Sexual Mutilation and the Moral Order

"The child shall be protected from practices that… may foster racial, religious or any other form of discrimination..." - International declaration of the rights of the child

(PARIS, France) - Problematic and basic concepts of the struggle against sexual mutilation...

“It is not worth while saying power, That children resemble us, That they have the same scars initial beauty...” And that they're born with violence. It really suits us to say that, those marks, It helps us to educate them enjoyment was hell.” In our image, in our image." Bénin

“This postulate: parents, learning, And that cunning dictatorship Which removes them from their “When you were a child, remember They already told you that Morice

“This commandment has not been prescribed to correct a physical deficiency but a moral one.” Maimonides, XIIth century

"The sex of the (child) appears well as a stake of possession, a symbol of submission." after Simone Veil

The Jewish philosopher Maimonides ascribes circumcision to a moral order that, under the guise of religion and/or tradition, pretends making supermen. Through setting up the threat of castration of a barbarous torture into the family, which can only be lived as parental betrayal, that tyrannical order tries to dominate the child as the adult in the name of: "Hush, it’s for your own sake!" Similarly, under the pretext of hygiene, excision and circumcision were introduced into the Anglo-Saxon world in the end of the 19th century, in order to prevent autosexuality. However, as soon as 1950, following an article by Dr Gairdner, English medicine abandoned routine circumcision overnight. Then, in 2010, the Royal Nederland medical association (KNMG) took an adamant stand against non-therapeutic circumcision for the motive that, without necessity and at the price of sometimes serious physical and psychological complications, it violates the fundamental rights of the child to physical integrity, autonomy and dignity. Sexual mutilation is a minor crime against humanity. Resting upon antique customs and devoid of intention of harming, it is not punishable. But that is on the condition that it will stop as soon as its damaging effects will have become notorious.

These atrocious tortures are accompanied by the verbal repression that, for the sake of the puritan conception that likens pleasure and vice, forbids so-called infantile and before wedding sexuality, operating a mental mutilation, sole present in the rest of humanity. That in-the-general-meaning sexual mutilation similarly subjects the individual to hypocritical puritanism. May be less irreversible, mutilation of the minds through speech is as fearsome as physical excisions. It has the same aim of rendering the individual compliant through traumatizing them out of unconscious terror. Under threat of loss of love (exclusion), a stupid decree makes autosexuality the original sin. It is fierce and dangerous because it is a both parental and societal lie, difficult to eradicate from minds. The damage provoked by repression by speech is as incalculable as that of physical repression.

The discoveries of psychoanalysis (on the one hand, infantile sexuality and the unconscious, on the other hand, the emphasis upon infantile traumas put forth by Freud and Alice Miller) stand against those abuses. Violence in education, rather than tender care, has catastrophic results: breeding neurosis, psychosis and perversion, violence, addiction, depression. Transcultural studies of American anthropology (cf. James Prescott – violence.de) have, with absolute statistical correlation, extended the observations of psychoanalysts to entire populations. They report that pain is inhibited by pleasure, and reciprocally, and that violence stems from lack of tenderness in infancy and of the prohibition of premarital sexuality.

What? (sexual mutilation: the height of repression of infantile sexuality)
"At night, before going to bed, they all had to m.......te, in order well to know what they were going to lose…"

Gérard Zwang (preface of The drama of excision by Dore-Miloch L.)

"Do not throw your seed amongst thorn-bushes. Try to circumcise yourselves..." (Jeremiah, 4: 3-4)

The child perceives repression of infantile sexuality as a death threat through loss of love (forsaking). Outlawing pleasure, that threat opposes the resolution of the Oedipus complex: adherence to law. So is it likely to block them in their growth. Perversions, notably paedophilia, the twin sister of homophilia (Bergeret speaks of homoerotism in Psychologie pathologique. Paris: Masson), and rape, are the direct consequence – aggravated by the sexual fuss of the media – of the hypocritical public reprobation of what everybody does in private. Only seducers, rapists, paedophiles and homophiles "m.......te", in their victims, granting them the same contempt they endured in their own autosexuality of childhood. They will no longer need that when autosexuality will be socially accepted.

