Excision, circumcision; "Hush, it's for your own sake!" - Sigismond
From Peaceful Beginnings
Human sciences against sexual mutilation
The concept of infantile sexual mutilation (*) is not yet very widespread. Historically indeed, Western feminists, who have been at the vanguard of the struggle, have ignored and still ignore infantile mutilation, to speak only of the feminine mutilation. Monopolizing the fight against sexual mutilation, they make it a jolt between both sex adults. But the concept of infantile sexual mutilation alone enables to face the reality of a phenomenon that hits the child first. It stems from adult’s illusory learning and inacceptable possessiveness: “I know, therefore I have the right to determine what shall be done to your body.” Since neighbouring groups act differently, this is done despite the debate over this so-called knowledge. But in doubt, one does not.
The moral order
We stand against the religious and societal moral order which tries to dominate and make use of the child through corporal punishment including terrorist techniques of repression of sexuality: possessory branding, mutilation and torture. A summit of manipulation, they sadistically create dissatisfaction in order to ensure the individual's submission to this moral order. They are sometimes a preliminary for mere and/or sexual enslavement. Under the guise of identity marking or rites of passage into so-called adulthood, their sole aim is to obtain the submission and the alleged moral and physical purity of the child, through violence and traumatic threats. Perpetrated against a whole category of the population, these crimes are crimes against humanity. Being relatively minor, they are forgivable inasmuch as they rest upon antique and hereditary customs but they are forgivable only on the condition that they will now be stopped.
Concerning young girls, the films “Night watching – A murder in a Dutch painting” and “Raise the red lantern” show that these barbaric customs are not reserved to Islam, Judaism and a few primitive tribes but also existed in Western and Chinese civilizations. Indeed, only a few centuries ago, Dutch bourgeois tolerated, in order to spare themselves the inconvenience of virginity, that the young girls whom they abused should be “opened” by knife. The Chinese nobility, for their part, married their young girls more easily through the torture of foot-binding. However, these barbarities are accompanied by verbal repression. This mental mutilation is the sole present in the main part of humanity. Sexual mutilation, in the general meaning, subjects the individual to puritanical and hypocritical values.
Against infantile sexual mutilation, we gather and extend on the one hand the discoveries of psychoanalysis (on the one hand, the Freudian infantile sexuality and the unconscious; on the other hand the emphasis upon infantile trauma put forth by Alice Miller – cf. alice-miller.com), on the other hand, those of American cultural anthropology (James Prescott – cf. violence.de). The latter concludes that violence is inhibited by pleasure and reciprocally. Indeed, these advances in contemporary research reach the same conclusion: violence in education, rather than tender care, has catastrophic results: breeding violence, addiction or depression. The biologist, the anatomist and the neuro-anatomist, prophylactic medicine, the psychiatrist, the sexologist, the lawyer, the sociologist, the anthropologist, the historian of cultures and religions and the psychoanalyst are unanimous in standing up for organs sometimes alleged to be redundant and destroyed because they are the major organs of a taboo practice: autosexuality.
A definition of infantile sexual mutilation
The preservation of the clitoris and the foreskin hinges on four elements which illustrate the essential-to-life character of the suppressed organs. These four elements define infantile sexual mutilation: in order to submit the child and enhance their societal (and sometimes mercantile) “value” by diverting sexuality from pleasure towards reproduction - above all for women – infantile sexual mutilation irremediably castrate the specific organs of autosexuality, while deeply traumatizing the human person. In similar repressive perspective, the paediatrician Edwige Antier recently sustained the return to the appalling but lucrative epidemics of ablation of tonsils or amygdales as an effective means of submitting naughty children, advancing that this ablation is efficient since it symbolizes castration.
