Bigot? Racist? Something Else?

It reduces it. That's why it's done, i suspect, just like female genital mutilation. Agreed that it's less intrusive and damaging than FGM but yes, it is immoral to cut babies genital, however limited the mutilation is.

Female mutilation is done to eliminate all pleasure. I can't vouch for male circumcision, but I'm guessing it doesn't vanquish a males sex drive.......i figure you are not saying circumcised males are not interested or don't enjoy it.........and how would they really know unless the procedure was done at age 20 or whatever.......I have no foreskin in the game and I would never suggest grown men submit to such a thing. I know Max goes ape-**** every time women are mentioned and that girls live charmed lives. Oh, and everybody hates little boys.....that's just not true. Mutilation and sexual assault or anything that harms a person shouldn't happen, one should be subjected to pain just to please another.

Any society foolish enough to "vanquish the sex drive" of men and women would collapse demographically, so nobody wants that.

The foreskin is a highly exitable organ with much innervation, and it protects the gland skin which has even more nervous connections, so it stands to reason that cutting it out reduces the victim's capacity to enjoy sex.

You are right female muilation is done to eliminate all pleasure for the woman.
To be sure she has no desire left for other men.
Circumcising on men was problably done of hygenic reasons - at least I have been told so.
Here you can see how many men are circumsized in different countries.
http://www.circinfo.net/rates_of_circumcision.html

The question I am raising is whether the moral judgment of Western Culture is objectively superior to the judgment of cultures. I have made the following arguments.

- People in Western Culture feel very strongly that their values represent absolute truth. Every culture, including our own, involves indoctrination. We were brought up since birth to hold a set of cultural values. These values are ingrained in us and are part of who we are. That doesn't make them universal.

- Other cultures, particularly pre-colonial cultures, were ingrained with very different values than ours. They make dramatically different moral judgments that Western Culture. We see indigenous cultural practices as "barbaric".

- Western culture reached hegemony not by moral behavior, but by being lucky enough to have guns and steel. We have the ability now to push our values onto other cultures... but this is a matter of military and economic power more than moral superiority.

I don't know what you mean by Devil's Advocate (I don't believe in the Devil). I am pushing back against the idea that Western Cultural supremacy is based on absolute truth.

When Western ideas come up against indigenous ideas, sometimes the issues are passionate and difficult. The issue of using "Indian schools" to wipe out persistent cultural beliefs is troubling... but that was the way that White people in the US and Australia used to wipe out cultural practices that they found unacceptable-- including child marriage.

The male circumcision issue is a tangent. But it is an illustrative one. By showing that even in terms of Western morality it is fairly easy to find logical inconsistency I am pushing back at the idea that Western Culture represents absolute moral truth that has the right to judge indigenous cultural practice in any objective sense.

There are no real "hygienic reasons" for genital mutilation. These are mere rationalizations, excuses for a barbarian practice.

The foreskin is a feature, not a bug. It exists because it has brought survival or reproductive advantages to our ancestors.

Olivier... the US form of circumcision was an interesting tangent, but not a very relevant one.

I would like to hear from Glitterbag why male genital mutilation practiced by indigenous cultures doesn't get the same attention as female genital mutilation. Adolescent males in some indigenous cultures undergo rituals that involve cutting, and painful abuse of the penis without anesthesia that permanently change the appearance and form of the genitals.

In the West, violence against females has always been considered more horrific than equivalent violence against males. This seems like a cultural bias that doesn't make sense in the context of an absolute morality based on reason.

Western Culture has its own set of subjective cultural biases. They feel like absolute truth, but they don't always make rational sense.

Not today there is no reason that it should be hygenic reasons - you have to think thousand of years back and how people lived. And these "traditions" are kept.
When our western world mothers tell their daughters not to wash their hair or take a shower when they have their period one can imaged how it is more primitive countries.
Or when a mother and grandmother forbid the grand/daughter to let her son have an operation for club foot because God created him like that in our civilization what it is then in other countries?

How much does a grown up man suffer from the circumcision in comparasing with a woman?
By women so much more is cut off, often under absolutely unsafe and unhygenic sercomstances. Then the woman who did it sews her together.
The girl gets her period and the blood has difficulties to run out and gives her
enourmous pains - lifelong. Plus other bodely functions which hurt.
When she marries it is cut open so her husband can have sex with her - which gives her pain.
Does a circumcised man have pain by sex and urinating?

This is an example of how White people explain the meaning of indigenous cultural practices to the indigenous people as if White people understand their cultures better than they do.. Do you see the problem here?

There are indigenous women who support and promote these practices because they value their own cultures. Could you listen respectfully to how they feel about the practice? Have you ever sought to understand their point of view? Would you accept that their understanding of their own culture is more valid than a White perspective?

This is the crux of cultural supremacy. Rather than listening respectfully to indigenous cultures, we insert our own bias and interpret anything they say using our own values. We are invalidating and shutting own any indigenous voices that haven't changed their own views to be acceptable to our own.

Whether or not you can accept these indigenous practices... the fact that White people claim to understand them better than the indigenous people themselves is ridiculous.

This is the reason that those of us in America, and Canada and Australia have wiped out the cultures that used to thrive in our lands. We did this consciously... we invalidated practices that didn't conform and used them to consciously eliminate anything that we felt we couldn't accept.

Read about Indian schools... they weren't that long ago.

