Do you agree with baby girls having ears pierced?

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MagicKnight
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02 May 2017, 12:45 pm

seaweed wrote:
it's more harmless than male circumcision, which is more harmless than female circumcision.

the way i see it is all of these to varying degrees of torture/complications are forms of culturally normative mutilations, and to routinely subject infants to that speaks towards our strange human social mentality.
i would not be surprised if many autistic people could not rationalize these practices.

my mom let my sisters and i all choose to be pierced or not once we had each reached 7 years old. i did because what are silly lobes good for if not to have shiny pieces of metal in them, but i remember when my little sister was 6 she complained that all her friends had already gotten theirs pierced and i got to have mine pierced and she was left out. the day she turned 7 she had hers pierced. i also think my decision was influenced by external pressure to a lesser extent, because while its socially acceptable for a girl to have pierced ears, it isn't as much for a boy. it's the same with dresses. dresses are comfortable and i enjoy wearing them but i have the benefit of being able to wear one and not be criticized by others.

i remember in 7th grade a male classmate had divulged to me that he had not been circumcised as an infant. he was embarrassed about the look of his member, and he chose to get circumcised that year. i don't understand that choice without looking through a social lens.

there is also an issue of more direct coercion, like with mothers taking their young daughters to be circumcised despite the well known health risks.

but it all falls back on social conditioning, i think. to pierce an infant girl's ears is a preemptive act of conformity and a perspective that it is what's best for her as a social animal even though she can't understand it yet.


... and that's what I'm talking about! Cheers!



komamanga
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02 May 2017, 2:01 pm

In my country piercing baby girls' ears is also kind of a tradition. My ears were pierced when I was a baby and my mother told me I had no reaction to it in such a way that it looked like I didn't even realize it. Seriously though as someone who has over twenty ear piercings I know that getting pierced on the earlobe is not really that painful, if at all, there's no trauma or whatsoever in it. No need to compare it to other obviously violent traditional practices.

Metal allergies can be observed easily and taken care of by a responsible parent. They removed my ear piercings later because of that and then replaced them with silver ones that I had no problem with.

But today I can't use my ear holes that were pierced then, because they are not in the 'correct' places and not symmetrical. So probably it's better to let your baby girl physically grow up and have her own decision about it.