WhentheRed I have to take issue with your suggestion that the purpose of mc is to leave men with a healthy functioning penis. The purpose is to comply with a doctrine dreamt up millennia before by religious leaders. Unless performed on medical grounds it has no purpose beyond that. Yes the intention is to leave the man with sexual function, which distinguishes it from fgm, but I know of at least one case where a child died following male circumcision carried out at home by a nurse, and another where twin boys were lucky not to bleed to death at the hands of a retired orthopaedic surgeon who hired himself out to do this (yes, he botched them both).
To suggest, as someone did up thread, that mc is equivalent to piercing a baby's ears is ludicrous. It is the removal, in children entirely without consent, of a part of their anatomy that they will never regrow even if they decide in adulthood that they'd quite like it back.
My son was born with v mild hypospadias, which is where the urethra doesn't come out at the very end of the penis. His was so mild that he didn't require surgery for the hypospadias itself, but his foreskin didn't form properly and we were advised to address that for cosmetic reasons when he was a baby. We were told that the options were circumcision or reconstruction and very strongly advised, by NHS consultants, that we should opt for the latter, even though it was a more difficult procedure (which we did, and they did an excellent job).
I agree however that mc is not a feminist issue, it's a human rights issue, but then so is fgm. I would not expect my husband to care less about the latter because he has different genitalia himself.
Just to be absolutely clear about my position, I do think that fgm is worse than mc in terms of the effect on victims as a whole, but then I also think that beating a child to death is worse than hitting them occasionally with a cane, but I don't think either is acceptable. If we are going to say that the genital mutilation of a child is unacceptable then we need to apply this across all instances, male or female. There will obviously be resistance to this, because mc is a very established practice among some communities in this country, but we are getting there with physical punishment of a child, which seems to be less and less acceptable. The risk, of course, is that it is driven underground and more children are put at risk at the hands of unqualified practitioners, and that's a difficult argument to address, but that doesn't mean that it should be condoned.