My six year old son and his friends of both gender are capable of figuring out how to destroy things naturally. They don't need any stinking book to tell them how to have fun. Dolls are to be kidnapped, tied up, and ransomed by pirates or superheroes. Beads are treasure to be fought over, won and displayed. Girls as well as boys run around my house with cut-off swim noodles, wacking any adult mad enough to play monster with them. From digging in the garden to grabbing garden houses to scaring us silly with rollerblades, children are far more creative at figuring out cool things than adults. These kids have thought up things to do with swingsets that never ocurred to me, with good reason; I am sane, and they are kids. Kids are, by definition, insane.

I was taught by a photographer how to make a pinhole camera at age 6, and I am teaching the kids in the neighborhood. I, a female, corrupt the neighborhood kids with water guns (the great equalizer- the smallest get the bigger guns, the parents the biggest). Bows and arrows? Hah, try digital cameras, video camera (they make movies), small homemade rockets (yes, they scare me) and whatnot. Jumping bikes? No gender divide.

Calling it "boy" is marketing. It's really pathetic. Most of us already know how to do that stuff. Who needs a book to figure this stuff out?

"They're as scared of you as you are of them" is silly. My son knows these girls are fully capable of being dangerous. After all, one of the most feared bullies at his school is female. To underestimate women's ability to be as destructive as men is to get seriously hurt.

This child is in pain, and the pain needs to e stopped. The mother wants the pain stopped. The father is simply playing a power game. If he was worried about the pain, why didn't the FATHER take the kid to a different doctor? The clinics are open on Saturdays.

Bottom line: getting the kid out of pain is the first priority. If Dad loves kid, Dad should get the kid treated and THEN say the circumcision is not necessary. Whining and then not doing anything is a cruel thing to do to a child.

If some people had a few more things to worry about, they would not be overanalyzing BJs.

Litmus-testing feminism with this subject is trivial. Even arguing that it has something to say about women's empowerment is trivial. When women have assured access to birth control, the choice of work or staying at home with kids, protection from rapists, the guarantee that if they kill their rapist it will be seen as self-defense, and a number or other things, all around the world, then I will entertain trivial discussions on this kind of upper middle class sexual freakiness-as-equality dumbass analysis. We don't have equitable divorce laws, stronger protections for children, better protection for workers, and some people are left out of health care, clean water,etc. Just why is this subject important in the larger scheme of things?

But right now, most normal women have more important things to think about. The adults are worrying about paying bills, not the existential meaning of the BJ.

This is an example of the excesses that give feminism a bad name.

"Sorry domini, that’s pretentious, condescending bullshit. The essence of the secular humanism that emerged from the Enlightenment is the recognition that every area of human conduct and belief is a legitimate subject of critical inquiry."

No, it's not. It's navel gazing. Secular humanism and the Enlightenment did NOT argue for nitpicking and dissecting the trivial. Rousseau did not sit around nitpicking the trivial. Secular humanism and the Enlightenment argued that human rights flowed from humans, not the state, and dicussed what those rights and the condition should be.

The Voting Rights Act is held up for renewal, birth control access is under attack in several places, soldiers are dying in Iraq. Wasting time on this is not legitimate, it is a distraction that keeps progressives from converting ordinary people to their vision of security, equality, and economic progress. It makes progressives look trivial and obsessed with trivia. Why should anyone allow progressives control of national security, or even take progressive discussion of such seriously, when it is conflated in importance in discussion of private sexual practices?. This kind of inquiry is why people legitimately ask "what are these people thinking" and "why should I be a feminist"? It's exactly this kind of stupidity that allows authoritarians on the right and the left to argue that liberty = licence, and that they know "Best" for us. After all, the puritans who also navel gazed blowjobs in the 90s thought it was a "legitimate sunject for critical inquiry". That navel gazing allowed Al Qaeda to grow while the government and the public was wasting time and energy on this exact same stupid subject. Navel gazing about blow jobs kept the public and government officials from paying attention to the Nigerian embassy bombing, the bombing of the Cole, and a number of important events. Sometimes people, sex is just sex. Far too often in America, we become so mesmerized by sex that we allow important things (like our jobs) to be destroyed. "My job went overseas because of corporately owned politicians, but no one is getting oppressive bjs or abortions". Are you seeing the practical problem now?

While you fiddle, Rome burns.