M H Navoiseau-Bertaux

(sexual mutilation, an elitist, hyper-dangerous ultra-racism,

masked behind religion, culture, tradition and folklore)

 

            Primitive thought happens to make sexual mutilation a condition of belonging to the social group, when it does not make it a brand of divine election: 

"And the uncircumcised male, who will not have cut off the flesh of his outgrowth, will himself be cut off from his people for having broken my covenant." Genesis, 17: 14

 

"... if you keep my covenant, you will be my treasure between all peoples..." Exodus, 19: 5

            Several Jewish authors emphasized the fact that circumcision is a sophisticated form of racism. In 1909, Freud exposed, with non-Jewish children, the danger of a racism induced by that ultra-racism imposed by surgical violence:

 

"The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery, little boys hear that the Jews have something cut off in their penis – a piece of their penis, they think – and this gives them a right to despise the Jews." Sigmund Freud^[2]

 

In 2001, in philosophical terms, Rozenberg^[1] spread the remark to adults:

 

"... the otherness of the Jew confronts itself with the fellow creature, and only has for equivalent that of woman.",

 

"The Jewish people bothers and scares because it represents the Other. This equivalence precisely points at the thematic link that gathers myth and psychopathology, themselves epiphenomena of a double crisis of sexual and cultural identity. This equivalence provokes in both cases a phantasmagoria bearing, on the one hand upon the anatomical difference, perceptible as well with woman as with the circumcised Jew, and, on the other hand, upon an attachment to the natural and carnal materiality that they similarly embody."

In 2002, that inescapable consequence of circumcision has been exposed for Jewish children by Reyes and Zagdanski:

"In my little boy's head, an uncircumcised penis looked like a sex of dog, the irregular aspect, the bright red little top…This really did not seem very aesthetic to me compared to my own penis or that of my brothers... A feeling of great difference, thus... between me and non-Jews, the majority. In other words, between me and all others. With all the same a slight complex of superiority because of that disclosure, namely that the penises of non-Jews looked like sexes of dogs."^[3]

 

This admirable avowal shows how circumcision, through unconsciousness of a handicap reversed into an advantage, generates deep emotional belief in an ethnic superiority of quasi-biological order, without even needing to resort to the religious vindications of that so-called superiority. It must be brought together with the African saying:

 "An uncircumcised is not a man."

            Many other thinkers denied that abomination:

 

"But a private person may not perform such an ablation, 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[4]

"For it is a barbarous thing to meet a newly born infant with the knife, with a deliberate mutilation." George Wald - medicine Nobel prize

 

"…not only does not the child's body belong to us but... its sex still less." Françoise Dolto^[5]

 

"Ritual practices of circumcision and excision have effects that reach not only the individual and their descendants but also other men." Alice Miller[6]

"Another psychological consequence of early circumcision is that it imprints an aggressive and traumatic situation onto the mind of the newborn… The impossibility of processing such a tremendous infusion of inwardly focused aggression may lead, a posteriori, to the emergence of psychopathic and violent behaviour or, in many other cases, to the emergence of extreme masochistic behaviour."[7]

 

"... society ... till now said yes to humanity’s greatest crimes." Alice Miller^[8]

 

"… the Jews having lived apart from all nations in such a way that they incurred universal hatred, and this not only by observing exterior rites contrary to those of other nations, but by the sign of circumcision…" Baruch Spinoza^[9].

 

"… (the handicap) confronts each one of those who are not affected by this disablement to the anguish of castration, to the horror of the narcissistic wound, and, beyond, to the irreparable of physical or psychic death, thus establishing the most uncompromising of exclusions." Julia Kristeva^[10]

 

"In Western society, circumcision is imposed on the defenceless child to whom it offers no definite advantage and for whom it is, consequently, undesirable and threatening…" Bruno Bettelheim^[11]

 

These observations explain why, with sensitive persons notably (feminists, far right), sexual mutilation provokes, more or less consciously, an aversion that may go up to the fiercest hatred.

