Body Literacy Podcast
The End of Circumcision with Eric Clopper
Let us know what you think of this episode!
Is infant circumcision a medical necessity or ritual abuse hidden in plain sight? Join us as we sit down with Eric Clapper, a former Harvard employee whose one-man show, "Sex and Circumcision: An American Love Story," sparked so much controversy that it led to his termination and a tragic legal battle. Eric's journey from academia to advocacy unveils the hidden costs of circumcision, both personal and societal, making a compelling case for bodily autonomy and justice.
In this episode, we delve into the decline of circumcision rates in North America, exploring the ethical, medical, and legal arguments against the practice. We highlight the severe psychological and physical consequences of circumcision and the cultural pressures that perpetuate it. Eric shares insights into the historical and religious origins of circumcision and discusses how modern communities are beginning to reject these ancient practices in favor of protecting children’s rights, as we progress towards creating a trauma-informed civil society.
We also touch on the broader context of medicalized childbirth and medical trauma and the ways in which medical interventions, often deemed routine or necessary, can leave an energetic imprint no different than more overt physical abuse and sexual violations. By drawing parallels between circumcision and other medicalized practices, we emphasize the importance of informed consent and bodily autonomy for all patients, regardless of age, while respecting the way Nature designed our bodies, minds, and spirits to work together.
Eric’s experiences have driven him to pursue legal education and advocacy to combat genital mutilation at the state level. By drawing parallels to other harmful cultural practices, we stress the urgent need for legal and societal reform. This episode is a powerful call to action, encouraging listeners to raise awareness, support civil rights protections, and strive towards ending infant circumcision for a more empathetic and just society.
You can learn more about Eric’s work and how to support litigation to end male genital mutilation in the US at https://www.clopper.law/ . You can find Eric on social media @attorneyclopper .
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The Body Literacy Podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Any statements and views expressed by myself or my guests are not medical advice. The opinions of guests are their own and the Body Literacy Podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. If you have a medical problem, please consult a qualified and competent medical professional.
The Body Literacy Podcast may promote, affiliate with, or partner with other individuals or businesses whose programs, products and services align with mine and Body Literacy, LLC may receive commissions or compensation for promotion of those products or services.
Theme music for the Body Literacy Podcast is provided by Big Wild, https://bigwildmusic.com/ .
Be sure to subscribe and sign up for updates at https://JenMayo.com . Follow us on social media @jenmayo.bodyliteracy .
As always, five star reviews are appreciated if you enjoy the content on the Body Literacy Podcast. Please visit Apple iTunes Podcasts to leave your rating or review.
Let us know what you think of this episode!
Is infant circumcision a medical necessity or ritual abuse hidden in plain sight? Join us as we sit down with Eric Clapper, a former Harvard employee whose one-man show, "Sex and Circumcision: An American Love Story," sparked so much controversy that it led to his termination and a tragic legal battle. Eric's journey from academia to advocacy unveils the hidden costs of circumcision, both personal and societal, making a compelling case for bodily autonomy and justice.
In this episode, we delve into the decline of circumcision rates in North America, exploring the ethical, medical, and legal arguments against the practice. We highlight the severe psychological and physical consequences of circumcision and the cultural pressures that perpetuate it. Eric shares insights into the historical and religious origins of circumcision and discusses how modern communities are beginning to reject these ancient practices in favor of protecting children’s rights, as we progress towards creating a trauma-informed civil society.
We also touch on the broader context of medicalized childbirth and medical trauma and the ways in which medical interventions, often deemed routine or necessary, can leave an energetic imprint no different than more overt physical abuse and sexual violations. By drawing parallels between circumcision and other medicalized practices, we emphasize the importance of informed consent and bodily autonomy for all patients, regardless of age, while respecting the way Nature designed our bodies, minds, and spirits to work together.
Eric’s experiences have driven him to pursue legal education and advocacy to combat genital mutilation at the state level. By drawing parallels to other harmful cultural practices, we stress the urgent need for legal and societal reform. This episode is a powerful call to action, encouraging listeners to raise awareness, support civil rights protections, and strive towards ending infant circumcision for a more empathetic and just society.
You can learn more about Eric’s work and how to support litigation to end male genital mutilation in the US at https://www.clopper.law/ . You can find Eric on social media @attorneyclopper .
* * * * *
The Body Literacy Podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Any statements and views expressed by myself or my guests are not medical advice. The opinions of guests are their own and the Body Literacy Podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. If you have a medical problem, please consult a qualified and competent medical professional.
The Body Literacy Podcast may promote, affiliate with, or partner with other individuals or businesses whose programs, products and services align with mine and Body Literacy, LLC may receive commissions or compensation for promotion of those products or services.
Theme music for the Body Literacy Podcast is provided by Big Wild, https://bigwildmusic.com/ .
Be sure to subscribe and sign up for updates at https://JenMayo.com . Follow us on social media @jenmayo.bodyliteracy .
As always, five star reviews are appreciated if you enjoy the content on the Body Literacy Podcast. Please visit Apple iTunes Podcasts to leave your rating or review.
While I was an employee at Harvard, I had developed a lecture for Cornell students. With support of senior faculty at Harvard and my boss, I produced this play called Sex and Circumcision an American Love Story Back in 2018, I was like the initial stories of the big cancel culture in academia. That's kind of how I got here into the legal field. Harvard promised look, we're Harvard, we're all for freedom of speech and expression and you can say what you want and do what you want in your play and we're going to respect that and not retaliate against you. But after Harvard terminated me, they moved to terminate my boss as well, because he supported the cause of protecting children from genital mutilation. He supported me. He refused to make up any lies that I had violated any policies as an employee. We'd worked there for 14 years. Instead, they moved to terminate him and then he committed suicide right before Harvard was able to terminate him and evict him from Harvard housing and you know he was my best friend at the time, so it was very traumatic. I performed CPR on his corpse. I found his corpse.
Eric Clopper:I was lucky enough to get accepted and attend Georgetown Law School. I learned the law. I sued Harvard, the first district court judge, who was not just a Harvard Law alumnus but golfing buddies with Harvard's counsel. I appealed it. The appellate court essentially sucked their head in the sand for two years, didn't address the issue. On appeal, I filed a petition to the Supreme Court of the United States and when the Supreme Court justices, their clerks and their analysts you know, full-time attorneys on staff read my petition, they said wow, this is a very obvious case of the judiciary toadying to power and not actually applying the rules consistently to everybody. They assigned my case the number one case of the 2023 term. The thousands of petitions they received. They're like this is the most important, the easiest to rule on, something that would give the justices an opportunity to show that they actually administer justice and are not administering favors for their billionaire friends or whatever it is they do. And when the justices saw my petition, they promptly denied it and said we're not going to touch this.
Jen Mayo:Eric, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I'm so excited to get started with this conversation. It's kind of controversial and it makes people uncomfortable, but I think that's the whole point of having it.
Eric Clopper:Oh, definitely, I'm very excited to be here. So thank you for the invitation, jen.
Jen Mayo:Fantastic, fantastic. So I'm just going to start out here. I'm kind of coming to this conversation as a mother, as a lover and as somebody who's experienced a fair share of my own sexual medical violence. So this topic is very near and dear to my heart and I don't think there's anyone at least not in North America who the topic of circumcision has not impacted them in some capacity or another. And I first came across childhood medical procedures as being a significant source of trauma that might cause health problems later in life in a book called Eastern Body, western Mind. And that was the first time I had kind of gotten validation for this notion that the medical establishment, while maybe well-intentioned, at least by the people on the ground doing the work, doesn't always have a bigger picture view of what it is they're actually doing to their patients. And we know when we start to look at Eastern philosophy, which is gradually starting to get more integrated into Western medical science and people are starting to understand the mind-body connection much better, that there is a bigger picture to understand, especially on this topic.
Jen Mayo:You have a really interesting backstory on how you got involved in creating awareness around infant genital mutilation. I think that's probably a more accurate way to term it, circumcision, which we'll get into sort of the particulars of how language is used, especially in medical culture, later. But can you kind of give us a background? You gave a one-man show at Harvard that captured a lot of attention and I don't think the administration there understood that their reaction was actually going to bring a lot more awareness to your cause than had they not had a reaction at all. So for anybody who's just joining this conversation and is not seeing your one man show, which I believe is called Sex and Circumcision, an American Love Story, can you give us kind of a brief rundown of what that was and where it's taken you?
Eric Clopper:Yeah, I'm happy to. So I worked at Harvard on and off for about eight years when I was an undergrad and then after I I graduated and I had a full-time. You know, I was a full-time employee there, nothing to do with, you know, protecting children from genital mutilation right, that was just independent activism. But while I was an employee at Harvard, I had developed a lecture for Cornell students. It was called Sex and Circumcision Identifying Truths and Trends in Genital Cutting Cultures.
Eric Clopper:Right, and anyone who has seen my play or performance at Harvard knows it's largely in a lecture-based format with some theatrical elements and what I. So after I gave this talk at Cornell, I thought you know what this talk is important enough in terms of explaining the history and why we continue to mutilate our children's genitals that it really needs to be done at an appropriate venue for people to understand the magnitude of this harm that continues to happen. So, with support of senior faculty at Harvard and my boss, I produced this play called Sex and Circumcision, an American love story, and kind of like you alluded to earlier, harvard's incredibly, let's say, knee jerk and ignorant reaction put a lot more attention on it, kind of like the Streisand effect, when Barbara Streisand got upset that somebody published her home in a magazine and sued about it.
Eric Clopper:Everyone in the nation mourned about it because she was fighting for his attention, right, and so now it's not, as it's well known that Harvard is quick to, let's say, censor views or anything controversial or anything that might upset their donors. Back in 2018, I was like one of the initial stories of the big cancel culture in academia, right, it's like, oh, you said something that either upsets our donors or upsets our sensibilities, such as, oh, we're a culture that mutilates our genitals and instead of actually earnestly engaging with that topic, that conversation, we need to straw man and cancel him, which, you know, harvard did effectively for a year until I went to Georgetown Law School. So it it actually pointed me in the right direction and I'm grateful in a way, and I was able to separate from Harvard, which is more of a political, financial instead of an educational institution. But, um, so that's kind of how I got here into the legal field, because Harvard promised look, we're Harvard, we're all for freedom of speech and expression and you can say what you want and do what you want in your play, and we're going to respect that and not retaliate against you. Now, I was skeptical always, but I was like, ok, we'll give Harvard the opportunity to honor its word and if they don't, it's going to bring a lot of attention on this important problem where we continue to mutilate our children's genitalia.
Eric Clopper:So it was a double-edged sword. It was helpful and hurtful in ways, but after Harvard terminated me, they moved to terminate my boss as well, because he supported the cause of protecting children from genital mutilation. He supported me. He refused to make up any lies that I had violated any policies, and so instead of keeping my boss, my old boss, tom Hammond, as an employee who had worked there for 14 years, instead they moved to terminate him and then he committed suicide right before Harvard was able to terminate him and evict him from Harvard housing and he was my best friend at the time. So it was very traumatic. I performed CPR on his corpse. I found his corpse.
