Hey! People! Leave the kids alone!
Foreskin: It’s Vital and It’s Fun
Okay, so who the hell came up with this bizarre notion of cutting and mutilating children’s genitals.
Answer in brief: Always men; usually the old wise (sic) ones leading the way.
They’ve been at it for thousands of years. The cultural and religious justifications demand cutting the flesh, marking the body — but what they’re really after is the brain/soul of the child. The medical justifications, which came into fashion since the rise of modern surgery in the 19th century, are even more pernicious as they falsely claim to be doing this for the health of the child (health translating into issues such as not masturbating.) The more one looks at the history of circumcision the more obvious it is that something psychologically unhealthy is going on in the old men’s minds.
Some old men had gods — whose representational personas were strikingly, unsurprisingly, like those of old men—gods that demanded that the laceration be done to baby boys. (Girls’ naughty bits were irrelevant to this particular higher scheme of spiritual things.)
Other old men, who were not quite comfortable with women’s sexuality, came up with their own wide range of nasty ways of doing unspeakable things to little girls’ genitalia…
