Male Circumcision is Not Genital Mutilation

One evening I was dining with my anthropologist friend Natalie and I expressed just how viscerally and zealously I abhor the African practice of female genital mutilation. As a male champion of women’s rights and a lover of the female form I believe that there is no reason to hack off a pubescent girl’s clitoris and/or labia other than to make the act of intercourse painful, to deprive women of their inherent sexual freedom and to oppress them as a permanently subservient class. I think that female genital mutilation is such a patently wrong act, a reification of misogynist and phallocentric violence that should be prohibited and criminalized. Anyone who practices female genital mutilation is a menace to society, and our police forces should lock them up behind bars.

Natalie threw a wrench into my crusade for the sanctity of the clitoris; “But Zac, aren’t you Jewish?”

“Yeah, so? What’s that have to do with anything?”

She looked down in the direction under the table and cleared her throat.


At that moment I realized the hypocrisy of my zeal. I was so humbled and dressed down that I concluded that when speaking of subjects as delicate as a culture’s practices pertaining to the sexual organs – especially those of cultures that are not one’s one – perhaps one should generally abstain from casting matters in sweeping judgments of “right” and “wrong”. I’m not saying that one shouldn’t criticize the genital practices of foreign cultures; sometimes one must. But perhaps we should limit our analysis to those things that we can prove at least somewhat scientifically and avoid subjective critiques of metaphysics and postmodern gender theory.

My friend Natalie isn’t the only one who thinks that my righteous indignation against genital mutilation should apply to both genders. There is in fact a growing faction of feminists, human rights activists and lovers of the natural male form want to broaden the definition of assault to include those who circumcise the foreskin. The self-proclaimed “Intactivists” advocate for the preservation of “genital integrity” and an end to the practice of male circumcision – or “male genital mutilation” as they prefer to call it.


One such group known as the Bay Area Intactivists values the foreskin as a nerve-rich portion of the male genital organ. From their perspective, male circumcision is means of denying to a male and his future partner(s) the potential for maximum sexual satisfaction.


Other groups such as Intact America are organizing the opposition to male circumcision from comparatively more scientific, rationally more compelling grounds. If you read their literature, you get the sense that they represent a faction within the American medical community who oppose the practice under the logic that 1. the act of circumcision can be painful; 2. it can lead to infections and other harmful complications, and 3. removing the foreskin is not medically necessary.


Now the combined Intactivists of San Francisco have garnered enough signatures to put a referendum on the ballot which extend the definition of assault to those who circumcise males under the age of 18. If the proposition passes, the circumcising of a male’s foreskin would be a misdemeanor offense punishable by up to a $1,000 fine or up to one year in jail. The consent of the underage male in question would be irrelevant; a male could only consent to having his foreskin removed if he is a legal adult. There would be no religious exemptions.

The movement to utilize the compelling force of criminal law to prohibit male circumcision is not without foundation. After all, since federal legislation was passed in 1996, Section 116 of the U.S. Code has defined whomever “circumcises, excises, or infibulates the whole or any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years” as a perpetrator of assault. The Intactivists make a reverse-sexist argument that by creating a set of legal protections for women – but not extending those same protections to men – the continued legality of male circumcision is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

As much as this blogger disagrees with the claims of the Intactivists, I am equally critical of the campaign by the Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union who are arguing against the San Francisco ballot measure in terms of religious freedom. If a federal judge were to strike down a municipal ordinance banning male circumcision because it is a violation of the Jewish people’s freedom to exercise our religion, then that same judge would have to uphold the right of West African Muslims to practice female genital mutilation on the same grounds. This would be an argument of cultural relativism; e.g. “Yes, it is a barbaric practice, but we live in a barbaric society in which cruelty and torture are woven into the fabric of our culture.” This is not the argument that the defenders of male circumcision ought to take.

