Sexual mutilation, the child’s point of view (The third and fourth sexes) - Sigismond
From Peaceful Beginnings
SEXUAL MUTILATION,
THE CHILD’S POINT OF VIEW
The third and fourth sexes
Medicine, religions, rights of man, psycho-sociology, history,
psychoanalysis and infantile sexual mutilation
Sigismond
translation revised by Gemma Collins, Sarah Grosvenor and Simon Green
“The edge of the knife is never as sharp as that of discourse.”
Jean-Thierry Maertens
The child must be defended free of charge and Sigismond does not wish to earn royalties from the misery of infantile sexual mutilation. He keenly encourages reproduction and distribution of all or part of this work available for free at: http://groups.msn.com/circabolition and http://intactwiki.org. If you appreciated it, please express your support there by registering yourself on our site. Please do not fail to sign the petitions. Comments, suggestions and critcisms are welcome in a site in perpetual construction that has been revised and updated for years (oldsigismund@hotmail.com).
“Friend, remember that love is stronger than hatred.”
Three things are worthwhile in life: music, flowers and women.
Only music is eternal.
Non violence is as fundamental as violence, love, hatred, beauty and ugliness.
But power is at the tip of the tongue and the sweet violence of speech,
if one takes hold of it, can silence weapons.
(after Moses, Jesus, Marx, Freud, Mao, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Baez
and many others)
“Je suis tombé par terre,
“C’est la faute à Voltaire,
“Le nez dans le…” divan,
“C’est la faute à… Lacan.”
Gavroche-Oedipus (after a revolutionary rhyme of La commune)
“Fascism is: “Shut up!”; democracy: “Talk all you want!” Psychoanalysis is neutral; “You talk to me, I heal you; I speak to you, you cure me.”
There are only facts; construction is that of the prince.
(against Nietzsche, the philosopher of Nazism)
The perverse, outlawed, pushes towards madness.
Freudian ethics is not Lacanian tics.
The analyst always speaks to the child.
The analyst is objector of unconsciousness.
Analysis enables the middle-class to identify with the working class.
The source of authority is suffering, but it does not prove anything.
Criticism of tears follows that of weapons.
“So that never again, on the play-ground, may a small boy be called
a shear-baptized or an uncircumcised dog.”
after Guy Bedos
(cf. Appendix IX, p. 179)
To understand infantile sexual mutilation (*),
it is necessary to put oneself in the child’s place; crime, whatever it is, can only be justly appreciated on the side of the victim. Through this approach,
“The main thing is invisible to the eyes, only the heart sees well.”
Saint Exupéry, Le petit prince
Warnings:
- the orthography “phantasy” is used to distinguish from day-dreaming fantasies,
- for the attention of American readers: according to English usage, “which” and “that” are-frequently treated as equivalent,
- inside quotations, italics, bold type or great letters indicate our remarks or emphasis.
- except when otherwise noted, quotations from the Bible are literally translated from the translation of the French Rabbinate. Paris: Les éditions Colbo; 1966.
“… For all who feel invaded, handled, bottled, packaged,
All who spent themselves with combat with the plague,
All who walked into the knives of humiliation or hatred.”
Pete Hamill. Preface to “On the tracks” by Bob Dylan. New York; 1974.
To the victims of infantile sexual mutilation
and to those who have the courage to rise
and defend the rights of toddlers, and elders,
when they are misled, humiliated and tortured,
in body, spirit and sexual life,
by primitive customs or immoderate so-called sanitary practices,
to Moses, John the Baptist and Jesus-Christ;
they lost their lives opposing Abraham’s diktat,
a diabolic so-called divine right
to invade a land though slaughtering its natives,
in compensation for the sacrifice of a precious piece of human flesh,
to Marilyn Milos and the other nurses who,
rising against blind medical order, lost their employment
because they were informing parents of the harm of circumcision,
to the members of the world movement against infantile sexual mutilation,
to Lady Diana who,
rising against the customs of a centuries-old aristocratic family,
saved the two Princes of the British Crown from foul mutilation,
to Nastassja Kinski,
she fought her husband in order to protect the flesh of her son,
to Woody Allen, Yvan Attal and Daniel Burman
who were the first to denounce the dismaying amputation on screen,
to Jean-Jacques Goldman
who put rock’n roll at the service of the fight against circumcision,
to Doctor Sigmund Freud
who did not fear throwing his reputation and practice into jeopardy
by publicly denouncing the barbarity of circumcision,
to the philosopher Jacques Derrida who,
following Freud, abandoned the familial tradition,
to the philosopher Michel Onfray,
he denounced antisexual mutilation,
to Doctors Wilhelm Reich, Bruno Bettelheim, Benjamin Spock
and Thomas Szazs, psychoanalysts,
Francis Crick and George Wald, Nobel laureates in medicine,
Jonas Salk, inventor of an anti-polio vaccine,
Jenny Goodman, Frédérick Leboyer, obstetrician,
and Gérard Zwang, sexologist,
to the psychoanalyst Alice Miller,
to Betty William, Nobel peace laureate,
who denounced circumcision, particularly with regards to the case of newborns,
to Helen Bryce, Norm Cohen, Ronald Goldman,
Miriam Pollack, Mark Reiss, Mosche Rothenberg,
Victor Schonfeld, Leland Traiman and Thomas Wolfe
who do everything they can to draw their coreligionists away from erring,
to the physicians, mainly North-American,
who spent hours with their microscopes,
overcoming their disgust in order to dissect dead bodies
and discover the unknown treasures of the human sexual organs,
to the psychologists who minister to the sufferings
of those victims of the horrifying criminality
with which mothers and fathers
raise a knife against their own children,
to the anonymous defenders of the child who fight nozzle and nails
against knives, scalpels and nails
that peel and tear off the living flesh
of a hypersensitive part of the child’s body,
to the obscure,
to those fighting from the shadows,
to those who do not dare approach such a subject,
to those who dare.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the Internet, the British journal of urology international, Sami Aldeeb, Dominique Arnaud, Bruno Courcelle, Christopher Cold, Antonio Fischetti, Kristin Enersen Hoye, Nansi Glick, Madeleine Gomez, Maxime Guérin, Gérard Haddad, Pierre Jehl, Tim King, Anabelle Lipous, Richard Matteoli, Marilyn Milos, Percheminier, Patricia Robinett, Elisabeth Roudinesco, John Taylor, “Timoté”, William Van Lewis, Francette Vigneron, David Wilson, Chantal Zabus and Gérard Zwang, for their encouragements, correcting of clumsiness, offering of suggestions, information, improvements and happy reformulations.
I also thank all those net surfers who, through either their personal websites or often lively debates, have brought to light precious information in a field where fact is sometimes difficult to discern from fiction.
THE AUTHOR
Sigismond (Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux), was born on April 5th 1947 in Villefranche sur Saône (Beaujolais), a royal democracy since the fourteenth century. He was twenty years old in 1968. He graduated in Economic Sciences (71), from H.E.C. (the French MIT) (72) and, having begun his studies in chartered accountancy, got the French Diploma for Superior Accountancy Studies (75). This was exhausting for his weak health. Following an episode of severe depression, he voyaged to Ariège in the French Pyrenees, in order to present his poems to the singer-composer-author Morice Bénin, where he met the shepherdesses and shepherds of a growing ecologist movement. Returning from the sick leave granted for his depression, he found himself fired from his job. This drive will be followed by many others and, in the five years that followed, he became the organizer of Morice Bénin’s, Gilles Hottot’s, Kirjuhel’s and Antoine Tomé’s concerts in Paris. Further, he went on to promote Morice Bénin in Montréal. During the same “epic epoch”, he applied himself to an endless analysis and autoanalysis (5 years with practitioners) and began to study psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes, then Vincennes in Saint-Denis (mid 76/84). He studied a half year in Psychology and Educational Sciences, followed by 6 and a half years in the Psychoanalysis department, without becoming a practitioner. Since then, he has devoted himself to research into the “Wolf-Man’s” case, the Lacanian phenomenon and Freudian metapsychology. During the course of his research into the first, he located a cultural gap between Freud and his patient, due notably to the circumcision of the Viennese master, as one of the principal causes of the relative failure of the analysis. This led him (No theory without previous practice) to abandon his research and henceforth dedicate himself to the fight against infantile sexual mutilation.
SUMMARY
Infantile sexual mutilation (ISM) irreversibly destroys the specific organs for autosexuality, threatens the child with castration and excludes the group from the rest of humanity, notably through distinctive signs of recalling (kippah, scarification, veil). Born in atmosphere of tyranny and jealousy of polygamous societies in order to dominate the young and make them biddable for war or domestic slavery, ISM is a crime against humanity torturing the body, traumatizing the mind and catalyzing violence. It threatens autosexuality in a terrifying way, neurotising (in the least drastic cases) the child.
Moses, in the 2nd commandment, Jesus, with baptism by water, Mohammed and Freud were precursory figures to the abolitionist movement that burst in the mid-eighties, in the American working class, spurred on by Marilyn Milos and a few other nurses.
Freud’s own trauma caused by his circumcision caused his distortion of Sophocles’s Oedipus and his fallacious theories of circumcision as voluntary submission and as progress when compared with supposedly formerly practised castration. As a matter of fact, circumcision is an attempt to subjugate by physical violence and the unconscious terror inspired by the implicit threat of castration. From there emerges the psychological damage and the chasm between the whole and the mutilated. The examples of Freud and Olievenstein show that phantasies, paralysis and/or flaws of the thought – ascribable to the trauma – are likely to affect even the most brilliant sexually mutilated persons. The same thing occurs with children who have suffered forced retraction of the foreskin or other types of threat of castration. For the matter is indeed one of a threat of castration and, indirectly, excision or death, an apex of the violence of educational methods based upon corporal punishment. They belong to a tyrannical and barbarous moral order inherited from ancient times.
Sexologists, paediatricians and urologists are more and more frequently refusing the ablation of sexual organs which are essential to sexual pleasure. But for rare cases of medical necessity, both deontology and law forbid such amputations. Law, history and sociology join medicine and psychoanalysis in condemning an as-yet-not-fully recognized crime against humanity. This multi-disciplinary work shows that the abolition of ISM is a priority task for humanity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword – EXCISION, CIRCUMCISION, “HUSH IT’S FOR YOUR OWN SAKE!” (p. 13)
The philosophy and basic concepts of the struggle against ISM.
