Sexual excisions and the moral order, the world in danger - Sigismond

From Peaceful Beginnings

“It is not worth while saying That children resemble us, That they endure the same scars And that they’re born with violence. It really suits us to say that, It helps us to educate them In our image, our image...”

“This postulate: parents, learning, power, And underhand dictatorship That removes them from their initial beauty...” Morice Bénin

Introduction: a definition of infantile sexual mutilation (ISM)

The preservation of the clitoris and the foreskin hinges on five elements which illustrate the essential-to-life character of the suppressed organs. These five elements define ISM; an education through violence, infantile sexual mutilation castrates the child from the organs of autosexuality, while deeply traumatizing the human person. It is done in order to submit the child and enhance their societal (and sometimes mercantile) “value” by diverting sexuality from pleasure towards reproduction, above all for women. It is also done as a means of discrimination of the foreigners and opponents.

First element: infantile. The concept of ISM is not yet very widespread. But alone it enables to face the fact that SM is practised by adults upon children. However, historically, Western feminists, who have been at the vanguard of the struggle, have ignored and still ignore infantile mutilation, to speak only of the feminine mutilation. Monopolizing the fight, they make it a jolt between both sex adults and accuse the defenders of the child of amalgamating excision and circumcision. But one may not amalgamate violence against adults and violence against the child. The war of the sexes is a war of “adults ignoring the child within themselves” (Maud Mannoni) ; that of generations is war on children. It stems from abuse of power, illusory learning and inacceptable possessiveness: “I know, therefore I have the right to determine what shall be done to your body.”

Second element: physical mutilation. For the entire (80% of the world population) who find pleasure from these organs, the particular and incidentally extreme enjoyment they provide is indisputable, as well for man as for woman. The recent discoveries of anatomy bring undeniable backing to this empirical affirmation. Taylor’s one, in 1996, concerns the part of exquisite erogenous mechanism of the ring of the tip of the foreskin. Since that date, it is scientifically demonstrated that the amputation of the foreskin is genuine SM; the foreskin does not only have the function of protecting erogeneity of the glans but also that of highly erogenous zone. This discovery has not received the medicine Nobel Prize it deserves and remains ignored, though it has been experimentally confirmed by Sorrells’s sensitivity enquiry. At last, the third sexual function of the foreskin – that of a gliding friction-reducer-cushion in coitus – has also been highlighted. It explains why African women whose partners are sexually mutilated are more hit by AIDS, particularly when dry sex is practised. In front of mass circumcision advocated to fight it, one should not forget that elementary ethics forbids mutilation for prophylactic motive – and very particularly that of children. Nobody has the right to practise circumcision without a serious strictly medical reason, upon child as adult.

Third element: trauma. SM provokes a trauma of exceptional seriousness. Highlighted by Freud, traumas bearing on infantile sexuality are at the origin of the formation of the unconscious and thus a deep cause of mental disease, indeed, autosexuality, the very first sexuality, the most innocent and natural, is gravely made guilty, consciously or not. This brings a weighty argument to feminists belonging to cultures that mutilate boys only; little girls suffer, unconsciously but much more than boys, from the threat associated with circumcision. Indeed, due to the smallness of the clitoris, the awareness of a threat of its castration is unlikely. The death threat and its heavy associated burden of guilt remain. When insane minds savagely annihilate (excision) or lessen (circumcision) the very existence of a pure personal pleasure, the child fall ill and will look for pleasure in sadist and/or masochist perversions, like doing the same to their own children. In most cases, mental disease is a pathologic reaction to the perversion of parental ethics.

Fourth element: sexual. SM is not genital but pre-genital; it bears exclusively upon the specific organs of the foreplay or autosexuality. But the matter is not impeding reproduction; it is lessening or suppressing pleasure. With boys, it is limited to feminine, preputial pleasure. But with girls, the mutilation of masculine, clitoridian pleasure entails that of feminine, vaginal pleasure, so that the mutilation of pleasure is total. In most cases, the woman is rendered frigid.