If defenders of circumcision are going to make a valid argument based on moral logic and reason, one must contend why the practice itself is not just a tolerable tradition with religious significance but actually a positive good with secular and tangible benefits. And moreoever, it doesn't hurt to deconstruct the logic for the argument against circumcision.

From what I gather after a comprehensive reading of their literature, the moral logic of the Intactivist movement runs as following:

1. Female circumcision is a cruel, inhumane practice which can cause disease and pain over the course of the victim’s lifetime. (Given)
2. The only reason why cultures practice female circumcision is to make the act of sexual intercourse excruciatingly painful and undesirable. (Given)
3. Therefore, female circumcision is a form of assault (1, 2)
4. Gender is only a social construct, there is no substantive difference between men and women, in fact, the binary characterization of human beings as either men or women is a form of gendered chauvinism. (Given)
5. Therefore, male circumcision is also a cruel, inhumane practice (1, 4)
6. Therefore, the only reason why Western culture practices male circumcision is to make the act of sexual intercourse excruciatingly painful and undesirable (2, 4)
7. Therefore, male circumcision is a form of assault (5, 6) Q.E.D.

The crucial fallacy in this logical argument is postulate number 4. Though traditional gender roles and identities might be a mere social construction, it is more than fair to say that there is, in fact, at least one significant difference between the vast majority of individuals born as males or female; generally speaking, males are endowed with penises and females are endowed with vaginas. In light of this fundamental distinction, the removal of the clitoris and/or the labia should be banned while the removal of the foreskin should remain legal because there is in fact a very compelling case to be made that male circumcision and female “circumcision” are two very different operations performed on two very different organs which ought to be distinguished as such under law.

Intactivists’ Sophistry #1: “Surgically removing part of a baby boy’s penis causes pain.”

If one were to practice circumcision with the same crude instruments and techniques as say, the Dogon tribe of Mali, then it is indeed an unnecessary painful procedure. The Dogons gather all of the uncircumcised boys 12 years old and up and to have the village blacksmith remove the boys’ foreskins with a homemade blade which is not very sharp by Western standards – and they perform the operation without any sort of anesthetic. Perhaps this argument over pain might be valid if Jews in America were to practice circumcision in a way similar to the Dogons; if that were the case, maybe circumcision should be prohibited under law.

The modern Diasporic Jews of America, however, have developed a method of circumcising our boys at the age of eight days when the nerves of the appendage are not as sensitive as a pubescent boy and we utilize various means of anesthesia which all but eliminate pain. The most effective of these is nerve-block applied locally with a shot to the penis – a remarkably effective anesthetic which renders the applied area completely numb. Rabbinical student Josh Stanton and Dr. Anne Epstein write: “While the idea of an injection to the penis sets teeth on end, it is as close to pain-free as we can get in this sort of minor surgery… It hardly hurts.”

Just about any operation involving the cutting of flesh – even an operation as minor as a tonsillectomy or the removal of an ingrown toenail – would be painful without anesthesia. But if the prick of a needle was reason to ban a medical procedure on the basis of pain, then banning circumcision would make no more sense than banning tetanus or polio vaccinations. In this day and age of modern anesthetics, the contention that circumcision should be banned because the procedure causes pain holds little ground.

Intactivists’ Sophistry #2: “Male circumcision creates immediate health risks and can lead to serious complications.”

Indeed, a botched circumcision could lead to an infection of the penis or worse. In cultures that perform this operation with crude tools and unsanitary conditions – such as the Dogon blacksmiths with their homemade iron blades – yes, the removal of a boy’s foreskin does sometimes lead to more serious complications including not only local infections but hemorrhage, scarring, difficulty urinating, loss of part or all of the penis, and even death. According to the Center for Disease Control, between 2% and 8% of all circumcisions performed in African cultures lead to an infection or more serious complications.