Eric Clopper:It was very hard on me in many ways and so after Harvard essentially broke its war, destroyed my career, destroyed my graduate school aspirations and then killed my best friend, I was like you know what? I'm going to sue Harvard because I spoke with a bunch of attorneys. They said Harvard said they weren't going to do this thing, retaliate for expressing your opinion. And they did that as extreme as they could, and even win or lose. It's going to be a learning experience, and so I was lucky enough to get accepted and attend Georgetown Law School. I learned the law.
Eric Clopper:I sued Harvard, and the first district court judge who was not just a Harvard Law alumnus but golfing buddies with Harvard's counsel threw the lawsuit out in 15 days, which violates what's called the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. I appealed it. The appellate court essentially stuck their head in the sand for two years, didn't address the issue. On appeal, I filed a petition to the Supreme Court of the United States, and when the Supreme Court justices, their clerks and their analysts full-time attorneys on staff read my petition, they said wow, this is a very obvious case of the judiciary toadying to power and not actually applying the rules consistently to everybody. And so they assigned my case the number one case of the 2023 term of the thousands of petitions they received.
Eric Clopper:They're like this is the most important, the easiest to rule on, something that would give the justices an opportunity to show that they actually administer justice and are not administering favors for their billionaire friends or whatever it is they do. And when the justices saw my petition, they promptly denied it and said we're not going to touch this. And so it's like okay, I'm not dealing. Well, at least with this cause of protecting children from genital mutilation. I'm not going to be interfacing with the federal courts anytime soon. If you look at a lot of other progressive causes like marriage equality, the decriminalization and legalization of cannabis, legalization of end of life medication and things like that, often they're done on a state by state level civil rights, women's rights, you name it and then, once there's enough support on the state level, then the federal government has the chutzpah, the courage, to deal with this, because the federal government is rarely leading in rights, they're typically trailing. And so the game plan now because you know, because I'm not fighting Harvard, the federal courts are not going to be involved, at least in these early stages is now I'm just focusing on a state by state basis, raising this issue. This problem is why do we only protect one class of children and not protect all children from genital mutilation. And to kind of give you some context, when I say one class, I just mean females, and it's great that we protect females from genital mutilation at birth. But most states have guarantees in their state constitution that the laws will equally protect all of its citizens right? And if you have a law that only protects one gender of child from genital mutilation, then that would violate the state's constitution. Very simple, very easy argument, and it's an argument that my law firm is going to multiply across as many states as feasible and responsible to do so. And so the first state we're going to be suing is Oregon, and that's going to be in the near future after Intact Global, the nonprofit that's funding. This raises probably about $30,000 is the estimate right. And then, once we have that little runway, I in my law firm will file that lawsuit in Oregon and then see how that develops. And as that's developing, we'll start suing other states, because we need the judiciary of various states to recognize the inequality here and say look, legislature, it's great that you protect girls from female genital mutilation and you should, at the same time, if we have a constitution that says we protect our citizens equally from the same harms or similar harms, then we need to protect all children from genital mutilation, and a big problem with that is just ignorance.
Eric Clopper:Right, for the first almost 20 years of my life had no idea that the foreskin of the penis was about 15 square inches, about the size of my palm. Most of the erogenous tissue, all of the mobility, keeps the head of the penis protected through life. It facilitates intercourse, and cutting it off is an act of extreme pain and torture where infants literally will scream so loud that their lungs, their stomachs have exploded. They've died by bleeding out and infections. Some have lost their penises. I mean, there's are incredibly damaging effects from mutilating an infant and the only reason it's been able to last so long is we use this Latin euphemism, circumcision right.
Eric Clopper:If we called it what it was infant genital mutilation Right. If we called it what it was infant genital mutilation, then parents wouldn't consent to it, right? But because doctors and you're very familiar with this because doctors say, oh, you should circumcise, or they ask for it, then parents not not unreasonably, but mistakenly believe that there's some medical benefit to cutting off 40 to 50 percent of the skin on an infant's penis for no medical reason, but doctors get to charge money for it. And because we have a for-profit health system, there's incentives to perform medically unnecessary surgeries. And if there was a poster boy for medically unnecessary surgeries, it would be infant circumcision. So that's my beginning spiel. I don't know if I answered your question, but yeah, no, no, no.
Jen Mayo:That was great. We definitely covered a lot of area there and I don't think most people realize. You know, a hospital is a business and they have a sales funnel. So if you think about, like, when you go on Instagram or something and you see an ad for something and you click on it and it's free or whatever, and you go and you get the free thing and then they funnel you into something else and when you buy that there's something else you know there is a sales process here.
Jen Mayo:It is a for-profit business system and I think, especially in the context of understanding informed consent, we have to understand that A there are so many weak links in that system even if there is a consent form involved links in that system, even if there is a consent form involved, we're still dealing with a bias system that is going to make money off of you consenting to a procedure, whether that procedure is necessary, moral or anything else. So there's a myriad of problems and I talk a lot too. We've had other podcasts and I'll just mention briefly here for anybody who's enjoying this conversation and wants to get some other angles of it as well. We've had Brendan Murata on in the past to talk about American Circumcision, his film and his latest book, children's Justice. We've had Dr Christiane Northrup on to also talk in part about circumcision and her conversation on sexuality and spirituality in medicine. Tony Nagy was on. We talked about sexual medical violence and an experience she had in the medical system, as well as Dr Darsha Narvaez, who's a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame, and she was the first person I had on to talk about this. Her focus is mostly on attachment, parenting and understanding the early childhood experiences and how they impact us later in life. And I'll share one thing that she had shared with me, maybe not specifically in that interview, but I went to the University of Notre Dame and had a conversation with her when this particular issue came to the forefront for myself, and she had written a myriad of articles for psychology today opposing circumcision and there was one of her colleagues on there as well that I believe was writing at the time and there were a lot of articles opposing circumcision at the time. But I believe at this point in time, the American Academy of Pediatrics was still recommending routine circumcision, kind of as a standard of care and because of that, psychology today, at least for a period of time, put a ban on being able to say anything negative about circumcision. I think that eventually got lifted.
Jen Mayo:I went to their website the other day just to see if there was anything more recent and there have been a few things, but not not like that time period prior to like 2015, ish, um. So I there's there's so many things to unpack here and um, I you know, especially from a trauma perspective, and you mentioned, you know, the agonizing pain that infants are put through in this procedure and the outward appearance of the screaming and clear signs of pain that they're in like. That's almost even more concerning is if you have an infant that's not having a reaction, because we know that in these extreme traumatic states that people and especially babies in this instance, will go into a freeze state or a state of shock where they're not even able. They're so withdrawn into themselves in a protective mode that they're not expressing those signs mode that they're not expressing those signs. So I wouldn't say that the expression of pain is even what's necessarily the most concerning part of this.
Jen Mayo:Even outside of that lens, we're talking about personal autonomy and the sovereignty of each person's individual body, and we're talking about a person that's completely defenseless and can't speak for themselves. And there are so many implications of this is just a routine thing we do to the weakest of our population, and as a human rights issue, as a social rights issue, and as a human rights issue, as a social rights issue, it's almost unbathable to me that we even have to have this conversation at this point in time. But just even in the last decade, or even five years, I've seen such a shift. Do you know what the statistics are now? I know it used to be, 85% of the population was circumcised in North America. Has that changed in recent years?
Eric Clopper:Yes, so it used to be. You know, between 85, 90% some religious circumcision sometimes aren't counted in the statistics and we're talking 60s, 70s. Now it's probably. It's much closer to 50% in the US. So we're talking about 30,. It's much closer to 50% in the US. So we're talking about 30, 40% drop and, like a lot of other progressive causes, they don't. They're not linear, they're exponential, right, and so that's the goal here.
Eric Clopper:Right, and that's why I'm grateful to be on your podcast as many podcasts as we can get on is because you know it's time to end this. Right, this is absolutely absurd. We're mutilating infants for no medical purpose, causing incredible immediate pain and lifelong loss of sexual function, of autonomy, as you mentioned, because, like you said well, especially in America and our legal theory, each of us is a sovereign. We get to decide the important decisions about our own bodies. Right, and if you look at countries that do not mutilate their infants, which is the great majority of them, over 99% of men who are not genitally mutilated or circumcised at birth decide to keep their entire penis because it is an exceptionally important part of your penis. It is like the eyelids To say your eyelids are not important is absurd.
Eric Clopper:It just makes no sense, and the pediatric body that used to recommend it retracted their recommendation. They said we no longer recommend this, like they no longer recommend lobotomies or female circumcision right. I mean, that is the category that this child abuse masquerading as a medical procedure fits in. So there is no actual medical, scientific, ethical authority that's promoting this and, to the contrary, secular medical bodies all across the world Australia, new Zealand, the Netherlands, germany, most of Europe, it's. They're like you need to respect the child's right to bodily integrity, not perform medically unnecessary surgeries, and you know, because this is important parts of your body. Now, a lot of them want to be culturally, religiously sensitive, and I I sympathize with that viewpoint and we should be. We also need to do what is best for the child, and what's best for children and what's best for them is to not violently mutilate their genitals at birth. So it's like you know, come on, we need to be adults and do the right thing.
Jen Mayo:Right, Can you give us a little bit of a history on the religious origins of the practice of circumcising? I know, especially in the Jewish culture it's very much a rite of passage and I know I've talked to Dr Christiane Northrup about this too, about we don't need to get rid of the rite of passage or there being a ceremony involved. You can still have a version of that that doesn't involve blatantly abusing a child or amputating part of their body.
Eric Clopper:Well, definitely and most so. I don't know if we mentioned this, but I'm Jewish right. I grew up in a Jewish household. I am Jewish. I've got the DNA test to prove it.
Eric Clopper:So, you know, I and I have a lot of close Jewish friends and family who I love and appreciate, and the majority of them are 100 percent on board. It's time that we protect our children and stop mutilating. But if you grow up in this culture, that only tells you that you know you're the chosen one and we need to mutilate our infants to prove it. It's really hard to break free of that, even if you're an adult and well educated, because it's not something that people discuss, right. Yeah, but the reason that my Jewish people adopted circumcision or genital mutilation is at the time, you know, they were one tribe of many tribes in Africa and Middle East and there were tribes around them that were literally sacrificing their children, killing them for the gods to make sure the droughts didn't come or whatever causal theory they had. That was not accurate, but they didn't know any better. And so the Jewish people, my people, were like, okay, we're not going to kill our children, we're just going to mutilate their genitals. We're going to do a great step down, which was progressive for the time, the way you look at it. But everyone knew at the time, as they did when we adopted, uh, circumcision in a big way in the American medical system that the foreskin was healthy in erogenous tissue, the.