Chapter I – THE FORESKIN, NOT GUILTY! (Medicine and circumcision) (p. 23)
A review of medical knowledge. For anatomy, sexology and prophylactic medicine, circumcision, but for rare exceptions, is harmful and needless.
Chapter II – THE ORIGINAL PUNISHMENT (Religions and circumcision) (p. 61)
The 2nd Commandment condemns “the crime of fathers upon children”. Jesus-Christ and Mohammed also pronounced themselves against circumcision.
Chapter III – THEIR BODY, THEIR RIGHT (The right to the body and the rights of man, child and citizen; infantile sexual mutilation, a crime against humanity) (p. 87)
Chapter IV – THE MORAL ORDER (The psycho-sociology of infantile sexual mutilation) (p. 101)
The great motivations behind infantile sexual mutilation.
Chapter V – THE IDEOLOGY OF VIOLENCE (History, anthropology and circumcision) (p. 116)
Sexual mutilation is a terrible source of violence.
Chapter VI – “AT THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD...” (Psychoanalysis of sexual mutilation, sexual mutilation and restoration of psychoanalysis)
I – The case of Sigmund Freud (p. 127)
He greatly suffered from his own circumcision.
II – The case of Claude Olievenstein (p. 135)
A case of paranoid psychosis partly provoked by circumcision, almost totally auto-analyzed (but for what concerns circumcision) by a famous psychiatrist.
III – Psychoanalytical ethic and theory, and infantile sexual mutilation (Anti-castration and a return to Sophocles against anti-Oedipus) (p. 141)
– Infantile sexual mutilation originates in phantasies.
– It hinders the child’s development by wronging the conditions of the Oedipus complex and is an obstacle to democracy by an implicit threat of castration to opponents.
Conclusion (p. 155)
The last human sacrifices must be abolished.
Annex I – A circumcision, by Rio Cruz (p. 164)
Annex II – Mothers’ regrets after their son’s circumcision (p. 165)
Annex III – Clitoris and foreskin, by Susan Peer (p. 166)
Appendix I – For autosexuality (p. 167)
Corollary I – Autosexuality of the foetus (p. 176)
Corollary II – Psychoanalysis and phimosis
Appendix II – Ethics against AIDS, not statistics (p.177)
Appendix III – For the abolition of discriminatory religious dogmas (p. 183)
Annex IV – Violence and circumcision: genocides, wars, death penalty, torture and excision, in circumcising and non-circumcising countries (p. 184)
Appendix IV – Terrorism and circumcision – 11 September and circumcision (p. 189)
Appendix V – Jacques Lacan and circumcision (p. 192)
Appendix VI – Sexual intercourse and circumcision (p. 194)
Annex V – Open letters to authorities (p. 195)
Annex VI – A parody of Darwin : the birth of the tragedy (p. 207)
Appendix VII – Criticism of the movie “The lost embrace”, by Daniel Burman (p. 209)
It takes position against circumcision.
Appendix VIII – Top hats against bowler hats, reds against greys (p. 211)
Appendix IX – Poems against infantile sexual mutilation (p. 212)
Bibliography – A few books against infantile sexual mutilation (p. 214)
tagtext (p. 215)
Key-words
Violence, pleasure, autosexuality, threat of castration, infantile sexual mutilation, phantasies, return to Sophocles.
Foreword
EXICISION, CIRCUMCISION,
“HUSH, IT’S FOR YOUR OWN SAKE!”
Human sciences against sexual mutilation
“It is not worth while saying
That children resemble us,
That they have the same scars,
And that they’re born with violence.
It is convenient to say this,
It helps us to educate them,
In our image, in our image.”
“This postulate: parents, learning, power,
And underhand dictatorship
That removes them from their initial beauty...”
Morice Bénin
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. 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. They are sometimes a preliminary for mere and/or sexual enslavement. 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 these 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. The latter operates a mental mutilation, sole present in the main part of humanity. Sexual mutilation in the general meaning subjects the individual to puritanical and hypocritical values.
Against this violence, we gather and extend on the one hand the discoveries of psychoanalysis – that is to say 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 (alice-miller.com) – on the other hand, those of American cultural anthropology (cf. James Prescott, violence.de). The latter affirms that violence is inhibited by pleasure and reciprocally. The conclusion is the same: violence in education, rather than tender care, has catastrophic results: breeding violence, addiction or depression. Giving the floor by turn to the biologist, the anatomist and the neuro-anatomist, to prophylactic medicine, the psychiatrist, the sexologist, the ethicist, the lawyer, the sociologist, the anthropologist, the historian of cultures and religions and the psychoanalyst, this book could be entitled “The foreskin and clitoris monologues”. Well, no! But for individual cases, sciences are unanimous in standing up for organs sometimes alleged to be redundant but actually destroyed because they are the specific 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 ISM. An education through violence, infantile sexual mutilation irremediably castrates the child from the organs of autosexuality, while deeply traumatizing the human person. It is done 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. It is also done in order to separate the ethnic group from others, out of artificial racism assumed to award a moral superiority and excluding opponents. 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 did not receive the medicine Nobel Prize that it deserves. It had no media coverage and remains ignored by the public. It has been experimentally confirmed by Sorrells’s sensitivity enquiry. 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 their companions. 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: a parasite worm and a genetic mutation have also been put forward. Mass circumcision is nevertheless practised on Africans that make it a diabolical panacea. But 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 strictly medical reason.
Second 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.
Third element: the psychical trauma. Psychoanalysis and psychosomatic medicine considering the psycho-physic set as a whole, 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 (I will not use the despicable term that means etymologically: “turpitude by hand”) are at the origin of the formation of the unconscious and thus a deep cause 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. When insane minds savagely and hypocritically annihilate (excision) or lessen (circumcision) the very existence of a pure personal pleasure, 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.
Fourth 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.
Fifth element: sexual mutilation is a mean of enslavement by terror, discrimination and exclusion.
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, their worldly abolition 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. This condemnation even seems to spread 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, invented 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 so created 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 inverted 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 non kept 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 girls. 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 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 birth in gentleness (Leboyer), 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 enlists 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
Distinctive physical signs hurt human dignity in a way typical of the moral order: a violation of intimacy. Marking 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.
Then, 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, one of the main concerns of the racist.
Intended to separate the group from others, sexual mutilation is a sectarian act, sometimes committed under the guise of religion and alleged to bring a moral and even sexual superiority. 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 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 bold consciences who rise up against mutilation. So, the dangers of circumcision have been highlighted by African voices (4). Césaire and the American blacks do not make it 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 minds 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 without even admitting it. 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.
(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
(4) http://geocities.com/RainForest/3719/circoncision.htlm
Chapter I
THE FORESKIN, NOT GUILTY!
Medicine and circumcision
INTRODUCTION
“I will not give deadly medicine.”
Oath of Hippocrates (400 B. C.)
The great medical principle is not to harm (“Primum non nocere.”) but the French medical oath goes further:
“I shall respect all persons...I shall intervene to protect them,
if… they are threatened in their integrity...”
In the beginning of the 20th century, a young Austrian researcher in neurology (a limited biologist as we shall see) and occasionally sexologist, discovers infantile sexuality and the psychiatric equivalence between the breast and the penis. Fifty years later, in the United-Kingdom, Gairdner emphasizes the absence of the foreskin in medicine manuals:
“Though tens of thousands of infants are circumcised each year in this country, nowhere are (the) essential data assembled.”
25 years later in the United States, Wald reports the same gap:
“It’s curious – and revealing – how few persons think about circumcision… At one point in writing this essay I looked through the shelves in our biological laboratory library, through books on the senses, on neurophysiology and neuroanatomy, some of them medical textbooks. I was looking for what new information there might be on sensory responses from the glans penis and foreskin. Neither of those words was in the index of any of those books.”
The 1967 medicine Nobel Prize laureate might have reported the same thing for the clitoris. However, no European physician would ever cut a foreskin without previous consent of those interested. By insisting, nowadays only it must be regretted, on this prerequisite, medical societies of Anglo-Saxon countries recall that, contrary to the traditional twaddle, circumcision is mutilation.
I – DEFINITE DISADVANTAGES
A – THE PHYSIOLOGICAL DAMAGE:
the loss of the triple sexual function of the foreskin,
the operative risks and pain
Introduction: Circumcision is mutilation
Diamonds are forever, so do the clitoris and the foreskin!
Mutilation is the ablation of a non auto-reproducible organ. Women (or men) who, for lack of possessing a foreskin, have no expertise in the matter, are ill-placed to affirm the traditional twaddle: “Circumcision is not mutilation”, or would be a “symbolic wound” according to a title of Bruno Bettelheim. Since they never stroked a foreskin, they have no right to affirm peremptorily that it would only be “a useless flap of skin”. But our mates who appreciate lingering over the foreplay, if they have an opportunity to compare, will easily be aware of the extent of the non-intact’s loss, of the great poverty of his sensations. However, homophiles are still better located than our female companions to appreciate all the details of masculine sensations at their true value. Great experts and practitioners of feminine enjoyment with man, they are the best testimonies of the loss to circumcision. For them, it stands out undeniably; as soon as a sexually mutilated enters a homophilic group, his handicap is obvious.
1 – The erogenous damage:
the destruction of the erogenous and protective-of-the-glans functions
Introduction: the preputial enjoyment, a feminine, tender and gentle enjoyment
Only lie down on your back, Sirs, and let a woman make love astride to you, a technique in which the pleasure of the eyes is not the smallest. If she should have a minimum of expertise, you will observe that she does not do it like you; no rhythmic, hurried for satisfaction movements. It is a slow caress, of unsettled speed, very soft and seeking the intense, fine and delicate sensations of the feminine enjoyment. This “Tease me, don’t squeeze me” can last for hours. Some people say that this pleasure, in which woman “dominates”, was that of Lilith and Adam whilst the enjoyment or the non-whole is that of Adam and Eve. This enjoyment is very obviously forbidden to the circumcised; it is also forbidden to the entire who rush making love.
