U.S. Doctors Wrong on Female Genital Mutilation Among Immigrants

I've never supported the idea of circumcision. I remember first hearing about it as a child and feeling appalled.

Imagine how I felt after recently learning of FGM. Where, after the fact, a woman is almost guaranteed to feel no sexual pleasure. It's incredibly rare for a women to feel a great amount of please from penetration alone.

I have to admit I think it's a tad worse for girls because they're usually years older than boys who experience it, what a wonderful and painful memory, and again because of the near-full pleasure removal.

I've heard a many varied justification of this barbarism. One of my favourites is that it allows a woman higher standing in society. That's all fine and good but why can't they just wait until she's at a proper age to decide that herself? "What? Oh, so I need to scrape away a piece of myself to fit it? Sure, why not?"

Jenn 2:08PM May 21, 2010

FGM and MGM are both tragedies and should be banned everywhere. I don't think it's particularly useful to argue about which is worse, whether supporting one but not the other is hypocritical, or how much mutilation must be done before it becomes "bad." I mourn for the boys (including myself) and I mourn for the girls. If anything, the absence of outrage over MGM is evidence of the danger of allowing any form of this mutilation. Over time it becomes normalized and seen as no big deal. Female genitalia can withstand a more thorough assault without losing reproductive capacity than can the male. So make no mistake, if we allow nicks today, then tomorrow we will tolerate the full removal of the clitoris and labia. FGM and MGM are both done for the same reason: to inhibit sexual pleasure. We may tell ourselves the reassuring little fairy tale about hygiene, but we're fooling ourselves. It's really about our sexual hangups. It's much easier to just continue the practice than to face the tragedy. This is why deferring to cultural traditions in cases like this is dangerous. Protect our boys. Protect our girls. Ban all genital mutilation.

David of TX 6:09PM May 15, 2010

Instead of comparing the details of circumcision of boys or girls, our country should be focused on the insanity of routine genital alteration for either sex, outside of medical reasons. Male infant circumcision may be common, but it is no less a violation of a boy's body. It became common in the hope it would prevent boys from masturbating (as if anything could). Decades passed when questioning the practice was unthinkable due to the excessive respect give to physicians, and our squeamishness about tampering with maleness. Now we know that many millions of men can be born, live and die without having their genitals altered. Female circumcision is still practiced widely in some areas of the world, but not in our country. It certainly isn't practiced under sanitary conditions, and the cultural imperative has no medical foundation. From what I understand, infections and other complications are fairly common, sometimes leaving lifelong scars. It is a violation of a girl's body. Both of these practices reflect a discomfort with human sexuality and attempt to control sexual expression long before it is a possibility. We need to see both boys and girls, men and women as whole sexual beings entitled to the integrity of their bodies from birth until death.

Mark Sikkila of WI 2:09PM May 13, 2010

When Hearst-free "fact press" due reprieve.

This being "LAC 21," the mothers of the U.S. are owed a posting based on the drinking age. The "Newsweek" cover states

"Victory at Last." What it actually reads is "How To Get Excluded For Life."

The CUSP is the Current U.S. President. The CUSAG is the Current U.S. Attorney General. The CUSGOR is the Current U.S. General Of Record. The CUSPAFME is the Current U.S. Presidential Advisor For Middle East. Mr. Goodspouse is anyone sent out by the CUSAG.

Picture a real adult male showing you some color slides, in some mild room. He's convincing a few present parties that he's got his own space program, except he obviously doesn't. But this doesn't bother him at all. He shows them slides of the astronauts in it. He's very happy. Now he shows a slide of a moon landing, a real one, and says this: "This photo is of the only place on earth where the further you go out in space, the bigger the bugs are."

And you look at the color slide closely and see that there are insects crawling on a metal part of the lunar module that obviously is in a real Apollo mission photo. But it must have been faked, because this man's slide shows insects crawling on it, on "the surface of the moon."

Do you think you'd like to work with this man? The CUSAG would like you to. The Bonnie Erbe mainstem to these postings has used Sandra Bullock, and as it will be the case that simply working on a specific number of the "LAC" franchise affects the posting, I will incorporate this being the drinking age one with something for Kirstie Alley.

Of "Veronica's Closet." The space between the earth and the moon can be called the closet. 27 humans have gone into the closet. No one has ever died in the closet. No woman has ever gone into the closet. Some say that the light in the back of the closet can cause strange affects in humans, when it is completely exposed. The Russians decided to stay out of the closet, but it's said that the Chinese may enter the closet soon. It takes several days to go through the closet.

"Lob Throws and Crab Nebulas" simply meant a dysfunctional and massive development, whereby lobsters and crabs don't provide a gravitational influence upon the other meaning to it.

Do you think your pinhead-sized minds can handle that? Not speaking to you, Russia. Moscow zhensenya. One would use a lob throw when not throwing a pitch to the plate, unless one were doing an intentional walk. Okay, but if not even lobsters and crabs provide gravitational control, how can the lob throw have metaphoric yet significantly bodily constants? It could wear plastic horizontally prominent glasses and make funny pressure faces like Britney Spears.

True. It could muddle through. That might raise the question of how often the lob throw to first, to draw the runner back to the bag, has actually been engaged in. That in turn might lead to the question of why crab nebulas have been so impactive.

Don Treact of WA 2:34PM May 12, 2010