Circumcision, in it's current status, is institutionalized by both men and women, which is something that's abundantly clear when you look at the actors involved at every level, from parents, to obstetricians and family care doctors — many of who are women, to the public at large.
Conscription might be more complicated, since it's more prevalent historically, so I'm hard pressed to discuss it in depth. However, the selective service system, which is essentially a latent conscription system, is kept in place by the government, which supported (more or less) by regular like you and me, women and men.
So when a discussion about women’s bodies gets turned into a discussion about men’s bodies (excluding discussions of trans* men and women) you’re using a legitimate complaint in a derailing manner.
The discussion of men's bodies was directly opened at the outset when someone wrote, "There’s NEVER been a law against a man’s body in America, EVER!" That's the moment it became a discussion of both men's and women's bodies.
And that's what happens when somebody makes such direct and sweeping comparison about the sexes/genders — it becomes a discussion of both. And when that person makes a completely untrue and unfair statement that completely ignores and erases vital issues like circumcision, people should comment against it.
And the popular support for circumcision also including women doesn’t matter so much. Because the majority of the propaganda that no amount of attempting to educate the masses has seemed to have a real impact on has been supported by, distributed by, and paid for by religious institutions (largely run by men) and individuals (also largely men).
Circumcision in the United States is mainly medical. In the religious context, at least in Judaism, it is pursued and enforced by parents. I have some familiarity with Jewish people, and it definitely seems like something that almost all Jewish adults see as a vital prescription.
From my point of view, circumcision is a practice and set of attitudes that get passed down to and from generations, and everyone bears as much responsibility in it as anyone else, along with a certain amount of innocence — since they were indoctrinated into it by earlier generation. Specifically, circumcision happens, in part, because it happened within the previous generations of the parents' families, because neither of the parents have ever seen a non-circumcised penis, and feel anxious about the possibility of their child having one. Another significant factor as to why parents choose circumcision is the expectation that future female partners will be unhappy with an intact penis.
So I think your view is too conspiratorial, and I think the responsibility lies with general public and not with some type of all-male oligarchy. Even if you do believe that circumcision was *invented* by ancient men or originally promoted by Victorian-era male doctors, I find the implication that this lessens the injustice against male children, and ultimately adult males, to be a form of collective victim blaming.
SO while you’re not explicitly blaming women for these things, by derailing a conversation in this way you’re giving accidental support to people like the super shitty MRAs that do constantly blame women.
Honestly, I feel like you're the one who's derailing a legitimate conversation. I don't think that anything that was said in response to that original post was unfair or unwarranted.
