The United Nations General Assembly unanimously approved a resolution on December 20, 2012, calling for a global ban on female genital mutilation, or as others such as myself call it, female circumcision.
It’s a centuries-old practice which stems from religious and cultural beliefs that circumcising girls controls women’s sexuality and enhances fertility when they are of child bearing age. It’s along the same line of nonsensical reasoning that is used for justifying male circumcision when people say it is necessary in order to keep the penis clean, that it helps prevent the spread of STD’s, and that it’s more appealing or enhances sexual performance.
These are just ridiculous, unproven claims used to justify mutilating someone’s genitals. The difference is, mutilating a females genitals is seen as barbaric and needs to be abolished globally. Mutilating a males genitalia? Well the UN has not said a peep about it except in 2011 when the UN launched a plan to accelerate male circumcision for AIDS prevention in Africa.
That’s right, the UN encouraged a plan to promote, speed up, and perform more circumcisions on men because
Voluntary medical male circumcision has been found to reduce the risk of sexual transmission of HIV from women to men by about 60% when carried out by well-trained health professionals. Since 2007, WHO and UNAIDS have urged countries with high HIV prevalence and low levels of male circumcision to expand access to safe VMMC services.
Oddly enough, finding any scientific, peer-reviewed, and empirical study that would explain how these results were obtained is no where to be found. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why.
Although the UN’s current resolution on female circumcision is not legally binding, the General Assembly resolutions do reflect international concerns and carry a lot of moral and political weight.
The U.N. said in 2010 that about 70 million girls and women had undergone the procedure, and the World Health Organization said about 6,000 girls were circumcised every day.
However, they neglected the fact that the global prevalence of circumcision in males, estimated using current published data, is roughly a total of 1,306,411,547 men and boys who are circumcised — a global circumcision rate of 37.4%.
The resolution, which was cosponsored by over 100 countries, and adopted by consensus, calls the practice of female circumcision “harmful and a serious threat to the psychological, sexual and reproductive health of women and girls”.
Nowhere was it mentioned that the same could be said for circumcision within the male population, or that male circumcision is much more widespread and affects men in much higher numbers than female circumcision. In comparison, female circumcision is much less prevalent or practiced than male circumcision is.
The resolution calls upon the U.N.’s 193 member states to outwardly condemn the practice of female circumcision and to launch education campaigns to systematically eliminate it. The resolution also urges all countries to enact and enforce legislation which would prohibit the practice and to hold any and all violators of the resolution accountable.
According to Amnesty International, female circumcision is quite common in approximately 28 countries in Africa as well as in Yemen, Iraq, Malaysia, Indonesia, and among certain ethnic groups in South America. They say it is also a worldwide concern because it can be practiced by immigrants in diaspora communities.
What they failed to acknowledge was that male circumcision is practiced in almost every country worldwide, and not just in certain countries or communities. Male circumcision is globally practiced and accepted, yet it is just as harmful, both psychologically and physically to men as it is to women. Many infant boys suffer permanent damage, and many have even died from botched circumcisions. These facts just don’t seem to matter to the UN or AI.
The most telling thing about circumcision is the way in which society phrases it in regards to females and males. For females it is considered to be ‘female genital mutilation’, whereas for men it is simply considered circumcision. You do not hear people saying men are genitally mutilated, even though this is exactly what is happening to them.
Amnesty International’s U.N. representative Jose Luis Diaz called the UN’s resolution “a first” for the General Assembly and “an important moment” for campaigners against “this grotesque practice.” He did not utter a word about male circumcision or how grotesque a practice it is.
I find it quite telling and disgusting that, as a man, your genitals being mutilated is of no concern to the world. It’s only circumcision, after all. Females, on the other hand, are genitally mutilated and that needs to be condemned.