I enjoyed reading your comments, the first one replying to the article, as well as your response to the commenter who replied above. I did do a quick search, scanned some scholarly reviews on Male Circumcision in the US, but I also have not been able to find a source of information stating that circumcision was part of one of the earlier waves of feminist movement, though I am aware of temperance/prohibition originating from suffragist/feminist organization, so my mind is open and I'd love to learn more about it. As a young adult more than a decade ago, I remember learning about FGM. In the same day, I started to question male circumcision, which of course is never presented as a nuanced idea by those who perpetuate it. These are babies with no choice. Violence and permanent physical trauma. I ended up reading on many forums about men's own experiences and suffering due to this. I also tried to find more articles speaking out against the practice. The first article I read about it, written in 2010, is on a website called Feministing - and it was speaking out very clearly against male circumcision, as a clear feminist stance. There's another article on the topic on the same site from 2015. I do remember in middle and high school, the boys bullying the very few who weren't circumcised (in the deep south in the very early 2000s). They also told all the girls who the uncircumcised boys were. I wonder if on some level back then, did they ever pause at all to consider that they had to make fun of the other boys, to prevent themselves from seeing themselves as victims of violence, without consent, from their parents and those they trusted, as powerless, voiceless babies? My experience is that it was heavily tied to oppressive evangelical religious practices that rule a large segment of the population in the US. And we know from speaking to people from other countries, and from easily accessible data, that it's not at all popular in other overly wealthy/"western" nations, even ones who are known for long-term feminist action and organization. I believe evangelicalism is the differentiator. Religious enforcement of the patriarchy. Submission and obedience to external incentives of people with power over you, or you assure yourself eternal damnation and torment. This evangelicalism is religious zealotry/extremism that functions almost as an extension of the Republican party itself, with the divine mandate (from their preachers and ministers and fathers and good, obedient mothers, and other patriarchal authority figures - of course they must represent God's will ) to be politically active in US government elections and politics. If they don't want to go to hell and be shunned from their community, they have a religious MANDATE from GOD to vote against women's bodily autonomy, over any other possible vote for policies, economic, or social, that are in the working class's self-interest. I was raised in a very religious household, and in elementary school (as a young girl, in a class of girls), they were teaching us in Sunday school classes how filthy and disgusting, and even diseased, uncircumcised men were, teaching us that we HAD to find an uncircumcised man to marry (and we had to be virgins, of course). They were saying this to us as small children who didn't even have penises. And of course we already had been taught by that age that we'd go to hell if we even thought about penises until after marriage, basically. But we also had to already start focusing on how to be a good wife, and what makes a good husband (unquestioning religious zealotry, a sense of entitlement second only to god's, the belief that he is in charge of any household he is a part of, and also the voice of God in the household - requiring submission from everyone else - and surgically altered genitalia, of course), as small kids. Of course this is one specific instance, which was part of a complicated web of programming and shaming children for everything natural about themselves. Instincts and self-preservation have to be overriden to make obedient, submissive workers for our US billionaire-oligarchs and others that profit like leeches off of everyone else who they feel power over and authority over. The school system and the modern isolated "traditional family unit" (it is not a tradiitonal or natural way to live at all, for most of human history, no one did, - it is a result of the industrial perversion ("revolution") ), also contribute to systems that keep people in check (undervaluing themselves, other people, other living things, and natural resources, too) and under the thumb of authority. All these systems may seem unrelated to many who still feel devotion to one or the other, or feel their identity is predicated upon fitting into our broken social system/culture (or their religion which they see as the cure for all the ills of a heathen society). But capitalism, and therefore a vast underclass population, is maintained by conservative social hierarchal constructs, including gender and race hierarchies, which are often programmed and enforced by conservative religious systems. On top of the obvious gender-role programming that starts on page 1 of the bible, I also heard the same "holy book" used to justify and uphold very racist views by these same people who consider themselves followers of a radical hippie socialist guy named Jesus, who told people to give away their possessions and help the poor. Jesus, who spoke of radical compassion and equality, who knew money was the root of evil, and that a camel had a better chance to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man has of passing into heaven. Religion and politics and capitalism have all gotten intertwined and perverted, if they were ever even really separate (they weren't). Unfortunately in the US now, and maybe always, both parties are conservative. Though one is actually a party of increasinly far-right extremism, more than conservativism, it seems. But with democratic control of congress and the white house, this country continues to become more backwards and volatile and inhospitable to the people it depends on to create wealth for a few. I also believe that carnism/factory-farming, and general industrial extraction of resources and ecological destruction are an extension of this complicated enforced hierachal "society" we live in. The point of all the different forms of programming is to take away our natural empathy. Our natural empathy and respect for ourselves, each other, for animals, for plants. From the time of our birth, we are programmed in our society to no longer see the magic and divinity in ourselves, and therefore every single creature that makes up this vast unified system of Life itself. Though I consider this to be less of a society, and more of a massive factory farm of humans being churned out for the use and consumption by the extremely powerful few, to continue to inflate their impossibly bloated egos and control of resources, at this point. <3