Ashley Montagu Quotes

I also survived circumcision, a barbaric practice designed to remind you as early as possible that your genitals are not your own.

How strange that excision – female circumcision, with several languages using the same term for both kinds of mutilation – of little girls should revolt the westerner but excite no disapproval when it is performed on little boys. Consensus on the point seems absolute. But ask your interlocutor to think about the validity of this surgical procedure, which consists of removing a healthy part of a nonconsenting child’s body on nonmedical grounds – the legal definition of… mutilation.

Historians of the future will find it incredible that we mutilated babies by cutting off the end of their penises in the name of medicine. There are now serious concerns this routine procedure may actually deprive adult men of a vital part of their sexual sensitivity.

I believe the time has come to acknowledge that the practice of routine circumcision rests on the absurd premise that the only mammal in creation born in the condition that requires immediate surgical correction is the human male.

Well, of course there’s my own experience of being mutilated as a little child. Having gone through this cruel practice and all the long-term consequences that come with it, I just cannot sit back and watch it being done to thousands of little girls every year. I believe that it is my responsibility to use the attention I get to fight against the continuing practice of FGM.

Were we to still be circumcising the hood of the female clitoris, we would not have difficulty considering this a continuation of our tradition to keep girls sexually repressed. America's reflexive continuation of [male] circumcision-without-research reflects the continuation of our tradition to desensitize boys to feelings of pain, to prepare them to question the disposability of their bodies no more than they would question the disposability of their foreskins.

I am circumcised, and I tell you something, I despise it. I despise it. I despise it... I am completely pissed off that I'm circumcised.

If circumcision has any justification AT ALL, it should be medical only. Parents' religion is the worst of all reasons - pure child abuse.

When we commit violence against an infant girl, we call it child abuse; when we commit violence against an infant boy, we call it circumcision.

You know what circumcision is, Private?

This could never be a crime in any society which deems itself enlightened.

Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to get rid it.

The Egyptians by the custom of their country circumcise the marriageable youth and maid in the fourteenth (year) of their age, when the male begins to get seed, and the female to have a menstrual flow

Female Genital Mutilation is a violation of the human rights of girls and women.

Americans are locked into our traditions.

Ceremony and ritual are like a warm, fuzzy coat to the Brits. It feels good to put it on.

The vast majority of the world knows there's no reason to circumcise. Someone should tell the doctors.

If "Thou shalt not covet," and "Thou shalt not steal," were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.

Circumcision , that's all I've ever talked about.

Even before the kids are born, you've go to make these decisions. If it's a boy, do we get him circumcised? If it's a girl, do we keep her?

Abortion doesn't belong in the political arena. It's a private right, like many other rights concerning the family.

I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things.

A great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me. Shame that I belonged to a race that could be so dealt with; and shame for my country, that it, the great example of democracy to the world, should be the only civilized, if not the only state on earth, where a human being would be burned alive.

In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948--on a five year old girl.

People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.