I can't answer these questions, and neither can you. Neither of us have any real understanding of these indigenous cultures, and that;s the point. You have a very simplistic view of these practices that is based on moral outrage and cultural bias.

If you were going to make a rational informed judgement about these practices you would want to hear both sides of the story, right? The stories from the indigenous women who value the practice are relevant.. have you read them? Do they have voices?

There are several important questions to ask...

- There are different forms of male circumcision from removing the foreskin of babies to genital mutilation of adolescent boys. The more minor forms of genital cutting are perfectly acceptable to Western culture. Are there different forms of female circumcision in different cultures. Should some of them be morally acceptable?

- How is female circumcision viewed in these cultures... particularly by the women involved? What is the language around it? What symbolism is used? Is it a matter of pride or of shame? Does the culture present it as a matter of power, or of submission? How does this differ from indigenous culture to culture?

- How do indigenous grandmothers, mothers and daughters... people who know more about the practice than anyone else, feel about the culture and their place in the culture?

- Which of our practices would indigenous cultures find barbaric... and how would we use our indoctrination to explain away their moral indignation.

- These practices are ancient, but the cultures have been impacted in harmful ways by contact with Western culture. Is it possible that these indigenous cultures were perfectly functional before the arrival of White people? I am suggesting that perhaps the imposition of Western culture is what knocked indigenous cultures off balance causing more pain than any of the indigenous practices.

You clearly have moral outrage. But is it informed moral outrage. I think it is wrong that you make judgments about the meaning cultural practices if you haven't thought about these questions. Your analysis says a lot about Western cultural bias. It doesn't provide any real insight into indigenous cultures. If you are going to judge other cultures, you should at least consider more than one point of view.

These are difficult questions, I don't have an answer to them. I do find it quite troubling that Western Cultures can't even give indigenous women or men a voice unless they comply with Western ideas of morality.

It is a mistake to equate Western Cultural understanding with truth... particularly when we are passing judgment on indigenous cultural practices.

I don't think there ever was any hygienic reason, even in the past. Nature does things well. It's not like we have any organ that's useless or detrimental. The foreskin brings a darwinian advantage, or it would not exist.



--- Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), rabbi, physician and philosopher, in The Guide of the Perplexed

I think it's an excellent example of the moral subjectivity you are talking about.

Not sure that "Western Culture" is the right unit of analysis here. In practice these things are more country-specific than that. Eg Europeans tend to scorn circumcision while Americans embraced it in the 19th century, as a way to control teenagers' masturbation. Likewise, one could say that the French are blind to the moral issue of force-feeding geese, or that the Spaniards ignore the moral issues posed by corrida. So "western culture" is too broad a set to highlight how moral values change from one social context to the next, IMO.

Regardless of which gender's mutilation gets more attention, the fact remains that it's all pointless mutilation. For some reason, when it comes to finding justification for cutting off a girl's clitoris, you turn to the opinion of women who will tell you that they're glad that someone had cut off her own clitoris. What have you heard from such women? What did they tell you concerning the benefit they experienced from the mutilation?

If someone defends the right of a girl to not have her clitoris cut off, you accuse them of claiming cultural superiority, as if that somehow cancels out the barbarity of the practice. It doesn't.

Only a western man can say something like that.
As a woman I have read what indigenous cultures say. More men than women are against it, many women start too. There are often articles in newspapers how women suffer under these practices. But I guess you as a man would not read them anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_genital_mutilation
My impression is that if a western person is against anything like this you would call them bias.
I certainly have no respect what so ever for you.

Now I know why Frenchmen, Italian and Europeans are so much more hotblooded and sexual attrative than many USAmericans, Turks, Jews, Asians or Africans.
The only thing is - it is difficult to compare before and after effect.

I am assuming that you mean you have read articles in Western newspapers. I don't think that is a very good place to get any real understanding of an indigenous point of view. Are we saying that unless an indigenous woman accepts Western cultural norms, that she has no voice? That is the practical result, other voices are labeled as "barbaric". You don't hear them. You don't want to hear them. Your cultural bias would prevent you from accepting them if you did.

I know that there are indigenous woman who support these indigenous cultural practices that you consider "barbaric". Could you provide a link any Western newspaper that gives these women a respectful voice on the topic.

This is an example of White people protecting indigenous women from their own culture. This idea makes me rather uncomfortable... particularly when any understanding of the meaning of these traditional cultural practices comes from the Western media. This is a rational for colonialism.

It is difficult to argue that colonialism has been good for indigenous women as whole, even though it has greatly reduced the prevalence of traditional marriage practices.

The use of the word "barbaric" to refer to indigenous cultural practices is bigotry. This meets any dictionary definition of bigotry.

The use of the word "barbaric" demonstrates privilege. It is only used by a dominant culture to refer to subjugated cultures. People who use this word are always in the group with economic and political power. The word "barbarian" comes from Ancient Rome... ironically the civilized people enjoyed watching the barbarians be mauled by wild animals as entertainment.

Whether or not the people in the dominant group have the actual ability to objectively discern absolute moral truth is irrelevant.... maybe that ability would justify bigotry. But it is still bigotry.

Not really. Just interview people who did it as adults, eg as a result of religious convertion.

Moral relativism is a philosophy almost exclusively embraced by the left. That many leftists also embrace situational moral absolutism is only an indication of their hypocrisy

Max isn't being stubborn, he's just enjoying being the center of attention