body modification

How Long Before Republicans Try Mandating Male Circumcision?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2011-03-19 09:41

Speaking of kick-em-while-they're-down Republican legislation you've probably already noticed the only thing more important to them than mollycoddling the super wealthy and driving the economy into the dirt is doing anything and everything to punch the hippies? No matter how petty, stupid, socially counterproductive, or, especially, fiscally irresponsible. Like, for instance, ditching paper for styrofoam cups in the Congressional cafeterias. And, of course, directing the IRS to start digging into women's underpants to see if they've used tax dollars, or tax deductions, to pay for an abortion.

Well, for those of you keeping track at home, one of the biggest victories for anti-circumcision activists (I'm a moderate activist myself) was persuading insurance companies to stop routinely paying for them as part of standard labor and delivery coverage.

Turns out that vast numbers of parents who would routinely say yes, they wanted their infant sons circumcised changed their minds when told they'd have to pay out of pocket.  (Which only goes to show how little conviction, and how much cultural inertia has been behind the completely unnecessary procedure!)

But since routine, secular, non-religiously-mandated circumcision has been "traditional" for the last 150 years or so, and since the initial motivation was to discourage masturbation,* and since its the sort of thing at would just appeal to hippie-punchers I'm curious now which one of those aching Republican rectal tears is going to introduce a bill requiring insurers to automatically cover circumcision again?

And don't think they won't do it just because it's something that happens to me.  It's a catastrophic error to imagine they have any less contempt for men than they have for women.

I'd just add one more point**: such a bill would literally be no skin off their cocks because...

Q: Why are Republicans never circumcised?
A: Because there's just no end to those pricks.

* It doesn't.
** This one's for occasional commenter tu quoque who, like me and many other MRAs and feminists is genuinely and correctly interested in ending routine, ritual genital mutilation of children of any sort for any reason.

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And No, Using Questionable Science to Justify Questionable Body Modifications of Your Children Does Not Make it a Better Idea

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-01-28 15:00

Speaking of how it's a bad idea for parents to impose their body-modification ideas on their children, the anonymous but seemingly-credentialed author of The Neurocritic says

In 5 years of writing this blog, I have come across a multitude of news stories and press releases that make outrageous claims. Here's another one to add to the list. On the basis of two highly variable DTI studies in 36 pre-operative, pre-hormone treatment transgender individuals, now we're supposed to screen children for gender variant behavior and scan them at a young age, so their hormones can be altered before puberty?

Source: The Neurocritic

Yeah, if it's a good idea to wait for children to be old enough to make their own decisions before piercing their ears, circumcising them, or forcing them to wax or use cosmetics, let's definitely add deciding which sex hormones to pump them full of.

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Coke Talk on a Completely Different Way Breast Implants May Not Be For You

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-01-14 23:54

Coke Talk's lowdown on someone for running down breast implants.

With your skanky brand of gender politics, of course you don’t see the point. Fuck you for even suggesting that it has anything to do with what you like to grope.

Source: Dear Coke Talk

Having been of the same opinion that fashion in general and boobs in particular were all about me -- that since I thought they looked and felt funny people shouldn't get them -- I appreciate Coke Talk's sentiment a lot more now than I would have then.

Same would be true if I instead thought implants were sexxxay.  They're still pretty much almost never for me.

That's not to say that as well as perfectly good and perfectly neutral reasons there are plenty of questionable reasons to get implants.  Or other body modifications.  Just that those reasons for questioning it have nothing to do with my personal opinion, my personal judgment, or my personal preferences.  Or anyone else's.

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On Actively Intending How Our Bodies Are Seen

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2010-07-11 10:13

Wow, I’ve just uncovered a ton of draft posts that for some reason (probably episodes of writer’s block) just needed a sentence or two to finish and post. This one’s from last September! Sorry about the delay! —fl

Bond of Dear Diaspora has a cool, cool post about body image, presentation, and visual “truth.” (Emphasis mine)

A friend of mine explains our mutual friend’s recent swing toward femininity by saying that she’s interested in being sexy and attractive.

Another friend complains to me about someone responding to her masculine clothes by lamenting that she has such a nice figure, why doesn’t she show it off?

These are two incidents among many like them, all pointing toward the same conclusion: there is one right, attractive way to present a female body.

Let us first establish that presentation is not true. Not so much in the “don’t judge a book by its cover” sense as: there are a hundred ways to represent something, and done properly, each of them is extremely convincing, so convincing you will find yourself believing it.

...