First element: physical mutilation. For normal persons (the very great majority: 80% of the world population) who find pleasure from these organs, the particular and incidentally extreme pleasure they provide is indisputable, as well for man as for woman. The recent discoveries of anatomical medicine bring undeniable backing to this empirical affirmation. Taylor’s one, in 1996, concerns the part of exquisite erogenous mechanism of the ring of the tip of the foreskin. Since that date, it has been scientifically demonstrated that the amputation of the foreskin is genuine sexual mutilation; the foreskin does not only have the function of protecting erogeneity of the glans but also that of highly erogenous zone. This discovery still did not receive the medicine Nobel Prize that it deserves. It had no media coverage and remains ignored by the public. Sorrells’s sensitivity enquiry experimentally confirmed this histologico-anatomic demonstration. At last, the third sexual function of the foreskin – that of a gliding friction-reducer-cushion in coitus – has also been highlighted. It explains why African women whose partners are sexually mutilated are more hit by AIDS than men. Several statistical enquiries showed that the circumcision status is without significant influence upon the transmission of STDs, except for AIDS. But Talbott (3) showed that in Africa, the most struck continent, the great vector of the epidemic is not the foreskin but prostitution. And other predisposing factors: parasites, genetic mutation, have also been put forward. Anyhow, the example of Japan – the first consumer of condoms – shows the whole world that hygiene and condoms are the safest protection against STDs, including AIDS. It should not be forgotten that elementary ethics forbids mutilation for prophylactic motive – and very particularly that of children. Besides, the cleaning of the foreskin takes but a few seconds and one does not pull out teeth in order not to have to wash them. Nobody has the right to practise circumcision upon child as adult without a serious medical reason. For violence begets violence; one must not fight temptation through destruction.
Second element: the psychical trauma. Psychoanalysis and psychosomatic medicine consider the psycho-physic set as a whole. Consequently, the expression: “sexual mutilation” must be taken in the general sense. Now, sexual mutilation provokes a trauma of exceptional seriousness. Highlighted by Freud, traumas bearing on infantile sexuality (and certainly not “m........n”, etymologically: “turpitude by hand”) are at the origin of the formation of the unconscious and thus of mental disease. The consequence of this necessary becoming aware brings a weighty argument to feminists belonging to cultures that mutilate boys only; actually, little girls suffer, unconsciously but much more than boys, from the threat associated with circumcision. Indeed, due to the smallness of the clitoris, the awareness of a threat of its castration is unlikely; the threat of death and its heavy associated burden of guilt remain. For this guilt bears upon the very first, simplest, most innocent and natural sexuality: autosexuality.
Third element: infantile. It means that sexual mutilation is practised by adults upon the child. The great novelty of this concept is incongruous in relation with the current appellation: “feminine sexual mutilation” (FSM). The boldest ones would oppose it to MSM but daring this gathering, at once qualified an amalgam, brings the wrath of certain feminists down upon themselves. But one has no right to amalgamate violence against adults and violence against the child. The latter are roughly marked for life, on the one hand by a savage attack against the sex and sexuality, on the other hand by a psychological trauma as serious for both sexes even if it remains, most of the time, unconscious. The war of the sexes is a war of “adults ignoring the child within themselves” (Maud Mannoni. Letter to Sigismond). The war of generations is above all war against children.
Fourth element: sexual. Sexual mutilation is not genital; it bears exclusively upon the specific organs of autosexuality, gravely made guilty. Therefore the matter is mutilation of pleasure. With boys, this mutilation is limited to that of feminine (preputial) pleasure. But with girls, the mutilation of masculine (clitoridian) pleasure entails that of feminine (vaginal) pleasure so that the mutilation of pleasure is total; in most cases, the woman is rendered frigid. But when the very existence of pure personal pleasure is savagely and hypocritically annihilated (excision) or lessened (circumcision) by insane minds, the child fall ill and will look for pleasure in sadist and/or masochist perversions like doing the same to their own children. Mental disease is a pathologic reaction to the perversion of parental ethics.
This is why we rise against sexist designations that set up one gender against the other instead of gathering them together in defence of the toddler, of their sexuality and physical and moral integrity. Sexual mutilation is irreversible. It strikes more particularly three categories of the population: children of course, but also bachelors and widowers, not to say anything about the rest or the population. As long as the clito-phallocratic or feministo-masculinist speech ignoring the child’s sexuality will prevail, it will not be possible to eradicate infantile sexual mutilation. On the contrary, the worldly abolition of sexual mutilation will be a powerful lever of liberation of consciences.
