, but to perfecting what is defective morally.

      The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision. None of the activities necessary for the preservation of the individual is harmed thereby, nor is procreation rendered impossible, but violent concupiscence and lust that goes beyond what is needed are diminished. The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable. For if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened. The Sages, may their memory be blessed, have explicitly stated: It is hard for a woman with whom an uncircumcised man has had sexual intercourse to separate from him. In my opinion this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision.

      More recently those who popularized routine infant circumcision in English-speaking countries in the Victorian era included John Kellog (yes the cereal magnate) who said of the practice: “circumcision in infancy is a good remedy for masturbation, it helps in most cases. It is important to perform surgery without using any anesthetic so that pain during an operation may affect the mind. It would be good if pain could be also associated with the idea of punishment. Cauterizing the clitoris with carbolic acid can help women combat the perverted ways of getting sexual pleasure.”

      As I said, the key point that I’d like people to take away here is that male circumcision is different and sometimes worse that FGM (and that FGM is different and sometimes worse that male circumcision).

      No rational human being cannot authentically look at the least harmful examples of FGM (eg ritual pricking or nicking of the clitoris) and say they are worse than the most harmful cases of male circumcision, notably those examples where boys and young men bleed to death.

      The practices bear many similarities and they are different and sometimes worse than each other.

      Glen Poole

    • Lawrence Newman

      Rubbish. Male circumcision has always been about sexual suppression of males. And circumcised men have lost the most sensitive parts of their penis. Where is your evidence they enjoy sex? Because these men have sex, can get erection ergo they must enjoy it? No, these men have never known what foreskin feels like. I can tell you , having experienced both, that circumcision kills pleasure dead. A woman’s glans clitoris is a small part of her sexual apparatus and she can enjoy sex without it via penetrative sex. A man without a foreskin can’t enjoy sex because he has no ridge band and frenular delta. The glans penis is virtually sexually insensitive. IGNORANCE.

  • https://independent.academia.edu/MichelHerv%C3%A9BertauxNavoiseau Michel Hervé Bertaux-Navoiseau

    The true reason why circumcision is more damageable to humanity than circumcision is explained in the following article: https://www.academia.edu/3444281/Between_barbarity_and_exclusion_ritual_circumcision_height_of_a_racism_masked_behind_religion_tradition_culture_and_folklore_updated_09.11.14_

  • http://www.farreach.org B. Maurene White

    Both male and female ‘circumcision’ are prima facie wounding which by damaging the genitalia, altering them for the worse damages sexuality in many ways. Considering just the physical alterations, in males, amputation of and absence of the foreskin causes the penis to be ridged instead of flexible, interferes with the sensorium and triggering of ejaculation, so male reproduction is altered. In females, destruction of the labia and clitoris similarly cause loss of sensory sexuality and rigidity of vaginal and vulvar structures preventing normal reproductive action. The difference in male and female reproduction is that the work of males, to produce small amounts of fluid, by ejaculation, not so terribly difficult, whereas the work of females is to produce menses, again fluid, and not so terribly difficult to expel but also to produce by expelling INFANT people, which when the flexibility of the vagina and vulva are destroyed is infinitely more difficult, and is extremely risky to the health and life of both mother and infant, often causing infant brain damage and maternal hemorrhage. This is really a heavier burden of reproductive responsibility than ejaculation. But as someone who has worked all her professional life, student nurse in May ’60 to the present, defending and promoting the integrity of male infants and promoting foreskin restoration in adolescent and adult males I will not say that one is worse than the other at the time of the event – read torture and mutilation – or defend one second of one person’s intent to torture and mutilate the genitals and the lives of others, especially of children who are so vulnerable and powerless to reject their assailants (circumcisers).

  • cosmopolite

    No one has constructed a large random sample of African women, then had all these women submit to a pelvic examination, whose aim would be to establish a baseline for the appearance of the unaltered African female genitalia, and then to measure just what African FGM does in practice. Circumcised African women have assured investigators that they orgasm regularly with their husbands. Is this the truth, or wishful thinking? We simply do not have a good understanding of the sexual and other consequences of FGM. Hence we cannot meaningfully compare FGM and male circumcision.
    There isn’t a lot of ambiguity about the anatomical result of male circumcision. But the effect of boyhood circumcision on adult male sexuality is not well understood. For example, we do not know if circumcised men are more or less likely to experience PE and ED. This further ignorance makes it even harder to compare FGM and male circ.
    The fact remains, however. FGM and male circ, done forcibly on minors, are grave violations of the individual’s right to self-determination, especially in the sexual realm. These violations are usually justified by invoking a need for religious or sexual conformity, a need so strong that it overrides all talk of self-determination and freedom of choice. Genital integrity is part of our species’s groping towards an improved understanding of its own sexuality.

    • Lawrence Newman

      Women can still orgasm after type 2 FGM. The external genitalia are not needed for orgasm. A woman experienced pleasure during penetrative sex, obviously. A man with no foreskin can’t feel pleasure , because all the sexual sensation is in the foreskin. The glans penis of the male is almost sexually insensitive.

      • mr greene

        Lawrence, I was circumcised when an infant but i still enjoy sex. As my foreskin, which is packed with nerve endings and is highly sensitive, was cut off the pleasure i feel during sex was significantly reduced . However, it wasn’t eliminated.
        I don’t know how it feels to have sex with a foreskin, and i never will, but I do know for a fact that the many 1000s of men who have ‘restored’ experience significantly more pleasure.
        https://secure.norm-uk.org/ is a very useful and informative website.
        I am against circumcision, but to say that circumcised men feel ZERO pleasure during sex is nonsense and misinformation such as this only serves to weaken the argument of those opposed to circumcision.

        • Lawrence Newman

          You have never known any better. Any slight feeling you have left is only the result of having a little scrap of frenulum left. For all intents and purposes it’s destroyed sexual pleasure. Virtually all erogenous nerves are in the ridged band and delta.