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[Vector]

however saying that all male genital mutilation is just foreskin removal is incorrect.

Ah, yeah, I should update what I'm saying:

I think I mean more that "male genital mutilation" should not be used as shorthand for removal of the foreskin.  Explicitly taking circumcision as a subset of male genital mutilation makes sense to me, but there needs to be some way that we get this away from the sanitized, "culturally acceptable" vision we have at the moment.

And I'm really tired right now, so establishin' the problem is pretty much all I've got.

[penguinofhonor]

I think I mean more that "male genital mutilation" should not be used as shorthand for removal of the foreskin.

Yeah. This is my gripe too. Additionally, I feel like most people against "male genital mutilation" really only care about circumcision, and they're just throwing in the others so they can justify using a more extreme term for shock/publicity value.

[Neonivek]

From what I've seen, women really seem to hold a lot of power in relationships these days.

It is sort of a give and take and the standards have shifted so much. It honestly depends on where you live.

For example where I am dates have become so mutual it would be unusual for eachother not to pay for themselves on a date (exception abound). As well both parties are expected to buy eachother presents. It isn't as perfect as I make it sound but it shows that there can be equal play.

Now in a area where there is less expectation for women to hold up the regular courtship activities and men are expected to hold it up and respect women. Then yes we have seen situations where men have been outright abused and where the expectation is that the man should just take it, yet the woman is not held at fault. Now this isn't common, but it shows that we should remember that the values and expectations we put on gender is not static.

Schools are probably some of the institutions that noticed this the most. Where their attempt to make classrooms more female oriented managed to disorient male students. Striking a balance takes a while.

If circumcision has had a disastrous effect on men in general, then it's pretty much gone unnoticed all these years.

Well a lot of religious practices I have found to actually be there to strengthen the community as a whole. Ignoring ritualistic Hazing which is ancient... You can even come up with things such as Fasting where even now people know what fasting does to your mind. It is one of the more scary things I discovered in my research of mind-control tricks is that you can find almost all of them being used by religion. Given that I am not athiest it sort of shakes me.

As well it has hardly gone unnoticed, in fact it being risky is probably one of the lost points to the proceedure. It is a part of a hazing ritual (I am using the term lightly) it keeps the community together, There is supposed to be risk or else there would be absolutely no point. Though if you want to argue that sexually repression has nothing to do with it... I'd probably would have to disagree (at least today). Using a co-relation with female circumcision where there are three types (One that is harmless and a third that would render a woman incapable of feeling sexual pleasure) the third is the most popular. Though honestly I don't really care about this point to argue it, especially since religious matters have been debated so much that there are people who specialise in nothing but philosophically defending religious dogma (known as appologists).

-Edit addition: Actually you may be interested to know there are interesting articles that explain why all rules came to be and a lot of them make perfect sense for the time. For example the rules on what meat they can and cannot eat prevented them from eating dangerous food.

My feelings of supressing the sexual urges of individuals is somewhat shifting. I used to not care (as I am a rather asexual person) but when I found out others did...

Finally there are a lot of things people delt with that people discovered was bad for you. Even today there are myths. Heck it is EASY to "prove" things now adays or to misrepresent information.

Additionally, I feel like most people against "male genital mutilation" really only care about circumcision, and they're just throwing in the others so they can justify using a more extreme term for shock/publicity value

I agree, but on the other hand you can also consider it destroying the illusion created through words. People don't consciously think of Circumcision it is just a thing that has been around for thousands of years. How do you convey what it actually is and the risks involved without first attacking the common perception? Is there a fair attack?

Though I guess if you travel to other countries... Then Genital mutilation is extremely common. It is actually a very interesting subject. I suggest reading up on Hazing.

however saying that all male genital mutilation is just foreskin removal is incorrect

Whoever said all male circumcision is foreskin removal is also incorrect as well. Though I am getting into other countries.

Also I noticed this entire time I didn't really present a point. I am only adding information. Which I am fine with. I prefer to present information and to attack specific points without giving one myself... then to attack someone dirrectly in a conversation. There are two things you should notice
1) People often give incorrect data with correct data thus padding their information
and
2) People do not consider attacks on specific points instead of a whole arguement as honest. It is a good way to get people mad at you. Often they attribute it as misrepresenting their arguement even if you don't actually deconstruct it. I've been called out on quoting specific sections before even though that was the only part of it I was refering to.

there needs to be some way that we get this away from the sanitized, "culturally acceptable" vision we have at the moment

Well what needs to stop in my oppinion is circumcision outside of religious docterine. Since those are based off of now debunked science. At least last I checked it was.