My choice to de-emphasize my breasts and draw attention to my shoulders is no less accurate or honest an image than the opposite. Both the breasts and the shoulders are mine. I should be able to position them however I want.

Definitely read the whole thing here.

I realize it might already be obvious to everyone else but me. And goodness knows appearance, appearing, and the performance of appearance have been heavily critiqued. What I appreciate about this, though, is that what Bond’s talking about is about her intention to be seen.

Anyway, it makes sense. I mean, we all already appear different to other people. For instance without dressing or standing differently at all I look old to my children, young to my parents.

Sure, there’s the perfectly real chance that while Bond might prefer to draw attention to her shoulders, and her friend to her breasts, onlookers might instead direct their attention somewhere else entirely (e.g. face, legs, hands.) Lead a horse to water and all that. But it makes sense that it would be legitimate for us to condition how we’re seen by others based on our image of ourselves and based on the image we desire to present.

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Conversations Overheard: Body Modification in Perspective

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-11-03 12:32

Unrelated conversations overheard in a community-college cafe: at one nearby a young man telling someone he thought another lip ring would “help;” at another table an older woman telling a friend that getting breast implants made her feel like she “had herself back” after her children grew up.

Boy, it’s really up to each of us how we choose to modify our bodies. Tattoos, piercings, braces, haircuts and shaving, dieting, working out, tanning, hair plugs for men, and so on are all ok, I guess. And if we can stick things in our ears, noses, bellybuttons, scalps (hair plugs again) and lips then I guess you can stick things in your chest too.

Which is a long way of saying yeah, if you want to modify your body then go for it. Just don’t do it because you feel inadequate, or unattractive, or “if only I had…” because, you know, it doesn’t “improve” other people. So why should it “improve you?” On the other hand, just like a tattoo or a tan or all the other things we do to ourselves it will decorate you. And if you’re into self-decorating, and not “improving” then, again, that’s completely up to you.

Which gets to my main point: I don’t think you’d let someone browbeat you into getting a tattoo because they wanted you to have one. And I don’t think many people would buy someone else saying “if you’d just dye your hair blue could find a partner.” And so, thinking about implants as decoration you can sort of immunize yourself from what you think anyone else would like, in favor of what you’d actually like.

Anyway, keeping in mind that some things, like tans and haircuts can grow out while tattoos and implants… not so much, the real question being not just so much what you do as what’s the long-term impact on your health. A boob job is a much bigger risk than body piercing. (Take it from me: recovering from general anesthesia is not the same as the day after Quaaludes and tequila. And recovery from surgery hurts! Complications from surgery can hurt too.)

On the other hand in the long run it may have less health impact than, say, chronic tanning. Which we tend not to think of as “body modification” at all.

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From Porn and Self-Mutilation to Serious Social Change

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2009-09-05 10:57

This post started out as an innocent attempt to answer a startling accusation about the influence of porn on men. The answer is… larger. Unusually, for me anyway, there’s a call to action at the end.

The porn commentator Daze Reader, newly revived after a long hiatus, expresses skepticism about one more outlandish story about the perils of watching porn. The source is an interview with BBC producer Tim Samuels on The World from public radio’s PRI

And even Papua, New Guinea there were doctors who said that they’ve had to deal with cases of young men putting ball bearings down their penises to try and keep up with the impressive nature of the porn stars they’ve been watching in films.

Samuels said it here.

Daze Reader retorts

As for porn-obsessed dudes stuffing ball bearings down their penes, I’ll believe that when I see notarized X-rays. Until then, it’s a great urban legend.

Read the quotes in context and follow the links here.

A bit of Googling suggests it actually might be an urban legend. But if it is it’s a very old one! Australian research demographer Terence H Hull, writing for the website Inside Indonesia, says that reports of Indonesians, Melanesians, and Southeast Asians employing esoteric penis piercings and implants go back to Chinese traders in the 1400s and Magellan’s voyagers in the 1500s! The inserted items included “spurs,” bells, implanted balls, and even precious jewels.

(Quick aside: According to Hull the traditional Indonesian word for a device piercing the glans of the penis is “palang.” According to Wikipedia the traditional kinkster word for a glans piercing is “ampallang,” which they say derives from a tradition of the Dayak peope of Borneo. And I know this is all complicated but I’ll just say here that parts of both Borneo and New Guinea islands belong to Indonesia, which is why I’m citing an Indonesian website. Now, where was I?)

For the record the, well, record of Indonesian, New Guinean, Southeast Asian ball-implanting predates the kind of porn folks like Mr. Samuels concern themselves with by at least (um, 1980, the year VHS-based video players became commonly affordable, minus 1433, the year Ma Huan noted ampalling in Thailand equals) five hundred forty-seven years! Give or take.

