Infantile sexual mutilation in short - Sigismond
From Peaceful Beginnings
The concept of infantile sexual mutilation is not very much spread yet. Indeed, historically, Occidental feminists, who have been at the vanguard of the struggle against sexual mutilation, ignored and still ignore infantile sexual mutilation to acknowledge only feminine sexual mutilation. Monopolizing the fight against sexual mutilation, they make it a struggle between both sex adults. But only the concept of infantile sexual mutilation enables to face the reality of a phenomenon that strikes the child first.
In spite of the benefits to humanity of his 1996 anatomic discovery (1) concerning the part of exquisite erogenous mechanism of the ring of the tip of the foreskin, John Taylor was not awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. On one hand, sex is not Nobelisable, on the other hand, Jewish physicians are very influential in the medical world. Taylor’s disclosing never received media coverage and remains ignored by the public. However, since that date, it has been scientifically demonstrated that the foreskin does not only have the function of protecting the erogeneity of the glans but also is a fully erogenous organ. This histologico-anatomic demonstration has been experimentally confirmed by Sorrells’s sensitivity enquiry (2). The third sexual function of the foreskin, that of a gliding friction-reducer-cushion in coitus, has also been highlighted. Several statistical enquiries showed that the circumcision status is without significant influence upon the transmission of STDs, but AIDS. But Talbott (3) demonstrated that for the latter, in Africa, the most contaminated continent, the great vector of the epidemic is not the foreskin but prostitution. Anyhow, the example of Japan (first world consumer of condoms) shows the whole world that hygiene and condoms are the safest protection against STDs, including AIDS. It must not be forgotten on one hand that elementary ethics forbids mutilation for prophylactic motive, on the other hand that the cleaning of the foreskin takes a few seconds and that one does not pull out teeth in order not having to wash them. The amputation of the foreskin is now scientifically proved to be a genuine sexual mutilation. Nobody, today, has the right to practise circumcision without serious medical motive, upon the child as well as the adult.
A second consequence, since in antiquity the term castration was used in order to designate an odious crime, not only for the gonads but also for the penis, it is not abusive to use this word not only for the clitoris but also for the foreskin. Taylor’s finding scientifically confirms that the clitoris and the foreskin are each, as regards autosexuality, the functional equivalent respectively to the penis and vagina as regards heterosexuality. Denying the importance of the loss of the clitoris or foreskin is unrealistic; attacking only one of both mutilations would be unfair and sexist. Infantile sexual mutilation is the castration of the feminine and masculine organs of autosexuality. Perpetrated against a definite category of the population, infantile sexual mutilation is not ordinary crime but crime against humanity. A relatively minor crime, it is forgivable only inasmuch as it rests upon antique and hereditary custom, but only at the condition of being abandoned.
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 in the practice of circumcision and excision, common since every minute, 6 girls and 25 boys endure the knife. Impossible not to bring forward “the rights of the child” in this debate! After having brought in it the above definition of infantile sexual mutilation, we shall broaden it to the question of the right of all, whatever their age, to free access to their own body 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 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 terms mostly pejorative and reproachful. The root of the most common one, like in perturbation, designates disturbance but also turpitude. This condemnation even affects 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 great. Autosexuality must replace the execrable term imposed by religious people, which must be crossed out of vocabulary. This is a compulsory step in the fight against sexual violence and crime (including infantile sexual mutilation) and also, as testified by the African chiefs of state who discreetly advocate “abstinence”, in the fight against AIDS. This puritan discourse is dangerous for their peoples; how many youngsters, with the gullibility of their age, will take it literally, which would be a 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, insidiously reinforce the customary slating of autosexuality. This undermines the physical and psychic health of peoples. In the fight against AIDS and infantile sexual mutilation, all hypocrisy must be abandoned.
The repression of – very thoughtlessly said – infantile sexuality stems from this universal taboo. A forbidding against nature suddenly makes you 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. Indeed, this guilt leads to various pathologies: neurosis or depression through internalization of guilt, violent behaviour rejecting guilt upon others, or soothing 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 the law. The social contract rests upon the acceptance of law by free and equal individual, it should not be imposed by force or intimidation. The 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 revolting against the abuse of authority, others will be pushed towards dissidence. Perversions – notably paedophilia – and rape are the direct consequence – aggravated by the sexual fuss of the media – of the hypocrite 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.
“If one must be twelve to kiss the lady,
I rather like playing alone, thank God!”
Georges Brassens (The plural)
They will not 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 or in some cultures (Asia, Oceania), more particularly in popular classes.
Transcultural anthropological studies brought a support extended to entire populations, to Freud’s and psychoanalysts’ clinical and theoretical observations. With absolute statistical correlation, they showed that depression, violence (drug, alcohol, criminality), are the consequence of deprivation of tenderness during infancy, a deprivation that can be increased (or decreased) by the banning (or permission) of premarital sexuality (cf. the works of James Prescott – violence.de).