[moocowmoo]

I think it's funny that I'm being accused of trying to artificially create "shock value". It is a shocking thing by nature if you do not cover it up in euphemism and ignore what is actually being done. If an adult chooses to have their foreskin removed, or if it must be amputated because of disease, then I do not call it mutilation. But to perform unnecessary cosmetic surgery on someone before they can consent seems pretty shocking to me. Imagine I don't like how your ear looks, and I want to save you the trouble of cleaning it, so I strap you down and cut it off. It sounds absurd, because you think "the law would protect me, someone would protect me, or I would defend myself". No such luck if you're a baby in America and someone decides for whatever reason that your foreskin (along with the frenulum and ridged band) should be cut off.

All the hairsplitting over the word mutilation I feel ties in to the OP's sentiments. When girls genitals are mutilated there is no hesitation or reserve using the word, but when it is happening to boys, we have to determine the degree of damage, and use softer words to reflect the lesser severity. If the language is too strong, it is clearly a publicity ploy and just confirms that someone is trying to make an issue out of a triviality. Men cannot be victims.

[Neonivek]

All the hairsplitting over the word mutilation I feel ties in to the OP's sentiments

Its a back volly. Obviously the conversation is tough to win when you can use that word freely. Thus they have to counter its use to its accepted euphamism.

Words are a great weapon and they are abused often.

When attacking you want a word that needs little to attack yet carries a lot of weight.

When defending you want a word that is small and carries no weight at all.

It isn't unusual that someone would focus more on disarming you then on attacking your points itself. Especially since genital mutilation is an accurate term yet is also one that carries a lot of extra connotation (thus weight). Allowing you to attack more effectively.

Their battle is purely defense. They don't have to attack your points they only have to make sure you can't make any. Your battle is purely offensive, if you shatter their illusion then there is no defense.

Though since they managed to shift the conversation into the use of your word they successfully muddled you. You tried to counter with the sexism card which played right into it as you confused the audiance even more. You lost moocowmoo when you allowed them to pull you into their pace. Though unintentional I am sure it was a nice play.

[penguinofhonor]

I think it's funny that I'm being accused of trying to artificially create "shock value". It is a shocking thing by nature if you do not cover it up in euphemism and ignore what is actually being done. If an adult chooses to have their foreskin removed, or if it must be amputated because of disease, then I do not call it mutilation. But to perform unnecessary cosmetic surgery on someone before they can consent seems pretty shocking to me. Imagine I don't like how your ear looks, and I want to save you the trouble of cleaning it, so I strap you down and cut it off. It sounds absurd, because you think "the law would protect me, someone would protect me, or I would defend myself". No such luck if you're a baby in America and someone decides for whatever reason that your foreskin (along with the frenulum and ridged band) should be cut off.

All the hairsplitting over the word mutilation I feel ties in to the OP's sentiments. When girls genitals are mutilated there is no hesitation or reserve using the word, but when it is happening to boys, we have to determine the degree of damage, and use softer words to reflect the lesser severity. If the language is too strong, it is clearly a publicity ploy and just confirms that someone is trying to make an issue out of a triviality. Men cannot be victims.

You're really incapable of seeing the difference between the degrees of basic male circumcision and full-on, serious FGM? Because, if so, I'm going to stop arguing with you.

When attacking you want a word that needs little to attack yet carries a lot of weight.

When defending you want a word that is small and carries no weight at all.

It isn't unusual that someone would focus more on disarming you then on attacking your points itself. Especially since genital mutilation is an accurate term yet is also one that carries a lot of extra connotation (thus weight). Allowing you to attack more effectively.

Their battle is purely defense. They don't have to attack your points they only have to make sure you can't make any. Your battle is purely offensive, if you shatter their illusion then there is no defense.

No. Not at all. I'm 100% against male circumcision, and I'm perfectly capable of arguing against it while I'm not using a word that's hyperbolic.

[Agdune]

I don't think moocowmoo 'lost' at all. That's an extremely good point he/she just made.

Penguinofhonor; It doesn't look to me like moocowmoo is trying to say that all FGM is comparable to circumcision. He's saying that refusing to class circumcision as male genital mutilation is logically flawed when the exact female analogy (removal of the clitoral hood and/or segments of the labia minora) does come under the umbrella of 'female genital mutilation'. It's minimising a rather serious and unecessary medical procedure essentially because the person it's being done to is male, and because there are more extreme unecessary medical procedures being performed on women. Of course circumcision is not comparable to type III FGM, but like I said before, that does not mean that critising male circumcision is invalid, because it's still comparable to commonly performed type I FGM.