Case closed on the “porn drives young men to ball-bearing themselves” idea? No, it’s still complicated. Hull says reports of the practice, once believed to be obsolete, is flourishing in laboring-class sailors, loggers, miners, and prisoners. Who evidently share the characteristics of being young, single, unschooled, and very segregated from contact with actual women.

Which lack of contact is… problematic.

Says Hull

From ad hoc interviews I have found that men use the devices before marriage, but remove them when they settle down with one woman. Why, if the purpose is to please a woman? One explained: ‘You can’t really be sure about these things – what if something went wrong? You wouldn’t want to take a risk with your wife.’

So where does the idea that women “love it” come from? Hull says

Informal but persistent attempts to understand the practices of genital cutting and the use of inserts and implants among Indonesian men indicate that what we are seeing today is not the resurgence of tradition. Rather these are largely attempts to come to terms with sexualities based on gender relations emerging from rapid modernisation.

Workers in isolated camps who rely on their peers for information on ‘what women want’ are easily convinced that implants may make them attractive to lovers. Young men who see peers attempting the operations to insert stones or plastic balls, and hear the bragging afterward are easily swayed to try the practice themselves. They do not hear clinical evidence of damage done to sex organs, and they definitely do not hear women’s stories of pain, discomfort or infection. From the viewpoint of men and reproductive health the response to penis implants must be based on education and the demystification of large areas of sexuality.

And how easy would it be to get word out that a) it’s dangerous, b) it’s actually not all that traditional, and c) despite what young men tell each other women actually don’t care for it at all? Turns out it’s hard because

The Indonesian Health Department regards any talk of penis adornments as esoteric, sensitive and obscure. Reproductive health service providers do not recognise the problems associated with genital cutting and the use of sexual accessories because such things are quickly dismissed as immoral. Whatever the moral arguments though, the practice of penis inserts appears to be spreading because men’s sexual education is incomplete and isolated. Lower class men in particular are likely to experiment with implants, not because their sexual needs are any different from other men, but because they are the groups most likely to experience isolation from women in their occupations.

M’kay, so in that environment it’s actually possible to say that porn could somehow be influencing young men raised in that environment to stick ball-bearings (and horsehair threads, bells, and the caps from toothpaste tubes!!!) in their penises. But whereas I don’t have a lot of patience with porn I think its totally missing the point to imply, as the BBC’s Tim Samuels does, that without porn young Indonesians and their regional counterparts wouldn’t “[put] ball bearings down their penises to try and keep up with the impressive nature of the porn stars they’ve been watching in films.”

To the extent porn matters at all for these men it’s just one shovel of dirt in an egregiously stifling, repressive, dehumanizing cemetery of isolation, bad information, institutional denial, misogyny, segregation, chattelization, miscommunication, insecurity, bluster and bravado, loneliness, alienation, ignorance, not even rudimentary education about actual heterosexual sexuality, othering, exploitation, and self-mutilation!

And that’s just for the men! Who nevertheless have an understanding that the mere fact of their gender renders them superior. Or, worse, baseline/constant/normal against which all others are measured and made to fit! And if they’re willing to subject themselves to such torment what are they willing to see befall everyone else inside and outside their societies?

Yeah, porn might be a problem in parts of New Guinea but that’s like PETA saying the problem with Guantanamo Bay is they serve meat to prisoners. A problem, possibly, but so far from the problem it would… I think… you could…

Sorry, lost for words there.

Recommended Action Item: It would be really, really nice if, when he’s done promoting this series the BBC would send Samuels and/or other documentary production teams to shine a little light on what’s happening to the men in the places he casually mentioned. And I’m not saying this in a “whut about Teh Menz” way. I’m saying it because what happens to these guys is bad, yes, and shouldn’t happen to anyone, yes, but also because whatever they learn, whatever happens to them, whatever view of the world they bring home with them rains down on everyone else in their lives from wives to children to brothers and sisters to sex workers to employees and so on.

So, to get back to Daze Reader’s question about whether this is an urban legend. Here’s one last snippet from Hull’s article

For some years I had been hearing of penis inserts in Indonesia, but like most middle class Indonesians I dismissed the stories as being little more than sensationalist rumours or fillers for slow news days in tabloids. Eventually though the growing number of reliable sources suggested that there might be something worthy of further research.

I was serious when I said someone like the BBC should send someone like Samuels shed light on it. The world still needs change and change doesn’t happen in the dark. This would be a good place to start.

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