Eric Clopper:The overt explanation for some Jewish leaders, some rabbis, was we're going to circumcise our children to excise their sexual pleasure and to check his pride. It makes them easier to control. That's why Genesis 17, it's not only do we circumcise our Jewish boys, but we circumcise our slaves, right, and you know, I'm quoting Philo Judeus now, who is a rabbi at the turn of the millennium, around 30 AD, right which you know, the time of Jesus as well, which is kind of not super relevant but he was circumcised, but he never preached circumcision, he preached against it. So if you're Christian and circumcised, it's important to know that that is actually somewhat violative of your religion is Christianity does not promote circumcision, it promotes circumcision of the heart, essentially meaning we're no longer requiring or promoting mutilating infants, which is probably one of the major reasons christianity caught on, because you didn't have to mutilate yourself or your child to be part of it right right, it's a smart recruitment mechanism.
Eric Clopper:But, um so, and what happened? And I, I would definitely count myself as one of these individuals, but a lot of jews who were circumcised did not want to be circumcised, right? So what they would do, especially the Hellenistic Jews, the Jews who fit in with Greek culture around the turn of the millennium first, couple hundred years after the birth of Jesus, whatever they would take their remnant foreskin, they would stretch it over the head of the penis and tie it with maybe a knot or something, because what that would do would allow them to fit in with Gentile culture, right, the culture that didn't mutilate their infants at birth and that was seen as a renunciation of Jewish identity for the rabbis, the hardcore, you know, orthodox Jewish elders whose entire identity and sense of value revolves around this religion. And so, to combat this trend of adult Jewish males saying you know what I no longer identify with, this genitally mutilating aspect of my identity or my tribe, they radicalized the circumcision. So, from just cutting off the tip of the foreskin to removing all of the inner mucosa, to about 40, 50 percent of the, the skin on the penis and this extreme bird, this extreme version of genital mutilation that the rabbis instituted in 200 ad is the exact same version that america adopted in a medical sense, right, it's not a coincidence. But the point is these are extreme forms of genital mutilation. It's not just, it's not like, oh, you're just cutting off a piece of the penis. You're cutting off about 15 square inches with, you know, two dozen functions, right.
Eric Clopper:And so this extreme version of genital mutilation from 200 AD all the way to pretty much present day, and what my people, the Jewish people, used to do is, after they would mutilate the infant with their fingernails, they would actually suck on the baby's penis afterwards. And they did this from like 200 to 1850 AD, approximately Right, so about 1650 years AD, approximately right, so about 1650 years. And then, even in the 19th century, a lot of my fellow Jewish people and Gentiles were like, okay, you know, I think you really should abandon the penis, the infant penis sucking, because infant bloody penis sucking, excuse me, it gets worse, and most of my Jewish people did. At the same time, there's still like some hardcore Orthodox sects in Brooklyn, new York, who continue to suck on the bleeding infant penises and that's a huge problem. I mean, that's child molestation by any sober analysis. Yeah.
Jen Mayo:Where is child protective services in all this?
Eric Clopper:Well, the law is largely political, and by that I mean judges, law enforcement, executive officers. They will do what they believe in, that they believe that they can get away with, and I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way. But let's say, the mayor of New York's like you know what we're going to cut down on, you know bloody infant penis sucking. There's going to be a huge outcry from the Orthodox community and then the conservative Jewish religious community They'll say, oh well, this is an attack on our religion and we need to do everything we can to politically dethrone this individual, which is kind of what happened to me at Harvard. If they're going to, you know, talk ill about our religious blood sacrifices, right, and so sometimes it's just not worth the battle for politicians to to combat religious child abuse.
Eric Clopper:Now, obviously I would not fall in that category. I am happy to go to bat for what I believe in, not fall in that category. I am happy to go to bat for what I believe in, which is protecting children from genital mutilation. But there are some individual adults who have a lot of resources and will spend that on combating anything they perceive to be a threat to their religion, which might also be a threat to their physical identity, which can stem from historical trauma. You know, as you know, what I mean.
Eric Clopper:So there's a lot of trauma-based thinking in the Jewish religion and that leads to poor outcomes, because if you are acting from a place of fear or insecurity or trauma, you're not going to be doing things that are, let's say, logic and ethics but just more knee jerk reaction, which is why it's hard for a lot of Jewish individuals and my Jewish people, to have an honest conversation about this, because it's like, well, this is my identity. It's like, well, it's not identity for female girls to have their genitals mutilated, so, and they seem to be doing just fine, and they're just as Jewish as us Jewish boys. So why don't we just cut a pomegranate and have a naming ceremony?
Jen Mayo:Right, right right.
Eric Clopper:So, you know, which makes all the sense in the world, and we will get there. We will get there, but that's not the immediate or even the near future. We are just trying to protect, you know, most boys whose parents don't have some religious, you know, affinity for mutilating their children, right, yeah, that can be later, but right now we're going with the secular, what's best for most of us, and that's obviously protecting our autonomy, our fundamental human and civil rights to make important decisions about our own body and not inflict extreme pain and lifelong sexual loss on children and infants. Right, I mean, it just makes all the sense in the world.
Jen Mayo:Right, absolutely. And do you think you know we're at this kind of 50 50 tipping point? I mean, it was different when 85% of the population was doing it, but if we're at a point where it's half and half basically at this point, and the main argument that I think most parents are making this decision on is, oh, we want him to look the same as his father, think that kind of makes this the most advantageous time to start pursuing this from a legal standpoint, because we do have half the population that is sort of awakened to this as an atrocity.
Eric Clopper:Yeah, I think it is a perfect time to raise this issue in as many courts as possible. The issue of equal protection of children from genital mutilation Like, as you said, 50%, and each state is different. Like the Midwest is 80%, oregon is like 20 to 17% of kids, of baby boys, are generally mutilated, which means less than 10%. About eight and a half or one in 12 children are, or, let's put it the affirmative way, 11 out of 12 children in Oregon are protected from genital mutilation, and so my law firm is going to come into that state Pro Hoc, fiche the court permitting and we're going to argue look, 12 out of 12 children should be protected from genital mutilation and we'll do that in as many states as possible. But this is the perfect time to raise as many legal challenges as possible on the legality and the constitutionality of only protecting one class of child and not protecting all children from genital mutilation.
Jen Mayo:Yeah, yeah, Wow, that's, that's amazing. Um yeah, Um, can. Can we talk a little bit too about anatomy here, Because I think some people hear this and they're they don't understand what the big deal is. And there's, um, there's a saying that goes you don't know what you don't know until you do know. And then I'll add you can't unknow what you know now and what that might mean from an anatomical or physical standpoint, as well as a mental and spiritual angle on that as well.
Eric Clopper:Well, you know. So you two separate things. I mean they definitely overlap. But if we talk about the anatomy of the tissue that is being amputated from children, right, americans are largely squeamish about the genitals and sex in general because we have no sex education as children. You know, in Europe, in many countries they'll, they'll just introduce the idea of love and families at early age and then talk about more specifics as you get older, which makes sense, right, because these are, as you mentioned the email to me, exceptionally important parts of life and obviously the continuation of our species. I mean, you know, like these are, as you mentioned in the email to me, exceptionally important parts of life and obviously the continuation of our species. I mean, you know like these are important things right.
Eric Clopper:Yeah, and what you're doing to an infant is you're taking the most erogenous part, sensitive part of his body and you're putting thousands of pounds of force on it and cutting it off right. It's medieval torture by any sober analysis. Yes, and what the foreskin is is the. The non sexual analogy would be the foreskin is the lips of the penis, right, it is where these, these outer skin of the penis goes to the inner mucosa. And just for people to be kind of familiar with, this skin would be like the skin on my face. Here the inner mucosa would be like inside your lips, right, and your lips are the transition from the skin to the inner mucosa, right.
Eric Clopper:And so if you're circumcised, you will literally see a scar on your penis where you were sexually assaulted as an infant, a scar on your penis where you were sexually assaulted as an infant, and that scar, below the scar, will be the skin of the penis and on the other side of the scar will be where the inner mucosa is, but it won't be moist like the inside of your mouth or my mouth, because the covering was literally stolen from you in a violent manner as an infant. So the foreskin is that tissue that goes. It's a bilayer tissue, two layers. That goes essentially the skin of the penis to the tip, which is called the ridge, to band, which is the male G spots, where most of the nerve endings are. It's where you kiss someone most of the sensations in your lips, right yeah yeah.
Eric Clopper:And, and then it folds into itself and attaches where the other part of the scar line is, in circumcision. And so not only is most of the erogenous nerve endings, are they concentrated in the foreskin, that tissue, that's removed, but that tissue is supposed to move. The penis is a moving tissue, organ structure, whatever you want to call it, and it's supposed to slide in and out of itself during intercourse and it reduces friction, if we talk about heterosexual sex. It reduces friction in the vaginal corpus, it keeps the lubrication in and, just like the inside of your mouth and lips, it actually secretes its own lubricants. So it reduces the need for any type of artificial lubricant you buy at CVS or whatever, because we evolved in the wild and we're not supposed to need any type of external lubricant to masturbate or have sex.
Eric Clopper:And when you see that in pop culture in America that is a trend in a genital cutting culture, right, right, and that's it's also hard to, it's hard to conceive because we look at, let's say, not to throw China under the bus, but you know, hundreds or thousands of years ago they used to, you know, bind their, their girls feet, right, right, and we can immediately see, wow, what an obviously violent and wrong act that reduces function and has weird kind of sexual connotations, and immediately we see that.
Eric Clopper:Well, the genital mutilation of male infants or circumcision is exactly the same. It removes a incredible amount of function to create this artificial and cultural delusion that the circumcised penis is anything but a man-made creation designed to dull the sexual pleasures, which is what rabbis have been saying since its inception, and that is why American doctors adopted it as well. Only in the last 50 years did they change their tune, because 70s, 80s, it's like oh, sexual pleasure may not be bad, so we need to change the justification because otherwise people aren't going to do it. But the reality is you're removing the same tissue and you're having the same negative outcomes, which is far less sexual pleasure, far less orgasms, less control over orgasms, more friction, more pounding, much more violent sex. It has a litany of terrible outcomes, and that's because this is important tissue, just like if you were to literally amputate the lips of children. You're going to have not just disfigurement but dysfunction, and that's what you have both with neonatal circumcision.
Jen Mayo:Right, but if everybody was walking around without lips on their face, we would tend to think that was normal.
Eric Clopper:Well, yeah, I mean, it shows how powerful culture is. And also, we don't typically expose our genitals in this culture. Right, we're not a naturist or nudist culture, but if we had more, let's say, non-sexual nudity, then people would see the different penises type you know, the intact and the circumcised and this and they would start asking the right questions why do we do this? Is this harmful? Yes, it is harmful. Should we stop doing it? Yes, right, but it's something people don't see and then they don't discuss, and that's why it's so important. You know that you're raising awareness about this. So thank you for having me on, and we're just going to keep doing, we're going to keep pushing until all children are protected. That's, that's the mission, and there's going to be no let's say there will be no lightening of that mission or no relenting or however you want to say it, because this doesn't have to be aggressive, but it is going to be a final decision where we're going to stop mutilating our children.