Hurting human dignity in a way that is typical of the moral order: a violation of intimacy, sexual mutilation is a height of that repression. Denuding someone and mutilating her or him is a revolting humiliation.

A caricature of ritual marking today concerns non-mutilating countries where a fringe of the youth unconsciously rises up against the repression of autosexuality through voluntary marking (piercing, etc.). The adornment symbolizing the sexual organ, those provocative automutilations are an unconscious rebellion against a particularly strict banning of autosexuality in some families.

The preservation of the clitoris and the foreskin is founded on six facts that illustrate their essential-to-life character.

First fact: minors. Sexual mutilation the most often aims at minors. However, Western feminists, who have been at the vanguard of the struggle, speak of feminine mutilation alone. Monopolizing the fight, they make it a gender affair, a contest between both sex adults, blame men for being the instigators of merely-executing-of-excision women, and accuse non sexists of amalgamating excision and circumcision. So doing, they forget that dads, who finance excision, have themselves been circumcised with the complicity of their own mums, so that excision is only the tip of the iceberg of sexual mutilation. And, instead of approaching sexual mutilation in a dynamic, transgenerational, rather than static, perspective, they amalgamate violence against adults with violence against minors. If the war of the sexes is a war of "adults ignoring the child within themselves" (Maud Mannoni), that of generations is war on children (in order to avoid all resistance, excision is now practised at birth). Following Mrs Albagly (Director of the DDASS of the Rhône - 02.26.07 FSM colloquium in Lyon), we affirm that "The right to the respect of the physical integrity of all children is not negotiable." There is no masculine or feminine sexual mutilation but sexual mutilation quite simply.

Second fact: sexual. The specific organs for autosexuality are not genital organs but merely sexual organs. The clitoris, notably, is the sole organ of creation intended for pure pleasure, without any other function. Excision lessens, suppresses or turns pleasure into pain but does not impede reproduction. With man, the loss is limited to preputial pleasure, but the destruction of clitoral pleasure often entails that of vaginal pleasure; two thirds of the excised are frigid.

Third fact: physical mutilation. For eighty per cent of the population of the planet who enjoy these organs, the particular, incidentally extreme pleasure they provide is indisputable. Recent anatomical discoveries bring scientific founding to this empirical affirmation. In 1996, John Taylor highlighted the part of exquisite erogenous mechanism of the tip of the preputial lip (the dear to the Scots pleated ring). That discovery ends the tale according to which the sheath protecting the erogeneity of the glans, man's mini-vagina in autosexuality, would not be an organ. Not having been awarded the Nobel Prize it deserves, it remains ignored, though experimentally confirmed by Sorrells’s sensitivity enquiry. At last, the third sexual function of the foreskin – that of a gliding cushion reducing friction in coitus – has also been emphasized. It explains why the African women whose partners are sexually mutilated are much more hit by AIDS. Several enquiries have shown that the circumcision status does not influence transmission of STDs, except AIDS, but in the medium term only. Circumcision may not be practised without serious medical motive and ethics and medical ethics forbid preventive mutilation, upon minors or adults.

Fourth fact: the psychic trauma. Highlighted by Freud, traumas bearing on infantile sexuality provoke the formation of the unconscious and are a deep cause of mental disease. Assaulting the image of the body, the "castration" of the organs for autosexuality has strong emotional repercussions and creates a grave trauma, the most often unconscious. Autosexuality, the very first, most natural, innocent and harmless sexuality is made heavily guilty. Indeed, sexual mutilation threatens boys of total castration. However, and even in non circumcising cultures, girls, as well as boys, unconsciously suffer from the threat associated with circumcision. The sheath of the glans is destroyed with boys. What then is going to happen to the clitoris: a small and pure enjoyment organ? But a symbolic or oral threat is enough and the mere passing along of a knife over the body of the child is sometimes substituted for excision.

