Sick

Pediatric urologist Dix Poppas at Weill Medical College of Cornell University has been up to some pretty sick shit. Concerned parents bring their little girls to the good doctor and express their worries. Their worries, namely, that their developing child's clitoris is too large. The WTF factor only snowballs from here. Dix Poppas performs a "nerve-sparing" surgery on the little girls (most are around six years old) in which he removes the offending tissue from the shaft of the clitoris, then reattaches the glans to what little remains. 

Imagine growing up with the knowledge that your parents found the most private, sensitive part of your body so aesthetically disturbing, so very ugly that they arranged to have it chopped up by a creep who would later masturbate you as they watched. Ugh. 

I have few words to describe exactly how wildly unethical this is. Here's a Pharyngula post on the topic, and the original post from Psychology Today. The comment threads are worth reading and rather cathartic. Dan Savage has also caught wind of this, and has a long, passionately written post at the Stranger.

From Dan Savage's post:

There's lots to be outraged about here: there's nothing wrong with these girls and their healthy, functional-if-larger-than-average clitorises; there's no need to operate on these girls; and surgically altering a girl's clitoris because it's "too big" has been found to do lasting physical and psychological harm. But what's most outrageous is how Poppas is "proving" that his surgery "spares nerves." Dreger and Feder:


But we are not writing today to again bring attention to the surgeries themselves. Rather, we are writing to express our shock and concern over the follow-up examination techniques described in the 2007 article by Yang, Felsen, and Poppas. Indeed, when a colleague first alerted us to these follow-up exams—which involve Poppas stimulating the girls’ clitorises with vibrators while the girls, aged six and older, are conscious—we were so stunned that we did not believe it until we looked up his publications ourselves.


Here more specifically is, apparently, what is happening: At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch.... Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls....

I encourage you to vent your disapproval/outrage here (Weill Cornell Medical College contact form).


Now for something completely different: in the runup to next week's IWC meeting in Morocco,   celebrities are joining the "fight against whaling". If you're a Doctor Who fan, the wonderful Christopher Eccleston has gotten behind the cause. The BBC article also outlines the agenda for the meeting, which will probably result in the 24-year old moratorium on commercial whaling being overturned. Environmental groups are, of course, up in arms against this. More information is here, at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society website. If you'd like to subscribe to their blog, the RSS feed is here.