Circumcision as a Distinction of Class

Circumcision Series

Circumcision by David Gollaher, 2000, Excerpts

Medical circumcision in its early phase was reserved for the carriage trade: better-off patients who could afford it. Consequently, medical men grew accustomed to thinking of the procedure in class terms. So it came about that the foreskin, viewed as dangerous by the medical profession, commonly came to indicate ignorance, neglect, and poverty.

Circumcision became standard practice, its legitimacy bolstered by the American military experience [WWII]. Physicians in the armed forces strongly believed that the foreskin was a risk factor for venereal diseases – a source of paranoia during the war – and encouraged uncircumcised recruits to undergo the operation. Impressed by the fact that most officers and soldiers from affluent families were circumcised, thousands of enlisted soldiers and sailors signed up for circumcision in military hospitals before returning to civilian life. Americans found circumcision appealing for its connotations of science, health, and cleanliness – newly important class distinctions.

As white middle-class Gentiles adopted circumcision, those left behind were recent immigrants, people of color, the poor, and others at the margins of respectable society. These were the groups imagined to have filthy, malodorous bodies: people who lacked culture, manners, intelligence, and, in a word, civilization.

Photographer Margaret Bourke-White

Psychological Impact of Circumcision

Circumcision Series

Circumcision by David Gollaher, 2000, Excerpts

As a Jew, Freud himself had been circumcised as an infant, though he subsequently left religious faith far behind. What intrigued him were connections between cutting the penis and his burgeoning theory of sexuality, including the relationship between childhood trauma and later neurosis. Circumcision is perceived by the child as an aggressive attack on his body, which damages, mutilates and some cases totally destroys him.

The most ambitious attempt to find a transcendent psychological basis for circumcision was a treatise written in the early 1950s by the distinguished, and later notorious, psychotherapist Bruno Bettelheim, a self-styled Freudian who would become world famous for his interpretations of fairy tales and myths. “Whatever the origin and meaning of circumcision may be, it must originate in deep human needs, since it seems to have sprung up independently among many peoples, although in different forms.” Moreover, even in places where the practice appears to have spread by diffusion, he reasonably noted, people would not lightly take up such a radical and risky operation. It was “a strange mutilation,” all the stranger for being “found among the most primitive and the most highly civilized people.” Thus, he concluded, circumcision “must reflect profound needs.”

Circumcision: The Hidden Trauma by Ronald Goldman. Arguing that the violence of the operation disrupts the mother-son bond shortly after birth, Goldman asserts that American men on a massive scale are afflicted by post-traumatic disorder. The lingering aftershocks of circumcision, he writes, include low self-esteem, avoidance of intimacy in male-female relationships, disregard for women’s sexuality, and most alarming, a pandemic of violence in America’s high rates of assault, rape, and murder. Both rape and circumcision involve sexual organs and violence. Rape perpetrators’ motivations and excessive, inappropriate anger reflect feelings of having been victimized themselves. It can be argued that in a broader sense, circumcision [what’s done to children] could be considered to be a form of rape [they will do to society].

The Painful Dilemma by Rosemary Romberg [1985], nurse and alternative-child-rearing advocate, concentrating on the violence circumcision visited on male infants and its possible psychological aftershocks which she strongly believes contributed to an increasingly violent American society.

Pain of Circumcision

Circumcision Series

Circumcision by David Gollaher, 2000, Excerpts

According to a popular consumer medical guide published during the 1970s, infants naturally protest any prodding or restraint. “Although the baby may scream and kick during the procedure, this seems to be more a reaction to being bundled to the circumcision board than the actual pain. Many babies fall asleep during the process, especially that part that localizes pain, circumcision done at this age the first few days after birth is probably the best time.”

Pediatricians who studied infant pain produced unsettling descriptions of babies trembling, becoming plethoric, dusky, and mildly cyanotic because of their wailing, and on occasion, vomiting and breathing irregularly. The operation triggered significant physiological changes: in breathing, crying, heart rate, and cortisol levels. Immediately after the operation, babies demonstrated classic responses to intense stress: their appetites deteriorated and they became apathetic, disinclined to interact with their mothers or nurses. In some instances, circumcised infants needed to be fed infant formula, a finding that bothered some physicians, because early feeding with formula tends to reduce the duration of maternal breast-feeding.