The legislator also took a stand:

"Subjecting a person whose vulnerability or state of dependence are apparent or known to the author, to working of living conditions incompatible with human dignity is punished by five years jailing and a 150 000 Euros fine. " article 225-14 of the French criminal code 

"The child shall be protected from practices that… may foster racial, religious or any other form of discrimination..." Principle 10 of the International convention on the rights of the child of the UNO

 

Since sexual mutilation is committed without intention of harming and since criminal law does not yet repress its will of discrimination through artificial physical differentiation, the only means of doing it is denouncing its attack against the dignity of minors. 

Exclusion, the sanction of the group to opponents of sexual mutilation, is the symptom of a feeling of superiority that enables the sexually handicapped to artificially overcome the trauma of the operation and, for the majority of women, the depression and sadness provoked by an often wrecked sexuality. As a corollary, mutilation is a condition for marriage and a barrier to marrying outside the group, a great concern of a racism that goes up to excluding foreigners from cemeteries, and even forbidding them burial on the national territory (Islam).

The superiority allegedly conferred by sexual mutilation is affirmed in the Bible (dogma of the election). Some go up to pretend that circumcision inscribes man into the dimension of lack (sic). Maimonides and Philo of Alexandria, uphold that circumcision grants the individual with virtue, loftiness of the mind, purity, chastity, and even a fidelity that nevertheless frequently condones polygamy:

"This commandment has not been prescribed to correct a physical deficiency but a moral one." Maimonides[12]

Reference to the "moral order" is explicit. This fantasmatic belief seems at the origin of Freud's affirmation of a superior ability of the Jews for spirituality[13]. World population would be shared between great mystics: sexually mutilated males, and meanly earth-bound beings: females and intact males. The trite insult: "Uncircumcised dog" testifies that, in the imaginary of circumcising peoples, circumcision differentiates man from animals. Birds do not have a foreskin but circumcision does not give man the wings of the angel.

            This superstition finds its origin in the likening of sexuality, and very particularly autosexuality, with sin. These queasy conceptions rest upon ignorance (or guilt) of the delights provided by the specific organs of autosexuality. In her preface to a psychoanalytic book, Élisabeth Roudinesco praises it:

 

"...if, in the course of the second half of the XX^th century, mas........n has ceased to be classified as mental disease, thanks, to a great extent, to Freudian theory, it is henceforth claimed, by numerous postFreudian liberation movements, as the purest expression of a sexuality that, at last rid of the rags of puritan moral, allows unlimited pleasure, without risk of contamination, without procreation, without bothering partner.

A symbol of modern individualism, lonely sex may at last be seen – particularly on internet – as a discovery of oneself or as an exile that falls into melancholy. In the case in point, the "surrogated danger", reduced by Freud to the polymorph triteness of infancy, has become the emblem of a sexuality^(*) raised into ethics of liberty."^[14]

 

            However, the deep unconscious guilt weighing upon autosexuality leads to reciprocal despise between circumcised and "non-circumcised". The psychiatrist Michel Erlich points out that "goy", "uncircumcised", and even "uncircumcised dog", is a grave insult[15]. This claim of superiority sometimes degenerates into snobbery, which was the case in the United Kingdom, where circumcision first spread within the nobility and in the United States where it is a criterion of social standing. It finds its sanctioning in language: the intact is never named as such but as "non" or "un" -circumcised, with the connotation of loss and emptiness linked up to negation. Jacques Derrida^[16] himself, in a depressive episode it is true, came to wonder whether his decision not to have his sons circumcised would not make them suffer from "a lack of lack"! This inversion of realities is characteristic of perversion. Isn’t it perverse indeed to reassure oneself about one's difference through lessening others (pretending oneself "elected by God") by humiliating instead of simply exact naming? A basic principle of right applies to that pseudo-spirituality:

 

"No one may take advantage of their own turpitude."