Fifth element: discrimination. ISM is done in order to separate the ethnic group from others, out of artificial racism, assumed to award a moral superiority. It is also a means of enslavement through exclusion of opponents.

This is why we rise against sexist designations that set up one gender against the other instead of gathering them in defence of the toddler. SM is irreversible. It strikes more particularly three categories of the population: children, bachelors and widowers. As long as the feministo-masculinist speech ignoring the child’s sexuality will prevail, it will not be possible to eradicate ISM.

The agent of ISM: the moral order

We stand against the religious and societal moral order which tries to dominate and make use of the child through corporal punishment in the name of “black pedagogy” (“Hush it's for your own sake!”) including terrorist techniques of repression of sexuality: possessory branding, mutilation and torture. Under the guise of identity or passage rite into so-called adulthood, they have for sole aim to obtain the submission and the alleged moral and physical purity of the child, through violence and threat that traumatize them. They are sometimes a preliminary for mere and/or sexual enslavement. Being relatively minor, these crimes against humanity (children) are forgivable inasmuch as they rest upon antique customs, on the condition that they will now be stopped.

These barbaric customs are not reserved to Islam, Judaism and a few primitive tribes but also existed in Asia where the Chinese married their daughters more easily through the torture of foot-binding and the Balinese would file short the incisive of the youths in order, probably, at the beginning at least, not to risk biting during sexual abuse. However, these barbarities are accompanied by verbal repression. The latter operates a mental mutilation, sole present in the rest of humanity. This SM in the general meaning also subjects the individual to hypocritical puritanism. Without perhaps being irreversible, mutilation of the minds through speech, Paulinian, Christian and Western, is almost as fearsome as physical excisions. It has the same aim of rendering the individual compliant through traumatizing them by a genuine putting into unconscious terror, founded upon the most stupid decree that, without even admitting it, 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 mental repression is as incalculable as that of physical repression.

Against this violence, the transcultural studies of American anthropology (cf. James Prescott, violence.de) have extended to entire populations, with absolute statistical correlation, the clinical observations of psychoanalysis; they affirm that violence is inhibited by pleasure and reciprocally and that it is the consequence of lack of tenderness in infancy and of the prohibition of premarital sexuality. The discoveries of psychoanalysis, that is to say, on the one hand, the Freudian infantile sexuality and the unconscious, on the other hand, the emphasis upon infantile trauma put forth by Freud and Alice Miller (alice-miller.com) go in the same sense: violence in education, rather than tender care, has catastrophic results: breeding violence, addiction or depression (neurosis, psychosis and perversion).

Giving the speech by turn to the biologist, the anatomist and neuro-anatomist, to prophylactic medicine, the psychiatrist, the sexologist, the ethicist, the lawyer, the sociologist, the ethnologist, the historian of cultures and religions, and the psychoanalyst, this book could be entitled “The monologues of the foreskin”. Well no! But for individual exceptions, human sciences are unanimous in standing up for organs sometimes alleged to be redundant but actually destroyed because they are the specific organs of a taboo practice: autosexuality.

ISM: the height of repression of infantile sexuality

More than a century ago, Freud already made himself the defender of infantile sexuality, including natural exhibitionism and voyeurism. By verifying its existence (manusexuality and auto-fellatio) right up inside the womb, prenatal ultrasonography today brings him strong backing. However, autosexuality is still repressed in one way or another, very particularly by the common practice of circumcision and excision: every minute on this planet, 6 girls and 25 boys undergo the knife. How not to bring forward here “the rights of the child”?!

Indeed, imagine a being that has freely practised autosexuality in its mother’s womb. You are this being. Now imagine that once out of this Eden, while quietly being bathed, you are suddenly glowered at and harshly told: “Why is it so? You touched it?” Or else you realize one day that everybody around you not only condemns nudity but also insidiously disparages your act of self love by wording it through pejorative and reproachful terms. The root of the most common one, like in per-turbation, denounces disturbance and turpitude. “Autosexuality” must replace the execrable term, invented by religious, made guilty and allegedly chaste bachelors but so often revealing themselves paedophiles, which must be crossed out of the vocabulary. This is a compulsory step in the fight against sexual violence and crime (including ISM).

