Sir Ted's blog post

A photograph of a circumsized penis is a double inscription. It records the image of a a recording--in this case a

physical recoding inscribed on the body itself, a record of an act of violence.

I mentioned in a previous post how issues of power and gender are complicated--cut (pardon the wordplay) both ways.

Case in point: if circumcision were something done to infant girls, would it still be carried out with any regularity

in the United States?

The answer, obviously, is no.

Why is circumcision still done fairly routinely in the U.S.? Part of the reason is the medieval (if that) stance on

medical care we have in America, where the illness and infirmities of our fellow citizens are seen first and foremost

as a profit-making opportunity. And if they aren't actually sick, we'll invent something!

Circumcision is the most common surgical procedure in the U.S. It takes but a moment, only the crudest of implements,

and it adds many hundreds of dollars to a hospital bill. There is no monetary incentive for American doctors to not

do this procedure. Quite the contrary.

But this might be overcome if there were enough social and moral pressure brought to bear.

Which brings us back to the issue of gender.

If circumcision were a procedure done to baby girls, it would have been done away with decades ago, because questions

like this would have been raised, first by feminists, and eventually by a larger and larger segment of the

population:

"What sort of sick society do we live in where we have such twisted ideas about female sexuality that we, as a matter

of course, sexually mutilate the genitalia of our infant girls?"

"How do we expect girls in our society to grow up with a healthy attitude about their bodies and their sexuality if

one of the first experiences in life is the excruciating pain of this 'surgery'?"

"How can women have a healthy attitude about their sexuality when, every time they see themselves naked--getting

undressed, going to the bathroom, taking a shower--they see the scar left on their body and are reminded,

subconciously at least, that their genitals were seen as 'unclean' and in need of purification through violence?"

"Why do we feel the need to force this procedure on girls when they are helpless, rather than allowing them to make their own decisions about the most intimate parts of their anatomy?"

"How bizarre is it that the fact that this procedure tends to reduce sexual sensitivity of the genitals is actually touted as a supposed benefit?"

"Doesn't such an act serve as a twisted inauguration of women into a society that sees sexual violence against them

as not only acceptable, but good for them?"

"Isn't this act the epitome of a sadistically patriarchal society that sees women's bodies and sexuality as something

dangerous that must be controlled, altered, and violated in order to be deemed 'clean' and 'acceptable' despite the fact that there is no medical reason for this procedure to be done?"

Such questions would have been right on the money, and circumcision, were it something done to infant girls, would have gone the way of the dodo a long time ago as a result.

Yet, so twisted are our notions of gender, that we collectively have an easier time thinking of infant boys being treated violently in this way than we do infant girls. Because there is no "masculinist" movement, and because of our deeply entrenched ideas that males and violence go together (be a man, boys don't cry, and all that), that we see little wrong with what amounts to systematic sexual violence on infants.

The photograph inscribes the scar, which inscribes the violence--but the violence isn't the simple act of mutilation itself (one so grotesque, by the way, that my wife who is a nurse was became physically nauseated when she witnessed one the first time--this from a woman who looks at the chance to watch somone's chest getting cracked open for open heart surgery a real treat).

As bad as that may be, it inscribes the violence that we inscribe on our own collective self.

How can we pretend to be surprised when such violence, in only slightly altered form, leaves its own countless scars when it is committed not by the masked surgeon, but the masked intruder?