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Jen Mayo:You know, in the historical context I think we have to understand that back when these practices were maybe incepted, there were more social circumstances and athletic competitions where men were competing in the nude or in social situations where people were naked together and might see each other more. It's always kind of like difficult to wrap your head around because most of us wear clothes most of the time, at least if we're in public. So it's kind of like well, what's the big deal? Nobody's seeing it anyway. But if it's just something that's been passed on from generation to generation because my dad did it and his dad did it to him, and that's been passed on from generation to generation because my dad dad did it and his dad did it to him, and so forth and so on, but we're at a level of awareness now, I think, and I think there are consciousness is is such a popular thing coming into the culture now where I think we realize in a variety of ways we've been living very unconsciously and not asking questions and not being curious about why it is we do, the things we do think are pivotal to creating a vastly different looking future in so many ways, but especially in the medical culture, that I think this issue in particular is like, at the ground level of that, like if we're treating the weakest and most defenseless members of our population in such an abusive manner, that says something about the culture and society as a whole and where we're headed. So the fact that we're even at, you know, maybe a collective 50% versus 85 or 90%, I think, is, you know, indicative of where we're heading, and I think you're right that this likely will be an issue that turns fairly quickly, much like gay marriage and some other social issues did, both through litigation and social pressures.
Jen Mayo:Back to the anatomy for a second, though I don't think most people understand. I've had conversations with girlfriends in both sides of this, both friends who have experience with men who have both versions, as well as women who have no experience with anything other than a circumcised penis. I don't think people understand the sexual act is intended to be a mucus membrane to mucus membrane contact, where the foreskin is almost like a gasket, if you will, and, I think, on the like, the sexual shame part of things. We think about this more in terms of men, you know, and being ashamed in the locker room if they don't look like you know the guy next to them or whatever. But I think there's a lot of shame absorbed by women on this subject too, because there's a lot of quote unquote sexual dysfunction that gets applied to women because their anatomy is not working with anatomy that's been altered. So when you have women who are experiencing quote unquote, unquote vaginal dryness, it may not actually be that her vagina is dry, that the equipment she's working with isn't working in the way it was intended to work with her own body. So I think there's a lot of nuances for both men and women in the sexual realm.
Jen Mayo:Definitely in terms of the experience of sexual pleasure as well. There's a distinct difference. You know, and I've I've never met a penis. I didn't like, not that I've seen that many, but they're, they're all beautiful, they're all wonderful in their own way, but there definitely is a difference in how they function their own way. But there definitely is a difference in how they function.
Jen Mayo:And I'll say like, from like an Eastern philosophy perspective, we understand that sexual energy is life force, energy and the flow of energy through the body and our understanding of the meridians in the body is very much connected to you know the genitals and the heart being connected and I think this is one of the bigger areas that's very difficult to quantify like we can look at the anatomy and understand the mechanics of things and why that might be problematic, but when we look at it more on an energetic and spiritual level it's very difficult to quantify.
Jen Mayo:You know, this experience that you had before you even have memory of life, impacting your ability to connect with other human beings, your ability to experience pleasure with other, with women or whoever you're partnered with.
Jen Mayo:With women or whoever you're partnered with, there is a much bigger conversation to be had that extends beyond what I think the Western medical model is capable of even participating in, because they have been so segmented out of the mind-body conversation and they're kind of like trying to catch up now. But they're having a lot of trouble because they come from such a different. They come from a triage system of medical care which is so much different than what actual healthcare is and, I think, understanding the importance of those bodily experiences in cultivating spiritual growth and expansion and our ability to collaborate and co-create with other human beings in asexual and non-sexual capacity is very much linked to those traumas in early childhood, especially when it involves the genitals, and that's largely been ignored, I think. And we know the brain is actually the largest sex organ for both sexes. So can you elaborate any more on just like? Um, so can you elaborate anymore on just like? How is the brain also impacted beyond just the physical mechanics of of the body?
Eric Clopper:Uh, absolutely so. One of the kind of more pernicious aspects of genital cutting cultures in the United States of America is definitely one of them is, uh, men or women's sexuality. It is tied to their self-image of themselves, and, and to understand that, oh, I had an important part of my sex organ removed as an infant is not something that would enhance one's sexual image, usually right. And so to maintain that delusion, they need to convince themselves and it's easy when the mainstream media would often recite this, this misinformation that circumcision is healthier, improve sexual pleasure, which is obviously nonsense. But when, when you know, let's say, the New York York Times or you know, the Boston Globe, which have published stories like this in the past they have in recent years, which is good, but in the past when they say, oh, it's healthy to have a big part of your penis cut off, it's easy to believe that because it reinforces your sense of sexual self right, sexual self right, and so, like you said, the brain is the biggest sex organ that you have and self confidence and your own self image and sexual self image it.
Eric Clopper:It is easier to maintain that when you believe the lie that your culture gave you, that having parts of your genitals mutilated is good for you, Right? So that's one of the more difficult and unfortunate aspects as we go on this healing journey together is we're going to have to acknowledge, as adult males or young males or whoever you are, that, oh, what happened to me wasn't great or it was harmful. And even if it was harmful to me, I'm a big enough man to say look, I don't want other children to be harmed from this. And even if you don't reach that level of maturity, if you were cut as an infant, you just don't fight it, right, Just let it happen, Let the movement complete and protect children. So those are the two options. But there's a lot of psychology going on there, and so I don't know if that answers your question, but that is certainly part of of the problem, right? That's more psychological than actual anatomical.
Jen Mayo:Right, right. And I read one statistic that said circumcised men were four and a half times more likely to have to use erectile dysfunction drugs later in life. And I think there's a massive disconnect between understanding that these early childhood experiences, especially something as brutal as circumcision, might impact a man's sexuality to that extent in a physical sense later in life that most people aren't looking at the long-term ramifications. And we know that through the ACEs study. So that's the Adverse Childhood Events study, that the more adverse events that are experienced during childhood, that I don't think that study even took into account infancy, it was older children, but we start to see a much bigger picture. The more insults a child has, the more likely they are to have mental and physical diseases later in life that maybe don't show up right away but again on the energetic level are priming the body for a variety of issues later in life.
Eric Clopper:Oh yeah, I mean because when you're removing the sensory tissue, the foreskin, which is what it is extremely sensitive erogenous tissue you're desensitizing and dehumanizing the individual and it is much harder to connect with others. If you've undergone these extreme trauma pre-verbal, pre-memory, right and then well, not only is it harder to connect with other individuals, right, but then it's. I can talk about my own experience. But then to come to terms with the fact that you know your parents not just your culture, but your parents, your body amputated and mutilated and then, and at least in my experience, having my Jewish father throw it in my face and say you should be grateful for it, I mean he was totally off the rails and ignorant moron and he's come a long way in, you know, 10 years, and now my family doesn't circumcise anymore. But you know, this is, that can be. It can really estrange you from your family, it can really damage your sense of self, create a sense of and this is just coming to terms and those who live, let's say, with this unconscious trauma.
Eric Clopper:It's hard to quantify and everyone deals with it differently. I mean, I've heard doulas say after the circumcision of an infant, I could see the spark and the eyes of the child leave and he no longer wants to be part of the society. And I totally get it If your first major experience is having the most rarious part of your penis violently torn apart. It's like dude, I don't want to be here. Let's end this experiment of life now. Now, I'm not suggesting anyone should do that, but that is the curse that we are giving our children. And it's so easy to stop because it requires nothing. Just don't do anything.
Jen Mayo:Well and I don't think people have the context to really like understand, especially if they've never witnessed this procedure, which I definitely recommend. American Circumcision the film is a great place to start if you're wanting more information on the subject. But I mean, this is in fact, the first sexual experience a boy has in his life, and it's frequently with a man, and I don't think people understand that the child's penis is actually stimulated to erection to be able to perform the procedure.
Eric Clopper:So we have these medical professionals molesting children and then mutilating their genitals with no medical need and by any sober analysis it would constitute fraud because they are performing medically unnecessary surgeries and then usually billing Medicaid for it. So the public treasury and I mean it's outrageous. In many ways it's a battery because there is no medical need and you're literally sawing the genitals off of a child and it's a breach of fiduciary duty. And what that means is if you're, let's say, a lawyer or a doctor, you're a fiduciary to your client or patient, meaning you have to put your patient's interest above your own, your client's interest above your own. It's the client's or the patient's interest that matters. But if you are harming a newborn infant, who is perfectly healthy, to enrich yourself so you can bill Medicaid or Medicare for this it's Medicaid then you are putting your interest above the patient's and that's also a breach of fiduciary duty. So there's a bunch of legal theories that circumcision or male genital mutilation obviously violates. Now is it something that the clopper law firm is going to be litigating? Probably not just because it's easier to litigate constitutional issues, because you don't have to say to a doctor or medical association you lose and you pay this much money right, which should happen, and it's something that we my law firm may entertain if it gets there.
Eric Clopper:But the purpose of this movement to protect children is not to punish anybody. It's not to get money or imprison anybody. It's just to protect children right. And if we all consent to do that, nobody else needs to get hurt. And I mean that in a very literal way, because right now, thousands of kids in the US are being mutilated because accurate information about it is suppressed. People who talk about it in a professional sense sometimes get retaliated against by people who feel strongly about mutilating children. You know, my Harvard career was terminated because of my advocacy to protect children from genital mutilation, which was difficult at the time. It eventually led me to Georgetown Law and to starting my own law firm. So it was ultimately a good thing.
Eric Clopper:But you know there are significant risks of were were about discussing and trying to address this problem. So you know, but we're we're moving in the right direction. Like you said, we're about a 50% circumcision rate and I think that we can get that very close to zero if people support the movement. And I'm just gonna throw a little plug in there If you support intact global and tap globalorg become a monthly donor that's going to fund impact litigation on this right. That's an easy way to get involved, and I'll probably say that a bunch of times, and that's why I'm eager to go in as many podcasts, not just to raise awareness, but to actually get people who feel passionate about this. Okay, let's get involved. This is an easy way to get involved. Another way to get involved is put me on a podcast, but other people who do the work on a podcast share this podcast. You know whatever you can do, but it's about raising the collective consciousness.
Jen Mayo:Absolutely. I love that, and I will make sure to include intact globalorg in the show notes so people can reference that directly. Did you end up going to law school because of this situation, or was that something you had already planned on?
Eric Clopper:I had no intention to go to law school ever. It sounded really boring and terrible. I was a physics major. That's where I was going to go to graduate school at Harvard in data science. That was the plan. And when I spoke with one of the faculty on the admissions board, he said well, this Jewish faculty member blackballed you, but just apply next year and I'll vouch for you. So that was kind of the plan, right.
