We must all hang together,  or most assuredly we shall all hang separately. – Benjamin Franklin, 1776   Boys and the Boy Crisis July 13-14, 2007 in Washington, DC 2007 Boys and the Boy Crisis Main Speakers Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register   Warren Farrell PRE-Conference Workshop     Conference Presentation Our Sons, Our Schools, Our Future: The Crisis Beneath the Boy Crisis—and How to Solve It     The Boys’ Crisis: the Danger; the Opportunity What is the underlying issue when we perceive our daughters’ problems as the schools’ fault and our sons’ problems as our sons’ fault? If our sons and daughters’ brains are different, what do we do with that info? What needs to be changed about the male-female dance to improve both our sons and daughters’ lives? Which men’s issues are the most crucial boys’ issues? Is our sons’ genetic heritage in conflict with their genetic future? A new approach to teaching communication and sports that can vastly improve our sons’ and daughters’ lives.     When we explain men's issues, women, men, liberals and conservatives could care less. Yet when we explain boys’ issues, women, men, liberals and conservatives care. Why? Protecting boys calls upon women’s instinct to protect; but protecting men wreaks havoc on women’s instinct to expect protection from us. Similarly, men, whether liberal or conservative, recoil if we fail to protect. Understanding boys’ issues therefore has a dual benefit: it helps us communicate our issues to others; and it helps us to know ourselves. Thus, just as the Chinese symbol for crisis incorporates both the danger and opportunity, we will discover both the depth of the crisis for boys and the depth of the opportunity for us all.     Friday July 13th, 12:30-3:00 pm, (requires separate registration)       Warren is no stranger to men's activism having written the classics that have mapped out our issues.  From the groundbreaking Myth of Male Power through his latest book Why Men Earn More Warren has beautifully articulated and painstakingly documented the many ways that men are at risk and are all too often judged as expendable.  We are excited that Warren will be with us and look forward to hearing from him.   Bio Dr. Warren Farrell is the only man in the US ever elected three times to the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New York City. Dr. Warren Farrell has been chosen by the Financial Times as one of the world’s top 100 thought leaders. His most recent book, Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap--and What Women Can Do About It, has been the subject of widespread praise, from features on ABC’s 20/20 to The New York Times and U.S. News and World Report. Dr. Farrell’s books are published in over 50 countries, and in 13 languages. They include two award-winning international best-sellers, Why Men Are The Way They Are plus The Myth of Male Power.   MORE Warren Farrell.com Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register     Matt O'Connor Founder, Fathers 4 Justice   PRE-Conference Workshop     Conference Presentation THE FATHERS REVOLUTION     FATHER FIGURE Founding father of campaign group Fathers 4 Justice, Matt O’Connor exports his no nonsense vision of non-violent direct action to the United States for the first time and spells out the strategies and structures that can turn a campaign in crisis into a campaign in the national headlines. Expect strong arguments and strong language.     Fathers 4 Justice leader Matt O’Connor explains how fatherlessness in the first world is creating a social catastrophe for young boys who are growing up without any kind of father figure. O’Connor sets out how his work with young offenders in the United Kingdom has brought home to him the how the vicious social cycle young boys and teenagers find themselves in has led to an explosion in young offending and the creation of an increasingly dysfunctional society. Friday July 13th, 3:30-6:00 pm, (requires separate registration)       BIO     Matt O'Connor is the founding father of the most controversial and high profile pressure group of modern times. Denied access to his own two boys by the Family Courts, O'Connor decided to take on the legal system and the British Government with the creation of Fathers 4 Justice, the group which established the phrase "fathers' rights" as part of the political lexicon. O'Connor has three boys, Daniel aged eleven and Alexander aged nine from his previous marriage and Archie aged one with his partner Nadine. In 2005 he was one of twenty people shortlisted for the Great Briton of the Year Awards. The judges said, "He displayed great humour, eccentricity and innovation in raising awareness of a very serious social issue." He was also named GQ Magazine's 7th Top Communicator in the UK, the 92nd Most Powerful Man In Britain & and was also named as Esquire Magazine's 35th Most Powerful Man In Britain Under 50 in 2005. He has spoken at the Oxford Union on numerous occasions and is currently writing his first book ‘Fathers 4 Justice: The Inside Story’ which is due to be published in the summer of 2007. A film about his life story is in development with Miramax. O’Connor is also working on a stage musical treatment of the Fathers 4 Justice story and other related projects including the launch of a new political party. MORE Fathers 4 Justice     Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register     Glenn Sacks PRE-Conference Workshop     Conference Presentation Anti-Male Bias in the Media     Can boys (and girls) be raised without men? The drive to diminish the importance of fathers Anti-male bias runs throughout the mainstream media and also, to a lesser extent, the conservative alternative media. The media provides a terribly stilted view of issues such as divorce and child support, domestic violence, child abuse, and men's and women's contributions to their families. Prominent examples include: media coverage of the Clara Harris 'Murder by Mercedes' Case; numerous child support enforcement publicity campaigns against so-called "deadbeat dads"; and the "lazy husband" myth currently being used to explain the decline of marriage. Discuss what you can do to combat anti-male media bias with Glenn.     Call it the backlash against the backlash. Over the past decade, Americans have increasingly understood that the divorce revolution, fatherlessness and single parent households are harming our children. Now those who view the traditional family as disadvantageous to women are firing back, defending women who choose single motherhood and depicting fathers as superfluous. Last fall Stanford University Gender Scholar Peggy Drexler penned the highly-publicized book Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men. This month Oxford Press released Wellesley College Women's Studies Professor Rosanna Hertz’s Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family. Certainly one can sympathize with those single mothers whose husbands or lovers abandoned or mistreated them, and who soldiered on in the raising of their children without the father those children should have had. However, Drexler and Hertz go well beyond this, openly advocating single motherhood as a lifestyle choice. Friday July 13th, 9:00-11:30 am, (requires separate registration)           BIO Glenn Sacks is a men's and fathers' issues columnist, commentator, talk show host and blogger. Glenn's columns have appeared in dozens of the largest newspapers in the United States. He has made hundreds of radio and TV appearances and is often quoted in major publications. To learn more about Glenn, read his biography here. .

