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Me: after bukit timah hill my mother says I walk like I just got bersunat
Jabir on Male Genital Mutilation: um. a nicer word would be khatan
and usually people just say sunat
i wrote a eulogy to my foreskin on lj
don't rub it
i read that eulogy for a gay poetry event
it's a symbolic circumcision for girls. i hear they just prick it
it being the clitoris
幸福論 - on foreskins
"i remember the day it was cut away from me. i was all of 5 years old, in the prime of puerile innocence. it was a joyous event, relatives were called over, food and drink aplenty. i found company in my cousins, and whilst they served to diminish some amount of apprehension, i never totally forgot what the day was really about.
they had said it was for the better, that it was cleaner (and cleanliness is closer to godliness). everyone had to get it done, even the girls i had heard, though theirs was a quieter affair i never could find out much about, and no one questioned the logic of cleanliness. who wants to be dirty?
i had seen what it would look like. halim had showed his to me in the toilet, the year before. we were good friends then, and even went to the same cubicle during toilet breaks. i was always eager to examine it closely; it was so different from mine. the exposed bulbous head almost shiny and so smooth to touch, the inset rim before it joins the shaft a ring of gleaming red. there was a certain grandness about it, in stark contrast to my enclosed, pale brown one, and halim's seeming indifference (he had it done neonatally, without the fancy of ceremony) only served to fascinate me further. i would often toy with it then... but i digress.
yet beyond the aesthetic and rite-of-passage-esque ascension it would bestow, i knew it would hurt and it terrified me.
it was after lunch and there was still no sign of him. the doctor was late. given my disquiet, and not wanting to have to stop playing, this was immeasurable relief. i even managed to somehow convince myself that he wasn't coming after all, that it'd get postponed. or something.
but he came in the evening, i heard someone announcing it, and the announcement being echoed around. it came like a bolt, striking through my heart. i thought he wasn't coming anymore! i looked around, but not in time to catch him going up the stairs to prepare, in my parents' bedroom.
the surgery itself went by painlessly though. i was under local anaesthesia and awake the whole time, but lying down in preconceived terror, with a blur of faces around me under the bright fluorescent lights, i didn't know what was going on and felt nothing but a vague numbness down there, occasionally punctuated by further jabs as the anaesthesia wore off; it was a rather protracted affair.
i must have fallen asleep because i woke up alone in the darkness, the numbness still present. i was clad in a sarong and underneath was a wire coat hanger, bent into a sort of tripod, to avoid the any contact
in the morning, the pain was still there, and as i would later find out, would not go away for a couple of weeks. i got out of bed very carefully, with mother's help, so as not to shift the tripod away, and then walking was awkward and difficult; i had to hold on to mother's hand for support, in both senses of the word. we walked, insofar as my gait could be considered walking, to the toilet. as i started to pee, a jolt of piercing pain shot through and i could not help a burst of tears and cry. i would most dread going to the toilet for some time, a painful and undignifying affair.
when it finally healed, the head had shriveled up a little. it didn't look as grand as halim's, or was that just my imagination, my delusions of penile grandeur? or maybe it was because we had different procedures, done at different ages? mine was done with a freehand scalpel method and took hours, whereas the common plastibell (link here, but not for the faint-hearted) or ross circumcision ring method would have taken only 10-12 minutes. might there have been some complication, perhaps? but i wouldn't know. and i didn't care much either. it was done, and the pain finally gone, leaving me only relief. in school, i would feel a bit more grown up than the other muslim boys who had not got it done yet, and enjoyed the attention i received while sharing with them my experience of the ordeal.
years later today, i was talking with a friend about foreskins and it dawns on me that i miss my foreskin. it was taken from me at an innocent, vulnerable age, and although there was no cruel intent, all the same, i feel deprived of it. foreskins are very useful. this page has a list of 18 of their functions, 9 of which are sexual. you can even keep contact lenses in them, if you want. i mean sure, you'd have to clean off smegma build-up all the time, but these things come into habit, like brushing your teeth or shampooing your hair, so it's of negligible loss of time, in the greater scheme of things. and what you get for it, are 18 functions you'd never get without it, and not to mention a complete body. i mean, think about it: it's like losing any other part of your body, like an arm or toe. the foreskin might be less important you say, but it's not so much about fuctionality (although i remind you i have lost 18 fuctions of my body) as simply losing something that so intimately belongs to you. and just because many men don't have foreskins too doesn't make you any more complete; just means many men are sadly deprived of their foreskins too.
so this entry i dedicate, in loving memory of my foreskin, wherever it may be."
