What are your views on the act euphamistically referred to as 'Female Circumcision'?

Question

Do you feel this can be reduced to cultural trope?

Answer 1

It is mutilation and needs to be stopped.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, most places where Female Genital Mutilation exist don't have the luxury to discuss online how moral it is. And most cases take place in Africa. In many tribes women view FGM as a cleansing process. If they opt to forego the procedure they spend a lifetime feeling dirty.

The act is done to prevent females from straying away from their husbands, when in fact most women who undergo this procedure do stray at some point.

Another difficult aspect to this situation, is the pressure applied by the females in the communities. Usually an elder woman performs the ritual on females around the ages of 13 or 14.

Personally, I do not advocate it. Saying that though, I have seen the way American teens pressure each other into doing things that would never make sense to other cultures. I would like to see the looks on an starving African woman's face when an American tells her that American girls starve themselves to become more attractive to males. Or that American women cut open their b*****s to put fake material inside to  make them bigger. Isn't this just as big of an issue as FGM?

Every culture has its issues to deal with. Education is always the most thorough way of correcting a social wrong.

Answer 3

I would like to see international laws against it as crimes against humanity and if necessary force those that practice it to stop.  We went to war against Northern Africa to stop p****y.  This is an even greater abomination.

Answer 4

In the last few weeks in Kenya rival tribes have been fighting, one of the tribes, the Kikuyu "circumcises" males and the other, the Luos do not. The Kikuyu tribe has been forcing "circumcision" on male members of the Luo tribe that they have caught and many of them have bled to death in agony. In other parts of the world Christian men have been "circumcised" with force by muslims and again many have died in agony from these wounds to their "privates". It is interesting that none of this gets any press in this country, but if a girl dies from "circumcision" it is played up big time.

"circumcision" is just plain evil, it doesn't matter what gender the victim is.

Answer 5

If there was a society that, not only promoted paedophilia but made it virually obligatory, it would rightly be condemned.

I consider the mutilation of ones own children, an even greater obscenity.

A further obscenity, is that it is women, who have had this 'procedure' themselves, who are responsible for perpetuating it.

They are beneath contempt.

As an aside, I once discussed male circumcision with a doctor, stating that it was wrong except for medical reasons.

He argued that being circumcised was cleaner, tho which my response was - 'Couldn't you just teach people to wash?'

Answer 6

I have a nasty suspicion it originally begin as a medical procedure to  remove tissue damaged by childbirth or infected by some tropical disease or as a cosmetic procedure to reduce the size of the outer parts of the labia. Somewhere along the line some one started doing it as  preventative measure in younger women but started removing too much tissue ... as well as trimming off the outer tissue they started on other parts ... some male psychopath probably decided he liked the result and made all his wives and daughters do it and the custom spread or rather got spread by various individuals with OCD who thought removal of body parts made them and others  "cleaner" .

Yes thats my theory genital mutilation of females was some ancient surgical procedure that got changed by some psychopathic / OCD type who was in a position of power and promoted its spread. This to me explains why there are so many different forms of it?

Answer 7

There are in fact many parallels between male and female circumcision.  Both involve genital mutilation by removal of tissue, the outcome of which is a decrease in sensitivity of the genitals.  Both can have severe long term effects, as well as dangerous surgical complications (http://www.norm-uk.org/  -is an interesting foundation that highlights this issue).

It is certainly the case, however, that female circumcision/FGM has in all these circumstances far more dire implications, and is a greater violation of human rights.

If you are suggesting that by calling it by the same term 'circumcision' this is implying a masculine hegemony over a female issue, then I might agree to some extent.

Perhaps calling male circumcision "male genital mutilation" and keeping "female genital mutilation" would be a compromise, and remind us of the strange and damaging nature of both processes.

Answer 8

Well, removing the clitoral tissue is exactly the same as removing the penile tissue of a male.  It removes the element of arousal and makes a woman nothing more than a vessel for childbirth.  If a culture had a tradition of "penectomy" on men, could it be reduced to cultural trope?  Of course not.

I am sick of cultural relativism.  Some things are just wrong, and some cultures are better than others.  China used to cripple women by breaking and binding feet until they were deformed and non-functional.  That was wrong.  That was a bad culture.  FGM is a result of a bad culture.  Some cultures think it is good to kill entire ethnic groups.  That is another example of a "bad" culture.  Some cultures train children to strap bombs to their bodies and kill innocent civilians.  That is another example of "bad" culture.

Yes, just because something is a part of your "culture" doesn't make it right, good, or moral.  Some cultures are evil, depraved, and bankrupt.  People within those cultures do "choose" to contine these bad things, but it is not a real choice.  It is a matter of "choose or be an outcast".

So, there is my humble opinion.

Answer 9

It is most commonly referred to as "female genital mutilation".  Its purpose is to do away with women feeling pleasure, thus they are controlled and have no sexual identity of their own.  It is a horrific violation against nature.

Answer 10

I think that post modernism is the most perverted thing to come out of the western world since Nazism.

The term female circumcision is fallacious because it is not f******n being removed but the clitoris. Thus since the clitoris is analogous to the p***s the correct terminology for this practice is female CASTRATION.

Post modernism, political correctness and multiculturalism are anti-art, anti-intellectual and regressive movements that have poisoned academia and reversed the advance of human kind over the past 50 years or so.

What matters more than anything is the dignity of the individual. Primitive cultures stand between the individual and his or her dignity. Primitive cultures with their oppression and superstition should not be celebrated. They should be challenged.

Answer 11

Another abomination committed by weirdos in the name of religion.

Answer 12

It is difficult to discuss the machinations of the profoundly ignorant stone-age inadequate males living in the Middle East and a few other moslem areas around the equator.

These incredibly ignorant males who fear women as superior, excuse their very human indulgence as serving some religious urge.

There is a solution to stop it.

Enlightened peoples can hire mercenaries to go about and collect any moslem male who participates in this mutilation of females and respect their religion by delivering the exact same benefit to the guilty.

The mercenaries would travel incognito, dressed appropriately as Arabs, identify the perpetrators, kidnap them tie them to stakes in the desert, allow them to bleed out then release them to spread the word.

The practice would cease almost forthwith.

I'd be happy to assemble the teams, competent, one and all.

Answer 13

The reason why it's done is to prevent a woman from feeling sexual pleasure, therefore minimizing the risk of her being "tempted" into adultery.  It's meant to keep her from straying from her marriage.  In this context, it is barbaric.  It is mutilation.  It's demeaning and wrong.

Answer 14

Actually, female genital cutting is the preferred term in the international community.  FGM is awfully weighted, while female circumcision makes a false analogy with male circumcision.  Most forms of FGC are not at all like male circumcision.

Cultural trope?  I don't really know what you mean by that.  A commonly repeated belief?  It really exists, you know.  And why would you want to reduce it to anything anyway?  This practice involves cutting on a woman's very delicate bits, often destroying her sensitivity, and potentially putting her at grave risk.  I think this is a human rights issue, and a very thorny one at that, as we need to keep in mind both the rights of the women and girls to not undergo such a procedure, as well as the right of the cultures to exist.  But I don't think it can be "reduced" to anything.  These are people.

Answer 15

Your last paragraph reveals your ignorance of the work being done on human evolved moralities that transcend such superficiality as culture.