Genital Mutilation American Style

The "cancer prevention" argument would have greater persuasive appeal if applied to breast cancer in women. The American Cancer Society estimates that 44,000 women will die of breast cancer in 1998. This same year, by comparison, an estimated 200 men, most of them beyond 70 years of age with poor hygiene habits, will die of penile cancer. If amputating healthy tissue is an antidote to cancer, it would make far more "sense" to routinely perform radical mastectomies on adolescent girls and remove the breast buds of all newborn females than to amputate the foreskin of male infants to prevent such comparatively paltry numbers. But nobody in their right mind would suggest this as appropriate therapy... except when applied to infant boys, that is. Go figure.

The HIV scare is another in the continuing effort of circumcision advocates to view their favorite "surgery" as a hedge against disease. Despite the fact that the United States is a "circumcising country," where the majority of sexually-active men are cut, we nevertheless have the highest HIV infection rate among advanced industrialized countries. In fact, the U.S. has an infection rate 3.5 times greater than the next leading country, or 16 cases per 100,000 population. None of the other advanced industrialized countries circumcise routinely. France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, Finland and Japan all have near-zero infant circumcision rates, yet their AIDS infection rate goes from 3.5 cases per 100,000 down to 0.2, respectively. Consequently, not only is it clear that circumcision does not prevent HIV or AIDS, the infection rates suggest that circumcision may actually contribute to HIV infection by depriving the penis of the natural immunological protection of the foreskin. But rest assured, as soon as medical science debunks these latest "benefits" for mass mutilations, the pro-circumcision industry will invent new reasons and new diseases for continued use of their favorite treatment of nonexistent ills.

Such persistence in the face of overwhelming evidence against routine circumcision should alert us to the fact that irrational, more emotional and compulsive forces may also be at work. These forces have been identified and were alluded to earlier: the seldom mentioned psycho-sexual pleasure derived by some, possibly many, circumcising physicians.

The notion that the ranks of circumcising doctors harbor what have been termed "circumsadists" and "circumfetishists," comes as a shock to many parents who never considered the notion. They realized they were being pressured insistently by their pediatrician or urologist to have the procedure done, but it never entered their minds that darker motives may have been at issue. "The idea that we turned our son over to some pervert who got off sexually by handling and cutting our baby's penis just makes me sick," said one mother when learning of this possibility. "I had no idea such people existed."

Few people outside the medical profession do realize this. As with the Catholic church and the pedophiles lurking within the folds of its priesthood, the medical profession has coalesced around a wall of lies and silence that allows these sadists to do their work in obscure anonymity.

One person who does recognize their prurience is John Erickson. He has done extensive work on this subject and maintains a web site dedicated to the Memory of the Sexually Mutilated Child. "It would never occur to most parents that the doctor's real reason for wanting to circumcise their child might be sexual," he says. "They hold their doctors in such high esteem that this whole area of surgical sexual perversion never comes up."

Carla Miller, founder of Patients in ARMS, a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to reforming medical standards and eradicating patient abuse, who herself was sexually mutilated by an American doctor, has also given serious thought to this issue. She echoes the words of others who likewise have been victimized. "Like rapists, serial killers, and other sociopaths, serial circumcisers probably get a chemical high from doing the circumcision. The very act of shredding and mutilating a baby's penis with knives, clamps, electrocautery guns, or fingers affects the circumciser's brain chemistry like a drug, as irresistible as heroin. Carving, crushing, burning, and slicing a baby's penis, reducing it to gore, getting his hands covered with penis blood, and filling his ears with shrieks and screams of agony and terror are the potent elixir the serial circumciser needs to make himself feel alive."