Now make love to yourself in the same way, through slowly stroking your foreskin dry without retracting it, and you will provide yourself with the lively and silky purely preputial enjoyment. Its isolated but intense orgasmic contractions do not lead to orgasm. On the contrary, they seem to induce the closing of a sphincter impeding and controlling ejaculation. They are all the more numerous and smooth than the caress is lighter and slower. It is the enjoyment of the preludes, delicate and refined, indefinitely extendable, of variable sharpness and the centre of which, subtly and unpredictably moves from the perineum to the tip of the penis passing through the scrotum. The excitement can reach extreme levels to diminish then but it seems that the best of it precisely lays in fine variations that permit each time new discovery. But let us not exaggerate; the French say “préputial” rather that “préputiel” because heaven (“ciel”, pronounced like “tiel” in French) is in the other sex. But those gentle pleasures are unknown to the sexually maimed, and even to some whole men.
The three types of masculine circumcision, by the extent of the taken off surface of skin and thus by the loss of numerous erogenous and fine-touch nervous endings, well give account of the existence of this feminine enjoyment. Abrahamic circumcision takes off the sole “outgrowth”: the ring at the end of the foreskin, the rabbinic one destroys the whole of the foreskin, the “tribal” one (rare) tears out the whole skin of the penis and scrotum ; “One does not eat a banana with the skin on, does one?”, would ironically say Professor Aldeeb to the advocates of circumcision.
Let us now examine the physiological basis of this enjoyment.
a) The loss of a major erogenous organ: Taylor’s anatomic discovery (1996) and Sorrell’s experimental confirmation (2007)
It is for the pleasures of sex as for those of table. The one with a cut tongue can enjoy swallowing, he cannot taste what he is eating. Similarly, the one who has no foreskin loses a great part of sexual pleasure. The foreskin has as many nerve endings as tongue.
1° The quantitative loss
The amputation of the foreskin is irreversible; it destroys around 90-120 cm2 of skin and mucosa: twice (outer face and inner face) 4.5-5 cm of length by 10-12 cm of diameter. Now the foreskin contains 116 nerve endings per cm2 . The loss is thus around 10 to 14 000 nerve endings. But, Bazett 3did not mention certain types of nerve endings present in the foreskin and these figures are underestimated. This sensitivity is constituted both by a great affluence in fine-touch sensory receptors 3, and by erogenous receptors. This alliance bestows the foreskin an exquisite ability of stimulation.
“(The foreskin) contains a richer variety and greater concentration of specialized nerve receptors than any other part of the penis.”
The only touch organ possessing as rich erogenous innervation as the foreskin is the clitoris. Circumcision deprives man of 2/3ds of the main erogenous zone constituted of the foreskin and the glans.
2° The qualitative loss, loss of the erogenous function
– Glans versus foreskin, compared sensitivities
The glans only has a limited, selective sensitivity. It is practically insensitive to fine touch (this remark assumes a dry glans since the glans of intact men, in its natural moist state, cannot bear non lubricated touch) but it is sensitive to deep pressure. According to Sir Henry Head , the sensitivity of its mucosa, as rich in free nerve endings ,as that of the cornea – is, “in the absence of the more discriminative faculties” (p. 557) a primary, crude sensitivity, an “all or nothing” sensitivity (p. 649). The threshold of fine-touch sensitivity of a moist glans is equal to its threshold of sensitivity to pain. The glans is supersensitive to pain and temperature but only beyond high thresholds. In the opinion of the illustrious neurologist, its sensitivity is “affective rather than discriminatory” (p. 650). It is a warning sensitivity (pleasure/pain, acceptance/rejection), not calling for the intervention of the “epicritic” nervous system, enabling choices. A normally constituted glans cannot be exposed to any stimulus. Its crude sensitivity, similar to that of the cornea, is a natural alarm system for the organism. The fact is that both organs are traditionally considered as the most precious of the body.
The experimental study by Sorrells & al. about penile fine-touch sensitivity confirms the works of Head about the great insensitivity of the glans. They also disclose a certain fine-touch sensitivity of the corona of the glans (a part traditionally considered as the most erogenous). Circumcision reduces this sensitivity of the corona by 20%. They also show on one hand that, with the intact, the orifice ring – cf. Taylor’s discovery below – is the area with the highest fine-touch sensitivity. Foremost, this sensitivity is twice that of the most sensitive part of the mutilated penis (scar). So, they bring experimental evidence that the fine-touch sensitivity of the foreskin (yet nothing could be said about erogenous sensitivity) makes it the privileged organ of sexual caress, very particularly dry caress. On one hand circumcision amputates the most sensitive part of the penis, on the other hand the fine-touch pressure thresholds of non-intact are, as regards to their little remains of penile skin, equal (only for the scar) or higher than intact’s, who are thus more sensitive. The synergy between erogeneity and fine-touch sensitivity makes the foreskin an irreplaceable sexual organ.
Moreover, the foreskin is erogenous dry, without irritation. It is a specific erogenous area (by rubbing and stretching, without need of lubrication), complementary of the glans that requires lubrication. These characteristics confirm that the foreskin is made for dry fondling and the glans for deep massage, either lubricated or through the foreskin. The foreskin excites, the glans satisfies.
– The mechanism of the foreskin: muff, lid or stocking?
“The foreskin can normally be slipped all the way, or almost all the way, back to the base of the penis, and also slipped forward beyond the glans. This wide range of motion is the mechanism by which the penis and the orgasmic triggers in the foreskin, frenulum, and glans are stimulated.” 5
The foreskin plays the part of a lid shaped like a muff but, as it does not glide, it is neither the one nor the other. As a matter of fact, it is a double-layered roller-blind, wrapping and unwrapping the glans through a unique in nature mechanism. In autosexuality (*), the foreskin, unrolling and stretching in width and length, narrowly makes love to the glans, for the greatest pleasure of each of both organs but without sliding nor rubbing and thus without need of lubrication, in both braced and smooth contact. Narrowly hugging the glans, the foreskin (and its ring) widens and shuts itself back upon its both extremities. In the end of its run, it becomes a simple stocking gliding on the shaft. Alternation of tension and release produces upon its erogenous cells an intimate and effective stimulation.
But we need the sensitivity and talent of observation of a woman and mother to crown our efforts in describing this organ. Comparing the foreskin with both the clitoral hood and small labia, Susan Peer brings us an outstanding recollection of the symmetries between the foreskin and the feminine sexual apparatus (cf. Annex II).
– The loss of the erogenous and elastic ring, a genuine love accordion
The ring at the tip of the foreskin is the corona of the corona of the glans. Its great erogenous value seems to have been known for long and the Greek called it: “posthias”: what comes after, after the glans. Now, the ring is the very part affected by phimosis, of which very probably suffered Abraham (the divine order is very precisely to cut off the “outgrowth”). It must be reminded here that phimosis can be provoked by senescence or herpetic inflammation. So, it is likely that Abraham, happy to recover the use of his sex (he could have children after the operation), ordered general circumcision for preventive purpose because he was unaware of the ethic necessity that forbids such amputation.
The foreskin contains the fraenulum, and the “ridged band” discovered by Taylor , a pioneer of sexual histology. Composed of rings (ridges) noticeable after retraction, the ring is fitted with high erogenous innervation (Meissner’s corpuscles).
A year after this discovery of the ring of the tip of the foreskin, Fleiss gives a precise description of the functioning of this part of the organ:
“This exquisitely sensitive structure (the ridged band) consists of tightly pleated concentric bands, like the elastic bands at the top of a sock. These expandable pleats allow the foreskin lips to open and roll back, exposing the glans. The ridged mucosa gives the foreskin its characteristic taper.” 5
The ring is composed by highly stretchable flesh cells intertwined with a bounty of various kinds of erogenous nerve endings. Through its elastic final narrowing, it plays the part of the strings of a purse:
“(The foreskin)… is lined with the peripenic muscle sheet, a smooth muscle layer with longitudinal fibers. These muscle fibers are whirled, forming a kind of sphincter.” 5
Let us complete this description with the image of the accordion that marvellously describes the functioning of the retracted foreskin. Its possibilities of both lateral and longitudinal stretching make it an extraordinary variable-geometry love accordion. Under solicitation, the foreskin and the glans first reciprocally massage each other, narrowly and intimately. After total retraction the foreskin moreover massages the shaft. In this use, it can operate away from the glans in order to trigger orgasm.
Furnished with its ring, the foreskin is the specific organ of autosexuality. The very wealth of this instrument, irrevocably destroyed by prepucectomy, is aimed at by puritan and youth-oppressive religions and customs that advocate the operation in order to hamper autosexuality. These religions and customs erect a veritable “Wall of silence” around infantile sexual mutilation. Taylor’s discovery has never been given media coverage. In spite of the major interest for humanity of the finding of a till now ignored sexual organ, he did not receive the Nobel Prize. Neither did Foldès for his discoveries about the clitoris and his operation of reconstruction of that organ. Autosexuality is not Nobelizable.
b) The loss of the function of protective sheath to the glans
Who said: “My kingdom for a skin!”?
– The glans.
“The foreskin protects the glans throughout life.”
Half skin, half mucosa, the foreskin is not mere skin but a protective lid, very richly vascularised, furnished with muscles and lubricating, anti-microbial and antiviral glands . Extending over the glans in children and often also in adults, it keeps it moist and protects its delicate internal mucosa, especially during the period of infancy . The creator thought of everything; the foreskin becomes retractile sometimes very late in adolescence 1, . Forcing things would be harmful.
The ablation thus destroys the lid of the main masculine erogenous organ. The thin, smooth and silky mucosa of the glans is no longer protected from the constant rubbing of clothes, a permanent source of irritation, contrary to the natural comfort of the absolutely necessary sheath, elastic and warm. Besides, it is not mere skin but veritable flesh, including a peripheral muscle: the dartos. Whereas the glans is supersensitive to cold 5, the foreskin protects it from chilblain (northern countries, high mountain). The hypersensitive mucosa of the glans becomes skin, 10 times thicker , dry and coarse. A study showed that penile sensitivity of whole men is 25-30% higher than that of sexually maimed men. Love is intended by nature mucosa against mucosa (some see there a promise of subtle exchange) and not skin against mucosa. It is not an exercise of gymnastic or massage but a demonstration of tenderness.