 

That conviction of moral superiority does not stop there. From all antiquity, the circumcised believe and pretend themselves cleaner:

 

"Also, neither man nor woman in Egypt would kiss a Greek on the mouth nor use a Greek’s… knife." Herodote^[17]

The intact are assumed lustful, impure and unclean! The popular prejudice of the sexually maimed that they are "m.......tors without hygiene" is not likely to put racism at a disadvantage. Nevertheless, the circumcised plunge their organ without fear into that of women which, believing them, should be a culture fluid. They also spread the rumour according to which they would perform sexual exploits. Whatever it may be, a superiority resting upon a physical difference is of racist type. It is not the foreskin that smells like cheese, it is circumcision that stinks of racism.

            That arrogance is cultivated by religio-political elites who cherish circumcision like the apple of their eyes because it is at the source of their power. They deliberately use it as a technique of manipulation of the masses:

 

"It is well-known how much men like and help each other when they all have the same distinctive mark which is for them a kind of alliance and agreement." Maimonides^[18]

Through separating the group from others by a sectarian act, an ultra-racism founded upon a small but significant difference that flatters and exacerbates the narcissism of the group, finds a privileged means of expression in sexual mutilation:

"It is my opinion that circumcision has another important motive: it makes that those who profess this idea of the unity of God distinguish themselves by a same body sign which is imprinted on them all, so that the one who is not part of them cannot, being a stranger,

 pretend belonging to them." Maimonides^[19]

That chauvinism is easily rooted into the mind as well by its link with the weighty taboo of autosexuality as by man’s (woman’s) denial of his (her) own femininity (masculinity). It is reinforced by an unconscious awe of castration or death, generated with the victims as well as their neighbours. That discriminatory attitude is aware and resolute for extremist elites, it remains unconscious and denied by the masses. Sexual mutilation is thus less religious than sectarian. Like castration practised in Russia by the sect of Skoptzis, it aims at shutting the group on itself in order to ensure the power of the chiefs.

            That motive is closely linked with that of domination of women. Circumcision is intended to separate the child from his mother, from the world of women and childhood. There precisely lies the most criminal intention, the most abject, the most contrary to life, love and the best of existence. All this in the deep aim of steering the child’s affects towards the world of men, ploughmen and makers, excluding women of it in order to dominate them better.

But exclusion calls for hatred; Spinoza and Freud exposed circumcision as a source of hatred from neighbouring peoples whom they scare. An extremely serious collective pathology (transgenerational and collective syndrome of Munchausen by proxy), it 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 implied circumcised on both sides. In six of them, circumcised were the perpetrators. But for one civil war (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, two per cent of circumcised commit sixty per cent of the rapes. Sexual mutilation irreparably separates the child from the mother. This is the last thing to do. The result is catastrophic; it is the breeding ground of paranoia, sexism, 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 with 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, tattoos, forced obesity, breast ironing, stretched oral or vulvar labia, scarification, knocked off teeth, bound-feet, cut off clitorises and foreskins, the death penalty, to arms et cetera..., the escalation of the very ethnic techniques of manipulation of the minds through marking the bodies – a great instrument of the war of generations and sexes – channels human needs at the service of the interests of the ruling classes and generations.

            Sexual mutilation, circumcision very particularly, is a genuine cancer that gnaws the planet. It is not properly racist but, looking for making up "supermen", it is an artificial racism, more racist than racism, power two racism, some neo-Gobineau enacted by Mengele. Exerted collectively in the name of God and/or tradition, that hyper-racism is a monstrous abomination, generating an as virulent counter-racism. Racism is all the more arrogant, self-assured and dangerous that it rests on the circumciser exclusion (genocides of Armenia, Biafra, Bengal, Kurds, Rwanda, Darfur, invasion of Palestine, Islamic terrorism, phobia of massive destruction weapons...). The abolition of this crime against humanity is a stage in the fight against the repression of sexuality and for the right of the human person to the free access to their own body and the respect of their physical, emotional and mental integrity.

 

Sigismond – oldsigismund@hotmail.com

[1] Rozenberg J. Biologie de la race et psychopathologie. Archives de Philosophie 64, 2001.