Since most circumcisions are done without anesthetic, most boys suffer acute pain. Whether or not this pain makes a lasting impression – influencing the child’s future development – has been hotly debated.

Nurse’s Description of a Circumcision

Circumcision Series

Circumcision by David Gollaher, 2000, Excerpts

Marilyn Milo’s life was permanently changed when as a nursing student she witnessed her first circumcision. On the fateful day, she joined her fellow nursing students in the hospital nursery where they found a baby strapped spread-eagle to a plastic board on a counter top across the room. He was struggling against his restrains – tugging, whimpering, and then crying helplessly. Her natural instinct was to comfort the child. When the surgeon arrived, he suggested she put her finger into the baby’s mouth to pacify him. But nothing had prepared her for what happened next.

“The silence was soon broken by a piercing scream – the baby’s reaction to having his foreskin pinched and crushed as the doctor attached the clamp to his penis. The shriek intensified when the doctor inserted an instrument between the foreskin and the glans [head of the penis], tearing the two structures apart. [They are normally attached to each other during infancy so the foreskin can protect the sensitive glans from urine and feces]. The baby started shaking his head back and forth – the only part of his body free to move – as the doctor used another clamp to crush the foreskin lengthwise, which he then cut. The baby began to gasp and choke, breathless for his shrill continuous screams. My bottom lip began to quiver, tears filled my eyes and spilled over. I found my own sobs difficult to contain. During the next stage of the surgery, the doctor crushed the foreskin against the circumcision instrument and then, finally, amputated it. The baby was limp, exhausted, spent.”

Milo does not view hers as a protest movement. “I’d like to make the point that we are not about “protest” as much as we are about human rights and truth. The demonstrations were a way to bring attention to the issue when the media were reluctant to cover this taboo subject. The history of circumcision in the West is not about differences or opinion. It is about the infiltration of genital mutilation of infants and children into Western medicine. I don’t deny I am passionate about the issue, and it is because I was mother first, before I saw a circumcision as a nursing student. It’s been twenty years that I’ve been living with the screams of the baby in my ears – a sound I have never heard come out of the mouth of a human being, except during circumcision [and I have four children!]. I am as chilled and disturbed by it today as I was twenty years ago, and I know that this is consistent with post traumatic stress.”

Sexual Function of the Prepuce

Circumcision Series

Circumcision by David Gollaher, 2000, Excerpts

Circumcision’s real mischief, according to William Morgan, a Baltimore specialist in pulmonary medicine, was that it deprived men of sexual pleasure. For a man to experience sexual intercourse without a foreskin, he declared, was like viewing a Renoir color-blind. Circumcision robs the penis of a dynamic element that contributes significantly to sexual pleasure. The mechanics of sexual activity – masturbation, foreplay, intercourse – involve ranges of motion: touching, gliding, expanding, and contracting. The normal lubrication and sliding movement associated wit the foreskin is simply missing if a man has been circumcised.

Some physicians contend that women suffer as well, writes Paul M. Fleiss. “The natural penis is self-lubrication. Vaginal secretions serve only to ease the initial insertion of the penis. Preputial secretions enable the foreskin to evert and revert smoothly over the glans. Without the mobile sheath of the foreskin, the circumcised penis acts like a ramrod in the vagina. This unnatural and has negative health consequences for women.”

Rodin The Kiss

Analysis of the Prepuce

Circumcision Series

Circumcision by David Gollaher, 2000, Excerpts

In 1916, Geoffrey Jefferson, a hospital pathologist in British Columbia, took time to dissect, stain, and examine ten prepuces under his microscope. He expected to observe simple flaps of skin. Writing up his findings, however, he professed astonishment as the amount of muscle tissue in his specimens and the complex connections of the peripenic muscle within the muscular structure of the penis. This laboratory research, along with his experience in the clinic, led him to conclude that the foreskin was unusually dynamic, both in muscular activity and in long-term development from infancy to maturity.