Eric Clopper:And then when Harvard terminated me, I knew I needed to sue Harvard because I told Harvard for months because they investigated me, investigated me for months, right. And then they stole some naked images of me when they were investigating. They tried to blackmail my boss, to lie about my work performance, to terminate me. They did a lot of illegal, shady stuff and it was obviously illegal. And so I was like, okay, well, now I got to sue you. You right, I know that you're, you know, more powerful than the state and, as they've shown, the federal judiciary. But I'm going to do it anyways and we'll see what happens.
Eric Clopper:And my mentor at the time and one of my lawyers, who's giving me counsel, you know he suggested law school because I was looking at different PhD programs and I was like. You know what this makes sense. This puts me in a position to effectively advocate for this cause, because there are some career activists let's call them and you know I appreciate their work and they do good work and we want to give gratitude for the work they've done in this field and other fields. But I'm not a career in tactivist, right and anti-circumcision activists. I want to get this done in like two years, right?
Eric Clopper:If we're well-funded, we can. We can solve this problem in short order, because the other side is so obviously heinous. They are mutilating infants for profit, right? So we just need, um, we just need to have our day in court and have the legislatures address this issue with sober glasses on and say, look, we're not going to do this anymore. But I had no intention to go to law school, but I'm very grateful I did, and getting into Georgetown Law and an academic scholarship was a great outcome to the play. I was like, oh, okay, you know it is what it is, Um, that it was meant to be, and I was able to separate myself from Harvard before.
Eric Clopper:Uh, any further affiliation would do damage to my reputation because at this point you're kind of like you know they're the black sheep in academia because they're not an academic institution for the most part. Yeah, yeah, Um, so you know it was all good.
Jen Mayo:Yeah, um, you know it was all good. Yeah, I think it's interesting that I, you know, I've seen numerous accounts at this point of people either in the medical field or involved with a medical issue like this going on to get their going on to law school. Dr Thomas Levy is actually one of the early doctors who I really came to appreciate his body of work. He's a cardiologist but then got involved with the politics of holistic dentistry and witnessed how state licensing boards and medical associations would destroy somebody's career for not towing the line of whatever is being promoted in the politics of medicine.
Jen Mayo:And I think it's unfortunate that people can't just dedicate their lives to helping people through the health sciences and arts that it has become such a legally charged. We've developed so many legally charged issues within the medical system, especially with, you know, big pharma, basically owning agencies, federal agencies and so forth. So I applaud, you know, your passion in pursuing this and getting involved from the legal aspect. Do you think we've used academia and I'm going to put in your quotes medical science here to discredit common sense because I hear so many arguments? Well, there's not a double blind, placebo, controlled study that shows that they're experiencing X amount of pain and it's just from this, it's not from these other factors. Like at some point we have to say like this is just common sense, like you, don't abuse children.
Eric Clopper:Oh yeah, it's obviously common sense. And there is an incredible body of literature specifically on male genital mutilation called infant neonatal circumcision. See, if I were a medical professional and I were to propose a study that, um, let's say, measures the pitch on how loud a baby girl screams when you're cutting off her labia as an infant, you know it would not even, you'd probably maybe not get lose your medical license that's probably a high bar, but you would, your reputation would tank and they would say, no, of course you can't do that. But if you look at male circumcision, there are studies that literally will measure the pitch of a male infant screaming as he's having his genitals torn off and amputated. And what the study found which is not at all surprising, is when the foreskin is being crushed with thousands of pounds of force and you're taking a scalpel to this penis, that's when the infant scream was the loudest and the shrillest. And it's like, obviously right, like, we have an incredible amount of data that shows that babies are going through incredible, practically inconceivable amount of pain when they are undergoing a circumcision because you are mutilating the most sensitive part of their penis. Right, you don't need a medical study, like you said, to show this. It's just, it's ridiculous.
Eric Clopper:And even if there were medical benefits to circumcision and if you were to look at the sexual health outcomes of Europe, country that does not mutilate its infants, in America, country that mutilates its male infants, europe has way lower rates of sexually transmitted diseases than HIV, which suggests that the foreskin actually protects you from some level of STD transmission, which makes sense, because the foreskin facilitates intercourse and reduces friction dramatically, which means there's less bleeding, there's less, let's say, coarse skin that could easily break, and that blood to blood contact is where at least HIV can be transmitted, but other STDs and STIs as well.
Eric Clopper:So it doesn't matter what the studies say, but they're overwhelming in their conclusion that boys go through unbearable pain when they are circumcised. Some dissociate from reality and go into shock, and the long term health outcomes and sexual outcomes are way worse. There was, there was another study I think it was let me take a look 1999, where they found that women who had intact partners of men who were not circumcised had came to orgasm from vaginal intercourse twice as often as men who were circumcised, which makes all the sense in the world, considering that is how the generals evolved to stimulate each other.
Jen Mayo:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And kind of back to my point on you know the shame aspect of women absorbing something because the act is not as it's designed, and I think there's so much around. You know there used to be the term frigidity. I think we've excluded that from the culture at, in fact, it's that the act itself has been altered in a way that limits their ability to access that.
Eric Clopper:Oh yeah, well, protecting male infants from genital mutilation is also a woman's health issue as you touched on multiple times, because a lot of sexual problems women experience and then they're blamed for is actually because their partner has a big part of his penis missing. That is important in sexual function, right. So, and also, as we mentioned earlier, it's also important for women's safety, emotional and sexual relationships to stop mutilating male infants, because it makes the man more empathetic, more emotionally available, more present If he wasn't violently and sexually abused as an infant. It's, like you know, a good way to. There's a couple of ways. Because we love our dogs, right, and we can make many analogies to our dogs, like you wouldn't circumcise your dog just right off the bat. But also, if you have two puppies from the same litter and you love one of them and the other you abuse chronically, like in his early days, and then treat them the same as adults, those puppies are not going to act the same. One is going to be very reactive and violent and kind of feel unsafe and manifest those behaviors of feeling unsafe. And the other is going to be a normal loving dog, right, and when humans are mammals, just like dogs are, and if you're going to violently abuse infants, it's going to have an effect on him for the rest of his life and it's going to be subconscious, but it is going to be there.
Eric Clopper:It's hard to quantify, but if you just look at, if you just look at the warring nations, they're typically the generally mutilating ones America, the Middle East, that's where most of the conflicts are and that's where most of the men have had their genitals mutilated. I read a study once where, of the last 24 genocides, 23 of them had genitally mutilating cultures on one or both sides. Right, which you know it is. Genital mutilation is a form of mainstream violence, right, or mass violence is the word I'm looking for. And so you know, does it? Does it lead to, you know, horrific outcomes? I think absolutely it could, and that's why we need to stop mutilating our children's genitals ASAP, because there's only negatives and it's just so easy to do. It really is. It requires nothing, it's an affirmative act to mutilate an infant right. It's difficult to repair the damage we've done to the Earth's ecosystem. For example, it's very easy to not take a scalpel to your child's genitals and several important parts of it. So that's why I think this is like the lowest hanging fruit to improve society.
Jen Mayo:Exactly. I could not agree more and I think we also know. You know, historically and even in modern times, rape is used as a tool of war. And can you expand a little bit on the coupling of sex and violence and how that may play out in that landscape as well?
Eric Clopper:Well, I can expound upon it, but it would be pure conjecture. Or you know, there's a great psychologist, ronald. Kind of casts a shadow over a man's entire life and, although he may not be able to articulate this and it may be subconscious his first sexual act because medical professionals have to sexually stimulate infants before they cut off part of the foreskin it's the first sexual act is coupled with the greatest pain that most men will ever feel in their lives, right, and I mean talk about an act of sadism to the highest degree, now, how that affects individuals and how that promotes rape culture. You know, I don't have the data to say. Well, causally, you know, you circumcise this many men, you have this many more rapes, right, but it is an act of extreme sexual violence to circumcise an infant, to mutilate his sex organs. Right, and it's contributing to this, this belief, whether it's spoken or or acted out, that you know to baby boys you do not have control over your own body. I am bigger and stronger than you, so I can do what I want to you. That is what we are communicating to our men when we circumcise them as infants, and a lot of, or some of those men will act out a similar ethos when they sexually assault women or other men. Right it is.
Eric Clopper:You know, I can't say well, this is the coefficient of how much circumcision increases rape, but I would bet my life on it that if you could mutilate most of the men in your culture, their sex organs, then you're going to have more sexually violent men who are not good at communicating their feelings, who are not as effective at communicating their feelings.
Eric Clopper:They're not as effective lovers because they literally do not have the anatomy to make love as they are supposed to. And I'm sure and I know because I've experienced a lot of rage around this and that was part of my play, which made people uncomfortable but it is a totally valid and legitimate feeling to to, to acknowledge this extreme violation of your body and be upset about it. I mean, of all the things to be upset about, this is, you know, the top of the list, right, this is your body, this is the inviolate thing that you own and that you alone and it was. It was horribly attacked as an infant. Right, and you can't, you know, reverse that. So, and you certainly can't reverse the trauma, even if you can, you know, undergo therapies that would minimize it. Right, but so the reality is.
Jen Mayo:I don't have like the exact coefficient and nobody does of how much circumcision increases sexual violence in the culture, but it is far more likely than not that the more you generally mutilate your infants, the more sexual dysfunction and sexual maladaptive behavior you're going to have in a society in a society, right right, and you did mention the Middle East and North America are still kind of the main purveyors of this practice and if we look at the way women are treated, especially in the Middle East, I think we can draw some parallels there, at least as to contributing factors of the man-woman relating in that neck of the woods, which is unfortunate, and I don't know that we're going to make any progress there. We've got better hope in North America, obviously, but there's a definite connection there, I think for sure.
Eric Clopper:Oh, definitely, I mean.
Eric Clopper:what at least my law firm is going to focus on is secular genital mutilation right, and you know what the religions you know, command you to do and what the religions command you to mutilate, like that's not an argument that I'm interested in having or my law firm's interested in having or pursuing right, and that religious genital mutilation is really kind of the forte of the Middle East. That's what they do. They religiously mutilate all their children and they're very proud of it. And you know that's just nuts and I don't really want to engage with it. It's like dude, you know you mutilate your babies babies. I'm strongly opposed to it, but I don't have the influence in the Middle East like I can have here in the United States of America. So that's what I'm going to do, and the United States is a big exporter of culture as well.
Eric Clopper:And so once we stop mutilating our children and we will, and if you donate to Intact Global, you can help then the rest of the world is going to take note that, oh, we are no longer mutilating our children, and we will. And if you donate to Intact Global, you can help then the rest of the world is going to take note that, oh, we are no longer mutilating our kids. I think it was like Denmark or Iceland. They actually moved to outlaw it and America came down with the influence of Israel to say, look, if you put any restrictions on generally mutilating boys, we're going to economically sanction you and brand you as Nazis, effectively, right. And I think it was like the ADL sent a letter to that effect with like a bunch of congressmen signing on. It's like we are going to punish you if you protect your baby boys.