Dr. Paul Nathanson and Dr. Katherine Young


Conference Presentation

Coming of Age as a Villain: What Young Men Need to Know in a Misandric World

summary - We will begin by discussing coming-of-age as a cultural process that in other times and places fostered the transformation of boys into men. What happens in a society that provides not only fails to acknowledge the entry into manhood but also—and this is even more important—refuses to provide an acceptable view of manhood in the first place? The social-scientific evidence looks very grim, most obviously (but not only) the statistics on suicide and dropping out of school. What’s going on? These are symptoms, we suggest, of a much deeper problem. By and large, people are either unaware of this problem or unwilling to do something about it. In that sense, it is analogous to what Betty Friedan called women’s “disease with no name.” But it has a name now: misandry. MORE

	Dr. Paul Nathanson and Dr. Katherine Young are the authors of two very important books that uncover the underlying contempt for men and boys in our culture today. Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture and Legalizing Misandry: >From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men
Dr. Paul Nathanson, who has a BA in art history; a BTh (Christianity); an MLS (library service); an MA in religious studies (Judaism and Islam); and a Ph.D in religious studies (religion and secularity) is a senior researcher at McGill in Religious Studies and a professional editor. His first book was Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (1989). He has published articles on other movies (such as Rebel without a Cause) and on culturally significant events (such as public response to the death of Princess Diana).			Dr. Katherine Young, who has a BA in Philosophy and Religion and an MA and PhD in history of religions in the Faculty of Religious Studies, is James McGill Professor and teaches at McGill University. She has pursued her interest in gender, collaborating, for instance, with Arvind Sharma on twelve books about women in world religions. One of these, Feminism and World Religions, was selected by Choice in 1999 as an Academic Book of Excellence.
Nathanson and Young have collaborated for many years on research projects. His areas of expertise are Western religions, ethics, and secularity; hers are Eastern religions, ethics, and gender. In the mid 1980s, they received a major grant for research (at the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law) on new reproductive technologies and the family. Their focus, on these technologies as closely related symbolic systems with significant effects on the ways in which men understand both maleness and masculinity, led to several additional projects. One is a trilogy on misandry, the sexist counterpart of misogyny. The first volume, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, was published in 2001. MORE
Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture				Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men	"Legalizing Misandry is a tour de force that exceeds even Spreading Misandry in power and persuasion." Don Browning, Divinity School, University of Chicago

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.

