Intactivism

Last week I got the joy of adding a new word and all of its conjugations to my vocabulary.  Intactivist.  Never in my life had I heard of such a thing.  When it came to pass that I learned what it was, it was in the worst, most hateful manner I could.  Immediately the word became synonymous with threatening, belittling, overbearing, accusative, intrusive, malicious, and loathsome.  It took less than 24 hours to develop an unhealthy contempt for those who would bear this title, and presently, I will explain why.

An intactivist, per urban dictionary (because their movement isn’t even recognized by any reputable sources), is a “Person who campaigns against involuntary genital cutting of boy, girl and/or intersexed babies and children”.  Clarified, they are people who are opposed to circumcision.  If you didn’t catch the “activist” part of that, they like most activists like to protest, and cause little annoyances among the populace in an effort to garner support for their cause.  Fair enough, if you feel strongly enough about something you should speak out.  That’s what makes things in this country great.  We CAN speak out.  However, there goes a fine line when you start speaking AT people, and ABOUT people.  In my particular case, they not only trampled the fine line, but set up a picket line on it.

My micro-preemie son, who has come far in his short life already, was circumcised last week.  I say this, not because it’s any of your business, but because I CAN say it.  We are some of the proudest parents you will ever meet.  We are praised by the NICU nurses for our dedication, our caring, our community within the NICU, and how much time we have simply put into making sure our son knows he is loved.  We work hard to make sure he is developing properly and despite being born at 25 weeks, as opposed to the normal 40 weeks of gestation, he grows up to live a full life.  We have built a support page because it is the easiest way to inform all of our family and friends of his successes and setbacks with out both my wife and myself having to post the same thing twice.  We also made the page open to the public because there are other parents of premature children that might be able to draw strength from our son’s story.  Well, when you open the gates to the public, wolves come in with the sheep.

As I said, I wrote a post about my son having his circumcision done.  There was even a little light-hearted comment that the doctor, in his overly accented spanglish, made about the endowment of my son (according to the nurses he doesn’t say that if he doesn’t mean it, and has been known to bluntly let parents know it will be difficult to perform the operation due to small size).  All of that was comical and once he began the procedure he was nothing but professional, and diligently set to his work.  The operation went smoothly and the doctor made sure to explain all of the benefits of doing this to us, which we were thankful for.  He went about his day, as did my son, no worse for the weary.  The simple post mentioning this all occurring was left overnight as we all drifted off to sleep.  What we awoke to was far from innocent or comical.

Overnight, the intactivist trolls found their way on to the page, which had over a thousand followers, and attempted to set fire to the village.  We found in the morning nearly 300 comments, some in our defense though they were overwhelmed.  The comments from this wretched group of people ranged anywhere from telling us how horrible of parents we are, to saying we sexually assaulted our infant baby, to even calling the doctor a pervert.  Of course, we had to see what was being said because of the overwhelming amount of comments that popped up within 8 hours, though, in retrospect, we wished we hadn’t.  No parent should ever be told these things, ever.  Possibly one of the most hurtful things I have ever endured.  To make it worse, their bullying tactics, were all for naught.  What did they expect us to do?  Repent our “evil ways” and ask the doctor to sew the foreskin back on?  Sorry folks, it doesn’t exactly work that way.

We simply deleted the post about the circumcision, and with it went all of the malicious comments as well.  A polite admin post was put up in its place asking visitors to the page to refrain from arguing their personal opinions, ethics, and morals on a baby’s support page, and to leave the negativity out.  We soon found out exactly the amount of cowardice we were dealing with.  Nearly immediately, we got a couple people to say similar comments, despite having been politely asked not to, and they were appropriately banned from the page.  I managed to hold my anger in check with the singular thought that one day, my son will read back on this page and see positive vibes that helped him get through all of this.  The last thing he should see when reading back was his dad blowing up and getting in petty arguments with complete strangers who would do nothing but use foul language and attempt to make his parents feel awful.  All that would do is validate the intactivist scum anyways and fuel them to do it to the next family.  We went through the first day with a total of 5 people banned.  Over the next two nights that number bumped up to 17.  Where I mentioned cowardice.  They would post while everyone was asleep so that they could sneak their comments in and have them up for a few hours to get their point across to as many people as possible.  But as my wife is a walking milk factory right now, she wakes up twice a night to pump milk for our son, so these dirty little bastards were found rather quickly.  I would have rather her never see any of that mess, but soon I found that we stood together against making sure that our son’s page wasn’t going to be the place for them to spew their filth.  We also found that these people were interconnected through pages like Savingoursons.org, and Jewsforintactivism, and a few other activist pages which probably rallied them to our page.