The repression of infantile sexuality
More than a century ago, Freud already made himself the defender of infantile sexuality. By verifying its natural existence (manusexuality and auto-fellatio) right up inside the womb, prenatal ultrasonography today brings him a strong backing. However, autosexuality is still repressed, in one way or another, very particularly by the practice of circumcision and excision, common since every minute that passes on this planet, 6 girls and 25 boys undergo the knife. How not to bring forward here “the rights of the child”?! Moreover, after the above definition of infantile sexual mutilation, we now broaden the question to that of the right of the human person, whatever their age, to free access to their own bodies and to the respect of their physical, emotional and mental integrity.
Indeed, imagine a being that has freely practised autosexuality in its mother’s womb for several months. You are this being. Now assume that once out of this Eden, while quietly being bathed, you are suddenly glowered at and harshly told: “Why is it so? You touched it?” Or else you realize that everybody around you insidiously and hypocritically disparages your act of self love by wording it through pejorative and reproachful terms. The root of the most common one, like in per-turbation, denounces disturbance. It is also that of “turpitude”. This condemnation even spreads to University which affects slightly precious, somewhat perverse terms: autoerotism, onanism. Let us recall that making love means “pretending to be the cherub, the cupid, the little love”, before knowing the love of one’s life. “Autosexuality” must replace the execrable term, imposed by religious, made guilty and allegedly chaste bachelors, which must be crossed out of the vocabulary. This is a compulsory step in the fight against sexual violence and crime (including infantile sexual mutilation). The fight against AIDS too, as testified by the African chiefs of state who modestly advocate “abstinence”. This puritan discourse is dangerous for their peoples; how many youngsters, with the gullibility of their age, will take it literally, which would be stupid and unhealthy deprivation. One may not, above all in the fight against AIDS, above all at the scale of whole populations and through the use of media, surreptitiously reinforce the customary slating of autosexuality. This undermines the physical and psychic health of whole peoples. In the fight against AIDS and infantile sexual mutilation, all hypocrisy must be abandoned.
Repression of the – very lightly said – infantile sexuality stems from this universal taboo. Forbidding natural needs suddenly makes one plunge from the paradise of the womb into the hell of repression, guilt and trauma. The unconscious guilt it creates is one of the origins of mental disease: neurosis or depression through internalization of guilt, violent behaviour projecting guilt upon others or the soothing of the tension produced by guilt through perversions and addictions. Children and young people emotionally perceive the repression of sexuality as a death threat through loss of love and thus abandonment. Contrary to the natural law, such a threat can only oppose the happy resolution of the Oedipus complex that implies adherence to law. The social contract rests upon the acceptance of law by free and equal individuals; it must not be imposed by force or intimidation. Repression of sexuality, and very particularly infantile sexuality, is likely to block children and adolescents in their growth. It submits them to a law contrary to the natural law, outlawing pleasure. Some will be inhibited in the exercise of genuine authority or in revolting against abuse of authority, others will be pushed towards dissidence. Perversions – notably paedophilia, the twin sister of homophilia – and rape are the direct consequence – aggravated by the sexual fuss of the media – of the hypocritical public reprobation of what everybody gaily practises in private. However, in a paradoxical way, one goes up to tolerate the noisiest perversions for the sole reason that one is unable to realize the root of the evil. Nevertheless, only seducers, rapists, paedophiles and homophiles “masturbate”, in their victims, granting them the same contempt they endured in their autosexuality of childhood. They will no longer need to go through this when the value of autosexuality will be universally acknowledged. For the time being, it is only recognized by some rare personalities and cultures (Asia, Oceania), most particularly in the working classes.
“If one must be twelve to kiss the lady, I rather like playing alone, thank God!” Georges Brassens (The plural)
Transcultural anthropological studies extended to entire populations Freud’s and psychoanalysts’ clinical and theoretical observations. With absolute statistical correlation, they showed that depression and/or violence (drug, alcohol, criminality) are the consequence of deprivation of tenderness during infancy and of the banning of premarital sexuality (cf. the works of James Prescott – violence.de). Unfortunately – the taboo obliges it – these studies did not focus on the prohibition of autosexuality to children.
