Intact America: Intactivists appear on 'The Today Show'

I cant' get the video to play, but if it is the family I am thinking of, I don't remember the father being "clearly against it" at all.

I remember seeing an expecting couple that was contemplating the decision like saps and they both had mixed feelings. Then it showed the family later after the baby was born and revealed that THEY had decided to have the baby circumcised and the father still had mixed feelings about it.

Even if I am thinking of a different couple, and the father referred to in the post was clearly against it, this would be the first that I know of of a mother being pro-circumcision and a father being against it (and the mother getting her way), as it is not the norm.

I don't know any mother that has strong feelings about circumcision and would make that choice on their own. Every mother I know feels that they let the father make the decision.

Several articles have been posted about circumcision lately, and most have a comment section. I cannot help but notice that almost all pro-circ comments come from men.

The father of my two boys made the decision to have them circumcised and my brother recently had a baby with his wife. While my sister-in-law was pregnant I asked if the baby would be circumcised. My brother answered "yes" (my sister in law had no say in the matter, but they ended up having a girl).

I agree that both genders need to become informed on the issue, but I will not let anyone blame women for making choices to circumcise when circumcision is overwhelmingly perpetrated and promoted by men.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-uuMNidKhc

If you are using a spam filter, you might be having a hard time viewing it from the IA page as an embedded file. I am guessing though that you do have Flash Media Player installed but if not, go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ to download and install it.

You may also want to try using Google Chrome ( http://www.google.com/chrome ) instead of Firefox or IE for your web browser. I have found it to be very good about supporting video streams without much nagging for this or that plug-in, as well as it being a faster renderer of ordinary web pages than the other two browsers, much as I like them.

"Several articles have been posted about circumcision lately, and most have a comment section. I cannot help but notice that almost all pro-circ comments come from men."

Yes. I chalk this up to cognitive dissonance as well as a desire to avoid facing one's own feelings over the issue. If you had part of your genitalia, even benignly, cut away from you as an infant, then tell me, how would you feel about that? A lot of men sort of seize up and cannot face it, it is so overwhelming. The anger a man can feel when he finally accepts the implications can be so great, his feelings so conflicted, that he just shuts down. This is what he thinks, at least subconsciously: "What, now do I have to start HATING my parents? Do I have to condemn my own religion (if indeed it was part of a religious ritual or a tradition)? What have I been missing all my life? How will I ever know for sure if what happened to me hasn't made my sexual satisfaction a fraction of what it should have been? And WHY WASN'T I CONSULTED? JUST WHAT WAS THE HURRY!?"

For many men, it is too much to bear. And the same could be said of women who as girls were "circumcised" and to this day think it is the right thing to do to their girls, yet even if they have moved here to America and know that it is an outlawed practice. The power of cognitive dissonance, denial, and the urge to suppress feelings so strong that a person does not know if he or she will be able to handle them, feelings that entail recognizing that one was, intentionally or not, abused badly as an INFANT by ignorant but well-meaning parents, who may otherwise have been perfectly decent parents--- well, this is just too much to bear. It is better to stay with one's opinion that this act of GM is somehow defensible, even desirable. It is easy to stick with this idea and to deny the implications, despite the obviousness of its indefensibility.

It should come as no surprise at all. All throughout human history, ridiculous and injurious traditions have been promulgated for no other reason than that they were done before. Amazing, but that is what we are. Flawed, injured, human. Humanity. It is what it is. But once we have identified this process in action for a particular such practice, we must endeavor to bring about its termination. Every moral and ethical system ever conscioned insists upon it.

When in comes to GM it seems to me that both genders promote it onto their own.

From what I have read about female GM, it seems that many women were not happy when it was becoming outlawed in Africa. Many mothers rushed to have their daughter's done while they still could.

I think many people here in America have this notion that we are thought of as heroes for leading and funding the crusade to stop the female genital mutilation in Africa, but many women were mad that the practice was stopped and feel that we have encroached on what should be their right as parents to decide.

Many woman are still having their daughters circumcised illegally. So I understand what you are saying about how hard it is to get this out of people's heads and how irrational people can be when it comes to tradition and religion.

I don't have the opportunity very often to bring up the subject of circumcision to men other than my brother who just went thru a pregnancy with his wife, and my husband. But both are pro-circ. And all the baby boys I have changed diapers on in my family are circed so I assume that attitude runs in my family.

I got married rather quickly less than a year ago. I thought we had covered all the important conversations like pregnancy, having kids, etc. But I forgot to mention my opposition to circumcision. Now I am not sure how to present it to my husband. I casually mentioned it once and he joked that guys that aren't circed don't get as much oral sex. (I have heard that before from men, so it must be a fear they have)

I have to somehow slowly convince my husband not to circ as he feels it is an area that he should get sole decision-making rights. And as I mentioned earlier, the father of my two boys had sole decision making rights as well, and he chose to have them snipped (which I now regret).

Like I said, this is a hard topic to deal with when you have the force of tradition, sometimes religious, as well as cognitive dissonance. A lot of men want to make sure their sons have this same "treatment" since it affirms what happened to them, thereby keeping their true feelings about what was done to them at bay. For some men, to fail to support doing it to their own sons is a tacit admission that what was done to them was unnecessary. Same thing as with the women in Africa who were "circumcised".

General social attitudes do change, but slowly. Until then, this practice will remain, but its days are clearly numbered. Do the best you can. Sometimes you can talk rationally and constructively with strangers or friends re topics that you can't get anywhere with with S.O.s or relatives. You just have to accept that and you do what you can where you can to get the word out and get people thinking about it.

When we get the legal system to finally see things in favor of the infant's well-being on this matter, that will be a huge step forward, and probably easier to do than changing the minds of our relatives. So it has to be a 2-pronged approach: legal system, hearts and minds. Getting the law on our side will be much easier when we get the medical establishment on our side, which it seems to me is starting to happen. Slowly, but surely, the dominoes will fall and one day, baby boys will no longer have parts of their genitalia removed with legal or moral consent but without rational justification for the level of damage done to them.