Repression of the – very lightly said – infantile sexuality stems from this universal taboo. Children and young people emotionally perceive the repression of sexuality as a death threat through loss of love and thus abandonment. Outlawing pleasure contrary to the natural law, such a threat can only oppose the happy resolution of the Oedipus complex that implies adherence to law. So is it likely to block children in their growth. Perversions – notably paedophilia, the twin sister of homophilia – and rape are the direct consequence – aggravated by the sexual fuss of the media – of the hypocritical public reprobation of what everybody gaily practises in private. Only seducers, rapists, paedophiles and homophiles “masturbate”, in their victims, granting them the same contempt they endured in their autosexuality of childhood. They will no longer need this when autosexuality will be universally acknowledged.

ISM being the height of this repression, it generates particularly high violence. Of the ten genocides of modern times, only one did not imply non-intact, the frequency of wars is four times greater in circumcising countries, the death penalty is twice more frequent in them and they (half of them) are the only ones to excise girls. In Norway, 60% of the rapes are committed by 2% of the population who are circumcised. SM is the breeding ground of sexism, paranoia, fanaticism and terrorism.

Discrimination through ISM

1) The assault on the respect of the human person and species

Distinctive physical signs hurt human dignity in a way typical of the moral order: a violation of intimacy. Marking the body makes it an advertising poster. Moses and Mohammed forbade tattoos because the body must not be treated like a commodity. Pulling down the trousers of the child in order to mutilate them is humiliating lack of respect.

At last, physical marking attacks the human species. Founding one people’s identity upon an assault against the identity of the species is not only degrading, it is also discriminatory and leads to illusorily believe oneself superior or even boast about it. No people may carve out for themselves a purely formal identity upon the body of their children without offending the rest of humanity.

2) A double exclusion: discrimination of the individual and seclusion of the people

The common African saying: “An uncircumcised is not a man!” implies that the absence of mutilation entails casting out by the ethnic group. This systematic accessory of SM reveals its deep meaning of measure of exclusion, of barrier to marrying outside the group through dissuading the youths from mixing up with those of neighbouring groups, one of the main concerns of the racists.

Foremost, intended to separate the group from others, SM is a sectarian act, sometimes committed under the guise of religion. But exclusion calls for hatred and some great thinkers (Spinoza, Freud) denounced circumcision as a source of hatred from neighbouring peoples. SM is encouraged by tyrannical regimes that use it as initiation for their troops and sign of tribal distinction. It has (luckily) a sexist character. Taking for alibi the festivities of folklore, this incitement to discrimination is imposed by military-religious elites. The community sign is always a call for nationalism and a sign of war. Tattoos, veils, burkas, scarifications, cut off clitoris and foreskins, knocked off teeth, bound-feet, stretched vulva labias, forced obesity, the death penalty, to arms et cetera, the escalation of the very ethnic techniques of manipulation of the minds through mutilation of the bodies channels human needs at the service of the interests of the dominating classes. It tries to set up sexuality against love for the sake of reproduction. SM is both antisexual and antidemocratic. More fascist than fascism, it is unbearable by fascists themselves; this is not a reason for democrats to tolerate it.

Conclusion

Sexual mutilation is not racist; it is artificial racism, more racist than racism. The abolition of criminal ISM is only a stage in the fight against the repression of the sexuality of the youths and for the right of the human person to the free access to their own body and to the respect of their physical, emotional and mental integrity.

Sigismond (Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux), HEC, Lic. Sc. Eco.

oldsigismund@hotmail.com

Psychoanalysis researcher and a specialist of infantile sexual mutilation, author of “Sexual mutilation, the child’s point of view”, for free at http://groups.msn.com/circabolition or intactwiki.org, of which this text is an excerpt.

Revised and without cut for lack of time version of the lecture pronounced 4th September 2008 in the University of Keele (U.-K.), at the 10th international symposium of NOCIRC, organized by NOCIRC, NORM-UK and the University of Keele school of law.