	Conference Presentation
	Boys: The Next Fathers
	The fatherhood crisis, though comparatively new, is not limited to one generation. For the African-American community, we were warned about it at least as far back as the Moynihan report in 1965. That’s almost two generations, just since the warning. It is very likely that males have been gradually relinquishing their hold on fatherhood for at least a century, without fully realizing they were doing it, and that the rise in crime rates, incarceration, and substance abuse reflected this long before we became aware of a "fatherhood" crisis. The main ways boys learn to be fathers is from their own fathers. How many of us do things the way our fathers do, even when we are not quite sure that is the right way? Or at least when we do things differently, we are usually consciously aware of the fact. When boys don’t have fathers, how do they learn to be fathers? At best, these days they may learn from a variety of new psychotherapeutically-designed, government-sponsored, and feminist-influenced "responsible fatherhood" programs. I am not certain that is much better than learning nothing. Today the state has become the de facto father to large numbers of children. The head of the household has shifted from the father not to so much to the mother but to the government. What are the consequences of boys growing up with the authoritarian state as their principal role model?

BIO

Baskerville is widely recognized as "the leading authority" (in the words of Paul Craig Roberts) on the politics of divorce, custody, and family courts. His writings on family and fatherhood issues have appeared in leading national and international publications, both popular and scholarly: the Washington Post, Washington Times, Independent Review, Salisbury Review, Society, Political Science and Politics, The American Conservative, Human Events, Women's Quarterly, Catholic World Report, Crisis magazine, Insight magazine, World Net Daily, Whistleblower magazine, The Family in America, Family Policy Review, American Spectator, The Spectator, American Enterprise magazine, National Review, Liberty magazine, the Sunday Independent, LewRockwell.com, New Presence, MovieGuide.com, and others.

MORE

www.stephenbaskerville.net		Stephen's new book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

Tom Golden LCSW

BIO

Tom is the author of Swallowed by a Snake: The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing and has been teaching mental health professionals around the world about men and boys and their unique paths in healing from stress and grief. He is well known in the field of healing from loss. Tom's book has been acclaimed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and others. Tom enjoys presenting workshops in the United States, Canada, and Australia, having been named the "1999 International Grief Educator" by the Australian Centre for Grief Education.  His workshops are known to be entertaining and informative. Tom brings a gentle sense of humor and a gift for storytelling as he draws on his twenty-five years of practical, hands-on clinical experience. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and U.S. News and World Report, as well as on CNN and CBS Evening News. In 1995 Tom created the internet's first interactive web page for grieving people webhealing.com and designed and started the worlds first internet memorial page, the Place to Honor Grief. Tom presently serves on the Maryland Commission for Men's Health.

Swallowed by a Snake:
The Gift of the Masculine
Side of Healing

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

 

 

Gordon E. Finley, Ph.D.

(boys issues panel)

	Conference Presentation -- Boys Issues Panel
	The New Gender Divide in Higher Education:  Long-Term Social and Occupational Implications
	A 40% male attendance, graduation, and advanced degree rate hardly represent equality for men -- and indeed represent a reversal of historic proportion.  The occupational implications are relatively straightforward. Far more murky -- but linked to the occupational and income implications -- are the future social worlds of men, women, children, and matters of sex, reproductive rights and responsibilities, and family forms such as single, cohabiting, married, and divorced. Looking through the glass darkly, the brick floor may well turn out to be far more important than the glass ceiling.

BIO
Gordon E. Finley received a B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Antioch College and a Ph.D. in Social Relations from Harvard University. Prior to his present position as Professor of Psychology at Florida International University, he taught at the Universities of British Columbia, Toronto, and California at Berkeley (as a visitor)

He publishes empirical research, family policy articles, op-eds, and letters-to-the-editor -- which have appeared in most of America's major newspapers; The focus of these endeavors includes: fatherhood; divorce; family law reform; and the status of boys and men in contemporary society.

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

J. Steven Svoboda

(Boys Issues Panel)

BIO

J. Steven Svoboda is Founder and Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC), a section 501(c)(3) educational non-profit organization. For his work with ARC, he received the 2002 Human Rights Award of the International Symposium on Human Rights and Modern Society. In August 2001, he traveled to Geneva to present oral and written interventions to the UN Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. Recent publications include “Genital Integrity and Gender Equity,” in G.C. Denniston et al., eds., Bodily Integrity and the Politics of Circumcision: Culture, Controversy, and Change; Springer, 2006, “HIV and Circumcision: Cutting Through the Hyperbole, Journal for the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health (UK), and “Prophylactic Interventions on Children: Balancing Human Rights with Public Health,” 28 Journal of Medical Ethics 10-16 (October 2001).