However, such fears are essentially unwarranted in the developed West because we utilize modern medical practices, the doctors and mohels who perform circumcisions are rigorously trained, and we perform the operation in a sanitary environment. Even if the most basic aspect of male circumcision remains the same, the cleanliness of our foreskin-cutting arenas, our medical instruments and our practices make a world of a difference. Local infection is still nevertheless possible – but then again, even having your bellybutton pierced can lead to an infection if it is not done by the right person in the right place the right way.

Whether an adequately trained, certified mohel conducts a circumcision in a synagogue or if a bona fide doctor circumcises a baby boy in a hospital, the risk of immediate health risks with serious complications is extremely small. According to the CDC, the rate of complications due to male circumcision in the United States is around 0.2% of all cases – in other words, just about negligible.

Indeed, the medical Intactivists are correct when they argue that male circumcision can cause infections – there is that 1 case in 500 in which the circumcision does lead to a complication – but that fact cannot be adequately evaluated in isolation. In a study of circumcised boys in Washington State conducted over the course of a decade, it was found that for every circumcision complication there were 6 urinary tract infections prevented. Circumcision also reduces the chance of contracting human papillomavirus (and thereby penile cancer), genital herpes and HIV.

Intactivists’ Sophistry #3: “Male circumcision is unnecessary” because “Claims that circumcision prevents HIV have repeatedly been proven to be exaggerated or false. Only abstinence or safe sex, including the use of condoms, can prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS.”

At this point in the evolution of homo sapiens, the continued possession of a foreskin actually poses a risk to the health of males and those who have sex with them. The main reason why not circumcising a boy creates a health risk is that this vestigial structure creates a cavity which can retain smegma which can sit and fester, inviting bacterial and viral infection. Uncircumcised males are more likely to contract and transmit HIV than those who are circumcised, largely because the smegma which can be retained in the foreskin allows for the transmission of the virus to and from vaginal fluids. In addition, the foreskin has considerable surface area which renders the penis more susceptible to minor trauma and ulcerative disease – thus increasing the chance of transmitting the HIV virus.

A 2000 study of the relationship between male circumcision and heterosexual transmission of HIV in Africa noted “a substantial protective effect of male circumcision on risk for HIV infection”; finding that the risk of HIV infection in circumcised men was 44% lower than those who were uncircumcised. The strongest association between circumcision or lack thereof and HIV infection rates was found in high risk populations (e.g. patients at STD clinics) for whom the adjusted relative risk was 71% lower for those who had been circumcised. Another study conducted in 2003 found that the risk of HIV infection in circumcised men was 42% lower than their uncircumcised counterparts.

More macro-level epidemiological studies indicate that the practice of circumcision is not limited to the individual men but also the population as a whole; after all, if a man has contracted HIV due to his smegma-retaining foreskin, he is then liable to transmit the virus to his sexual partner(s), who are then liable to transmit the virus to their sexual partners, etc. African and Asian countries in which less than 20% of the male population has been circumcised have HIV infection rates several times greater than comparable African and Asian countries in which more than 80% of the male population has been circumcised. Of course, there are many other variable including religious mores and sexual norms which also vary among these countries, but the link between relatively high rates of circumcision and relatively low rates of HIV infection is so strong that the value of the practice as a significant factor in reducing disease transmission cannot be ignored.

I have heard a number of objections to this kind of analysis; namely that such studies have only been performed in underdeveloped Third World nations and not the developed West. These skeptics contend that since Americans and Europeans have better hygiene than the typical African, since we generally practice monogamy, wear condoms and bathe regularly we do not need to bother with circumcision.

Such First World-centrics are faulty in their reasoning, particularly because the studies linking the lack of circumcision to higher rates of HIV infection found the greatest correlation in the most at risk populations – precisely those persons in the United States who are the most likely to have sex with multiple or even concurrent partners, those who do not wear condoms, and those who have the worst hygiene. The mere fact that one might reside in the Global North does not separate that person from the basic facts of virology which tend to be associated with the Global South. Likewise, if circumcision has been found to be an effective method of minimizing the HIV epidemic amongst homo sapiens in sub-Saharan Africa, absent any fundamental anatomical or physiological distinction between Americans and Africans, there is only reason to conclude that that practice remains effective amongst homo sapiens in the United States.

