I’m feeling a bit dismal this morning, thanks to some petty and entirely trivial interactions, and then I read this–an eyewitness account of female genital mutilation in Kenya. I won’t describe it, except to say…old blind woman with a razor blade, no anesthetic, swarm of women holding the victim down and silencing her screams.
I’m done. Mars is looking increasingly attractive. Humanity, you suck.
On some notably better news, albeit not from Kenya, It takes a village: the Malawi school Guardian readers helped build: “Thirteen years ago, inspired by an article, readers raised £20,000 to give children living in rural Malawi an education. What happened next?”
I’m conflicted. On the one hand I would like to be informed about what is going on, but on the other, reading that item would probably spoil my day.
I’m going out on my bike now, feeling slightly guilty.
There are a great variety of surgical procedures that are inspired by FGM, including doing nothing more than ritualistically nicking the clitoris. But on the whole this barbaric practice needs to end end end. Of all the various practices that harm and oppress those who happen to have two X chromosomes, this is among the worst worst worst.
Arrrrrgh.
Somehow I doubt the countries with common FGM practices are karyotyping their kids. The distinguishing characteristic you’re actually looking for is “has a vulva.”
I skimmed the linked article to find out whether I should aim my wrath at Muslims or Christians.
Neither, it seems:
.
Disregarding the possibility of immortality anywhen now, I think this is the best argument against it: bad traditions or bad ideas in general need to die, and the only way this seems to be ever happening is when their carriers die off. Now, we just need to prevent them from infecting the generations that come after…
How do I get my name on the list for a one-way trip to Mars? I don’t want to come back.
prae @ #7:
Your last sentence is the problem. It’s perfectly comfortable to say that terrible traditions die with older generations, but that simply isn’t true, because older generations have a habit of passing those traditions down. And that can only be countered by education, and getting a proper education to people is damn hard, not least because of resistance (just look at the sudden emergence of Flat-Earthers, the continual persistence of creationist, and the uptick on homeschooling… and that’s all just in the United States)…
Education is basically the only effective weapon against this shit, but it’s biggest weakness is the fact that it can be resisted and overruled.
Agreeing with Nathan. Traditions are by definition something that holds up for years and decades. Some die out or get substituted with new ones, but it’s hardly as simple as waiting for a generation or two to die off.
Beatrice @ 9
There’s also something very uncomfortable in looking at the eventual deaths of the practitioners of a tradition–no matter how harmful–as a positive thing. Change from within, with people who are part of that culture driving it, will have far more of a positive impact than anyone’s death.
I wonder how Juliana herself feels about this tradition persisting. Did she also think it had to be done? I guess that all of the women who were involved in performing the circumcision had undergone it themselves. And since the pain is not only a one-time event but will, IIRC, remain with them for the rest of their lives, it’s crazy to think that someone who continues to suffer the consequences would be so enthusiastic in inflicting them on another generation.
The Mellow Monkey,
That too. Especially when we consider that we’re probably talking about the very same people we at one moment commiserated with or pitied as victims of harmful traditions.
Maybe Juliana had a daughter. Maybe Juliana proudly took her daughter to be cut, or will do so before her wedding night. It would be great if she was (or will be) the one to break the tradition in her line, but who knows.
PZ, you know what I do after getting a face full of the evils humanity and need to once again see that there is joy in the existence of Homo sapiens?
Nothing. It’s impossible and death will be the only relief I will find from my constant disappointment.
Petty and trivial interaction? What happened?
@Nathan #8:
The huge uptick in my state of residency has nothing to do with education resistance. It has to do with the cycle of testing that causes kids anxiety to the point that you have third graders throwing up during testing. They also rarely have physical education or recess because of it, and physical health is very important for kids.
There is also the big problem around here that the specific school you go to is either a 9 or 10 (scale 1-10) or a 1-3. It seems like the lion’s share of public school money goes to certain schools in the district, with the others falling more and more by the wayside every year.
Also, on the topic of FGM, I think of it as worse than male circumcision, possibly because I am a circumcised male. That said, I have not and will not practice either on any of my children, even for the sake of him “looking like daddy”.
Re traditions persisting, never underestimate the desire of people who have undergone harmful traditions to want to continue them because if they went through them everyone else should have to too. The rules on how long medical residents could work in the US changed shortly after I finished residency and I remember people who graduated with me denigrating those who came after us as being “wimps” for “only” working 80 hours per week and “just” 24 hours in a row and yet complaining that they felt tired. (As opposed to working 100+ hours per week and sometimes up to 48 in a row, as was previously the norm.)
Why do people do that? I don’t know. Jealousy that someone else doesn’t have to go through the same trauma they did? Some feeling that it is, although hard, in some way beneficial? Lack of imagination? In any case, I wouldn’t count on the younger generation being less interested in getting their children cut than the older.
Also, I have this crazy idea, possibly related to my age, that older people can also learn and that trying to convince the older woman doing the surgery that she ought to quit it and not train a successor might be successful as well. That might be particularly hard because admitting that something you’ve been doing your whole life, a service you took pride in providing to the community, was not only unnecessary and unhelpful but actively harmful is not an easy thing for anyone to do, but if she could be convinced that would go a very long way towards ending the tradition altogether.
I never meant to say that changing traditions is easy. My last sentence (“Now, we just need to prevent them from infecting the generations that come after…”) was actually supposed to be sarcasm. Anyway, imagine those asshats not only indoctrinating their children and grandchildren into awful traditions, but also all the generations afterwards. Say what you want, but YES, I consider the deaths of the practitioners to be a positive thing, and a prerequisite to change of ANY kind. Because as long as they stay around, they oppose change.
Perfectly apropos is the following This American Life story. It’s about an Islamic American woman’s exploration of family, tradition and identity through her own FGM story and how it affected her life.
As rage inducing and nightmare fueling as the subject can be the story is very interesting.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/586/who-do-we-think-we-are?act=1#play