Men and boys and those who love them are adversely affected in many areas by the empathy gender gap, a direct consequence of gynocentrism. Wikipedia’s entry on the term starts with this:

Gynocentrism n. (Greek, γυνή, ‘female’ – Latin centrum, ‘centred’) refers to a dominant or exclusive focus on women in theory or practice; or to the advocacy of this. Anything can be considered gynocentric (adj.) when it is concerned exclusively with a female (or specifically a feminist) point of view.

Gynocentrism accounts for the widespread societal concern about non-therapeutic circumcision of female minors (Female Genital Mutilation, ‘FGM’), which is rare in the UK, and the relative disinterest in the equivalent for male minors (Male Genital Mutilation, ‘MGM’), which is common in the UK.

Relentless feminist narratives in the mainstream media have succeeded in persuading the public of a number of myths about FGM and MGM, including:

FGM is carried out at the behest of men, with the aim of reducing women’s pleasure during sex, helping men to ‘control’ women. The plain truth is that wherever FGM is carried out, it is carried out at the behest of women, and almost invariably by women. This helps explain why there has never been a successful prosecution for FGM in the UK – the police target men, not women. The harm caused by FGM is always far worse than that caused by MGM. This is a complex area, in part because of the number of different forms of FGM and MGM, and I refer the reader to an article by Brian D Earp, a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, Female genital mutilation and male circumcision: should there be a separate ethical discourse?

Practitioners of MGM are not routinely prosecuted by the criminal justice system in the UK, which has naturally led people to assume the practice is legal. This is not the case. James Chegwidden is a barrister, and in 2013 he gave a talk on the legal position of MGM, starting with:

The default position of the criminal law is that circumcision is a crime, and it requires a parliamentary override to stop it being a crime.

There is no such parliamentary override, so performing MGM is a crime. In their responses to our Freedom of Information challenges on MGM, neither the Home Office (with responsibility for the police) nor the Crown Prosecution Service denied that MGM is a crime – but they declined to explain why prosecutions are not routinely being brought against practitioners.

People often assume that religious and/or cultural considerations mean that performing MGM can be legal. They are mistaken. A long history of case law makes it clear that exemptions on these grounds are inadmissible (in England and Wales, at least).

MGM breaches several Articles of United Nations and European Union conventions. On the website of the Children’s Commissioner for England, we find this claim:

Children’s rights: Every child under the age of 18 has all the rights of the UNCRC.

The UNCRC is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In September 2015 we presented Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, with a Lying Feminist of the Month award, in recognition of the claim.

Proponents of the mutilation of boys’ genitals frequently assert that medical benefits result from the procedure – for men, or for their sexual partners – but almost all such claims have been successfully debunked, and for the remainder, the alleged benefits don’t justify the risks associated with MGM, including the risks of physical or psychological harm, or death. We recommend a video (49:32) of a presentation given in 2015 by Tim Hammond, an independent American researcher, on the Global Survey of Circumcision Harm.

MGM is known to have been practiced since at least the time of the Ancient Egyptians, so what was the historical purpose of amputating the extremely nerve-rich foreskin? A wide-ranging article on MGM by William Collins cites a lengthy passage written by Moses Maimonides, a leading Jewish intellectual and physician, in 1135. An extract:

With regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible. The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable. For if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened. In my opinion, this is the strongest of the reasons for circumcision. Jewish men, sexually subdued and readily controlled by their wives, don’t stray into mischief. The power of his member has been diminished so that he has no strength to lie with many lewd women.

For confirmation that MGM reduces the pleasure experienced by men during sex, we need to listen to men circumcised as adults, such as here (video, 21:40).

Justice for Men & Boys is the only political party in the English-speaking world campaigning for the human rights of men and boys, on many fronts. Our electoral strategy is to challenge the party (or parties) in power. At the 2020 general election we plan to field candidates in the top 20 Conservative marginal seats, with the objective of consigning the party to Opposition for five years. The funding streams for those candidates’ deposits were in place a few weeks after the 2015 general election.

Our 2015 general election manifesto explored 20 areas where British men’s and boys’ human rights are assaulted by the actions and inactions of the state, usually to advantage women or girls. MGM was one of the areas covered in the manifesto (pp. 9,10). There are no areas where the human rights of British women and girls specifically are being assaulted by the state.

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Mike Buchanan is a men’s human rights advocate and the leader of the political party ‘Justice for men & boys (and the women who love them)’.

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