I have also heard the argument made that circumcision is unnecessary for homosexual men, because the studies cited above have only demonstrated a link between circumcision and reduced prevalence of HIV amongst heterosexual men. This Intactivist argument maintains that for a parent to decide that they will circumcise their boy to protect him from HIV and AIDS is to make a heteronormative assumption that their child is in fact straight, and that if their boy turns out to be gay then they will be deprived of sexual satisfaction due to a societal bias towards heterosexuality.

This Intactivist sophistry is not only spurious in its logic but quite dangerous in its potential for giving homosexuals a false sense of security. Though the possession of a foreskin is most likely to transmit disease via the mixing of smegma and vaginal fluids – which is exclusive to heterosexual intercourse, that is not the only reason why possession of the foreskin increases the chance of disease transmission. Disease can also be transmitted because the foreskin is more easily susceptible to tearing. One must also take bisexuality into consideration; an uncircumcised man could very easily receive the HIV virus by trading fluids with an HIV+ woman and later on transmit the virus to a male sexual partner (or the other way around) explicitly due to his possession of his original foreskin.

Read Intact America’s sophistry again: “Only abstinence or safe sex, including the use of condoms, can prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS.” This is more or less the logic of abstinence-only sex education; “if you don’t have sex, then you can’t get a sexually-transmitted disease; therefore don't wear a condom”; “if you always wear a condom, then you can’t get a sexually-transmitted disease; therefore you don’t need to be circumcised.” The problem with this logic is that uncircumcised men do have sex, sometimes they use condoms, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they have sex with a condom but the condom breaks, etc. Even the highest-quality prophylactics can fail - that is why instead of relying on the effectiveness of one or two disease prevention methods, it is best to employ as many as possible.

Intact America is telling the truth when its literature states that circumcision is not the only way to prevent the transmission of HIV, that abstaining from sex or practicing safe sex are alternative ways of preventing disease transmission. But they're not telling the whole truth. “Male circumcision is unnecessary”; indeed, for a practitioner of celibacy there might not be much of a benefit, but for everyone else it remains a very sound, particularly effective means of reducing the transmission of disease. There is no silver bullet which can by itself inoculate an individual from HIV/AIDS, no one is claiming that circumcision can by itself rid the world of this deadly epidemic. Rather, medical proponents of circumcision are contending that it is but one of many practices which ought to be maintained – along with fidelity to one’s partner, safe sex, regular testing – in order to defend oneself from STD transmission.

Likewise, the Intactivist movement is making a grave mistake in trying to ban male circumcision under the guise of public health; their pseudo-scientific case to ban the practice is so full of misleading language, cherry-picked half-truths and outright falsehoods that it cannot be taken seriously. Perhaps there are other reasons why a parent might reasonably decide to opt to not circumcise their male child – religious, sexual, aesthetic or otherwise – but the health of the child is not one of them. Male circumcision is not genital mutilation; it is a sound medical procedure which is safe, which does not cause undue pain, and it is still a very effective component of our society's efforts to maintain men's health and curb the spread of disease in America and throughout the world.

Water and Sanitation and Extraterrestrial Amphibians and Penises on the Dogon Plateaus

Mali is home to one of the few most isolated and anthropologically fascinating cultures in the world: the Dogon tribe. Originally the Dogons were a paganist tribe which hailed from southern Mali where they worshipped the stars and extraterrestrial beings. That is not a misprint; the culture of the Dogon is predicated on the belief that they were visited by amphibious humanoids called Nommos hailing from a planet orbiting the Po Tolo - which in Dogon is the name of the smallest known seed. Dogon tradition espouses that Po Tolo is white in color, and that it is the heaviest star because it is made out of sagala - an uncomprehensibly heavy metal. This has also taught that the miniscule star rotates on its axis, that it has an elliptical orbit with a companion star as the focus, and that the period of Po Tolo's orbit is 50 years.