Infantile sexual mutilation is the height of this repression. The horrid physical torture is accompanied by an irreversible loss and a threat of castration or death, which provokes a deep, unconscious but highly guilt-producing trauma. This guilt may generate strong individualities and great achievements but also, and as certainly, great disorders and troubles of the mind (Einstein, a Zionist, had an unhappy married life). Physical and emotional castration of the specific organs of autosexuality undermines the image of the body and threatens boys with total castration and girls with death. The upshot is a trauma necessarily buried in the deepest layers of the unconscious. One shivers at the idea of what can occur if it comes back up to the surface. Occasionally, this is called a stroke of the head for an insult, a decimation against one death but also Hiroshima and Nagasaki in retort for Pearl Harbour – which is, in the realm of pure analysis, the whole for the part (one of the structural mechanisms of perversion), in the image of the initially suffered trauma (circumcision) or of the dreaded torture implied: total castration. But coming to the point of invading a country for a promise made by God without witnesses enters us into the field of pure psychosis: taking oneself for God. Of the ten genocides of modern times, only one did not imply non-intact, the frequency of wars is four times greater in circumcising countries, the death penalty is twice more frequent in them and they (half of them) are the only ones to excise women. In Norway, 60% of the rapes are committed by 2% of the population who are circumcised. Sexual mutilation is the breeding ground of sexism, paranoia, fanaticism and terrorism, it is also that of excessive counter terrorism.
This mutilation is extremely harmful in the case of infants (USA, South-Korea, Jews) where circumcision, committed before the age of speech, cannot be verbalized, which impedes the substitution of society for the mother and renders the emotional shock still more horrible. The torture is increased by the skinning of the glans (stuck to the foreskin at this age). Today, the best observers of infancy strongly recommend breast-feeding till the age of speech and holding until that of walking. This is poles apart from the savage ordeals of separation from the mother that make the child enter a kind of barbarous military service. Infantile sexual mutilation does not welcome infants into a society regulated by the difference of sex and age, it integrates them into gangs of pirates intoxicated with domination and blood. These groups are submitted to hierarchies of medieval type with relationships in terms of the power struggle of personal allegiance, in a homophilic and sadistic relationship of seduction, for sole rule. We are dealing with pure bestiality, we shall not say animal nature because animals do not know such abomination.
Sexual mutilation is particularly severe in the castration of woman’s erectile organ and vulva, not to mention the long-term havoc frequently endured by adjacent organs (vagina, urethra, bladder and intestine). In societies where woman is openly considered a commodity, excision, bringing feminine sexuality down to the function of substitute of the foreskin, is the ultimate and logical complement of circumcision and vice versa. Indeed, in polygamous cultures, these partial castrations, threats of total castration or death, aim or aimed at, on the one hand, imposing virginity and fidelity by reducing young women’s ardour through disability and terror, and, on the other hand, still through terror, deterring sons from rivalling their fathers for their young spouses. Circumcision – we have seen it – threatens the little girl more seriously than the little boy. So, infantile sexual mutilation is one of the instruments of the perversion of the woman-man relationship in the patriarco-matriarcal society (treatment of woman as a servant rather than an equal, imprisonment at home or under the veil and dress, obsessive care for pureness, polygamy, being sold like merchandise, forced marriages, forbidding of marriage with foreigners, repudiation, absence of the right to divorce, impunity for rape, stoning of the adulterous, “honour” crimes). One of the worst repressions of individual independence and sexuality, it traumatizes, terrorizes and makes both the child and the adult guilty.
The assault on the respect of the human person and species
Signs of physical distinction also injure human dignity, in a way typical of the moral order: a violation of intimacy. Every marking of the body makes it an advertising poster. Moses and Mohammed forbade tattoos because the body must not be treated like a commodity. Pulling down the trousers of the child in order to mutilate them is lack of respect. It injures their modesty and humiliates them.
At last, physical marking attacks the human species. Founding a collective identity upon an assault against the identity of the human species is not only degrading, it is also discriminatory since it leads to believe oneself illusorily superior or even boast about it. No people may carve out for themselves a purely formal identity upon the body of their children without offending the rest of humanity.
“An uncircumcised is not a man!”
A double discrimination: of the individual and of the people
The absence of mutilation entails a casting out by the ethnic group. This is an intolerable attack against the right of the individual to be considered by their relatives whatever their physical appearance may be. This systematic accessory of sexual mutilation reveals its deep meaning of measure of exclusion, of a barrier to marrying outside the group by dissuading the youths from mixing up with those of neighbouring groups.
