Alan Cumming denounces circumcision: ‘It’s genital mutilation’
The actor and outspoken anti-circumcision campaigner says his foreskin made him feel 'freakish' in America.
By Will Stroude
Alan Cumming has once again spoken out against circumcision, branding it “genital mutilation”.
The Good Wife star, 55, told The Guardian that the practice of removing the foreskin from a penis should be treated the same way as female genital mutilation.
Cumming, who is uncircumcised, is a long-time opponent of circumcision, even penning a book on the procedure in 2012 entitled ‘May the Foreskin Be With You: Why Circumcision Makes No Sense and What You Can Do About It’.
In a new interview with The Guardian, the Scottish actor said that he was made to feel “freakish” about his own uncircumcised penis after moving to the United States, where circumcision is far more widely practised than in the UK.
“I never thought anything about my foreskin, and then I came to America and I was having sex and people would just be gasping because they’d never seen a foreskin before”, Cumming recalled.
“I was made to feel weird and freakish because I had an intact body.”
He continued: “It’s genital mutilation. And I think people say: ‘Oh, that’s hysterical.’ “But we do it to girls and it’s called genital mutilation.”
Circumcision remains a widespread cultural practice in the Jewish and Islamic faiths, and is also often carried out for medical reasons.
Branding the religious justification for circumcision “ridiculous”, Cumming added: “We choose to keep doing some things and we just let the weirdest things go.”