This star which does in fact exist is known to Westerners as Sirius B, an ultra-dense white dwarf orbiting Sirius A so small and so distant that it is invisible to the naked eye - technology to photograph this star did not exist until 1970. The period of Sirius B's orbit is now known to durate for exactly 50.04 +/- 0.09 Earth years. Centuries before Copernicus and Galileo, the Dogon also knew of the heliocentric solar system in that the planets revolve around the Sun, the rings of Saturn and the four major moons of Jupiter. All of this was taught by a culture which otherwise has very little history of mathematics or astronomy, no telescopic technology, and has for the past thousand years chosen to live in isolation from their neighboring tribes.

Dogon belief holds that there is a third star in the Dog Star system known as Emma Yar, and that this star is circled by a single planet from which the Nommos hail. To date, even Western astronomers equipped with the Hubble Telescope and the most sensitive photographic technology ever known to man have yet to discover a third member of the Sirius star system.



According to legend the Dogon were once the brothers of the Bambara tribe. But in the 12th century intertribal relations soured when the Bambaras and Fulanis adopted Islam en masse, because the Qur'an explicitly teaches that the enslavement of other Muslims within the Dar al-Salaam is haram, but that it is perfectly acceptable to enslave the pagans and idolaters of the Dar al-Harb. And so in the 12th century the Bambaras and the horseback-riding Fulani tribe began to raid Dogon villages for slaves. Over the next few hundred years the Dogons fled their ancestral homeland, completely relocating their society to the central plateaus by around 1490. As hostile as the terrain was, upon high vantage points accessible only by solitary mountain passes Dogon warriors with spears and slings could easily defend their villages from Bambara and Fulani raids.

The central plateaus were not such welcoming terrains either, for they were already occupied by the Tellem people. Very little is known about this ancient culture except for the dwellings they left behind in the caves and crevices of the cliffs. Judging by the dimensions of these stone and mud dwellings, the Tellem must have been a very diminutive people akin to Pygmies. Apparently the Tellem also lived in the plateaus because they sought sanctuary from hostile tribes – archaeologists have excavated so few of these huts because they are extremely difficult to reach even with 21st century rock-climbing equipment. Archaeologists believe that a millennia ago the climate of this region was so much more humid and lush that the Tellem might have been able to climb up sturdy vines to their dwellings - Dogon legend maintains that their predecessors had wings and sticky feet like geckos which allowed them to scale the cliffs.



The flightless Dogons have been unable to inhabit the cliff dwellings of the Tellem, but in the roughly eight centuries that they have been living on the flat tops of the plateaus they have built their own villages, most of them a good day’s hike from any road and accessible only by the dexterous foot, and nothing too heavy to be carried by humans can make it in or out. The style of the Dogon huts is fairly approximate to what they were building a millennia ago back when they coexisted with Bambaras and Fulanis in what is now southern Mali, but due to the hardships of this rugged terrain there are a few main differences. In my own Minianka village, logs and mud constitute 95 percent of all construction materials, but high up on top of the plateaus there are no riverbeds where one can find ample supplies of mud, there are very few trees large enough to make sturdy skeletons. In Dogon Country all structures of any sort were made primarily out of rocks fit together with no mortar. Centuries ago there were more than enough rocks large enough to build a decent hovel, but now that the population has greatly expanded they have to import dynamite to blast apart boulders into usable sizes.



Islam is gradually making headway especially with young Dogon men who have lived in the cities, but up on the plateau, most Dogons continue their traditional animist practices as though monotheism never happened. Here an elderly holy man manages a rock garden which he uses to predict the future.