First consequence: the mutilated need strong stimulation. They more frequently resort to marginal sexual practice such as anal or oral sexuality and homophilia 13, 16, , , . With reduced sensitivity and epithelial thickening, they very notably appreciate fellatio; the “Berber waking up” brings them the deep sensations that stir them.
The second consequence of that absence or protection, progressive impotence – in varying degrees – is insidious; it reveals itself in the very long run only. It is much more frequent with the sexually mutilated 16, 18, , , . Cases are thus numerous in the United States: 52% of the 1 290 random selected subjects of a study, aged between 40 and 70 21. The success of Viagra in the United States and its relative failure in Europe, have no other explanation. We can predict that it will easily be sold to wealthy Africans and Muslims.
Third consequence: the restoration of the foreskin has become popular in the USA and the movement is spreading to Europe. Jewish sportsmen devised it in antiquity; as they were a little more naked than the others in the Olympic Games, the crowd gibed them. They imagined covering their glans through stretching the remaining of their foreskin. But this caused Jewish new-borns an additional torture non-prescribed by Abraham: the peri’ah (see chapter V). It cuts off the whole outer and internal foreskin all the way to the basis of the glans, including tearing off the inner mucosa, closely stuck to the glans at that age. Atrociously cruel, the operation seems having discouraged young Jews from restoration but contemporary Americans, who endure the peri’ah like them, brought it back into fashion. Obviously, growing again lasts longer with the peri’ah (from three to six years) but those persevering are largely rewarded by recovering their glans sensitivity. The success of restoration demonstrates both the pointlessness of a wanton torture and the sexual harmfulness of circumcision.
c) The unique autosexual function of the foreskin
One cannot really tale the defence of the foreskin without risking to look histrionic in the eyes of puritan minds. But manusexuality of the foreskin through the prized technique known as “the prayer” is the inescapable demonstration of its formidable erogenous efficiency. The circular gliding of both hands joined and rubbed the one against the other around the sheathed glans, in a lateral instead of longitudinal movement, is the fastest way to achieve orgasm: less than two minutes. A Brazilian feminist once gave us the pleasant demonstration of it and the recipe can certainly be applied to the vulva. Ablation of the foreskin besides destroys the fraenulum. This small square centimetre is man’s most erogenous area, a true erotic acupuncture point.
d) The mechanism of orgasm
It is for love as for hatred (paranoia); it’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back (the French metaphor: “it’s the last drop that makes the vase overflow”, is particularly pertinent in matter of masculine orgasm). This means that one arrives at the summit of love in the same way as in the starting of crisis of madness, through an accumulation of stimulations. Orgasm occurs when the quantity and quality of arousal is sufficient. The great problem is gathering this quantity and quality for both partners. For solving that thorny question, it is useful to observe that heterosexual love might look like autosexuality in which the foreskin makes love to the glans and not the reverse. This brings us to the conclusion that the best quality of arousal is achieved when woman is active, not man. Another myth that collapses!
Conclusion
Like petals around the cherry of the glans, the foreskin is the protective cover of its fragile mucosa. Its sexual response makes it the privileged organ of manual caress. For all those enjoying the extreme sensitivity of the sexual mucosa and skin in their natural state, stripping the child and man from this indispensable organ is an as inhuman as stupid and obscene act.
2 – The sexological damage:
the destruction of the heterosexual function of the foreskin
Sexological arguments have been debated. Maimonides writes:
“Circumcision undoubtedly weakens lust and sometimes pleasure.”
As a matter of fact, the sexually mutilated have, on the American continent, a poor sexual reputation. It is the opposite in Europe and in countries that practise circumcision traditionally; in such a field rumours abound. But Jewish sages were confirmed sexologists; they already asserted that the intact (if they should have a little expertise or that they should “leave the reins” to women) are better lovers:
“The woman who has made love with an uncircumcised can hardly separate from him.”
Zipporah so preferred Moses to the non-intact of her own tribe (Exodus, 2: 21).
Three recent studies, on unfortunately non-random samples, reinforce these empirical observations. The first two ones relate, one to 139 women, the other one to 35 women, who had relationships with both entire and non-entire men. The third one refers to men married with the same wife for at least 50 years. Intact men satisfy better their partners who note with them fewer premature conclusions of intercourse, they allow more frequent orgasms and less irritation. Goldman suggests that the non-entire divorce more often .
The first two studies explain that the foreskin limits friction irritating the vagina, for three reasons. Through movements of moderate amplitude, the normal can find the mechanism of erogenous accordion of the foreskin again and look for fine sensations in a less brusque, slower, gentler and tenderer act. In this movement, the foreskin glides on the shaft so that friction against the vagina is reduced, mainly limited to the glans. At last, through its mobility and folds, the foreskin plays a part similar to that of the piston rings in an engine, enabling to avoid the draining out of the lubricating secretions. The greater sensitivity of whole men is thus offset by better lubrication, which is particularly appreciated by our elderly companions.
Conversely, in order to compensate for his loss of sensitivity, the sexually mutilated require movements on a greater scale inducing indeed deep massage of the glans but also intense rubbing. Moreover, the rim of their glans voids the secretions little by little and the vulva gets irritated. Precisely, the wretched practice of dry sex has been invented just for shortening the length the laborious efforts of the circumcised to achieve orgasm, at the price of irritating the vagina. But consequently, as confirmed by the 2004 report of AIDSUNO that revealed that 13 women for 10 men are contaminated in Africa (*), circumcision worsens the transmissibility of AIDS to women (**). A recent study confirms that wives of non-intact are more at risk to contract the epidemic. But the difference has astonishingly been alleged non significant.
Preputial integrity offers a second advantage during coitus: a non retracted foreskin, gradually unrolling, eases intromission , , .
Up to the pleasure of micturition is impoverished by the lack of foreskin; if an intact man urinates decapped, he will at once feel a daily effect of circumcision: the loss of an elementary enjoyment.
Manusexuality without foreskin is like a day without sun, a movie in black and white rather than colour. To follow through Jacques Lacan’s metaphor (cf. Appendix VI), the foreskin is not only the sheath that preserves the polish of the sword, it is also the guard necessary to its good use. Love is a sunny day with fireworks in the evening; without the foreskin the fireworks are displayed but the sun is veiled, for both partners.
Those mutilated in their childhood rarely complain; they do not know what they have lost. So, Muslim circumcision is treacherously practised either during the latency period when the child has lost the souvenir of infantile sexuality or at an age when autosexuality is done in a rush. It traumatizes less than circumcision in infancy but chooses the moment when the child has not wholly discovered the pleasures of autosexuality. On the other hand, numerous adults, mostly sexually maimed either before their wedding or for medical reason, bitterly regret the decrease of pleasure and sensitivity 18, . Although they are the only qualified ones to testify with full knowledge of the harm provoked by circumcision, they remain silent. This silence dispels little by little; tongues free themselves in the physician’s consultancy. The enquiries of Pang and Fink 18, showing that circumcision – though for medical motive – makes between 13 and 38% (*) of dissatisfied, overthrow the myth created by thousands of years of denial, boasting and rumours. The enquiries of Boyle 35, Gemmell , Hammond , Kim , Shen and Solinis bring similar outcome; even in case of necessity, circumcision does not automatically improve sexual life but often (twice more failures than successes in Solinis’s study) creates loss of sensitivity, a lessening of autosexual pleasure and can provoke trouble in erection, pain or impotence. Compiling these enquiries gives 1/3 of indifferent, 1/3 of satisfied, 1/3 of dissatisfied . Obviously and as prescribed by deontology, a physician may not circumcise without serious medical reason. Let us recall that impotence can only be appreciated in the long run, which is excluded in these studies. Only Laumann’s enquiry 19 brings slightly contrary result, but its interviewers were not physicians.
Circumcision is no longer considered as a way of fighting premature ejaculation. Phimosis (**) is rare and may recede spontaneously: from 9% cases at 6-7-years-old to 2% at 17-years-old 15. A study bearing over 603 Japanese found out that 16% of 8-10-year-old still had a tight ring but 8% only at 11-15-year-old. The same study showed that retractability is total in only 63% of the cases at age 11-15. Otherwise, in most cases, non-steroid or corticosteroid anti-inflammatory creams, physical therapy and, in last resort, surgical plasty (triple incision) , enable to avoid the loss of the precious lid. Besides, numerous phimotics make love with their phimosis. An enquiry led in the United Kingdom in 2003 with under-fifteen-year-old revealed a rate of circumcision of 0.2% .
3 – The operation damage
a) A non negligible risk of accidents sometimes generating long-term effects
The operation sometimes degenerates into butchery leading to permanent damage. But only major complications are reported 16, , , when they are.
Amongst the many accidents that occur, death must be quoted first (a minimum of 1 over 500 000 in the USA , ). Actually, the frequency of babies’ death through circumcision in the USA is unknown, concealed behind secondary causes: bleeding, infections… This frequency is borne out by the existence of a Jewish law that exempts the third son of circumcision when his two elders deceased following their own. Each year in South Africa, “campaigns” of forced circumcision by fanatics make large numbers of deaths and quantities of severe disabilities and wounds. An African neonate recently died of suffocation due to his own vomiting , now vomiting is a frequent reaction to the operation.
Operative complications: excessive removal of skin provoking discomfort or even pain in erection and penian warping, insufficient removal of skin leading to a second operation, partial amputation of the glans through involuntary wound.
Post-operative complications: haemorrhages (“considerable in 15% cases” , it is sometimes necessary to stitch up the blood vessels or operate a transfusion), infections, skin bridges, urinary retention, necrosis of the glans or penis, ulcers and/or stenosis of the urinary meatus, associated enuresis, cysts, fistulas, etc.
A very bothering consequence of circumcision is fragility of the scar likely to get irritated during intercourse.