To make this all worse, the only thing I wanted to do was to just let slip for them to come find me at the hospital and we can have it out right there.  I’d even be as kind to drag their limp bodies to the ER as a public service.  I cannot stand keyboard commandos.  Not one fucking bit.  But unfortunately, all I would do is further their reasoning to call us monsters, and bring bad publicity to the hospital which has given such great care to our child.  Turning the other cheek was our only path through this.  However, that doesn’t mean I can’t vent in my own forum.

I’d really like to address savingoursons.org.  I wanted to firebomb their entire website with all kinds of shit, but its ultimately not worth the hassle.  I will speak my peace here though.  First off, the name.  That is THE MOST LIBERAL LOAD OF CRAP, EVER!  It is MY son.  It is my WIFE’s son.  Not YOUR son.  You get ABSOLUTELY NO SOCIAL CLAIM to him.

No bitch, just no…  “Lean Forward” and smash your face on the ground.  You may politely fuck off and go save YOUR own offspring from the mean doctors that are only looking to help him not be prone for urinary tract infections and STD’s, however keep your damn dirty mitts off of MY child who I am responsible for.  Secondly, are you a bunch of doctors?  Particularly in the field dealing with circumcisions?  Or did you just read a few uncited articles with statistics that someone produced from their anus?  I’m guessing the latter.  That being said, what scope do you have to tell ANYONE what to do with their bodies?  Furthermore, even if you might be one of two people involved in this site that are actually are medical doctors,  you are that 1 out of 10 doctors from the toothpaste commercials that didn’t recommend the toothpaste.  Summing that up, your peers probably all just looked at you like, “what the fuck is his problem?”
Continuing on from there.  WHAT FUCKING USE IS IT TO BULLY PEOPLE WHO ALREADY HAD IT DONE!?  SERIOUSLY?  You just wasted your own sad, pathetic time to accomplish nothing in a retroactive attempt to shame people.  If you REALLY give a fuck, maybe getting some awareness out there BEFORE a baby has it done would benefit your cause better.  But one thing I can be sure that doesn’t help it, is bullying parents going through a hard time.  You effectively just showed over a thousand people that you are a bunch of assholes in one swift decision.  From your facebook page, that’s nearly half of your total following that you just turned away from your cause.  MAYBE… JUST MAYBE, you should reevaluate your strategy there and stop being such dumbfucks.

Also, I am SLIGHTLY concerned for your mental well-being to begin with.  Though only slightly in the sense that you are not your own problem, but that your problems belong to whole communities, right Melissa Harris-Perry?  The most important part of your lives are little flaps of skin on baby penises.  Let that sink in…

Little.  Skin flaps.  Baby.  Penises.

You could care about the children in Africa that go without food, water, and vaccines.  You could give a shit about the christian children in the middle east that are getting beheaded and raped.  You could even buy into the ebola hysteria, but NOOOOOOOO!  You are overwhelmed and consumed with the thought of little skin flaps on baby penises.  How fucking sad is your life, that you stay up until 3-4 in the morning to try and sneak a comment in about how evil people are for surgically removing a little flap of skin from a baby’s penis?  I mean, really, that is a little concerning.
Sad motherfuckers, the lot of you.  You need to really just go rethink your lives.  And while you’re at it, apologize to all the parents you belittled along the way while hiding behind your keyboard.  I don’t think a single damn one of you would come inside a NICU where there’s roughly 50 distraught families and dare voice your opinion about how terrible of parents they are.  If you did, I don’t think you’d make it out unscathed for that matter.  So on that note, I conclude with a statement from Mr. Antoine Dodson.
Now get a fucking life, losers.

For the rest of you who aren’t intactivists…

Stay hidden; stay safe.