Starting life as a male

**Gary Burlingame** · 2nd-January-2011

I come to you from an abused generation. No male that I knew through high school escaped the horrendously anti-male "welcome" to life as a male by being sexually tortured and mutilated. It is good that so many of you will have escaped this extreme trauma.

The impact to our whole generation is incalculable. Some men it made into sex addicts, some of us into sexual recluses, and virtually none of us even knew what was done to us, or why. What can be said is that it changed the men who were thus abused. You don't traumatize someone so badly and not change him. The question is, what were, and are the people doing circumcision trying to accomplish? They really don't understand what they are doing. We need to understand it ourselves and tell them.

I have been active against circumcision online since the earliest days of the World Wide Web in 1992. This includes facilitating a mailing list for men who are restoring their foreskin.

If men are treated decently from birth, they will do better than if they are abused and traumatized. If we want men to stand up for themselves, start with day one.

I look forward to learning from you about other related issues of men's rights, and to a balance of my support for these issues, and your support for ending circumcision.

Thanks for your welcome. I'm sure I'll find many good friends here.

Gary

**Marx** · 2nd-January-2011

Greetings. Spreading awareness of the issues adult men can face from the circumcision as a child is key to educating people of today's generation.

**Gary Burlingame** · 2nd-January-2011

Quote from Marx

Spreading awareness of the issues adult men can face from the circumcision as a child is key to educating people of today's generation.

Thank you. Yes, and so is getting people to care about what happens to men in the first place, hence this site.

**RobYork** · 2nd-January-2011

Welcome !!!

**Charles U Farley** · 2nd-January-2011

wotcher!

**omegaflux** · 2nd-January-2011

Welcome!!!

**rohara** · 2nd-January-2011

Wecome Gary

**Tyrael** · 3rd-January-2011

Hi there Gary, enjoy your stay.

**Douglas** · 3rd-January-2011

Welcome, Gary.

I rather like the way one woman sarcastically answered a pro-circumcision "reason" being that the penis can get dirty under a foreskin. She said something along the lines of 'we all wake up sometimes with that gritty feeling under our eyelids - it's just not acceptable to wash our eyes, we should all have our eyelids cut off for hygiene reasons.' It has never been a big issue for me but that woman's sarcastic response woke me up to the stupidity of lopping off bits of baby boy's genitals.

**themanonthestreet** · 4th-January-2011

Welcome!

TMOTS

**Chris Wedge** · 5th-January-2011

Oh hey there, Gary. (motherfucking oak)

Good causes an... holy crap I need to do my coursework naos kthx

**Celtic Druid** · 7th-January-2011

Hello Gary. I think you'll find an overwhelming consensus of opposition to circumcision on this forum, including me.

Welcome to the forum.

**Martin E** · 7th-January-2011

Hello Gary, welcome. I'm also with you on the circumcision issue.

**Percy** · 8th-January-2011

G'day and welcome.

We start in life as a being-in-the-world, although we barely know it.

We live, as such, in ignorance of the great Gift that is Life and Consciousness, and die, usually still pretty damned ignorant.

We contend with a Universe that is rather small and confined in our minds to 'other people', most of whom we don't know and often don't like.

We moan and complain.

But hey, would you rather be something else, a stone or a fish, or nothing at all?

Life is something to rise through and in.

Being a chap is fine.

I am happy enough being a bloke, despite all the slings and arrows, the rain and distain.

It could be better if women were nicer. Men too. But then I might not discover what I am in the world for.