On the whole, the recorded rate is dismaying according to some: between 2 and 10% , moderate (0.6%) according to a study bearing upon 4 000 subjects . Others , reliable since their sample included 354 000 subjects, record a very weak rate of complication for hospital circumcision (0.22%) but 22 times higher than in absence of circumcision (0.01%). But victims do not always come at the hospital for complaining and the latter figure is underrated. The warning cry of a manufacturer of post-circumcision therapeutic products has something dramatic . An accident of circumcision, when it does not kill, may spoil a whole sexual life.
b) Excruciating pain (cf. Annex III)
Observers report that the pain provoked by circumcision is extreme and persistent. It is worse for infants, more sensitive than adults . The first month, the healing of an open mucosa is very painful, notably during unavoidable erections.
With babies (Anglo-Saxon countries, Jews), the operation is generally done without anaesthesia . The latter is only effective if it is general (inadvisable for new-borns). Nevertheless, after a first longitudinal cut, the inner mucosa of the foreskin must be torn down from that of the glans through skinning: in 95% of cases, they are not yet separated. A sharp tool (or the especially sharpened mohel’s nail) cuts in between. This dreadful torture, of inconceivable cruelty, is comparable to tearing off fingernails. More precisely, one must imagine that a scalpel is driven under the nail in order to unstick it from the finger by cutting forth and back and left and right… Then, a circular cut is operated. It has been noted that only babies in a state of shock owing to preparations do not cry. The others scream, before fainting 16. A study on neonates revealed a multiplication of 2.5 of the normal blood cortisol rate (pain marker) twenty minutes after the operation and 2.6 forty minutes later. Such figures, along with that of acceleration of cardiac rhythm up to 180 pulsations per minute, can only be found in victims of torture . For days after the operation, each wee-wee is a new torture that wakes the child up.
The Israelite ritual forbids anaesthesia: the child must suffer. In a few communities, mohels still suck the blood of the haemorrhage from the baby’s all torn up and lacerated sex and spit red wine on him in spite of the risk of sometimes deadly infections . Considering the condition of the child’s sex, it is not precisely an oral caress but an obnoxious additional torture.
Conclusion: circumcision harms the sexual function
“When one likes good things, one does not throw the best away.”
Only those who have been deprived of the clitoris and the foreskin may ignore their marvellous erogenous value. As for those who would be wishing to lose it, one must care about their mental health. However, in matter of taboo, even the physician, is not safe from ignorance, as we saw in the introduction. This is true even if he is a psychoanalyst; so, Freud himself, though the inventor and first defender of the child’s sexuality, did not know what a foreskin is:
“A man, after all, only has one leading sexual zone, one sexual organ, whereas woman has two: the vagina – the female organ proper – and the clitoris, which is analogous to the male organ.” ,
Like Wald, he had the excuse of being Jewish but, as shown by one of the favourite songs of French medicine students that poses Jupiter as a hero for sharing the same ignorance:
"Never did his hand serve him of a cunt." ,
culture has nothing to do with the matter.
Present for million years in all mammals but bats, the foreskin testifies to a complete evolution that encourages doubting it would be a superfluous organ. Those who think that deleting a pleasant erogenous zone could protract pleasure probably do not know how to conclude in the right time. Sexology teaches less devastating methods to achieve better result.
For now that science disclosed the whole complexity and wealth of the masculine sexual organ, the mutilative character of circumcision wholly appears; it destroys the three functions of the foreskin: erogenous, protective and of coitus. The foreskin is not a secondary erogenous zone but actually an essential component of masculine sexuality and the pleasure or the non-whole, impoverished when it is not troubled, is of lesser quality than the entire’s. Irreversible, circumcision is mutilation in the whole meaning of the term.
Confirmed by Sorrells’ experimental study, Taylor’s discovery that the foreskin is a major erogenous zone operates a genuine decentring in our vision of masculine sexuality. The phallus loses its privilege of unique sexual organ in the benefit of the envelope of the glans that gains the status of associate sexual organ. The masculine organ of autosexuality and of the preludes to love, exactly like the clitoris is that of feminine manusexuality, the foreskin is the erogenous and functional (minus erectility) equivalent to the clitoris. The clitoris and the foreskin bring to mind to each sex on one hand that women origin in men and men in women, on the other hand that, in matter of phallus, dissymmetry lies in size and shape but certainly not in function.
If anatomical and sexological medicine confirms the antique knowledge of African cultures, it draws the opposite conclusion. Since the foreskin, a mini-vagina, organ of masculine autosexuality, is the feminine part of man and the clitoris, a mini-penis organ of feminine autosexuality, is the feminine phallus, then they must be protected and valued. If there is no absolute symmetry between excision and circumcision since the symmetric of excision would be castration of the glans, there is partial equivalence of functional loss. Nevertheless, excision is operated without regard for its redoubtable consequences in the name of an equivalence. But there where circumcision plainly lessens enjoyment, excision substitutes pain for pleasure. Now for the physician, autosexuality is a full, healthy and vital sexuality. Moreover, its biological basis being for each sex an ersatz of the other, its practice is a preparation for heterosexuality. Apart from the ignorant, no one thinks of excising the clitoris, no one must either mutilate man, and a fortiori the child, from the precious preputial instrument.
Two by two makes four. Human bisexuality conveys itself through a variety of sexes: the penis, the vagina, the clitoris… The fourth sex: the foreskin, deserves full acknowledgment.
B – THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE
a major but the most often unconscious trauma
“What is that funny thing at the end of the penis?
- Man.”
Though his message is still little heard, Freud, at the very beginning of the XXth century, brought humanity a great discovery of human sciences: the repression of infantile sexuality is the first cause of mental disease. Mental repression generates the unconscious – rediscovered after Sophocles but this time in a scientific way – that is to say ordinary madness, in its multiple forms. Infantile sexual mutilation is the most brutal physical form of this repression, the multiple aspects of which have been widely documented by psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Its consequence, exploited by some men in high places who unfortunately dragged down with them a lot of peoples, is hyper-excitability of the victim. This entails a great ability to be manipulated and therefore being reduced to slavery, which is the ultimate aim. But this is the ABC of psychoanalysis.
Indeed, if the minor crime of circumcision passes unnoticed, its psychological consequences are redoubtable. If it is committed consciously by the elite, it is enacted unconsciously by the masses. However, as a whole, the victims of circumcision begin with rendering their children victims of their own mutilation. Unconsciously scandalizing the whole planet by a criminality against the child, they next show it off through distinctive signs symbolical of the “auto-provoked” infirmity: kippa, scarification, veil. Those signs are typical provocations. Psychoanalysis interprets them as signals of deep distress calling for help.
Birth without violence and circumcision
Leboyer recommends the greatest gentleness at the time of delivery: the cutting of the umbilical cord after pulsations have ceased (but for cardiac difficulties), never separating the child from his mother, abundant fondling, a bath in a washbasin, sieved lights… These techniques bring irrevocable demonstration of the harm of circumcision and foremost of its deep psychological mechanism. Indeed, they have long-term repercussions: more than 90% of Leboyer babies prove to be ambidextrous. Therefore, the one and only birth trauma seems to be that of the premature cutting of the umbilical cord; one does not destroy an organ while it is functioning without provoking serious physical and/or psychological damage. But lateralization, the consequence of the trauma, brings us the key of its functioning. Obviously, the premature cutting of the umbilical cord does not render the great majority of children right-handed. The characteristic of this symptom is submission to a stupid order: “Put the pencil in your right hand!” This blind submission cannot but be the fact of terror. Intimately terrorized for life by a cutting wildly done by adults including the mother, the child will obey stupidly, without discussing. They become right-handed because they believe it is good to be so. But they blind believe because they are deeply terrorized.
What is true for the little innervated umbilical cord will a fortiori be so for the foreskin. The procedure being much more invasive, the trauma of circumcision, very obviously similar, will be much graver. The same cause: violence, will have the same effect but submission will be much deeper; the child will repeat the absurd crime on their own children.
But one does solve the world's problems easily; the bosses of gynaecology today profit of Semmelweiss's discovery, their successors alone will profit by Leboyer's... However, it is possible that researchers should find out one day that the mother gives her baby some last provisions during these ultimate moments before complete biological separation.
The mask
Robinett, excised in her childhood in the United-States in the fifties, describes , with photographs to prove it, the effect of character armour (cf. Wilhelm Reich) provoked by sexual mutilation. Rosemary Romberg-Weiner, author of “Circumcision, the painful dilemma”, makes the same remark for her circumcised sons, in spite of her efforts to practice Leboyer’s recommendations for delivery. For the same phenomenon, African women in revolt against excision speak of mask. Is the latter a war weapon like the shield, used to protect oneself and frighten the enemy or is it mere expression of suffering? In warlike societies, infantile sexual mutilation prepares the individual for war, through traumatizing them.
The trauma
The psychological trauma generated by infantile sexual mutilation is the severest of all. This outrageous violence is a shocking way of welcoming to the human community, all the more erratic that, as revealed by prenatal ultrasound, the foetus commonly practises autosexuality, up to auto-fellatio. It is aberrant that, at the way out of the womb, the individual should endure repression of this natural sexual activity through torture. Though the deep cause of guilt remains unconscious, repression is highly guilt carrying and generator of anguish of castration.
Nothing proves the reality of Otto Rank’s fantasy of a birth trauma. Only that of the hardly avoidable trauma of umbilical cord cutting seems hardly avoidable in the absence of Doctor Leboyer’s techniques. Circumcision unnecessarily repeats it. For the newborn treated as pure object, it is an experience of violence, pain, terror, abandonment and powerlessness, to an extreme degree 22. This trauma 21, 22, 23, , , , the body loss and the implicit threat of castration , , particularly harsh as there is partial castration, is liable to destabilize the individual, in the long term. This threat is particularly asserted in societies where the castration of woman’s erectile organ, indirectly but strongly, threatens man’s. The psychoanalyst Alice Miller writes:
“… the ritual practice of circumcision… inflict(s) the child a trauma likely to undermine the equilibrium of his whole being.”