Eric Clopper:And that was America right. I mean obviously Israel, but also America, and so we as Americans need to stop this. This is absolutely absurd. We're not going to be influenced by these generally mutilating nations and we're going to do what is best for our children and we're not going to kowtow to these religious individuals who say, well, my God requires me to mutilate my babies and I will do anything I can to crush you if you say otherwise. It's like we're not going to be intimidated by that anymore and we're going to stand up and we're going to do what's best for our kids. And you know, if that requires some type of escalation, then we will do whatever is necessary. But this is no longer a debate. This is a final decision and we're going to get it done. So, and I'm excited to do it. As you could tell, like this is my life's mission, which I hope takes two years, and then we can do other stuff.
Jen Mayo:Yeah, move on, yeah.
Eric Clopper:Yeah, it's like I'd like to move on. This is not something I'd like to do as a career. I want to get it done and be finished. Like you know, that's enough. That's how I feel, and I think most people feel that way, and that's why we're at 50%. Because you know one other thing, because you say, oh, we're at 50% and that's the tipping point, and I agree with you, because a lot of social causes are exponential. But if you look at, you know what is the main indicator of whether someone or not recycles? Do you know what that? Do you know what it is?
Jen Mayo:No.
Eric Clopper:It is whether or not their neighbors recycle.
Jen Mayo:Oh yeah.
Eric Clopper:They look at their neighbors recycling, they're like oh, I got to recycle, right.
Jen Mayo:I think I read a book called Influence. That makes sense.
Eric Clopper:But you know, oh well, most people aren't circumcising their kids, I'm not going to do it either. Or most people aren't mutilating their kids I'm not going to do it either. And so that's. That's where we're rapidly heading, and that's why we're going to start in states that already protect most of their children from genital mutilation. So it's a very small step to say, look, we're just going to protect all our kids, that's what our constitution requires, and so that's that's my spiel. All right, all right.
Jen Mayo:I don't think a lot of people know um. You know this is a practice done on infants in our country, but there are other cultures where they specifically wait until a boy is old enough to remember it and I think that's intentional and I remember, you know, when images are so much and we can sit here and talk all day long, but if you're forced to actually look at an image of what we're actually describing here, that's that's a much more powerful way to move people. But it's been so censored. On social media especially. And there was one gentleman that I followed for a while who had a, you know, a completely intactivist account and he had posted a photo at one point in time of a group circumcision of roughly seven eight-year-old boys being circumcised by. I don't know if they were nurses or less skilled, I don't know what they were, but they were posting on social media with scalpels in hand and naked boys behind them, with towels over their faces to help with the pain. And I don't know privacy too, but laughing. Here we are publicly having this mass circumcision of boys and these women are posting on social media that they're performing it.
Jen Mayo:And brendan and I had had a conversation about um patriarchy because he had a chapter in his book. You know that when I first read it I was a little bit triggered and by the end of the chapter I was like, oh my god, he's completely right. Um, that women, you know and I'll even include people of color and other oppressed groups or non-white men, are largely purveyors of that which we're. You know, we've blamed the patriarchy for so long, but yet women especially, you know, were the primary caregivers of children, for the most part through the age of 18. And so these experiences that boys are having with the women who are taking care of them this is an extreme example of that, you know really influences their relationship with women and even with themselves later in life.
Jen Mayo:But on the Filipino example, so when I was researching some of this a few months ago and I went and I found it was like on the Filipino, like tourism website. That's bizarre. They actually had a page on like how they circumcise boys and what the rite of passage is and so forth and so on. But as I was preparing for this interview, I went back to try to find that because I had bookmarked it and it's gone. So their PR department must have gotten wind of, like you know, maybe on our tourist website we shouldn't be like.
Eric Clopper:This is how we mutilate our boys here. This is how we mutilate them.
Jen Mayo:We want to make sure that they remember and you know, forget doing it as infants, like I mean, it's just like the different customs surrounding this. You know, regardless which culture it is and how it's being done. I mean, it's almost like science fiction, like I can't even like fathom, like I said before, that we even have to have a conversation like this at this point, like I wish that human beings had evolved to, you know, a level of collective consciousness where we just there's just an unspoken understanding that you love your babies and you nurture them when they come out of the womb. And you know, I will say, from a mothering standpoint and a psychology standpoint, babies do not understand that they are even separate from their mothers at birth. So when you inflict this kind of harm on them at such a young, tender age, the level of damage I don't think is something that we're even capable of studying and quantifying. But this is, I mean, this is all common sense. It should be at this point.
Eric Clopper:Well, so, speaking of, you know, a lot of boys are circumcised, you know, six to 16 years old, right? Yeah, so you know I, you know my firm, will be doing a lot of equal protection litigation, but I either have or do represent. You know various actors and models.
Eric Clopper:One model, slash influencer, is Filipino guy, about 28 years old, and when he was telling me in Los Angeles, when he was telling me, when he was 14, he got circumcised. It wasn't in a public ritual, it was in a medical setting. He got anesthetized, but even when they saw him remove his foreskin, he felt the sense of being violated and raped. Right, yeah, it was not some. He didn't have the autonomy at 14 years old to stand up to his parents. He didn't have the accurate information at 14 years old to say I don't want this, don't do this to me. Yeah, at eight years old it's even more, and at at one day old it's even extreme, right, but the point is, whether you're one day old or 16 years old, most individuals in that range don't have the autonomy or the ability to make this important decision or avoid this wound until it's too late.
Eric Clopper:Right, and most circumcisions in the world, male genital mutilation is done, uh, by muslim parents right, they are the largest circumcision circumcising group by an incredible margin, just because there's way more muslims than there are jews and there are way more muslims than there are americans, right, so that's in a lot of Muslims and it ranges, because Islam has many different ways to practice it and some of the more enlightened ways don't mutilate their kids, right, but most do. And a lot of Islamic circumcision is done by barbers, right, they cut your hair and they mutilate your penis, and you know it can be done from 6 to 16. And it's seen as a rite of passage like, okay, you're a boy, you're a man, you're a boy, now you're. We cut off your penis, a big part of it. Now you're a man. Why? Because it happened to the adult males and instead of confronting that and saying, oh, maybe it shouldn't have been done to me, they do it to their child because then they don't have to confront the reality that maybe their religion led them astray or their culture or their parents.
Eric Clopper:But at least from the few men I've spoken to who have been circumcised as young adults, they say they remember it, they feel a sense of extreme violation and they wish it never happened. I mean, after this podcast I have a lunch with someone in the hills who's like really wants to meet me because he was circumcised at 16. And it's his life's mission now to stop it, because it's the worst thing that ever happened to him. Yeah, so just because it happened to you as an adult doesn't make it, or as a young adult or a boy, doesn't mean that it still wasn't terrible.
Eric Clopper:And oftentimes I hear you know, I remember the violation, right, but it's not something that my client would have told me unless he knew that I was like hardcore activist and advocate in the space. It's not like he tells his circumcision story to many people and you know I didn't ask about it, but he's like well, this is why I feel passionate as to why we need to end male genital mutilation, and he shared with me his story. So, um and like I said, america is and as we know, america is a big exporter of culture. So once we stop mutilating our baby boys, that's going to be very influential on the rest of the world, whether they circumcise at birth or as a young adult.
Jen Mayo:Right, and I think that would be a much better thing to export than McDonald's. So yeah, exactly.
Eric Clopper:But if I had to, I would take my foreskin and eat McDonald's, Right, but there was a choice and I used to love that, but it's just so unhealthy for you. It's like you know it's crazy.
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Eric Clopper:So there have been other cases in Europe, like a German court in Cologne said look, it's child abuse and it violates human rights of the child Right.
Eric Clopper:And then politicians spent under political pressure from Israel, et which you know is what it is Like. Maybe over 30 years ago there was individuals who tried to litigate this equal protection issue, but this was, I think, before we even had anti-female genital mutilation statutes. So the reality is the culture wasn't ready, and I only know of one case. I don't think that it went well, but this was like in the 90s, I believe. So there's not really good precedent, there's not timely precedent, and I think it's time to just go full bore. This is what we're doing equal protection of children from genital mutilation on a constitutional basis in as many states as we responsibly can do so. And the reality is we don't need to win every lawsuit. All you need to do as an attorney is you need to have a good faith legal basis to bring the lawsuit. And let me tell you, I am very earnest in my belief that all children should be equally protected, right, no question. And it has compelling anatomical, ethical, biological background that you know. These homologous structures should be protected in both boys and girls, and also the civil and human rights that are analogous to keeping those important parts of your body. So, but what's likely to happen is what might win some? We might lose some no-transcript appellate court who rules against that and that opinion is going to it's not going to age. Well, put it that way, you're going to look extremely ignorant if you are sitting on a bench and saying you know what? I think that we should protect baby girls, but we should allow the continued mutilation of baby boys. And there's a whole bunch of jurisprudence around what's a religious right versus? You know what is not protected under. You know the religious amendments of the federal or state constitutions. And I'm not talking about religious circumcisions here. We're talking about non-religious male genital mutilation. That's the focus of these lawsuits, and if someone else wants to litigate that a religious circumcision is protected, well, that's not what we are going to be arguing.
Eric Clopper:But to answer your question, is there a good precedent of similar challenges? Not that I'm aware of, but I'm very optimistic that there will be in the near future. We just need, essentially, the resources. So if you donate to IntactGlobalorg, that will help move the mission along, and the more money we raise, the more attorneys I can hire to either improve my work or to do the litigation on their own. But right now my law firm is going to be focused on primarily this and representing some models and some actors and actresses in LA, but mostly protecting children from genital mutilation. Depending on how much we raise, because it is kind of expensive to do high quality litigation I can do it at cost because I've been litigating for almost four years very intensely now. But the more we raise, the quicker we can go and the more states we can raise this issue in it, yeah.
Jen Mayo:So if you were a man who is compelled to pursue this in a legal sense because you feel like you've been violated and your personal autonomy has been compromised, what are the steps that somebody would need to go through to say, hey, I would really like to bring this to the courts so the clients that I'm looking to represent, and I have a great client, mason, in Oregon, young man, kind, intelligent.
Eric Clopper:He watched my play at Harvard, I think earlier in 2024 this year, and he said, oh wow, I didn't know that the foreskin was so important that this, this important part of my body, was stolen from me and my human rights were violated here. And he said, oh wow, I didn't know that the foreskin was so important that this, this important part of my body, was stolen from me and my human rights were violated. Right, and the reason why he's a good client is not only is he a good person and just wants to see the other children in Oregon be afforded the same protections as baby girls in Oregon, and that he was not afforded, but I'm looking for plaintiffs who were circumcised in their home state after that state passed its anti-female genital mutilation law. Because a big part of filing a lawsuit, especially a constitutional challenge, is the plaintiff needs to have what is called standing, is you need to have suffered a harm to bring a legal challenge?