This repression is particularly severe in infantile sexual mutilation that intends to dominate and control the youth through putting it under traumatic terror (cf. Alice Miller). The horrid physical torture carries along both an irreversible loss and a threat of castration or death, which provokes a powerful unconscious trauma, highly guilt-carrying. This guilt may generate strong individualities and great achievements but also, and as certainly, great disorders and trouble of the mind. Physical and emotional castration of the specific organs of autosexuality undermines the image of the body and threatens boys and girls of total castration. 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. Incidentally, 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 (structural mechanism of perversion), to the image of the initially suffered trauma or of the dreaded torture: castration. But coming to the point of invading a country for a promise unaccomplished by God makes one enter the field of pure psychosis: taking oneself for God. Out of the ten genocides of modern times, only one did not imply circumcised, the frequency of wars is four times greater in circumciser countries, the death penalty is twice more frequent in them and they are the only ones to excise women. Sexual mutilation is the breeding ground of paranoia, fanaticism and terrorism, they also are that of counter terrorist excessiveness. These mutilations are particularly severe in the castration of woman’s erectile organ and vulva, not mentioning the long-term havoc frequently endured by adjacent organs (vagina, urethra, bladder and intestine). They are also 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 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 till that of walking. This is poles apart from ordeals of separation from the mother that make the child enter a kind of barbarous military service. Infantile sexual mutilation does not welcome the infant in a society regulated by the difference of sex and age, it integrates them into gangs of pirates intoxicated with domination and blood. Those groups are themselves dominated by hierarchies of medieval type which have for sole rule relationships in terms of the power struggle of personal allegiance, in a homophile, sadist, seduction relationship. We are within pure bestiality, we shall not say animality because animals do not know such an abomination.
In societies where woman is openly a commodity, excision, bringing feminine sexuality down to the function of substitute of the foreskin, is the ultimate, logical complement of circumcision and vice versa. Indeed, in polygamous cultures, these partial castrations, threats of total castration or death, aim or aimed, on one hand, at imposing virginity and fidelity by reducing young women’s ardour through disability and terror, and, on the other hand, still through terror, at deterring sons from rivalling their fathers for their young spouses. In a world dominated by men, circumcision threatens the organ of the little girl perhaps more seriously than the castration of the erectile organ of woman threatens that of boys, only unconsciously threatened. 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, selling like a merchandise, forced marriage, repudiation, absence of 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 guilty the child and the adult. Signs of physical distinction also injure human dignity. If the thing is particularly clear for feminine mutilation, every marking of the body makes the latter an advertising poster. Moses and Mohammed forbade tattoos because the body must not be treated like a commodity. Furthermore, the absence of mutilation entails the casting out of their bearer from their own ethnic group, which is an intolerable attempt 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.
At last, physical marking attacks the human species. Founding a collective identity upon an attempt on the identity of the human species is not only a degrading act; it is also discriminatory since it leads its holder to believe themselves illusorily superior or even to boast about it. No people may carve themselves a purely formal identity upon the body of their children. Intended to separate the group from others, infantile sexual mutilation is a sectarian act, sometimes under the guise of religion. So, some great thinkers (Spinoza, Freud) denounced circumcision as a source of hatred from neighbouring peoples. Therefore, infantile sexual mutilation is encouraged by tyrannical regimes that use it as well as initiation for their troops as sign of tribal distinction, of phallic, perverse rallying. Infantile sexual mutilation has a sexist character. It is incitement to discrimination, insidiously disguised under what could be finery if it were possible to easily take off and behind the festivities of folklore. Imposed by military-religious elites, the community sign is always a threat, a call for nationalism, a sign of war. The French legislator did not misunderstand it by forbidding carrying religious signs at school. Veil, foreskin, clitoris, the death penalty, to arms et cetera, the escalation of mutilation, sexual or other including mental, is the great instrument of the war of generations. For being latent and insidious, this neurotic war, a source of genuine other wars, is not less atrocious and merciless. In order to channel human needs at the service of the interests of the ruling classes, it attempts to divert sexuality against love. Those who mutilate their children are victims of their own parents. This leads them to deny the mutilating character of sexual ablations. They must understand that this denial is intolerable to all those who do not practise them, that is to say the very great majority of humanity. For non-mutilators, sexual excision appears monstrous, and still more when inflicted to children. Mutilators must also admit the fact that those who oppose mutilation are the more often foreigners, westerners. This does not imply that they would be attacking a cultural value worthy of being preserved. Against the circumciser 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 must be considered as one of the worst scourges of humanity. Not only is it natural that the fight against it – at the risk of hurting a little its adepts – would be initiated by non-mutilators but also there are, in the very bosom of mutilator peoples, consciences of great courage who rise up against mutilation. So, the dangers of circumcision have been highlighted by African voices (4). These persons must be listened to.
Culturalo-religious narcissism does not deserve the sacrifice of one single hair of a child. Its indignant protests must hush in front of the shrieks of the victims. But trauma is foremost psychological and physical mutilation is not the only condemnable one. Mutilation of the mind, through speech, Paulinian, Christian, puritan and Occidental, perhaps without being irreversible, is as redoubtable as physical excisions. It has the same aim of rendering the individual compliant by traumatizing them through a genuine putting under unconscious terror. But it is fierce and dangerous because lying, difficult to eradicate from minds. The psychical or physical damage of repression is incalculable.
The abolition of infantile sexual mutilation is only a stage in the fight against the repression of the sexuality of the youths and for the right of all to the free access to their own body.
(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).