The severity of this trauma is directly proportional to the fact that infantile sexual mutilation results in separating the child from the mother, in the most unnatural, brutal and dramatic conceivable way. The new convert, circumcised as an adult, will be less traumatized because he did not endure the experience of separation through the double torture, the physical one of course, but foremost the mental one, that of the maternal betrayal, of being snatched from her arms to be tortured. For the mother collaborated in the crime, either actively either through tacit complicity. Instead of being done through natural necessity, separation is made through the atrocity of an act implying submission through terror and violence. Premature separation operated through infantile sexual mutilation is a veritable emotional catastrophe, creating a major trauma. Submission is the main psychological result of the gruesome performance. Circumcising societies will hardly be democratic.
This fundamental motivation explains the Jewish law which wants that the Jew should be from a Jewish mother. Indeed, only the Jewish mother, for having lived it herself, is likely to pass on her offspring, in its whole scale, the repression resulting from the overwhelming experience of the threat of castration or death that she herself lived at the time of the circumcision of her brothers or of the boys of her neighbourhood. For the experience of the performance of torture is as terrifying and traumatizing as torture itself. The children of women who have not known this trauma themselves cannot be Jewish because they did not endure the terrible repression exerted by the Jewish mother (cf. the scene of repression of autosexuality in the movie “Esther Kahn”). The mother being the first object of love, repression by the mother is the most traumatizing. The fact is the same in other circumcising cultures.
It must be emphasized here that sexual mutilation is definitely the first step to enslavement. Indeed, the American enslavers, little aware of this necessity and merely cautious of short-term benefits, dug their own grave when they forbade sexual mutilation to their slaves. Freed from it, the latter became able to revolt, which happened several times in the Antilles.
- Psychoanalysis and circumcision
A medicine of the soul, psychoanalysis cannot be ignored by psychiatry about circumcision. Indeed, Freud was the first to describe the ravages provoked by castration threats, of which circumcision.
On the side of perpetrators, infantile sexual mutilation is a symptom of neurotic guilt in which a disorder of the superego (provoked by the perpetrator’s own mutilation) reverts the natural feeling of love of sexuality into its contrary, so as to forbid it to the child and punish it. This unconscious (powerfully repressed) feeling of wanton, phantastical and compulsive hatred, carefully hidden behind “the good of the child”, is harmful and deadly. Infantile sexual mutilation is a particularly acute expression of the death drive, enacting a phantasy of virile delivery (deprivation of an envelope assumed to belong to fathers). Whether it is a pulse of perverse influence or obsessive control, we are facing a sadistic, criminal (serial circumcising) compulsion of repetition, all the more powerful as collective.
On the side of the victims, the symptoms rest on the powerful unconscious processes provoked by threats of castration: repression, repetition drive, denial, projection, non-admission of a symbol, characteristic of neurosis, perversion and psychosis.
“Paranoia is the process of knowledge.”
Jacques Lacan
“The first man who saw a camel
Ran away from this new object,
The second approached it,
The third man dared making
A leash for the dromedary.”
La Fontaine
“ and you make enemies for yourself...”
Morice Benin
So, paranoid psychosis is the main potential trait of character of the sexually maimed. How could it be otherwise since circumcision is a practice of exclusion? For instance, read thanks to the key of circumcision, the autoanalytic chapter of “Parano man” is the most extraordinary indictment of circumcision ever realized by a sexually mutilated psychiatrist (cf. chapter VI). Olievenstein ascribes the release of paranoiac delirium to a phenomenon of summation of unhappy events: “It’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back” 73, p. 87-88. Noticing that this mechanism looks just like that of the triggering of orgasm is essential. Indeed, in orgasm a mere nothing of additional stimulation provokes the acme of enjoyment. In other words, repression of sexuality is responsible for disease. Did Freud ever assert anything else? But Olievenstein does not incriminate circumcision whereas sexual mutilation is the worst of those occurrences. Like Freud, he is unable to understand that the repression of autosexuality is the genuine source of paranoia. Like Alice Miller and her school, he even dismisses the psychoanalytic explanation through repression of the homophilic drive – itself a consequence of the repression of autosexuality and very certainly enhanced by circumcision. And he does not see that traumatic aetiology and absence of resolution of the Oedipus complex are intimately bound. Precocious traumas and ill-treatments precisely ruin the necessary conditions of the good resolution of the Oedipus complex and, instead of favouring the formation of a superego capable of mastering pathogen drives and condemning their acting out, favour the unconscious repression rendering the subject unable of resisting an accumulation of setbacks. Olievenstein precisely rejects the idea, that he attributes to psychoanalysis, of “inborn” identity differences, whereas circumcision is traditionally considered as one of those differences constitutive of an alleged identity, practically “inborn” since transmitted from generation to generation. A beautiful example of totally unconscious denial.
Total alienation
In civilized societies that progressively abandon all form of corporal punishment, alienation of the individual is purely mental.
In civilizations that still apply corporal punishment: the death penalty for adults and, for children, the punishment of “the original sin” by circumcision, spanking, claps and so on, alienation of the individual to society is total, physical and mental.
In both cases, the individual is convinced of the guilt of “the original sin”, that is to say guilt bearing upon pleasure and the use of sex in general.
However, with those mutilated with the complicity of their parents, a massive denial of the existence of the endured loss, linked to emotional distress rendering the necessary challenge of the “social” norm extremely difficult, can be noted. A young non-intact friend, reading this chapter, gave me a magnificent example of this denial. This brilliant boy, applying for Harvard University, after reading my first version of the passage concerning the surface of skin lost to circumcision, so written: “90-120 cm2 of skin (2 times 4,5-5 cm by 10-12 cm of diameter)” told me very seriously: “It’s impossible!”, forcing me to dot my i’s. When I did, he smiled bitterly, happy of discovering one truth, bitter facing the extent of his loss.
Trusting and loving, children defend their parents and deny their faults by all means. The above denounced denial of reality is so reinforced by that, as radical, of the fault of the parental circumciser, to end up at the three interwoven lies of denial: “No, my parents are not criminals! To prove it, it is not mutilation; anyway, it is moral and hygienic.”
This mechanism is that of total alienation. The putting under terror of the child infantilizes them for life, rendering them unable to ever reach adulthood. Of course, they will reach their majority and will obtain the right to vote but they will never be able of genuine independence, that is to say of reaching the level of consciousness that would enable them to doubt the sayings and acts of their sires or hierarchic superiors, and revolt against them when necessary. In particular, they will systematically oppose every calling into question of the established order and will show themselves fierce censors.
The concept of infantilization for life allows understanding the resistance of the slaves against those who want to free them individually, outside a movement of collective revolt. Similarly, in developed countries, the excised young girls are very reluctant and resist to revolt against their excisers. During the trials, they show themselves indulgent and indicate little taste for the condemnation of their executioner. Sexual mutilation is mutilation within love, “for your own sake”. Not the parents but “the others” are responsible for misery. In another register, one must quote the example of these black academics yearning for roots who, once obtained impressive academic titles, hurry going back to their country of origin in order to be excised! Here again, the weight of the community oppresses the individual who never really reaches the independence of adulthood. In such a context, “the other”, the one who is not cut, the foreigner, is the guilty one (in French “guilty” is: “coupable”, which also means: liable to be cut). So, the aim of the elite inventor of sexual mutilation is perfectly achieved. Its domination is enhanced through shifting its own guilt upon the foreigners, who become the phobic object of the collective psycho-neurosis.
A typical symptom of this denial is the claim of the majority of American activists against infant circumcision for the right of adults to circumcision. Against that appalling pretence, one must say and repeat that there is no more right to circumcision than to the amputation of an arm or leg. There is, on the contrary a duty of the physician to refuse such demands.
Indeed, suspected of unfairness, the other, the stranger, will have to endure the projection of the responsibility non-ascribed to the parents. They will suffer bitter and excessive proclivity to distrust and claim, and immoderate recrimination about as varied as surprising things. The circumcised will easily be offended. He will have a tendency to take badly the slightest intrusion into his universe. This protest is wholly justified as for its primary cause deeply buried inside the unconscious. Its mainspring is exceedingly powerful; it is the alliance of the three fundamental impulses: impulse for survival, sentimental impulse and moral impulse that clamour as much for the right not to be mutilated as for this not having to mutilate one’s own children. Women and foreigners above all, taken as witnesses because they are unharmed, become, at the slightest opportunity, the privileged target upon which the accusations to charge mother and father are projected. So, if their parental image remains intact, martyrs of infantile sexual mutilation make themselves unbearable. This tendency to psychosis can only be contained through severe social control.
This control is not always present. In most democracies, the “foreigners” whom we spoke of are trusting like children towards their circumcising parents. They do not have the slightest idea of the violence induced by sexual mutilation. Norway happily is and exception. In the land of Vikings, one does not fear informing oneself in matter of piracy and criminal statistics collect ethnical origin. This is how the Norwegians made sure that piracy against the child generates piracy against women; 60% of the rapes are committed by 2% of the population that are circumcised .
May it be inductive or induced, the psychosis generated by sexual mutilation expresses itself in devastating wars. Out of the ten genocides of modern times, nine implied sexually maimed on one side at least. Circumcising countries are three to four times more often in war than others, the death penalty is twice more frequent in them and they are the only ones to excise women (cf. Annex IV). This link between warlike temper and circumcision has been observed since antiquity; Moses, a fierce opponent to circumcision (cf. Chapter V), was the first to report it:
“The duration of our journey… had been of 38 years. At that time, the whole warlike generation had disappeared…” (Deuteronomy, 4: 14)
The psychoanalyst Moisés Tractenberg affirms:
“Another psychological consequence of early circumcision is that it imprints an aggressive and traumatic situation onto the mind of the newborn… The impossibility of processing such a tremendous infusion of inwardly focused aggression may lead, a posteriori, to the emergence of psychopathic and violent behaviour or, in many other cases, to the emergence of extreme masochistic behaviour.”
Tobie Nathan, ethno-psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, connects initiation through circumcision with the SS initiation .
