anewthrowaway

Bingo -- the whole thing about being "cleaner for living in the desert" or something is hooey -- every desert mammal has a foreskin; if it were a disadvantage evolution would've adapted that along with all the other adaptations that desert mammals have.

That entire line is garbage and meant to support the subservience, exactly as you've said. A mother's strongest instinct is to protect her children, so the tribe taking a child and cutting his body marks him as belonging to the tribe rather than to the family. It proves, in plain view, that the familial bond is secondary, and individual autonomy serves at the pleasure of the group, not the other way around.

And there's HUGE regional variation, the practice being very rare in the southwest and very common in the northeast.

I can say from personal experience, I'm in the midwest and in my entire dating career, I've only encountered two women with prior knowledge of natural men, and both of them had spent time in Europe.

So if the rate is indeed dropping here, it's happening in a younger segment of the population. (Good for them!)

However, the precedent that FGM is outlawed _despite_ religious protest, means that MGM might eventually fall too. This means that anyone wishing to preserve MGM is trying to find support for it on other grounds.

Hence the litany of "health studies" supporting the practice, so it's not just a religious issue, it's a health issue! Muddy the waters with just enough doubt to keep the debate alive instead of letting it be an obviously-settled issue like FGM.

The result is that, if you look at all the papers published on the topic, and sort them into two piles depending on who funded the research, and then look again and sort them into two piles depending on their conclusion, you'll find that you've performed the same sort twice.