Is Erica Jong insane?
It appears to be quite possible.
I’m all for greater discussion about male circumcision. Personally, I find circumcision seriously troubling. I wouldn’t do it to my kid. If you want to be circumcised, more power to you, but I think parents have an obligation to allow their children to make decisions about permanent body modifications for themselves, once they’re old enough to understand all the of the issues involved. That said, I don’t blame individual parents who have made the decision to circumcise their children – at least for my generation in the United States, circumcision was billed by the medical establishment as “clean,” as “healthy,” and as “normal.” I don’t have stats on this, but I would guess that the majority of boys born in the 1980s in the United States are circumcised. I don’t think that those boys have parents who are cruel or stupid. I don’t think that these boys are mutilated; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them or their bodies. I think that religious and cultural reasons behind circumcision are compelling, and I believe that most parents have the best interests of their children in mind. But I do think that circumcising children without that child’s consent (and at an age where the child is totally unable to give consent) is wrong.
But that isn’t really what Jong is talking about. Instead, she writes a bizarre screed about how Jewish men have issues with women, and manages to not only insult Jews and men in general, but Asian, Asian-American, black, African-American and Eastern European women in one fell swoop.
Ever wonder why Jewish boys are so fucked up about sex? Ever wonder why they fall for mile-high models from Slovenia who wear those big cold crosses? Ever wonder why they like Chinese girls, Chinese-American girls, Blonde shiksa cheerleaders from Kansas? Or those cool black models who dance like Beyonce?
…because a lot of them are straight men, and straight men are generally attracted to attractive women – even if those women aren’t white?
Removing a piece of one’s genitals may indeed make them fucked up about sex. (Although I would argue that a society which constructs certain types of surgically altered genitals as the only “clean” or aesthetically acceptable genitalia has bigger sexual issues to portend with). What’s odd is suggesting that attraction to Asian or black women is evidence that one is “fucked up about sex.”
Now, one is certainly fucked up about sex (and about race and about women in general) if one wants to date black women because they’re so sexual, or if one wants to date Asian women because they’re so submissive and exotic. There are certainly lots of dudes out there who are like that. You probably know the type – they frequent “Men’s Rights” boards, where they bitch about how American women are too uppity and shallow and insist that Asian women are superior because they’re true ladies and delicate lotus-flowers, and Eastern European women are beautiful and oh-so-grateful for attention from American men.
But, again, that’s not what Jong is criticizing; she apparently takes issue solely with Jewish men marrying outside of the tribe:
The mothers usually run in the other room crying. But they get blamed for it anyway. And Jewish women bear the brunt ever after. Either they marry you and run around with Diana Ross or Beyonce or Naomi Campbell — or they marry Sandra Oh or Lisa Liu or Yoko Ono and she converts.
They fuck over-sexed black women but marry submissive Asian ones – congratulations, Erica, for racializing the virgin-whore dichotomy.
Plus, you know, Jewish women aren’t all sitting around waiting for Jewish men to get over their circumcisions and marry them.
And then it gets even stranger when she suggestions that circumcision is bad because neo-Nazis will be able to tell you’re Jewish when they see you pee:
It killed me to see my grandsons marked like this so future Nazis can identify them. What is wrong with the chosen people? Chosen for pain? All the psychological troubles of Jewish men — from Sigmund Freud to Lenny Bernstein to Philip Roth — must stem from this dubious ritual. I want to tell my adorable grandson, Max, who is four: Just make sure you never make pee pee in front of a skinhead. But he doesn’t know what a skinhead is.
Chances are, if the skinheads are 20-something white Americans, they’re circumcised too. And “Skinheads might realize you’re Jewish” is not a very good argument against a particular behavior or choice.
Yes, I get that Jong is trying to be funny, and the neuroticism of Jewish people is always a good fall-back for a laugh (Over-bearing Jewish mothers! Spoiled-rotten JAP-y girls! Sexually stunted shiksa-chasing Jewish men!). But, while a certain amount of self-conscious cultural humor can work, Jong doesn’t carry it off here – perhaps because nothing in her column is self-conscious. She depends on misogynist and racist stereotypes to prop up other racist and sexist stereotypes, and doesn’t really seem to have a bigger point.
She also can’t discuss male circumcision without comparing it to female circumcision:
You think female circumcision is bad? (It’s hideous, health destroying and horrible — and inflicted on women by other women). But at least women have other things to think about than their pussies — like children, like politics, like writing. At least women don’t focus nonstop on their vaginas (or as Oprah says, their vajayjays). Men think about their pricks for the rest of their lives. Don’t get me wrong, they think about them whether or not they’re circumcised. But circumcision bumps it up to a whole other level.
I think I’ve made my feelings on male circumcision relatively clear. But you are out of your damn mind if you think that male circumcision is anything like most forms of female circumcision. The majority of female circumcisions involve removing part or all of the clitoris, which is simply not analogous to the removal of foreskin; a more appropriate comparison would be between removing the clitoris and snipping off the head of your dick. Female circumcision isn’t less bad because women don’t think about their vulvas (trust me, we do – and were you to suggest removing a part of mine, I’d be pretty damned opposed to it, despite my interests in children, writing and politics). It’s perfectly possible to question the cultural practice of male circumcision without playing the “what’s-worse” game with female circumcision.
I’d also like to think it’s possible to question male circumcision without shaming men. Conversations around circumcision in popular culture too often involve privileging circumcised men’s bodies over others; the first example I can think of is the Sex & the City episode where one of the ladies sleeps with an uncircumcised man, and there’s a collective freak-out over brunch wherein the conversation revolves around how it’s weird and gross and looks like a shar-pei. Watching that was, for me, pretty disturbing – and I couldn’t help but think about how I’d feel if I were an uncircumcised dude who saw that episode. Uncircumcised men are pretty common; they aren’t freaks, they aren’t unattractive, and there’s nothing dirty or gross or aesthetically displeasing about uncircumcised penises. I really, really dislike the narrative that says only circumcised penises are clean and normal, and all others are deviant.
So I also really dislike it when I read articles that talk about circumcision in terms of deviance. While she doesn’t attack the cleanliness or visual appeal of circumcision, she does flat-out say that circumcision makes you sexually fucked-up. And that’s flat-out untrue. I oppose circumcision as a cultural practice; I think it’s unnecessary, and, despite some asserted health benefits (lower risk of HIV transmission, for example), not a procedure that should be performed without the man’s full consent. For me, it’s a basic bodily autonomy issue: Foreskin may arguably not be a huge deal, but I think it’s simply wrong to remove a part of a person’s genitals without their consent. However, I don’t think circumcised men are horribly “mutilated.” I don’t think that there’s anything weird or unattractive about it. I don’t think that they’re all psychologically scarred. And I think it’s shitty to suggest otherwise.
We spend a lot of time on feminist blogs discussing the myriad ways women’s bodies are culturally negotiated. We spend a lot of time criticizing beauty standards and examining how public comments about and displays of women’s bodies are used as tools to keep us in line. We often mention that men just don’t have to deal with a lot of this bullshit.
That’s all true, and we should keep doing what we’re doing. But equal-opportunity body-shame is not feminist (and to be clear, I’m not suggesting that feminists want to bring men down; most of us don’t). And the shaming and altering of men’s bodies for social, cultural and beauty-related reasons are absolutely feminist issues.