Of female nurses and the male member

By Milly G

There has been debate this week on whether female nurses should be allowed to circumcise men. Local leaders, especially in Nyanza, came out, pardon pun, guns blazing, to declare it an abomination that a woman other than a man’s wife should see his private parts. "This is an insult on our culture. Surely, even if it is science, this is wrong," said Luo Council of Elders chairman Riaga Ogalo.

At a time when children are being kidnapped, a secret envelope containing a list of shame threatening to tear open, and special tribunals being sought to try perpetrators of crimes against humanity, I find it comically relieving, if ridiculous, that we should have to listen to men justify why female nurses should not carry out the cut on them. It just does not make sense. But as Matthew Arnold said, culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one. I will leave the morality to elder Riaga Ogalo, and deal with why any thinking person will find his claims laughable.

First, the kind of circumcision being carried out in Nyanza has nothing to do with culture. Luos are just fine with other initiation rites, unlike some other tribes that circumcise as a rite of passage.

The circumcision campaign has to do with lowering the risk of HIV infection, period. That is why public figures of high standing like Oburu Odinga and the Education Assistant Minister Prof Ayiecho Olweny declared that they would do it to lead the way.

They were not worried about their culture, but about the threat to their community. It is medical circumcision — a medical operation like any other. The last time I checked, any patient wants the best doctor, not the one who’s anatomy matches his. Otherwise we’d have hospitals for men only where treatment is by men only and the same for women.

Trained Female Nurses

Men better heed the advice of Prof Olweny "What is wrong with a trained woman handling a man? These are professionals and we should not mix this with politics. A great number of gynecologists are men and they have been handling women all the years. So what is the problem with trained nurses conducting male circumcision?"

I also cant help questioning the elder’s allegation that men usually don’t allow women other than their wives to see their, ahem, apparatus. The fact is that women hide their nakedness much more than men do. Just walk down any street and it will be odd if you don’t find a man facing some garden or fence, watering the nation. We women don’t mind it if men compare their, ahem, longevity in the urinals or have such progesterone inspired contests in their changing rooms, but we find it distasteful that men should offer us unsolicited demos on the streets.

And yet another case of men behaving casually with their ding dong bells is that they seem to get the itch at very odd places and times.

Why do men scratch in public, so oblivious of how that grates on other people’s sense of propriety? Women find discrete ways and places to answer that call when the craving strikes, but men, they just dig in no matter where they are. How gross! You just want to ask…who is your mother?!

And because men are obsessed with their life-gushing members and with their virility, many of them have no qualms about allowing more than one woman, the wife, to view and sample. Ask my DNA expert friend at Nairobi Crime Scene Investigation who recently published the promiscuity report on Kenyan men.

Some men are preferring female nurses because they cut with precision. They are good medics, and that’s all you need in a modern-day circumcision. Once the men or boys are out of the theater, you can sing Mwana Mberi all you like and banish the women from their rooms, because then, culture has a place.

The only culture admissible in hospital is the bacteria culture. If you really must insist that a man cuts you, feel free to go freeze in the river at three in the morning, with a traditional circumciser for a surgeon. Just don’t treat a nurse who has been vetted by the World Health Organisation and the Ministry of Health as one.