- Psychiatry and circumcision
On the side of perpetrators, a recent march in psychiatric criminology diagnoses with the non-intact a collective and transgenerational Munchausen syndrome by proxy . In this syndrome, echoing to the works of Alice Miller, criminals, strongly united by the association of the whole ethnic group, acquire glory, power and empathy not only from the harm they inflict upon their victims but also from that they themselves endured from their own parents. This confers it an exceptional strength and a particularly fierce compulsion of repetition, backed by the here-above-seen denial of reality and reinforced by the collective character of the aggression. Connoisseurs of the Munchausen syndrome will object that in the original syndrome, the abuser conceal their crime. But as soon as the syndrome becomes collective, criminal concealment has all leisure to reverse itself in public display of the both received and inflicted mutilation, negated as such and boasted out as a symbol of collective identity discriminating the foreigner. Similarly, the compulsion to consult the physician cannot exist in infantile sexual mutilation where religion and tradition hold the place of medical authority. The psychoanalyst will remark that we are in the presence of reversal into the contrary of the forbidden sexual pleasure (autosexuality), transformed into pain supposed necessary to obtain love and esteem from the parents. Infantile sexual mutilation directly hits the guilty organ, for the greatest satisfaction of grand-parents.
If infantile sexual mutilation is the showiest signature of controlling madness when it succeeds at settling the tools of tyranny down within educative custom, societies where they linger are often paranoid societies, dangerous for themselves and other societies 71 (Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, Chad, Turkey of 1905, USA, etc…).
On the side of the victims, psychology and psychiatry report the multiple symptoms provoked by infantile sexual mutilation.
A fear of repetition of the trauma is noted 21 and, paradoxically (this is a split), a compulsion to repeat it on others, one’s own children especially 16, 21, 22, 23, 67. Everything happens as if children became criminals in their turn in order to condone better their parents’ act.
Unsuited reactions to aggression are noted: panic, rage, violence, suicidal behaviour and dissociation 21, 22, 67. As first noticed by an American nurse, sexually mutilated children are supersensitive to pain .
The rare non-whole aware of their loss feel shame, bitterness, anger and resentment. The unconscious majority is affected by a feeling of superiority over the “non-circumcised” – likely to find expression in a condescension occasionally tinged with compassion – and suffers from unconscious guilt.
Unconventional sexual behaviour, homophilia notably, is favoured through an unconscious fear (or hatred) of women provoked by the premature and brutal breaking off of the infant-mother bond 16, 21, 22, 67, lived like betrayal.
Circumcision at birth, setting about the child at the age where he is the most vulnerable, is a paedophobic and youthphobic symptom. Anglo-Saxon puritanism (circumcision in the first three days) seems to have wanted to outbid Judaism that waits the eighth day. Like the latter, it profits by the weakness of new mothers, violating their canine reflex (puerperal psychosis). The effects of the trauma are more deeply perturbing at this age inasmuch as the victims, violated in their innocence and abused in their trust, are totally deprived of defence and possibility of understanding 21, 22, , 86. However, the idea that circumcision at birth would not cause anguish of love loss or anguish of castration, expressed by Maimonides 24, can be traced even to Anna Freud . Apart from the today disproved hypothesis according to which newborns would only have a vegetative life, this idea is in complete contradiction with the existence of the unconscious, whose memory records everything. Freud indeed observed that phantasies may occur after the event, out of fixation about previous experiences.
Those unaware of emotional response praise post-operative “calm” in some victims. But mental experts 21, 22, 23, 67 speak of a state of dissociation and of post-traumatic stress disorders; this includes psychological dissociation at the time of the trauma, recurrence of frightening images (nightmares) and avoidance of situations which could prompt to recall the trauma.
Mothers are kept away from the operation room. The sometimes severe disruption of the infant-mother relationship (bonding, breast-feeding) is systematic: the child withdraws his trust and no longer looks his mother in the eyes 5.
Mental professionals regularly deal with victims of circumcision. All along his works, Freud attributes the origin of neurosis to a sexual trauma occurred in infancy. Even when, later on, he worded his theory of fantasy, he never abandoned this saying. He seems not to have believed his ears of his patients’ revelations and even, according to Alice Miller, to have denied his personal trauma due to his own seduction in childhood by a member of his family. Besides, we record that he denied the sexual value of the foreskin, either due to ignorance or to a denial of the trauma of his own circumcision:
“A man, after all, only has one leading sexual zone, one sexual organ, whereas woman has two: the vagina – the female organ proper – and the clitoris, which is analogous to the male organ.” ,
This does not impede him to decry circumcision without appeal:
“When our children come to hear of ritual circumcision, they equate it with castration.”
“... fear of castration is one of the commonest and strangest motives for repression and thus for the formation of neuroses. The analysis of cases in which circumcision though not, it is true, castration, has been carried out on boys as a cure or punishment of masturbation (a far from rare occurrence in Anglo-American society) has given our conviction a last degree of certainty.” ,
However, attacking a taboo, Freud handles it with kid gloves. The condemnation is toned down, indirect. Only its consequences condemn the thing. Similarly, he only very discreetly affirmed – in a footnote of a posthumous work 69 written in exile after the rise of Nazism – that circumcision is similar to threats of castration. Nevertheless, the sole fact of tolerating ritual, pseudo-medical or even cosmetic circumcision allows opprobrium to threaten the sexuality of the child (autosexuality), with serious consequence for the individual and collective psyche.
Freud’s report is sadly confirmed by the psychological tests performed by Cansever upon twelve young Turkish boys before and after their circumcision. A recent enquiry upon 1 577 Filipino boys asserts that 70% of those ritually circumcised and 51% of those who endured the medical procedure between 11 and 16 years old suffered PTSDs. Circumcision produces neurosis, prolifically. This report is attested by Doctor Bruno Bettelheim’s testimony:
“In Western society, circumcision is imposed on the defenceless child to whom it offers no definite advantage and for whom it is, consequently, undesirable and threatening…”
Leboyer’s is still more eloquent; he affirms that the psychological consequences of circumcision at birth make it worse than excision:
“Yes, whatever is done to stop the terrible practice of circumcision will be of tremendous importance.
There is no rational, medical reason to support it. It is done just as a habit with no one being aware of why it is done.
• And much worse, no one being aware of the deep implications and life-lasting effect. Once we remember that all that takes place during the first days of life, on the emotional level, shapes the pattern of all future reactions, we cannot but wonder why such a torture has been inflicted on the child. How could a being who has been aggressed in this way, while totally helpless, develop into a relaxed, loving, trusting person? Indeed he will never be able to trust anyone in life, he will always be on the defensive, unable to open up to others and to life.
There has been, recently, a large, international survey conducted by the World health organisation regarding what takes place, in Africa, with young women at the stage of puberty. The public opinion was stunned and revolted finding out the tortures and mutilations (removal of the clitoris and so on) inflicted.
The practice of circumcision is of exactly the same nature and level. And we call ourselves “rational and developed”!
At least these young women are conscious and they are told that it is a sort of test, an act of courage. Although in fact it is meant to make them submissive to men and insure that they will never challenge man’s power.
But there is no such consciousness in the newborn. The torture is experienced in a state of total helplessness that makes it even more frightening and unbearable. Yes, it is high time that such a barbaric practice comes to an end.
And the work you are doing is of immense value.”
We are in the presence of a psychoanalytical theory of infantile sexual mutilation as punishment that dares telling its name only within Victorian and puritan extremism: the “original” punishment of infantile sexuality. It is the hypocrite chastising of the one who says: “Do as I say, do not do as I do.” Consequently, it is only unconsciously felt by the child. The comparison is imperative with the punishment of autosexuality of girls or in non-circumcising families; the child with dark circles under the eyes is harshly punished, without a word since they are supposed to know what they are punished for. Of course the child can ever take conscience of the reason of the without motive punishment only by extraordinary hazard and he thinks his parents are unjust. The repression of autosexuality is a dangerous insanity.
The psychological damage of sexual mutilation finds its best illustration in multicultural families. Family psychologists faced with such cases are very embarrassed and speak of identity problems. By adopting such talk, they let themselves be trapped by the mutilators who paint in glowing colours the illusion of a superior identity that their victims stand to gain under the condition to endure mutilation. It frequently happens that a young family chooses not to mutilate. It may then occur that one or several adults of the mutilating family, terrorised in their infancy by sexual mutilation and having adopted, psychologically speaking, group identity rather than personal identity, find themselves brutally faced with the absence of resolution of their Oedipus complex, that is to say to their own sexual identity, unconscious – do we have to mention it. The child also may suffer from this problem.
The researcher in psychoanalysis economist and financial analyst raises the hypothesis that the 2007-2008 housing crisis in the United States corresponds to both the injustice and radical impossibility to make pay an excessive price to persons having been deprived at birth from an as fix as natural dwelling place.
II – OTHER MEDICAL ADVANTAGES
AND INCONVENIENTS
Approaching such a topic right after having spoken of the deshumanization provoked by infantile sexual mutilation has something indecent. Nevertheless, we shall do it in order not to give a too bad conscience to those who got caught into that trap.
I – Prophilaxy
A growing number of doctors dispute medical arguments in favour of peritomy.
Winberg and his Swedish colleagues overthrew the main argument of upholders of circumcision: infantile infection by urethral contamination (UTI) – besides easy to cure – does not occur when the intimacy of the mother-child couple is respected. The newborn is naturally immunized against family coli bacilli. Such infections mainly happen when the child, separated from his mother, is exposed to nosocomial contagion. Doctor Leboyer’s recommendations (cf. above) find here an unexpected echo.
Still about post-operative infections, the epidemic of meticillin resistant staphylococcus aureus hits non-intact new-borns 12 times more .
Violence calls for violence; one cannot fight debauchery by the violence of sexual mutilation. Anyhow, contrary to the rumour, circumcision seems glob-ally without incidence on STDs 5, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, , , , , and the prophylactic alibi does not hold. According to Laumann’s enquiry 19, upon 1470 subjects, the sexually maimed are at markedly greater risk for two STDs; they are 25 times more prone to chlamydia and twice more to herpes. For these two same diseases however, Cook’s enquiry 92 led upon 2776 subjects gives a neutral issue. It also indicates some protection of the non-whole for syphilis and gonorrhoea but they are more prone to genital warts. Towards remaining STDs, circumcision is neutral. The third important randomised statistical study 20, led in England, shows a notable indifference of STDs to circumcision status but it did not concern AIDS. Yet, except for AIDS and herpes, fighting infection is today unproblematic.
