LogFAQs > #913180367

wwinterj25 posted...

Last time I looked girls don't have a foreskin.

What do you think the clitoral hood is?

Moving away from the term "female circumcision" in favour of "female genital mutilation," though, is more a matter of recognizing that a whole lot more is done to the female genitals than just what would technically qualify as circumcision. Clitorectomy, sewing the vagina shut, chopping off labia... "Circumcision" could probably still be used as a blanket term, but "genital mutilation" clearly covers everything without having to redefine it. In addition to generally being more invasive, it's typically seen as being worse than male genital mutilation because it's practiced purely for the purposes of keeping women sexually oppressed and subservient (they're not particularly likely to choose to have sex if sex is unenjoyable or painful or prevented by being sewn shut), whereas male genital mutilation is predominantly a matter of tradition (even having come into fashion as a puritanical anti-sex thing in the US).

For the record, neither are remotely okay, and nobody should be doing anything irreversible to babies' genitals (or any other body part, for that matter) unless it's medically necessary. Acting like the difference in common terminology is an example of men's oppression, though, is ignoring any of the details on the matter beyond the superficial similarities (namely that they both involve surgically altering genitals without consent). The actual details of what's going on are more complex than that, so you aren't going to get anywhere playing the victim (especially with the number of happily-cut men who will say "I don't feel oppressed" if you try to take that approach).

wwinterj25 posted...

AltOmega posted...

nurses find it absolutely disgusting when dealing with uncut patients.

Tell me more.

Presumably, they don't like dealing with smegma, which is going to be inevitable when dealing with uncut patients. In practice, it's not exactly hard to clean a dick regardless of how much foreskin is there, and viewing a bit of smegma as being worse than a similar quantity of feces, urine, vomit, or pus is a consequence of how normalized circumcision is, rather than anything inherently more unsanitary about it.