The point being, the logic of this argument can quite easily be interpreted as "women are mutilated by X, men should stop whining about Y because Y is nothing compared to X and they're meant to be tough about it". The only issue here is that you're (and most other people, I should add) assuming that lumping male circumcision in with female genital mutilation will minimise and/or legitimise the more extreme forms of FGM. Given how bad most people are at comprehending things, it may well do that, but that doesn't mean that we should instead just say ritualistic genital cutting is ok for males but not okay for females, 'cause then we're inadvertantly feeding divergent social sex roles and expectations.

edit: Dammit guys, I'm meant to be finishing an assignment tonight... stop talking about things that are more interesting than my assignment topic

[moocowmoo]

lol Neovenik, I'm enjoying your detached analysis. It helps to have outside feedback that is not emotionally involved in the issue. penguinofhonor feel free to stop arguing with me because I still see the word as accurate and not hyperbole. I know the difference of degree, but that doesn't mean I can't call something what it in fact is. If FGM were "just" removing the clitoral hood and good portion of the labia, is it then hyperbole to call it genital mutilation? I'm tired too and not thinking to clearly anymore, so I'm off anyway.

[Vector]

Circumcision and female genital mutilation are not equal.  One is a procedure.  One is a category of procedures.  Equivocating the two things not only feels weird, it's wrong because it erases the experiences of men who endure other forms of genital mutilation.  This is not just grammatically wrong, it is also morally wrong (cf: using "women" to only mean "cis-gendered women" or "fertile women" or "white women.").

Saying that circumcision is a type of male genital mutilation makes sense.  Using these two words as equivalent things does not make sense.  I do not think that anyone is saying "circumcision is not a type of male genital mutilation."  I think it is entirely proper to say "a form of male genital mutilation is widely practiced in the US," because it clues us in to what we are talking about.  But at the same time, I think it is important to carefully and deliberately distinguish that circumcision is a subcategory thereof.  This is so that the experiences of circumcised men, men undergoing other forms of genital mutilation, and women with mutilated genitals can be respected.

(And simultaneously, though I hate myself for forgetting this, there's probably men out there with mutilated vaginas; so having non-equivalent terms for categories, if not procedures, seems even more regrettable and hurtful)

[penguinofhonor]

My point is that western male circumcision does not have an equivalent in damage in female circumcision. I don't really care about how "technically" removing the clitoral hood is equivalent to removing the foreskin, when the results on the victim are worse for one than the other.

I'm not saying "Women are hurt by this more, so men suck it up," I'm saying "Women are hurt by this more, so women are hurt by this more." Don't pretend it's an issue where the sexes are equally hurt because it's not one. You can't just conjure up some extra harm for men to make things equivalent.

I'm probably being really aggressive here. It's sort of 5 AM. I stand by my points, probably not by my tone though.

[ChairmanPoo]

I said it before and I'll say it again: male circumcision is not something done or sponsored by feminist. So why is it being contrasted to female gm at all? They're not opposites, they're part of the same problem

[palsch]

Agdune, I just lost a lengthy reply. I'll see if I have the time to rewrite it later. Short version; radical and liberal feminism are compatible and complimentary contributors to modern feminist theory. Patriarchy theory is an incredibly useful model and describer of deliberate and incidental sexist structures being accepted or insisted as being normal in modern culture, offering a strong positive contribution from the radical movement.

I did just want to address this bit because I feel it's important;

(fuck you guys, why do you keep making personal jabs at me every few minutes? I'm on your side... )

I'm not saying this is the case here, but all too often when people say this they aren't on your side.

I see this most openly with race but more often with sexism. People consider themselves "allies", or more commonly as "not racist/sexist". This becomes part of their personal identity. The problem is it's not a considered, critically analysed position. It's an identity that has little to do with who they actually are, what they believe (in the context of wider social theories) or what they do.

Someone who considers themselves not racist can do or say horrifically racist shit or have gross racist misconceptions and beliefs that go entirely unquestioned. But they don't consider themselves racist and feel grossly offended if anyone calls them out on this or challenges their misconceptions as being racist. After all, they know they aren't racist and so their behaviours and beliefs can't possibly be problematic. How dare someone say otherwise?

If you feel peoples' criticism of certain behaviours or beliefs is a personal attack it might be worth considering whether those things are actually in line with your identity as being 'on their side'.

----

On the circumcision matter, I'm pretty much against infant circumcision and think it does quality as genital mutilation (a body modification without consent is mutilation) but also think that trying to force the issue of using the term MGM is simply counter-productive.

For one thing, it is going to piss off people who should be on your side. Opponents to FGM and wider advocates for bodily integrity/control are going to be frustrated by efforts to derail their campaigns, which frankly inserting MGM is going to do.

And that is because the debate isn't won and shifting the terminology isn't making progress. This is a debate that needs to be about consent, scientific and medical evidence, and confronting the current cultural standards that make involuntary circumcision acceptable. Until these base debates have been engaged in, at least, tying the debate into other issues is destructive to progress on those fronts.