Eric Clopper:And if you were circumcised before your state passed the anti-female general mutilation statute, well, the state could easily argue look, whatever the merits of protecting children from general mutilation is this anti-female general mutilation law didn't harm the plaintiff because it didn't exist until after the plaintiff was born. So, even so, the plaintiff didn't suffer harm from the statute, because no statute passed at the time that the anti-FGM statute was passed could have protected the man who was circumcised, if he was circumcised before the anti-FGM statute. So I'm essentially looking for men who have an anti-FGM statute in their state and who were circumcised after it, and intact globalorg will have a, will essentially have essentially what's called a spreadsheet or some visual that will tell you what type of plaintiffs I'm looking for, in which states. And I'm looking in like 20 or 30 states, right? This is not like a small operation. I'm looking in like 20 or 30 states, right? This?
Jen Mayo:is not like a small operation, right? Do all states have anti-female circumcision laws or statutes?
Eric Clopper:I actually have a spreadsheet made by GALDEF, who is a collaborator of mine, the General Autonomy Legal Defense and Education Fund, and I'm just pulling up the spreadsheet right now and it looks like. It looks like 41 states, Wow, 41. Wow, 41 states according to their data. So you know, plus or minus two, but just because there may be a mistake, I don't know, but about 40 states have anti-FGM laws and they range from passing in 1995, like in Minnesota, Delaware or Minnesota, to 2023, which is Washington States.
Jen Mayo:Now I'd have to double check this, yeah.
Eric Clopper:Well, according to GALDEF research, there is nine states Alabama, alaska, connecticut, hawaii, maine, mississippi, montana, nebraska, new Mexico. I am not looking for clients in those nine states because apparently they do not have an anti-FGM law. Now, I didn't go through every single law from the 50 states to check. I was able to outsource that to GALDEF and they're a great partner and I'm very grateful for them but almost 40 states approximately 40 is. I'm looking for plaintiffs. Now, let's say, the anti-FGM law was passed in 2020, right, the plaintiff has to be four years old or younger, and so what I would do is, let's say, you circumcise your child and then you later found out oh wow, this was a great harm and I wish I hadn't, but the doctor told me to do so and I I trusted the doctor, who, you know, enriched himself off of my ignorance. And now I'm upset and I wish that all children were protected. Let's say you're a parent who fits that category called a regret.
Eric Clopper:Parent, you could contact me if your child was born and circumcised after you know 2020, let's say, if you were in the state of um, kentucky or Massachusetts, um, which is where I'm from right. I'd love to see the state of Massachusetts, um, but so those are the type of well you know to help them improve their laws, not yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eric Clopper:No, I get it because I would like all boys in Massachusetts to be protected, where I was born, um, so those are the type of clients I'm looking for. So it's very broad, like you know, it encompasses tens of millions of potential clients, probably, um, and the other requirement is the state needs. So I didn't know very much about the law until I went to law school, beyond the basics, right, and so everyone's aware of the federal constitution. So you have the first amendment, freedom of speech and religion, the second amendment, guns, and so on and so forth, right? Well, each state has their own constitution as well, and each state's law needs to abide by that state's constitution.
Eric Clopper:So what I'm looking for in my clients and Oregon's a good example, because that's where the Klopper Law Firm will be suing first is the state's constitution needs to have some guarantee of equal protection of the laws for all its citizens. And if it has an amendment that says explicitly we do not discriminate on the basis of gender, that's even better. Because an anti-female genital mutilation statute, as noble and as important as it is on its face, discriminates on the basis of gender because it only protects one class of children, and we want to protect all class of children and for that law to abide by that state's constitution, which it must. It cannot discriminate on which children it protects from genital mutilation.
Jen Mayo:Yeah.
Eric Clopper:So that I mean those are the two requirements. Intactglobalorg is going to lay it out in a visual and in text. So if you want to be a plaintiff and say, look, I want to bring equal protection of the laws to my state, then you can get in touch with me at erickloppercom or put in your info at intactglobal or my law firm website, very easy to reach. I get a lot of correspondence so you have to be patient. But if you're like a potential plaintiff, then I'm very interested in talking. And also, if you want to help, I need local counsel in each state right to file a lawsuit, because I'm licensed in California right now only for now, and so since I'm suing the state of Oregon on behalf of Mason, I have local counsel.
Eric Clopper:His name is Brad Bradley and he already has experience in protecting children from genital mutilation.
Eric Clopper:He was one of the attorneys who actually brought a circumcision case up to the Oregon Supreme Court A bolt v bolt. It was a custody case where there was a teenage boy and two parents who were separating. The father converted to Orthodox Judaism and wanted to circumcise his young man. Right, his is, you know, probably young teens or maybe even like 12 tween, whatever, and the young boy was like you know, I don't want to have part of my penis cut off. And so it became a big court battle went up to the supreme court and at some point in the proceedings the young man actually testified on the stand and said look, you know, right in front of his dad, I don't want to be circumcised because you know I want my entire penis. I know it's painful and you know, right in front of his dad, I don't want to be circumcised because you know I want my entire penis. I know it's painful and you know I don't know his exact wording, but that was just right yeah can you imagine being a young boy?
Jen Mayo:you have to go to court and say yeah I can't even imagine the level of bravery that that took for him it's.
Eric Clopper:It's just a kangaroo ridiculousness that that he had to go to that lengths and I'm glad that he did, because the father was just off the rails unhinged. But anyways, brad, my local co-counsel, leckman Sue, he represented the boy after he won in the Supreme Court and ensured that he was protected to adulthood. So he, bradley, leckman Sue, great co-counsel, local counsel in the Oregon case. But I need local counsel in each state that I'm going to sue to essentially file the lawsuit and do some of the civil procedure stuff. And I'm happy to pay local counsel if we raise the money to do so. Right, and if you want to see this happen, donate to intaclobalorg. But that's the strategy. And if I could do this all in a year I mean I went through 20 states in a year I could do that if I had appropriate funding, because I've been a professional litigator, like hardcore, for almost two years and I've litigated very intensely for almost four. Right, no-transcript, I'll work with whatever resources are raised.
Jen Mayo:Okay, all right. Were there cases of FGM in some of these states that necessitated the statute be put in place? Because I have to imagine you know most of these states. You know to some extent, just didn't know. There was even a need to protect girls from having their genitals mutilated.
Eric Clopper:Well, what happened is in the 1990s, like 95, 96, it was very brave activists from Africa was claiming asylum in America. Say, look, if you send me back, I'm going to have my genitals mutilated. And America didn't recognize that as a real harm. In the 90s, right Like after I was born, and there was great legal advocacy. Who got? You know? Cnn got involved, I believe, or 60 Minutes, like some major mainstream who who aired this activist story.
Eric Clopper:And because they use the term mutilation, because that's what it is female genital mutilation people like, oh, we're against mutilation, as they should be. And so public opinion turn. That's why I always use male genital mutilation, because that's what it is Right. And so there was great advocacy in like 95, 96, 97, 98, where there's awareness was rising that, oh, women's genitals are being mutilated, of baby girls, and we need to stop that because that's an obvious violation of human rights. Extreme pain, lifelong sexual dysfunction, all the things with male genital mutilation Right, yeah, and so and so that's why these laws banning female genital mutilation, according to Galdef research, started in 95.
Eric Clopper:And there was like a whole string of them from 1995 to 1999. There was approximately 13 states who banned it right away, right. And then there was an anti-FGM law federal anti-FGM law in 1996. So I don't believe there was a lot of state lawsuits or stories. It was this brave activist from Africa who really raised awareness in the mainstream media because it didn't have any allegiance to female gender mutilation, religious or cultural or otherwise, was quick to denounce this practice that they don't engage in. Right. But there was a recent case in Michigan where this Islamic doctor was practicing female gender mutilation in Michigan where this Islamic doctor was practicing female genital mutilation, right.
Jen Mayo:Yeah.
Eric Clopper:And the defense counsel challenged it, saying look, the federal government doesn't have the power to outlaw female genital mutilation under the Congress clause. A very like legal, autistic argument. Right and so, and it prevailed. The federal judge, just as a matter of federalism, meaning you know how the state and federal governments share and delegate certain types of authority that just it wasn't in the federal government's power to ban this type of child abuse against women.
Eric Clopper:So the female Islamic doctor she was no longer prosecuted. It was dropped because of pure federalist issues. But the federal government amended the female gender mutilation statute and, for all intents and purposes, right now it still exists, which is also great because it means all of my law firm's legal challenges against the constitutionality of anti-female genital mutilation statutes will not endanger the welfare of those girls in those states because they're still protected from genital mutilation from the federal statute. So there's really no bad outcome except raising awareness and providing legislatures the opportunity to pass laws that pass constitutional muster and protect all children equally from gender mutilation. So that's a very long way to answer your question is there was one case about female gender mutilation I know of, like in 2018, approximately, and then before that I think I don't. I'm not aware of any like high profile cases, but there was that activist who really raised awareness of the issue in America in like 96 or so.
Jen Mayo:Okay, Okay, Um yeah, I mean, that's mind boggling that we even need these laws, but um, is there any? Is there any potential recourse or legal action, say in the case of um two parents where one signs a consent form against the other one's wishes?
Eric Clopper:um, that may vary by state. I believe informed consent became a thing in the 70s because there were certain surgeries that were done without the consent of either the patient or the parents, depending on the age of the patient, and I would wager that most of that is a state-by-state law, as in what constitutes informed consent, although the state laws often overlap right, but they're not the same, which is one of the reasons you need to get licensed in each state to practice law. But I do not know in terms of how many parents need to consent to a circumcision. It would vary by state right. There was a law in New Hampshire that lost by a narrow margin. That required both parents to sign the consent form and it put in 12 point, which is not that big, but 12 point bold font at the front saying this is a medically unnecessary surgery. And then it listed all the complications, from bleeding, infection, loss of penis, death.
Eric Clopper:I mean incredibly serious things. I mean babies die from this, like dozens at least every year in America alone, because people don't realize this is a major surgery. Slash amputation, yeah, but it would. It would vary by state and maybe even by hospital how many parents need to sign the consent form, but it's. It's usually at least one, because they used to just circumcise infants without asking the parents. It used to just be part of, like, the birth. You know the birth checklist. How can the hospital maximize money for every baby born?
Jen Mayo:Right the sales funnel. Yeah, exactly circumcision as a routine procedure in North American culture and what we're seeing play out in what I'll call porn culture.
Eric Clopper:Hmm, well, they're definitely connected, right and that, and you circumcise an infant or a man or whoever.
Eric Clopper:When you steal that foreskin, you change the mechanics of intercourse and because, like I mentioned earlier, the foreskin is a bilayer or tissue, it folds in on itself, kind of like the lips.