Steven is the proud father of 5-year-old son Eli and 2-year-old daughter Sarita, and is the proud husband of Dr. Paula Brinkley, M.D. He recently coauthored a gender studies textbook with Dr. Warren Farrell and Dr. James Sterba, due out soon from Oxford University Press. Steven is also Public Relations Director and Board Member of the National Coalition of Free Men (NCFM), the world’s largest and oldest men’s rights organization. He has published over 130 reviews of books relating to masculinity and men’s rights, and is a long-standing columnist for GRIP Magazine, having published over 40 installments of his column entitled, “Gender, Law, and Fatherhood.” He is a patent lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area and an expert tournament chess player. He also likes dancing and being silly.

www.arclaw.org Attorneys for the Rights of the Child

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

Malia Blom

(Boys Issues Panel)

BIO

Malia Blom is the Executive Director of Boys and Schools. She is an honors graduate of both Catholic University's Columbus School of Law and Mount Saint Mary's College, where she studied history and first became interested in the societal effects of gender issues. Her background in non-profit advocacy began in Hawaii, where she was very involved in the debate over end-of-life care, as well as various other social issues. She now lives and works in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband James, and her two sons, Andy and Magnus.

http://www.boysandschools.com/

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

Warren Farrell - Cont.

Warren has run his own business for more than 35 years. He has done keynotes, expert witness testimony or corporate training for Toyota, IBM, AT&T, Bell Atlantic, Revlon, Ogilvy-Mather, Texaco, NASA and the U.S. Air Force. He has spoken worldwide to associations of corporate executives (YPO, TEC, the Australian Institute of Management); associations of professionals (e.g., the American Management Association, and the Financial Planning Association), and think tanks (CATO, the Renaissance Weekends).

Warren has appeared more than 20 times on CNN (e.g., Larry King Live), and repeatedly on Oprah, the Today Show and Good Morning America. He has also been interviewed by Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings and John Stossel and been the subject of two special features on ABC’s 20/20. He has ruined a few shows by getting co-hosts who are conservative (Pat Buchanan) and liberal to agree!

Warren has been featured repeatedly in The New York Times, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as in Business Week and Boardroom publications. He is often quoted or featured in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report, and been the subject of features in both People and Parade. He has written for publications ranging from the World Book Encyclopedia to Ms and journals of sociology and psychology.

Warren is in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World, but is most comfortable at home. He lives with his wife and two daughters (teenagers!) in Carlsbad, California. You may visit him virtually at http://www.warrenfarrell.com

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

Recent Press:

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

Stephen Baskerville - Cont

He has appeared on national radio and television programs, including The O'Reilly Factor, Hardball with Chris Matthews, CNN, Court TV with Fred Graham and Katherine Crier, Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, Extension 720 with Milt Ros

He has been featured in profiles and write-ups in Human Events, Reason magazine, the Gannett newspapers, Enter Stage Right, News with Views, Men's News Daily, Fathering Magazine, the Washington Times, Townhall.com, the Ottawa Citizen, the Royal Gazette (Bermuda), El Visitante (Puerto Rico), and elsewhere.

He is an advisor to the Men's Health Network and serves on the board of affiliates of Gendercide Watch, a human rights organization that monitors gender-specific atrocities. He is a contributing editor to the journal, In Search of Fatherhood.

Many of his articles on family issues are available at: www.stephenbaskerville.net.

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

Drs. Nathanson and Young - Cont.

The second, Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men, was published in 2006. Having disposed of the negatives stereotypes and tendentious half-truths about men that have led to the polarization of men and women, they will re-open the topics of maleness and masculinity from both historical and cross-cultural points of view in a third volume: Transcending Misandr2082/frontend/x/files/index.htmly: Toward Intersexual Dialogue. Another manuscript related to this project is
Beyond the Fall of Man: Ideological Feminism, Secular Religion, and the Conspiracy Theory of History.

