There’s the Hastings Center report itself, which was the source of Lisa Wade’s article. Zinnia Jones has a great, detailed post on it. I’ll just mention some things that jump out at me.
Starting with the title.
Seven Things to Know about
Female Genital Surgeries
in Africa
They’re not surgeries. If you’re walking down the street and someone tears your arm off for the fun of it, that’s not surgery. [Read more…]
Renee Hendricks has been commenting here. She’s also been discussing her commenting with her pals on Twitter.
Welcome to the cool kids’ table in junior high school.
Now that the first steam has dissipated a little, a closer look at one part of Lisa Wade’s “Balanced Look” at cutting off parts of the genitalia of very young girls.
The third item in her list of useful things for people to know so that they can take a more “balanced” approach to Female Genital Mutilation.
Research has shown that women with cutting are sexually responsive.
Women who have undergone genital surgeries report “rich sexual lives, including desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction…” [Read more…]
So clearly the guilty verdict on Nechemya Weberman, unlicensed “therapist” to rebellious young girls, presents a problem for people who need to control rebellious young girls. What to do, what to do. Export them!
Embarrassed by the sex abuse trial of a Hasidic counselor, leaders of Williamsburg’s pious Satmar sect are considering a different way to deal with rebellious teens: shipping them out of the country for treatment.
For “treatment”? Rebellion isn’t an illness. [Read more…]
Sunil D’Monte alerted me to this blood-curdlingly horrible article on FGM by a sociologist, Lisa Wade, who wants more “balance” in the discussion of the grand old tradition of carving up the genitalia of very young girls.
While I’m most well-known for my work on hook up culture, I’ve written extensively on a different topic altogether: how Americans talk about female genital cutting practices (FGCs), better known as female genital “mutilation.” While FGCs are passionately opposed by essentially all Americans who learn about them, our understanding of the practices is, in fact, skewed by misinformation, ethnocentrism, and a history of portraying Africa as naively “backwards” or cruelly “barbaric.” [Read more…]
The verdict, against Nechemya Weberman, was a significant victory for Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, whose office has been criticized for not acting aggressively enough against sexual abusers in the borough’s large and politically connected Hasidic community. And the case offered a rare window into how the Satmar community enforces its sexual values, particularly for young girls, with so-called modesty committees chastising girls for wearing revealing clothing or using cellphones, and parents pressured to pay high fees to religious counselors to treat those girls.
He was convicted on 59 counts. [Read more…]
Manboobz offers a good thing by way of a break from bad things. We all get sick of bad things. The good thing is
comedian Jen Kirkman’s new tumblr blog: “MA’AM” – MEN AGAINST ASSHOLES & MISOGYNY, which she describes as “a place for men – not afraid to call themselves feminists – to write from their heart to help educate men who may still hold some sexist attitudes towards women.”
Kirkman started it a bit over a week ago after going on a sort of Twitter strike, frustrated by all the misogynistic assholes that kept popping up on her timeline.
Here’s how she explains it:
Sometimes I would get sad when I was batting away dozens of hate-filled things while in my timeline my male comedian friends were just joking along having fun – as we all should be. And I felt like I was alone on the playground and I wanted them to speak up for me. Not “beat up” the specific people attacking me … but I wanted my male comedian friends to write, in public, about things they have expressed to me in private about how much they feel for the women in their life who are still spoken to this way.
Yeh. I remember when I used to be able to post non-misogyny-related things and just chat away about them. It seems like another world.
A Turkish lawyer and women’s rights activist, Canan Arin, was arrested for mentioning the fact that girls get married off very young in Turkey.
I was the co-founder of the Istanbul Bar Association, Women’s Rights Enforcement Centre and worked as a trainer there. The Antalya Bar Association was opening a Women’s Rights Enforcement Centre and the lawyers needed training. I gave a talk on violence against women in the form of early and forced marriages in the context of training.
I used two examples to illustrate my point. One was the Prophet who married a girl of seven. The second was the head of the Turkish Republic who was engaged to his wife, the first lady, when she was 14 and married her when she was 15. [Read more…]
Via Veronica (via AtheismTV) – a montage from Eschaton 2012.
Blog posts on Eschaton are collected at Eschaton.
And a video of the protest outside the Uganda High Commission last Monday.
Don’t miss Katha Pollitt on Ross Douthat.
Ross Douthat, TheNew York Times’s Catholic-conservative columnist, is so obsessed with women’s fertility it’s really too bad he can’t get pregnant himself and see firsthand what it’s all about.
Yes but that would take all the fun out of it. The whole point of being a Catholic-conservative columnist dude is so that you can try to browbeat women into getting pregnant moar.
I’m not so sure why we want more people on our crowded, overheated planet, where world population is projected to increase by 2 billion before finally beginning to fall. But if Douthat really thought through what it means to have and raise a child these days, I’m sure he could come up with a lot of great ways to help women and families. The trouble is, he couldn’t be a Republican anymore. He’d be a socialist.
But it’s not about helping, it’s about telling.