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Genital Cutting and Western Discourses on Sexuality, Kirsten Bell
"Despite my efforts to reveal the heterogeneity of the practices glossed as “male circumcision,” the relative equanimity of my students when they learned of these male surgeries was a striking contrast to their sense of outrage and indignation at the female operations. Although it is true that several of the students did perceive that operations such as subincision constitute a form of mutilation, there was little sense that it was of a sexual nature. Indeed, what was striking was how willing students were to relegate such practices to the realm of “culture,” and how unwilling they were to place female surgeries in the same realm. Importantly, the lack of equivalence many of my students perceived between male and female genital surgeries extended well beyond male circumcision and included an unwillingness to consider any form of male genital surgery in conjunction with the female operations. For the majority of students in the class, the only procedure that they considered at all equivalent to female circumcision was castration, or more than that, full frontal castration—a penectomy.
Students did not think that carving up male genitalia had any damaging effects on male sexuality as long as the penis remained largely intact. My students reasoned that as long as the man retained the ability to ejaculate, his sexuality was unimpaired. They were so ready to assert that female sexuality has been totally annihilated by genital surgery of any kind and so reluctant to proclaim that anything short of full frontal castration will affect a man’s sexuality in the same way, it seemed clear that something very interesting was being revealed. Importantly, their insistence seemed to have less to do with these practices themselves and more to do with underlying assumptions about the nature of female and male sexuality, assumptions echoed in the dominant discourses on genital cutting...
However, although the genital equation between clitoris and penis has now become central to the dominant discourses surrounding both male and female genital cutting, how valid are equations of this kind? Although it is important to recognize that second-wave feminists deployed the homology argument to subvert the original biomedical intent to diminish the clitoris (Moore and Clarke 1995:995), the ongoing tendency to define the clitoris as the female penis merely reinvokes androcentric notions of female sexuality first described centuries ago (see Laqueur 1999; Martin 1987). Male physiology is still taken as the norm, and female physiology is still understood in relation to it. Indeed, by defining the clitoris as the female penis, contemporary activist discourses merely phallicize female sexuality instead of attempting to understand it on its own terms. Although the clitoris may play an important role in female sexual response, does it necessarily follow that female anatomy, so radically different in form and function to male anatomy, can be understood through the latter? Yet, in the dominant discourses on genital cutting, male anatomy continues to be the yardstick against which female structures are compared...
Many men clearly believe that any loss of sensitivity that accompanies circumcision is compensated by their enhanced sexual performance. Indeed, what is interesting here is how irrelevant the issue of reduced sensation is for both the men who have this operation and their sexual partners. This poses a striking contrast to the dominant discourses surrounding female genital cutting, where the idea of a woman undergoing genital surgery to enhance her partner’s sexual pleasure (while concomitantly reducing her own level of sensation) strikes most observers as “barbaric” and misogynistic. The differing reaction these operations evoke is hardly surprising in light of the assumptions regarding instinctive, active male sexuality and fragile, passive female sexuality that I have detailed above. Thus, as Bordo points out, when it comes to sex, “mostly, men’s bodies are presented like action-hero toys—wind them up and watch them perform” (1999:191)...
Ahmadu argues that many women (herself included) who had sexual experiences prior to excision perceive either no difference or increased sexual satisfaction. She also points out that many Western women who have clitorises are unable to achieve orgasms. Similarly, Rogaia Abusharaf (2000:152) points out that Western women overemphasize the effects of female circumcision on sexual pleasure and that the specificity of African women’s experience is overlooked.
Ellen Gruenbaum (2001:133–157) also questions the generalization that female sexual response is destroyed in circumcised women, pointing out that these perspectives are, in part, the result of ethnocentrism. Discussing her Sudanese experiences, she documents the changes in her own perceptions of female sexuality, as they were challenged over the course of her fieldwork."
Keywords: female genital mutilation, able to orgasm