Hooray! Maybe now all the cunts from the last female genital mutilation post can help stop this barbaric practice from happening to boys? Or would they like to complain endlessly some more?

This is a very complicated topic, but unfortunately Western condemnation has apparently driven the practice underground, and caused it to be performed on younger and younger girls as those groups struggle to preserve traditional practices.

I think it will be a long time before most of us are able to draw any lines between female genital nicking and male circumcision. Our culture is filled with these dichotomies.

treacle, you don't know what your talking about. Teh practice may be "underground" in western cultures, but its thriving in "the old countries".
Forced body modification before the ability to consent is wrong no matter your gender.
I'm talking anything from circumcision to gender assignment to earrings in month old girl children.
They can't consent.

@4 yes, true. But if giving them the nick satisfies their crazy ass parents enough to keep them from getting someone from the "old country" to come over and do the full thing, isn't that the lesser (FAR lesser) of the two evils here?

OMG parents should be allowed to abuse their children any way they want, especially since we've done it for thousands of years. That's an "argument."

BTW #1, you're a cunt who plays the "identify your organ with the correct genital" game, which makes you a shallow idiot. Go away.

What else should we keep doing because it's always been done? Cultural sensitivity be damned--it's called cultural abuse and I'm sick of people defending anything because of culture. Mutilation and torture is mutilation and torture regardless of *gasp* the age, color or creed of the parents of the victim.

Parents who think they own another human being are just as stupid and immoral as anyone who "purchased" a human being for their pleasure--just because you make a human doesn't give you bullshit property rights.

@ 6 - "Cultural sensitivity be damned--it's called cultural abuse and I'm sick of people defending anything because of culture."

Amen to that! And FWIW, it was the Makah people who taught me that lesson, back in 1999 (the fallacy that because a practice is 'cultural', it is therefore beyond reproach - it's 'cultural' to stone women to death in parts of the Middle East, fr'instance). I will be forever grateful to them for that. Srsly.

How is this something to celebrate? Girls will continue to be subject to mutilation instead of having the much, MUCH less serious nick or pinprick. And why? Because stupid, simple-minded, emotionally-driven Americans like @6 here, who isn't even aware of what this argument is about and has just given us a classic example of black-and-white thinking, have made their voices heard. Well, congratulations, America! You win the moral high ground. Fuck cultural sensitivity, fuck pragmatism, and especially, fuck the girls who are affected by this. If a few hundred thousand of them get their clits hacked off by auntie in a hut, well, at least you've got the consolation of knowing that their culture is wrong, and yours is right.

And seriously, Cienna -- you can't differentiate between the acknowledgment of a "tradition that has existed since antiquity" and an endorsement of it?