Eric Clopper:It's extremely sensitive. To get great sexual pleasure If you have an intact penis, if you're not circumcised, you only need to move very little inside the woman, right, it is much more of like a dance where your hips are essentially aligned and the clitoris gets more stimulated because you're not, you're not going, you're not moving away from the body, the females or your partner's body, whereas if you're circumcised, you have, you know, small percentage, probably 10, maybe 30% of the sensory tissue that you would otherwise have, and to get some comparable level of sexual sensation you need to do huge strokes, which, which moves you away from the female's body, away from the clitoris, reduces the amount of female orgasms, like I mentioned earlier, the 50% less female orgasms if you're circumcised, if your partner circumcised. And so what happens is we exaggerate this behavior in pornography and you have this jackhammering effect. We have these large circumcised penises that are not representative of actual size.
Eric Clopper:And they are just pounding these women. And it's not how you're supposed to make love, it's not how women experience sexual pleasure and orgasms. And because pornography is so accessible, you know, to anyone with an internet connection, especially at a young age, you have a lot of men's sexuality being formed by these gross characterizations of dysfunctional sex, because the man doesn't have all the parts of his penis he's supposed to.
Jen Mayo:Yeah.
Eric Clopper:So you know, and if you look at who's running the porn industry in California, most of them are circumcised and it just perpetuates their delusions of normality.
Jen Mayo:I would say yeah, yeah, I do think there's an element too of if you can control the sexuality of a culture. They become more submissive and easier to control as a populace. You know, either from a religious or, you know, a governmental standpoint. I don't necessarily know that that's done on a conscious level in most cases, although I mean, maybe we can look to some like dystopian literature and you know, communist regimes where maybe that's more obvious than what we're seeing it play out, you know, in the United States or similar type countries.
Jen Mayo:But sexual energy is the bridge between the natural and the supernatural or between the material and the ethereal, and I think these practices, including circumcision, including the perpetuation of porn culture, in some ways is intentional to degrade the capacity for what the sexual experience is supposed to be and its ability to bring people closer to God and bring people closer to each other by reducing it to this more mechanical act.
Jen Mayo:You know, and that's probably one of the bigger travesties, because you know back to you don't know what you don't know until you do know, I think we largely live in this culture that just doesn't know, largely live in this culture that just doesn't know. We we've not had access to what our energetic and spiritual potentials are, and I don't mean religious, but I mean um the ability to move energy in our bodies and to interconnect and co-create with somebody else's um in a way that's being destroyed, and if we can get past these handful of years in front of us, where I do see good things happening um in this respect, I think the potential on a more broader cultural and even global scale um are are fascinating. I am interested to see where where things go, if we can keep things moving in a great direction, and I think you're doing beautiful work to that, and I think you know, like you said, hopefully this is the next couple of years of your life, not not your lifelong career.
Eric Clopper:No, no, I. I'd like to finish this immediately. I'm, I'm, I'm not at all running out of steam, I'm like just gearing up, but at the same time, this is not like a lifelong fight. This is, if you, if you're passionate about this and you want to see the general mutilation of children end and you can support us at intact globalorg and become a monthly donor.
Eric Clopper:But not only that like this can be done in a matter of years, but we just need to have some support. And this is an asymmetric battle, like most are right, because the sides are not of equal moral value, equal resources and because you know I probably need to raise $1 for every $1,000 the opposition spends. Right, because the opposition is so contemptible that they mutilate infants for profit. It is hard to conceive of a more wicked position to defend and that's why they need an incredible infrastructure and resources to defend it. But I think this can be done in a matter of years like you know, two-ish years if we are just organized in.
Eric Clopper:Just a small percentage of those of us who feel strongly about protecting children donate or get involved. And you know you could just share this podcast, right? You could tell your friends who are going to, you know, have a baby, a male baby. You know there are easy things you can do Subscribe to your channel, subscribe to mine, right? So these are things that can be done on a, you know, very easy individual level. If you're committed, donate money or if you're an attorney, reach out to me.
Eric Clopper:Blah, blah, blah, but I'm going back to what you had said just recently and we had a little conversation about this offline but does circumcision, you know, mutilating a child's genitals at birth, make them easier or more docile, right, and what evidence is for that? Well, if we go back to the circumcision that America adopted, the Jewish circumcision, if you read Genesis 17, verse 13, you know, allegedly God says which is just a rabbi rewriting the Bible you know, whether born in your household or bought with your money, they must be circumcised right. And so the religious covenant is literally you need to circumcise your infants and your slaves right. And you're not circumcising your slaves because you want to empower them. You're doing it because it makes them easier to control. It's like you know why other cultures would castrate their slaves, because then they wouldn't be a sexual threat.
Jen Mayo:Now.
Eric Clopper:Jewish culture couldn't castrate their Jewish boys because then they wouldn't reproduce. So this was a way, this was a half step towards castration right, we're just going to remove most of the sexual pleasure.
Eric Clopper:We're not actually going to make you sterile. So if you look at you know why American doctors began to promote circumcision in the medical sense it was to prevent them from masturbating right and reducing sexual pleasure from the app, which is a form of sexual control. So, and there's a lot of justified complaints about how female sexuality is not respected and honored in America, and that definitely is the case, and it's also the same for men who have big parts of their genitals amputated at birth. The argument that circumcision is done to control you, to reduce your sexual senses and to make you, let's say, to traumatize and make you easier to do what those in power would like you to.
Eric Clopper:And you know, I think most adult men and women who are autonomous and proud to be who they are and, let's say, are just healthy, independent-minded people, they're not down with that and they don't want their children to suffer from that. So this is a freedom movement in a way.
Jen Mayo:Yeah, oh, absolutely. Can you briefly give us a rundown, because I just want to make sure this story is shared in this podcast? The history involving John Harvey Kellogg.
Eric Clopper:Yes. So John Harvey Kellogg is the guy who you may recognize from, you know, corn Flakes, right, kellogg? Corn Flakes, yeah. And he was also like a fanatically religious doctor at the turn of like the 20th century, like around 1900. Yeah, of like the 20th century, like around 1900. Right, and one of. So he promoted cornflakes back, you know, in around 1900, because they were so bland, they were supposed to reduce your desire for sexual intercourse. That was like a selling point.
Eric Clopper:And he actually published a book called treatment for self abuse and its effects in 1888. And self-abuse was a euphemism for masturbation, right. And so this guy who was influential in getting America to adopt circumcision, he promoted it because he knew that the foreskin was very erogenous and very important in masturbation, and so if you were to remove this tissue from baby boys and young men, it's harder for them to masturbate. But the same guy also, john Harvey Kellogg, advocated for burning the clitorises of young girls with carbolic acid. And he also recommended using chastity cages on children so they couldn't touch their genitals. He even advocated for tying up or restraining children so they couldn't, you know, masturbate. I mean, he was off the rails by modern standards.
Jen Mayo:God. I wonder what happened to him as a child.
Eric Clopper:He had some adverse childhood events.
Eric Clopper:Apparently he had some adverse childhood events apparently. Yeah so, um, yeah, so john harvey kellogg he was like one of the bigger secular promoters of circumcision. I mean, it's just such a ludicrous history and when you and it's such a ludicrous practice that's so overtly violent and sadistic, right and so, and when you look into it, it makes no sense at all. And there's this saying in the movement to protect children from genital mutilation that a lot of people have this obsessive epiphany where they. They have this epiphany oh my God, this circumcision was all a lie. It's male genital mutilation. It's incredibly painful and detrimental to your health for the rest of your life and violates your human rights. They have this epiphany and they obsess over it because once they understand this, it's so obvious.
Eric Clopper:It is so obvious. Right so yeah, and you know, John Harvey Kellogg is a good example. Like he said, oh, these are the people who are advocating for the other side. It's like, yeah, that's because it's totally twisted and worked to mutilate an infant.
Jen Mayo:Right, like, yeah, that's because it's totally twisted and warped to mutilate an infant, right, right. And just one more note on, you know, our example of, you know, creating a more docile populace. I think your puppy analogy is a really good one that people can maybe relate to better. If you're relating, um, or if you have a puppy who's raised in a very loving household and it doesn't even know what trauma is, versus one that's coming from the shelter, who's been beaten and abused and neglected, and observe how their behavior is throughout life, you're probably going to either see aggression and or a withdrawing and fear of interaction with people when they've been abused as a puppy and they're going to be, you know, from that respect, easier to control. So I mean, this has been like a fantastic conversation. I'm so grateful that you were able to share some time with us today and bring some more awareness to our listeners.
Jen Mayo:As I talk with more friends and more mothers on the subject, I will just say, like I've had a lot of conversations with moms in private on this subject and those whose sons are circumcised, the reaction is almost always I regret his circumcision and it was because his father said he wanted to look like him or we had family pressures and the doctor was pressuring us.
Jen Mayo:You know it wasn't. It wasn't an emphatic like oh yeah, this is. You know, I felt good about doing this and it's what I've always known I've wanted to do for my son, um, so I think, just the more you know, this conversation also is not about shaming parents who made that decision, um. Like I said, you don't know what you don't know until you do know, um, and we do the best with the information we have at the time, um, and I think the biggest takeaway on that is to have the awareness and forgive yourself for what you didn't know and encourage yourself to become the version of yourself that you would like to be and be that example for your children and your grandchildren and so forth. Is there anything else that we didn't talk about that you think would be important for our listeners to know about?
Eric Clopper:I think we covered a lot of ground. I'm really grateful for the invitation to be on your podcast. So thank you, jen, and you know, if anyone else wants to be on the podcast, they can email me at eric at cloppercom, and if they feel passionate about protecting children from genital mutilation and want to support my law firm's efforts to end this type of child abuse, then they can become a donor monthly donor at IntactGlobalorg. Other than that, I'm really grateful that you're bringing attention to this issue. I'm very grateful you invited me on your podcast and I'm hoping that in a couple years we will be in a much, much better position. And you know that 50% circumcision rate goes down to, you know, 10 or 5%. That would be a great outcome.
Eric Clopper:And you know I'm working on it as hard as I can and all the support we can get is greatly appreciated. So you know, thank you Jen, thank you listeners, and you know we'll be in touch hopefully.
Jen Mayo:All right. Is there any place people can find you on social media?
Eric Clopper:Um, yes, there is. Uh, I'm in the process of rebranding and making all my websites right now. By the time this is out, they'll probably be out, but, um, but my, my personal website is cloppercom and my handles will probably be attorney clopper. But we'll see.
Jen Mayo:Okay, and if we have that at the time we publish I will definitely include in the show notes.
Eric Clopper:Thank you, I appreciate that.
Jen Mayo:Yeah, no problem. So thanks for coming on. It's been a fantastic conversation. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Any statements and views expressed by myself or my guests are not medical advice. The opinions of guests are their own and the Body Literacy Podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. If you have a medical problem, please consult a qualified and competent medical professional. As always, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Body Literacy Podcast. Be sure to subscribe and sign up for updates over at genmayocom.