He is drawing designs in the beds of sand accompanied by the arrangement of sticks, pebbles and cowry shells – which according to Dogon belief are posing questions to the all-knowing fox. In the middle of the night, the fox is expected to come and alter the designs and arrangements ever so slightly, and only the holy man pictured here can decipher the fox’s answers.

Dogon Country has all of its own special development problems. To begin, water access is prohibitively difficult; and obviously there are no bodies of water on top of these barren rock faces, there is very little precipitation, and the Dogons have built their villages upon cliffs which purposefully arduous to reach. The only way for Dogons to eat, drink, wash and bathe is to send their women down to streams in the valleys many kilometers away from the village, and every time a woman draws water she then has to climb many kilometers back up those very steep paths with a heavy bucket of water on her head. In some villages, we’re talking about an entire morning's trek just to draw a single bucket of water. Of course the water in these streams is most likely contaminated with feces and giardia cysts, so right from the bat the Dogons are suffering from more water-borne illnesses than other Malian tribes. Since the sparse water supplies are most immediately needed for drinking and cooking, the Dogons almost as a rule have insufficient water for hygiene purposes, and as a result they suffer from more prevalent trachoma, dysentery, etc. relative to comparable Malian societies. Water is so scarce for human needs alone, thus raising livestock and growing garden crops is exponentially more onerous. And since women have to spend so many additional hours merely drawing water, they have less time than even overworked Minianka women to engage in lucrative economic activity or gain an education.



Over the past half century missionaries and NGOs have been disproportionately active in the most isolated and underdeveloped cranny of Mali trying to help the Dogons achieve the basic necessities of infrastructure. For example, a French group paid the men of one village to carry cement to the base of the plateau so that they could build a catchment basin underneath a spot where rainwater drips down from the cliffs. Their cistern has done a decent job of catching water, but somehow it also caught frog eggs and fish spawn – yes, somehow fish spontaneously generated in an artificial inland pool uphill from any other body of water. So that particular village has more water now, but it’s so polluted with concentrated frog and fish feces that it is even less potable than that from the stream many kilometers away. The women of that village still have to go to the stream to draw water three times a day.

When it comes to my line of work, there’s only so much that can be realistically done. The water table is so far low under impermeable rock - the lowest point of some villages is multiple hundreds of meters above - that hand-dug wells are not a possibility. Even in the valleys below the cliffs, the only way that one could possibly reach the water table is by drilling a well with mechanized drilling tools which are themselves extremely heavy and difficult to transport by hand up and down mountains to the isolated valleys where they could be of any use to Dogon villages. In so many words, the equipment needed to simply drill a well is so expensive that the Dogon could never finance a well project on their own. But even if an NGO parachutes in and drills a well in the valley to provide a particular village with a source of potable water, the women of that village still have to make their arduous hike down to the valleys and back up to use any drilled wells or hand-pumps.

Even worse than the water access problem, there is an unavoidable waste management problem inherent in living on top of a plateau. Even the mud brick “traditional nyegens” built in my own village are not practical technologies in Dogon Country – they’re living on top of solid rock, and short of a ready supply of dynamite it is impossible to dig a latrine pit by hand. Technically, one could theoretically blast a latrine pit with dynamite, but dynamite is already so expensive that the impoverished Dogons would never use it for anything other than to provide rocks for their own houses.

When Peace Corps Volunteers come into these villages to live for two years, PC Bamako has to first come in and ensure that our own housing needs are adequate - and Peace Corps regulations entail that doing as the Dogon villagers do and pooping out by the pooping rocks is quite inadequate. That means that if a Volunteer is going to live in a Dogon village, PC Bamako usually has to come in beforehand and build these revolutionary new “toilet” things just so that we can live there ourselves. It is next to impossible to dig a latrine pit down into the solid rock plateaus, so they have to take rocks and cement and “dig” up. Instead of digging a latrine pit, they build up a large one-story basin which serves as an above-ground latrine pit, and so our raised nyegens in Dogon Country are on the 2nd floor.