The prepuce is not just a fleshy cover. It serves as a platform for nerves and nerve endings. Indeed, the density of nerve fibers, particularly in the outer skin of the prepuce, make it as sensitive to light touch – and to pain – as any other part of the organ. The most remarkable feature of the prepuce had to do with the differences between its inner and outer surfaces. Its exterior is like the skin that covers much of our bodies. Its inner lining, however, is a type of skin found in only a few places in human anatomy. Tiny protuberances called papillae stud the cell surface, and there are microscopic bundles of nerve endings that again resemble those in the inner lining of the mouth. Unlike the surface skin of the penis, which becomes toughened by exposure to the elements, the prepuce’s inner mucosa never forms a dense collagenous layer.

During erection or when the prepuce is manually pulled back, the band is turned inside out on the shaft of the penis. The ridged band is more like the skin of the lips, forming a transition between the facial skin and mucous inside the mouth. The prepuce itself is a physiologically complicated structure with specialized parts that serve different functions. The “ridged band,” for example, is made up primarily of sensory tissue whose neural structure differs from that of the glans. Presumably, in the dynamic flow of sexual activity, its contributions to sensation are unique.

Statue of David

 

Description of Female Circumcision

Circumcision Series

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 2007, Excerpts

“Once this long kintir is removed you and your sister will be pure.” From my Grandma’s words and gestures I gatherer that this hideous kintir, my clitoris, would one day grow so long that it would swing sideways between my legs. She caught hold of me and gripped my upper body. Two other women held my legs apart. The man, who was probably an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan, picked up a pair of scissors. With the other hand, he caught hold of the place between my legs and started tweaking it, like Grandma milking a goat. “there it is, there is the kintir,” one of the woman said.

Then the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled. Then came the sewing: the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests, Grandma’s words of comfort and encouragement. “It’s just this once in your life, Ayaan. Be brave, he’s almost finished.” When the sewing was finished, the man cut the thread off with his teeth.

That is all I can recall of it. I must have fallen asleep, for it wasn’t until much later that day that I realized that my legs had been tied together, to prevent them from moving to facilitate the formation of a scar. It was dark and my bladder was bursting, but it hurt too much to pee. The sharp pain was still there, and my legs were covered in blood. I was sweating and shivering. It wasn’t until the next day that my Grandma could persuade me to pee even a little. By then everything hurt. When I just lay still the pain throbbed miserably, but when I urinated the flash of pain was as sharp as when I had been cut.

After a week the man came and inspected us. The man returned to remove the thread he had used to sew me shut. This was again very painful. He used a pair of tweezers to dig out the threads, tugging on them sharply. Again, Grandma and two other women held me down. But after that, even though I had a thick bumpy scar between my legs that hurt if I moved too much, at least my legs didn't have to be tied together anymore, and I no longer had to lie down without moving all day.

In Somalia, like many countries across Africa and the Middle East, little girls are made “pure” by having their genitals cut out. There is no other way to describe this procedure, which typically occurs around the age of five. After the child’s clitoris and labia are carved out, scraped off, or, in more compassionate areas, merely cut of pricked, the whole area is often sewn up, so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made of the girl’s own flesh. A small hole is carefully situated to permit a thin flow of pee. Only great force can tear the scar tissue wider, for sex.

Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia, where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam. Uncircumcised girls will be possessed by devils, fall into vice and perdition, and become whores. Imans never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure.

HRW presses Iraqi Kurds to ban female circumcision

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/middle_east/10327619.stm

16 Jun 2010

Human Rights Watch has called on authorities in the autonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan to ban the practice of female circumcision, also known as female genital mutilation (FGM). A report issued by the group on Wednesday said the practice was widespread in Iraqi Kurdistan, and was having a harmful effect on the physical and emotional health of many women. It has no particular origins in Islam, although some clerics in Kurdistan have welcomed it because they believe it stifles sexual urges in young girls and women.