Fifth fact: the taking of possession of the individual by the group through terrorist violence. The human sacrifice of a part of the body implements a powerful psychological mechanism of enslavement of the person. Indeed, for the unconscious, as for the fetishist, infantile or primitive soul, the part is equivalent to the whole (cf. the abuses of Voodoo that, after the prohibition of sexual mutilation by the enslavers, "possesses" its victims by cutting a lock of hair off, to the point of forcing them to prostitution). This abuse of power founds itself upon an illusory adult knowledge and an inacceptable possessiveness: "I know, therefore I have the right to determine what will be done to your body."

Sixth fact: discrimination and segregation. Performed in order to warrant an alleged moral superiority, sexual mutilation isolates the ethnic group through artificial racism, and sometimes in the aim of favouring endogamy. It is also a means of enslavement through exclusion of opponents.

A possessory marking, sexual mutilation is a barbarian method of banning infantile sexuality exerting a perverse sway of the group over the still minor individual in order to force them to work, reproduction and war. It humiliates through condemning personal pleasure by the "castration" of its specific organs. It makes autosexuality painful for women and severely impoverishes it for men. The atrocious pain, the terror of the operation and the permanent reminder of the related threat of castration, exclusion and death, deeply traumatize, the most often unconsciously. So, it is one of the most obnoxious techniques of enslaving and exploiting the individual. Pretending to socialize through warranting moral value but destroying human identity in its most intimate part, its illusory superiority discriminates and segregates foreigners and opponents through an artificial racism.

The great function of sexual mutilation is to give the right to marriage through certifying a passage to adulthood accomplished within submission to the established order. It is a false certificate. At the contrary, one may fear that numerous maimed persons practically do not reach maturity, characterized by deep acknowledgment of the difference of sexes and of the desire of the other sex, an acquisition that alone enables peoples' access to genuine democracy. This is why we rise against the sexism that sets one gender up against the other instead of gathering them in defence of toddlers. Irreversible, sexual mutilation harms children, adolescents, temporarily separated, divorced or with-different-sexual-need couples, bachelors and widowers, that is to say the majority of the population. As long as the sexist speech that ignores the sexuality of the child will prevail, it will be impossible to eradicate it.

1) The exclusion of opponents

The African saying implies casting out the opponents, considered as debauched and coward and the systematic sanction of the absence of mutilation is exclusion from the community. That punishment reveals the deep characters of the practice: an elitist seclusion and exclusion, a feeling of superiority that enables the sexually handicapped to fight depression, and, foremost, a barrier to marrying outside the group, a great concern of the racists, and, at last, an obstacle to the burial of intacts in community cemeteries, or even in the national ground (Saudi Arabia), but for posthumous circumcision (Jews)! 2) The assault on the human species and the discrimination of other ethnic groups

"But a private person may not perform such an ablation (of a member), even with the patient's consent; it would be committing an injustice to society, to which man belongs with all his limbs." Saint Thomas Aquinas

Physical marking also attacks the human species. Founding a collective identity upon an assault against that of the species is not only degrading in itself, it is also discriminatory since it leads to – illusorily – believe oneself superior in virtue, chastity, fidelity, purity, spirituality, and boast about it. No people may carve out a purely formal identity for themselves upon the body of their children without offending the rest of humanity. An alleged superiority through artificial differentiation is of racist type. It is even power two racism: some neo-Gobineau enacted by Mengele. Sexual mutilation is not racist properly speaking but it looks for making "supermen". It is artificial racism, more racist than racism. Since it is committed without intention of harming, the only means of criminalizing it is exposing its will of discrimination and segregation under threat of exclusion of opponents. Such motivation is contrary to the tenth principle of the International declaration of the rights of the child of the United Nations: "The child shall be protected from practices that… may foster racial, religious or any other form of discrimination..."