Intended to separate the group from others, sexual mutilation is a sectarian act, sometimes committed under the guise of religion. But exclusion calls for hatred and some great thinkers (Spinoza, Freud) denounced circumcision as a source of hatred from neighbouring peoples. Sexual mutilation is encouraged by tyrannical regimes that use it as initiation for their troops and sign of tribal distinction or of phallic, perverse rallying. It has a sexist character. It is incitement to a discrimination that is insidiously disguised under what could be finery were it possible to take off easily and takes for alibi the festivities of folklore. Imposed by military-religious elites, the community sign is always a call for nationalism, a threatening provocation to strangers, a sign of war. The French legislator did not misunderstand it by forbidding the carrying of religious signs at school. Tattoos, veils, burkas, scarifications, cut off clitoris and foreskins, knocked off teeth, bound-feet, forced obesity, the death penalty, to arms et cetera, the escalation of the very ethnic techniques of manipulation of the minds through mutilation of the bodies is the great instrument of the war between generations and sexes. Being latent and underhand, this neurotic war, a source of genuine wars, is no less atrocious. In order to channel human needs at the service of the interests of the ruling classes, it attempts to set up sexuality against love for the sake of reproduction. Sexual mutilation is both antisexual and antidemocratic. It is behaviour similar to that of irresponsible and delinquent adolescents. More fascist than fascism, sexual mutilation is unbearable by fascists themselves; this is not a reason for democrats to tolerate it.
The struggle and its actors
Those who mutilate their children are victims of their own parents. This leads them to deny the mutilating character of sexual ablations. They should understand that this denial is intolerable to all those who do not practise them, that is to say the four fifths of humanity. For non-mutilators, sexual excision appears monstrous and still more so when inflicted upon children. Mutilators must also admit that those who oppose mutilation are more often foreigners, Westerners. This does not imply that they would be attacking a worthy of preservation cultural fact. Against the circumciser's moral order, universal ethics and science show that every mutilation is a biological and mental impoverishment, a non-value unworthy of belonging to culture. Infantile sexual mutilation is one of the worst scourges of humanity. Not only is it natural – at the risk of hurting its adepts – that the fight against it be initiated by non-mutilators but also there are, in the very bosom of mutilating peoples, some persons of great moral value who rise up against mutilation. So, the dangers of circumcision have been highlighted by African voices (4). Césaire and the American blacks never made sexual mutilation a value of “niggerism”. These persons must be heard.
Conclusion
Sexual mutilation is not racist; it is artificial racism, more racist than racism. Cultural-religious narcissism does not deserve the sacrifice of even a single hair on the head of a child. Its indignant protests and self-righteousness must be quieted in front of the shrieks of the victims. However, trauma is first and foremost psychological, and physical mutilation is not the only condemnable one. Without perhaps being irreversible, mutilation of the mind through speech, Paulinian, Christian, Western and puritan, is almost as fearsome as physical excisions. It has the same aim of rendering the individual compliant by traumatizing them through a genuine putting into unconscious terror, founded upon the most stupid decree: making autosexuality the original sin. It is fierce and dangerous because it is a both parental and societal lie, difficult to eradicate from minds. The damage provoked by mental repression is as incalculable as that of physical repression. The abolition of infantile sexual mutilation is thus only a stage in the fight against the repression of the sexuality of the youths and for the right of the human persons to the free access to their own body.
(*) The expression “infantile sexual mutilation” is recent. It can be found, implicitly, in the name of the French Association against the mutilation of children (1989), it appears in the doctorate thesis of Maître Caroline Gonzalès (http://enfant.ovh.org/circ.pdf), on the cover of a book by Doctor Gérard Zwang (History of sex sorrows, 1994), then on Internet in 2006 (http://www.bodieslikeours.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-1805.html), without its novelty and specificity should ever be underlined.
(1) Taylor J., Lockwood A., Taylor A. The prepuce: specialized mucosa of the penis and its loss to circumcision. BJU 1996; 77: 291-295. http://cirp.org/library/anatomy/taylor
(2) Sorrells M., Snyder J., Reiss M., Eden C., Milos M., Wilcox N., Van Howe R. Fine-touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis. BJU International 99 (4), 864-869. http://www.icgi.org/touch-test/touch-test-article.pdf
(3) J. Talbott. “Size matters: the number of prostitutes and the global HIV/AIDS pandemic”. PLoS ONE 2(6). http://plosone.org/doi/pone.0000543