Both studies agree that the sexually maimed are relatively protected from AIDS but Talbott showed that prostitution, not the foreskin, is the great vector of the pandemic in Africa. The appalling extent of the pandemic of AIDS in Africa has, once more, favoured the making guilty of a foreskin decidedly a favourite scapegoat for epidemics of puritan phobia. For lack of integrating ethical and behavioural variables, statistic enquiries , , which showed an important (60% over one year, 50% over two years) reduction of the risk thanks to circumcision, however fascinating these results may be, are likely to be gravely misleading. The high price of the loss of all men’s foreskin is not warranted by these enquiries with hastily conclusions , and Appendix III. If one adds up genetic vulnerability and that provoked by the schistosoma mansoni , one is compelled to relativize the part of a foreskin that besides may not always be washed as it must be. The example of Japan (first world consumer of condoms) where STDs, and notably AIDS, are rare, proves the whole world that nothing replaces veritable hygiene or condoms. Cleaning the foreskin is much easier than nails or teeth and one does not pull out the latter to avoid brushing them. On the other hand, the non-intact’s reluctance to use condoms 23, 34 for cause of weak sensitivity of the glans would account for the extent of the AIDS epidemic in the United States and Africa. Circumcision of the major part of the population did not protect either the USA – the developed country where the epidemic made the more ravages – or Africa from AIDS. Now, if the scar is fragile, it is an open door for infections.
Genital warts caused by the human papilloma virus strike around 6% of the population. A study indicates that the circumcised are twice more prone to them.
As for penile cancer, it is extremely rare and its rate of mortality very low: 1/100 000 in the USA where most men are non-intact but only 0.82/100 000 in Denmark where very few men are sexually mutilated. But foremost, as asserted by the American Cancer Society , it is linked with lack of hygiene, smoking and risky practices. The loose living of a few ones should not provoke for the whole masculine population not only the loss of enjoyment but also the mortality and other accidents due to circumcision. The same reasoning accounts for cancer of the cervix sometimes ascribed to absence of circumcision, which is nowadays fought by the vaccine against papilloma virus.
The hygiene argument is the leitmotiv of ignorant who are, but for exception, ladies and the mutilated (the most often native of warm countries). It does not stand the fact that, in tropical countries, on one hand billions of men live with their foreskin , on the other hand, ethnic groups of circumcised and intact live side by side (Hutu and Tutsi, Luo and Kikuyu, South Africa). If the intact were worse off for it, it would be well known. That argument is all the more dangerous as it appears to be founded upon empirical knowledge deriving its strength from the antiquity of its practice – which managed to impress a few Westerners. Among military physicians, unlike their French, German, Italian, Japanese and Vietnamese counterparts, only those from Anglo-Saxon countries, influenced by puritanism, used it in order to impose the operation to young recruits. The hygienist myth tends towards accrediting the idea that circumcision is made for the good of the child. The true reason is much less blameless.
Ethic forbids mutilation for prophylactic motive. This rule is particularly true for an operation on a sexual organ but it is all the truer concerning children; they must not be victim of their elders’ sexual practices.
II – Repression of autosexuality
It is the veritable pseudo-medical argument, not only for the child but even for the military. Indeed, according to Kellog’s and others’ phantasy, autosexuality would be exhausting and render the troops unable for war.
III – Gastro-enterology
A Jewish gastro-enterologist recommends “Kasher” food as antispasmodic diet. Spasms would be reduced through avoiding ingestion of animal blood (meat and fish). Now, mutilated of the foreskin are victim of PTSDs entailing spasms of the colon (Freud endured coloscopy). So, at the difference of Christian cooking, the Jewish one picks the cloves of garlic into chicken or mutton legs, in order to facilitate the pouring out of blood. Here is the reason of the Jewish and Muslim cruelty in animal slaughtering. Torture of young children provokes torture to animals. The abolition of circumcision is a necessity for the living. Besides, one may wonder whether the spasms provoked by eating blood would not be a very healthy psychosomatic reaction to metzitzah, a kind of denunciation by the body making itself the advocate of the terrorized individual.
Moreover, psychoanalysis shows that the symptom moves and affects other parts of the body. It is not astonishing that the cutting off of the preputial conduct should entail troubles in the colon and anus. Freud declares the latter particularly erogenous with himself, against observations of sexual anatomy.
IV – Development of the child
Psychosomatic medicine reports that in repressive families, in which children are beaten, their maxillaries do not develop normally so that teeth overlap each other. Even practised on males only, sexual mutilation is part of the clinical picture of this symptom.
III – ETHICS, DEONTOLOGY, LAW
“The one who gives up an essential liberty for a fleeting and
uncertain security deserves neither security nor liberty.”
Benjamin Franklin
What then of the one who deprives innocent children of that liberty?
According to law and jurisprudence, circumcision (and its anaesthesia) by non-practitioners, attempting to physical integrity, is a matter for illegal exercise of medicine. This rule is not respected. Concerned about its prerogatives, the French medical Association obtained from the government the signing of the 6 January 1962 decree that lists a few acts reserved for physicians. Waxing is one of them but not circumcision. How not to see there the influence of Jewish religious?
If strictly medical arguments plead against circumcision, it is necessary to broaden the debate to elementary ethics that on one hand forbids amputation for preventive purpose on the other hand is loath to cosmetic or arbitrary mutilation on adults and reproves it bluntly on children.
Actually, keeping with the law that criminalizes mutilation (cf. chapter II), the French medical code of deontology opposes the operation:
“Article 41: No mutilating intervention can be practised without very serious medical motive and, except for emergency or impossibility, without the concerned person’s information and consent.”
“Article 43: The physician must be the defender of the child when he considers that the interest of their health is ill understood or ill cared-for by their relatives.”
Castration of the penis having fallen into disuse, the term castration is today reserved to the ablation of gonads. But certain cultures do not recognize the existence of the feminine phallus. In spite of the international humanitarian and social movement that rises more and more firmly against this monstrosity, they consider it a useless and even unhealthy snap of skin and, in the same way, deny all worth to the prepuce. We have demonstrated that this absence of taking into account essential parts of the human body rests on ignorance of sexual physiology. Therefore – but for strictly medical reasons – there is nothing abusive in speaking about castration and thus criminality, for the ablation of the functional organs that are the clitoris and prepuce. If circumcision is a symbol of castration, it is not a symbolic act but indeed effective castration of a noticeable part of the masculine sex. Excision and circumcision are the castration of the organs of so-called infantile sexuality (autosexuality).
Physicians have therefore an absolute duty to refuse circumcision for ritual, cosmetic or other non-medical purpose and to denounce circumcisions that could be prevented to authorities. A puritan medicine must not relay the circumcising compulsion and superstition . The French Ordre des médecins begins to worry about the deontological problem posed by the extension of the phenomenon .
The right of the child to bodily integrity must be respected. Sensible adults will choose keeping their foreskin, the physician will kindly dismiss the others, explaining them the functions of the organ and the interest of its preservation. For infantile sexual mutilation twists the sexes and wreaks havoc upon the minds. Those traditional ordeals are tortures, all the more horrific when their victims are children.
CONCLUSION
Four foreskins upon five in liberty on earth.
Why should the fifth prepuce be cut away at birth?
Hitting and circumcision are the two violent methods of education that are the norm in the Bible. Both have been proved harmful and are being abandoned. Posthectomy spread into Anglo-Saxon countries in the Victorian era and the first half of the twentieth century, through the guise of five entirely gratuitous presuppositions: autosexuality is harmful, the foreskin is dirty, the foreskin is useless, circumcision is painless, the newborn is insensitive to pain.
The demonstration of the wanton character of those assertions and the preceding arguments cast suspicion on members of the medical profession who gain substantial benefit from the operation (*) without care of the fact that circumcision is a heavily pervasive practice. Recent anatomical discovery confirms it is definite mutilation of a precious erogenous zone, necessary sheath of the glans. It is the castration of the masculine autosexual organ and, in the psychological field, a threat of castration. Consequently, the slight, debated and potential prophylactic advantages of circumcision are outweighed by the loss of enjoyment and the risks of the operation. But respectable physicians, reassuring themselves with superficially constructed statistics, do not seem to be able to place the authority of science against erratic dogmas. Nevertheless, American, Australian, Canadian and New-Zealand associations of paediatricians and obstetricians have published position statements against routine neonatal circumcision. As soon as 1971, the American academy of pediatrics declared:
“There are no valid medical indications for circumcision in the neonatal period.” ,
to take a more balanced position in 1999 (circumcision on request) but without mentioning Winberg’s suggestion in its bibliography (*). Recently (July 2000), the American medical association took a cautious distance, adopting the A.A.P.’s position and recommending training and previous family information to its members.
Preston 49 remarks that medical arguments in favour of circumcision do not imply a benefit but the prevention of little likely dangers which can be reduced by mere hygiene. Circumcising is a frightened and rigid behaviour, the expression of a neurotic desire: reducing, punishing and forbidding sexual pleasure. The foreskin must not be treated, castratist impulse must be. It has led to epidemics of tonsillectomies, adenoidectomies (vegetations) that actually have the same traumatic value of symbolic equivalent of castration. It is relevant that these operations have systematically been performed on children; adults would not let themselves be pushed so easily.
The quasi-systematic practice of episiotomy in French maternity hospitals (unlike England where it largely stepped backwards), in order to limit perineal laceration, seems to result, for the great number, in inverse effect . We are in front of iatrogenic sexual mutilation.
The Medicine Nobel Prize winner Georges Wald, though Jewish, brings overabundance to our utterance:
“For it is a barbarous thing to meet a newly born infant with the knife, with a deliberate mutilation. And the part that is removed is not negligible; it has clear and valuable functions to perform. Not circumcising a boy will not only spare him a brutal violence as he enters life; it will promise him a richer existence. And that not only because the possession of a foreskin will increase his genital sensitivity and make possible more satisfactory and pleasurable sexual activity; but also because of the consideration… that the foreskin is the female element in the male… For every child is born i