A particular sign cannot found identity. It is a false identity, an identity of collective alienation through auto-exclusion. Purportedly bringing a moral, physical (hygiene) and even sexual superiority, these sectarian mutilations separate the group from humanity. Antisexual, antidemocratic and cultural-racist, they discriminate the neighbouring groups and those of the group itself who refuse it. Now, exclusion calls for hatred. Spinoza and Freud exposed circumcision as a source of hatred from neighbouring peoples. Indeed, from the point of view of the unconscious, it is a threat of castration, and thus a death threat, and, on the collective level, a threat of extermination. An extremely serious collective pathology (transgenerational and collective syndrome of Münchhausen by proxy, which is psychosis), sexual mutilation generates particularly high violence. Out of the twelve genocides of modern times: Congolese, Hereros, Armenians, Jews, Tziganes, Biafrans, Bengalis, Hutus, Tutsis, Kurds, Bosnians, inhabitants of Darfur, eleven implied circumcised on one side at least and three on both sides. The circumcised perpetrated six of them. But for one exception (Sri Lanka), all wars between 1996 and 2002 involved at least one circumcising country and they were more than three times more numerous in circumcising countries. The death penalty is twice more frequent in them and they are the only ones to practise excision. In Norway, between 2006 and 2010, two per cent of circumcised committed a hundred per cent of the rapes. Circumcised Congo holds the world record of rape: 400,000 over a period of one year. Sexual mutilation separates the child from the mother at an age where this is the last thing to do; the result is catastrophic. It is the breeding ground of sexism, paranoia, fanaticism and group or state terrorism. More fascist than fascism, sexual mutilation is unbearable to fascists. This is not a reason for democrats to tolerate it. Taking for alibi the festivities of folklore, these ordeals are imposed by military and religious elites who have an adolescent behaviour. So, it has a sexist character. It does not welcome the child into a society regulated by the difference of sexes and ages; it socializes or affiliates through the trauma of a barbarous and military initiation that enlists into warlike gangs. So, it is encouraged by tyrannical regimes which use it as an initiation to violence and a sign of rallying. The community sign is always a call for nationalism, a sign of war, of possession of the individual and exclusion of the others. Scarf, veil, burka, kippah, tattoos, forced obesity, breast ironing, stretched oral or vulvar labia, scarification, knocked-out teeth, bound-feet, cut off clitorises and foreskins, the death penalty, to arms etc, the escalation of the very ethnic techniques of manipulation of the minds through masking or marking the bodies – a great instrument of the war of generations and sexes – channels human needs for the sake of the ruling classes and generations.

Conclusion

If the fight against circumcision is in good way in the United States where the rate of circumcision today has fallen from 90 to 54%, that against deadly excision (5 to 15% immediate deaths) progresses only in dribs and drabs and, in a scandalous paradox, its medicalization south of the Mediterranean is followed by its restoration north of it. This because symptoms are attacked without getting to the root: guilt of autosexuality and making it guilty. Consequently, circumcision is not fought in the same time, which would bring real efficiency to the fight. The recommendation of "abstinence" in the prevention of AIDS proves that autosexuality is considered as an infantile or profligate behaviour, to such a point that in certain societies, everything happens as if, facing the absence of biological sign of passage to adult age, the destruction of the specific organs for autosexuality had to be set up as a testimony of it. These societies seem ignoring that the human being is only an aging child and that those unable to regress cannot progress either. Sexual mutilation strikes the fundamental rights of 830 million persons. Attacking only excision neglects 85% of the victims.

Due to their weakness, sexual mutilation is the sole crime against humanity which nobody complains about. Committed without intention of harming, it is criminal because it claims to render morally superior. Perpetrated under the guise of culture, tradition, religion or hygiene, it imposes adults' way of living on the child through the collective madness of an odious torture. One of the causes of fanaticism, suicidal terrorism and redoubtable tyrannies, it is incompatible with democracy. Founded upon a perversion of ethics distorted into moralizing morality, creating neurosis inside the people in order to give a social basis to that of the rulers, it pretends to give lessons to the people. It is for the profit of those who exploit them. Its abolition is a stage in the fight against the repression of sexuality and for the human person's right to the free access to their own body and the respect of their physical, emotional and mental integrity, autonomy and dignity. The appropriation by adults of whatever part of the body of minors is contrary to basic values. Cultures or political systems that tolerate it do not deserve the name of civilization or democracy. Medicine may not be used as a pretext for barbarity. The right to the body must be mentioned in article 1 of the Universal declaration of human rights:

"All human beings are born free and equal in rights, in first place the right to the body, in its three dimensions of integrity, dignity and autonomy."

Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux - site CIRCABOLITION - blog DROIT AU CORPS at nouvelobs.com