Underlying their collaborative work are several closely related problems that afflict modern democracies: the close relation between extreme individualism (which focuses exclusively on personal rights) and extreme collectivism (which focuses exclusively on the group rights of ethnic, linguistic, religious, sexual, or other minorities); the relation of both to society as a whole; the rhetoric of rights and its relation to the culture of entitlement; the moral implications of political ideologies; the shift from political ideologies as secular religions of the few to political ideologies as civil religions of the state; and, ultimately, the possibility of “dialogue” between conflicting groups.

Dr. Paul Nathanson has a BA in art history; a BTh (Christianity); an MLS (library service); an MA in religious studies (Judaism and Islam); and a Ph.D in religious studies (religion and secularity). He began his academic career with an interest in the close but often hidden relation between religion and secularity. The former includes both myths (stories about collective origin, destiny, or identity) and ethics. The latter includes popular culture (especially movies), gender, and ideologies as secular religions. Nathanson’s first book, published by State University of New York Press in 1989, is called Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Several years ago, he and Dr. Katherine Young received a major grant for research (at the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law) on new reproductive technologies and the family. Their focus, on these technologies as closely related symbolic systems with significant effects on the ways in which men understand both maleness and masculinity, led to several additional projects. One is a trilogy about men for McGill-Queen’s University Press: Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture (2001); Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men (2006); and Transcending Misandry: From Feminist Ideology to Intersexual Dialogue (current research). The other project is about redefining marriage to include same-sex couples. At issue is not homosexuality but a conflict of rights between children (who might well need parents of both sexes) and gay adults. Both projects examine political ideologies as examples of secular religion. [282 words]

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

Drs. Nathanson and Young - continued

As we define it, misandry is the direct or indirect teaching of contempt for men as such, which makes misandry not only a form of hatred (as distinct from anger) in general but also of sexism and even racism in particular (because men are a biologically defined class). We have found pervasive evidence of misandry not only in pop culture (negative stereotypes, double standards, double messages) but also in academic works (based on the conspiracy theory of history and often indulging in what we call “statistics abuse”); and ultimately in legislation (overt and covert forms of discrimination against men). The institutions of our society care almost exclusively about the needs and problems of women, an official victim class. Parents and teachers, therefore, find themselves in the position of having to prepare boys for a world that is either indifferent to boys and men (assuming that they “have all the power” and therefore cannot have problems) or hostile to them (assuming that they cause every problem and therefore deserve no attention), a world that sees men as inadequate women or honorary women at best and evil beings at worst. If a healthy identity must involve at least one distinctive, publicly valued, and necessary contribution to society (which, we suggest, it must), and if women can do everything that men can do as well or better (which is what many women claim, although they acknowledge that there is at least one thing that only women can do)—or if the only things that make men distinctive are evil—then it is clearly impossible for boys to develop healthy identities specifically as male human beings. No amount of amelioration by psychologists and teachers working with individual boys or men, and no amount of amelioration by other social scientists working with institutions, will solve this underlying problem by themselves. Society as a whole must do so by acknowledging yet another form of deeply rooted prejudice—or, to put it another way, by taking seriously the full humanity of men and therefore the claims of those who advocate human rights.

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

Steven Svoboda summary - continued

Circumcision as a medical (as opposed to religious) procedure was born in this country in the nineteenth century as a technique aimed at stopping young boys from masturbating by reducing their ability to feel genital pleasure. The pain of the procedure was explicitly cited by doctors as a “positive” byproduct of the operation. Many doctors also recommended circumcision of girls for similar reasons.

As time went on, whenever any new disease would become a subject of social concern, circumcision would be proposed as a panacea. Circumcision was claimed to cure sexually transmitted diseases, penile cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer in women, and urinary tract infections. Currently, the procedure is being promoted as a near-magical preventive measure to stop AIDS. We seem to have learned little from history. Under standard medical practice, amputation is the treatment of last resort.

Cross-cultural studies demonstrate that the earlier and more violently the circumcision ritual occurs, the more violent is the society. Human rights treaties forbid female genital mutilation (FGM) and male circumcision alike. Yet somehow we have entered the 21st century but not yet learned from the errors of 19th Century Victorians. Let’s bring ourselves up to date and give our boys the same joyful birthright that we ardently safeguard in girls: safe, intact bodies.

Warren Farrell    Glenn Sacks  Christina Hoff Sommers Matt O'Connor
Stephen Baskerville Tom Golden   Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young
Malia Blom J. Steven Svoboda Gordon Finley Home Register

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