Unlike a great many social justice arguments the people who need to make the case aren't disadvantaged. This is a debate that can use traditional power structures and methods without major drawbacks. Anti-circumcision activists don't need to subvert other campaigns or tie themselves to other movements, especially ones which don't have such privileged access to mainstream power. Campaigns that are primarily concerned with minority females are going to be inherently disadvantaged compared to those addressing issues important to white men. That's where the co-opting of the terminology and derailing of debates gets disgusting.

[Agdune]

Just to leap to my own defense here;
I know you addressed it, but even though you may not have been refering to me specifically that's not an implicit association I'm going to let lie. Considering the fact that I identify as female in pretty much every way save for genitals and attire, long considered sexual reassignment surgery, have always associated almost purely with females and never gotten along with males, work in a female-dominated industry (social services) and am studying a female-dominated degree (psychology), I do feel justified in taking personal offense when in my gender studies discussions I get lumped in with rapists, mysoginists and pedophiles purely on the basis that I have a penis. God knows I already can't so much as talk to someone under the age of 15 like every other damn person I associate with without worried glances from strangers (which kinda sucks because I'm studying developmental psychology FFS.) but when you're sitting in a lecture listening to some 65 year old up front go off on a personal anecdote for 20 minutes about how all men are to blame for all the woes in both her life and the lives of every innocent women in history it's hard to not get pissed off when not even the lecturer who has a PhD in gender studies will bother to correct the blatant and unsubstantated sexism that just got rambled out to a crowd of 150 gender studies students.

'all men just think women are items to own and conquer, it's disgusting' was one of the memorable lines. Yeah, hi? I'm right here, I didn't exactly get to chose my genitals any more than you did, sunshine, and I don't enjoy unsubstantiated inferences that I only live to stick my penis into things and beat up righteous intelligent women. Hopefully the lecturer will point out that while true in some cases, that's actually quite a generalisation- no, wait, she's just nodded, smiled and gone back to the topic she was talking about. Real academic rigour here guys. I'm totally not alienated at all. I do love being excluded from the gender I've associated with my whole life on the basis of my physical attributes, that's for sure.

I'd be alot less bitter about it if it didn't happen every single class for that subject. Like I said; a terribly run subject, hard not to be personally offended by the way material was presented in that class, thus hard to really get into the specifics of feminist sociological theory. That's why I appreciated Vector's explanation, as for once I was hearing an explanation of 'male gaze' that didn't rely on suggesting that all men always objectify all women and so all women are forced to live up to male expectations (note: this is not male gaze, it turns out). Sometimes people taking personal offense is because they're in the wrong and don't know it, but sometimes it can also be because other people are making unjustified, insulting generalisations because they're in an environment that permits and/or encourages it and they feel like they won't be judged by their peers for doing so.

Raagh. Sorry, but it actually really pissed me off. Even if it wasn't insultingly poor academic rigour, that sort of halfassed approach to teaching gender studies is just moronic and damaging on the basis that it's just so fucking divisive and begs for people to get defensive about it.

Edit: should clarify. The lecturer was not the one making erronous statements about theories or making insulting generalisations (well, not much anyway). She just made slightly slanted lectures and permitted (without correcting) the sometimes insane statements coming from students, which encouraged other students to think the insane statements had great merit to them and they started using their own 'brilliant insights' to make even more crazy ideas about the different applications of negative male stereotypes. It was like a giant self-feeding loop of stereotpyes and anecdotes involving hundreds of over enthusiastic undergraduates with no-one stepping in to say "wait guys, this isn't what this subject is about". By the end I had to just stop going to that class, it was getting too much. Hopefully the faculty is planning on replacing that unit coordinator soon, 'cause it really isn't doing anyone any favours.

[palsch]

I know you addressed it, but even though you may not have been refering to me specifically that's not an implicit association I'm going to let lie.

Sorry, it's just a point I've been sitting on for a while (and which tied into the longer argument I was constructing that got lost, I should probably transplant it back when I rewrite). Absolutely making no judgements about you or your experiences.

I always try to avoid commenting directly on peoples personal experiences and anecdotes, simply because even if I believe I know what went on and feel I can safely analyse them I'm probably going to miss a lot of the nuance and context. If it came across as attacking your experiences I'm sorry.

[Agdune]

Eh, it's fine. Good to vent, that class did really get to me and made me rather bitter about pure social research (as opposed to applied), even though I'd had good experiences with my sociology subjects up until then. It's useful to remind myself that it was not indicative of social research in general, just a fantastic example of what happens when classes are mis-managed and allowed to stray into 'anecdotes can be evidence' and 'generalisations are okay' territory.