August 22, 2009
By James DeMeo
Growing International Crimes of Sexual Mutilations:
Both tribal and modern societies do them.
While proclaimed as a "cancer preventative", the surgical removal of women's sexual organs based upon flawed "genetic" testing methods is quack-junk science, and is no different from African Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), except that it is wrapped up with "medical" magic and superstition, rather than purely "moral-taboo" justifications. In fact, one could say, the Africans are closer to the truth, in that they openly proclaim female sexual organs (clitoris, labia) are "ugly, dirty, offensive, and ought to be cut out". The MD's doing this form of Western FGM won't say that so directly, but wrap their sadism in the language of "science".
Below is the Abstract of a paper I gave on the subject some years ago -- my only correct to it would be, to note this is not just an American phenomenon, but has similar expressions in hospital surgery world-wide. Such as the introduction of female genital mutilation procedures into hospitals within the Muslim world, something that should be classified as no different from branding of slaves with a red-hot iron (done in "hospitals" to make it "sanitary") and opposed by every decent physician and international health organization.... but isn't:
James DeMeo PhD: "Modern Horrific Medicine: Unnecessary Sexual Surgery", Presented to the 3rd Int. Symposium on Circumcision, National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers, Washington, DC. 1994.
One of the more telling methods for understanding the urge to mutilate the genitals of young males and females is to view the problem cross-culturally. There is a cross-cultural pattern recorded in the anthropological literature, demonstrating that cultures which engage in genital mutilations also have, in general: high levels of political hierarchy, premarital sexual taboos, subordinated female status, taboos regarding vaginal, hymenal, and menstrual blood, male dominance over childbirth matters (couvade), an emphasis upon military glory, high levels of alcoholic aggression, and belief in a moralistic high god. The argument is raised that the sadistic energy directed towards the sexual organs of children is but only one expression of a larger cultural component of sadistic energy more generally directed at sexual functions, especially childhood and female sexuality. From the cross-cultural and other scientific evidence, one can make an extended critique of other ritual sexual mutilations not generally considered to be in the same category as genital mutilations. Unnecessary surgeries upon the sexual organs of women in modern American hospitals are critically reviewed from this new perspective, wherein the same medical shamans who perform painful and unnecessary genital mutilations on children -- the obstetrical/gynecological specialists -- are given similar critical decision-making roles for a variety of other generally unnecessary but often routine and common sexual mutilations: episiotomy, Cesarean section childbirth, and hysterectomy all have been criticized by health reformers for their generally unnecessary nature, and for the subsequent problems they create for the women subject to them. Here, we view them as expressions of culture-wide sexual anxiety and sadism. For the patient, such sexual mutilations dampen or extinguish sexual feeling, thereby relieving the individual of sexual anxiety. For the medical surgeon, the mutilations provide an outlet for scientifically rationalized sadistic urges. Carrying the critique farther, the current "epidemics" of breast and prostate cancer are critically reviewed as expressions of epidemic mass sexual hysteria and sexual anxiety, lacking in a solid scientific foundation. The absence of serious investigation of natural healing methods, the broadening of diagnostic criteria to define larger numbers of healthy people into the "sick" category, and the use of medical-police tactics to imprison and suppress health reform dissenters, are reviewed as critical components in the "scientific" rationalization of traditional hospital mutilations as "treatment". This analysis is particularly relevant where cultural propaganda regarding the "unhealthy" nature of the normal breast is used to justify "enhancement" mutilations, or where unscientific "genetic" screening methods are employed to convince anxious but otherwise completely healthy women into having "preventative" breast-amputation mutilations. Other high-tech screening methods, such as mammography and other forms of x-ray when used for diagnosis in the absence of independent clinical evidence of pathology are critically reviewed as factors in the "elevation in cancer rates". In short, American medicine is awash in a host of various forms of unnecessary, scientifically invalid and barbaric ritualized genital/sexual mutilations. Most of these are as bad or worse than anything practiced by other cultures, such as infibulation of little girls in Africa. While this latter African practice has attracted much attention and criticism in the American press, circumcision of baby boys, and other "modern medical" mutilations, have not.