“I want my son to look like me,”
is what is spoken by the father, but what he really means to say is,
“I want my son’s penis to look like mine.”
The title of this article is often the argument that fathers make when trying to defend the reason as to why they want their sons penis circumcised. Is this not a creepy-sounding thing to say? Think about it this way: what if a woman said, “I want my daughter’s vagina to look like mine.” A little strange, huh?
Not every son perfectly resembles their father — specifically their father’s penis. We are each our own person in every way. While we share DNA with our parents, we each have our own personalities, talents, thought processes, characteristics, and perspective on reality. Would it not be outrageous to force a daughter who has brown hair and brown eyes, to undergo a surgical eye color change at birth, or to be forced to dye her hair at a young age to match her mother’s blond hair and blue eyes, simply for the sake that she is incessant on the ridiculous thought, “I want my daughter to look like me.”
NO. She would be considered an abusive, toxic parent for breaking down any chance her daughter would have naturally had of having a healthy body image and confidence in simply being herself. Her daughter wouldn’t know her own identity, and would look to her mother, and eventually everyone else, for affirmation regarding approval on her outward appearance.
So, why is it OK when a circumcised father uses the lame excuse, “I want my son to look like me,” as his unwavering standpoint for genitally mutilating his son, even though he knows intrinsically and inherently that he doesn’t agree with what happened to himself at birth?
The reason lies in denial of loss and psychological damage that incurred at the time of and perpetually thereafter the father’s own circumcision.
Circumcision is dangerous, not only in that it is amputating a piece of a male’s most favorite body part (and in terms of sexual health and behavior, his most important), but also in that there is empirical evidence stating that it causes permanent, irreversible damage the Limbic System, Frontal Lobe, and Temporal Lobes. Interestingly enough, these are the areas of the brain that have the most to do with processing emotion, memory, and the way in which we perceive cause and effect—all of which, if impaired, will completely negate any circumcised man’s ability to go back into his innermost thoughts and analyze how he truly feels about what happened to him.
Instead what is usually the case, is that a circumcised man will be in complete denial over the loss of part of his penis (and the most sensitive and erogenous part at that!), and he is not healthily handling the grief of his lost body part. Furthermore, whether he will admit it or not, he will act out on his frustration and anger, even if it’s dormant or repressed, by secretly wanting to inflict the trauma that he so undeservingly endured unto others…even if that includes his own son(s).
One can see the study for himself in the abstract to Dr. Bessel A van der Kolk’s fascinating research titled, “The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma,” in which he documents the reason for his postulation that there is a sadistic tendency among those who have been traumatized to re-enact their trauma unto others or the re-victimize themselves in displays of masochism. These traumas that the individual is re-enacting do not have to be ones from memories that they can pull from. They often are incidents that occurred during their formative years.
Analyzing this phenomenon superficially, it may seem that one may just adopt a conclusion that would follow the “logic” of the only psychiatrist they’ve really ever heard of, which is Freud, and automatically think that these compulsion to continuously incite a trauma from their infancy or childhood in their current adult life has its origins in some latent sexual desire to gain power or mastery over everyone around him.
However, clinical experience has proven that this is not the case. Rather, the true cause for a victim of trauma, such as in the case of a father who underwent Male Genital Mutilation wanted to inflict this same trauma and abuse on his son, lays in the sado-masochistic end of the behavioral spectrum: he has been programmed to re-play his own traumatic incident by causing suffering on others, even his loved ones, and trying to invent a rational reason, no matter how convoluted and confounded it may be, as to why. This is why you will find that any male doctors who recommend or perform circumcision (including mohels in the jewish community),are you guessed it!—circumcised themselves.
