A great day for women in Egypt!

[Butterscotch]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070628/wl_africa_afp/egyptwomencircumcision

Female circumcision has been banned at last, after the death of a 12 year old girl. This barbaric mutilation of the inside (not outside) of girls' genitals is finally illegal! It's going to take more time to get it out of the mindset of some in the culture, but it's a start.

 

[deep]

What ?

banning the right to practice religious beliefs is a great day?

 

[Irvine511]

^ vicious. but fair enough.

 

[Butterscotch]

It's time to stop using religion or cultural tradition as a reason to discriminate against and abuse women. (yes this includes the Saudis too) At one time, everyone's religion and culture had bad practices against women, but over time most have been stopped in the interest of fairness and humanity. Unfortunately we still have a long way to go in some cultures.

 

[sulawesigirl4]

What ?

banning the right to practice religious beliefs is a great day?

Actually, FGM is not a religious belief. It is a cultural practice. There is nothing in the Koran that says that it is necessary or even recommended. Indeed in some African countries, the imams have played a key role in educating the populace as to how the practice could actually go against the principles of Islam.

 

[CrownVCJ]

What ?

banning the right to practice religious beliefs is a great day?

this is the worst troll of any thread ever

 

[BVS]

this is the worst troll of any thread ever

You may want to actually spend longer than one post in FYM before making such judgements...

 

[Irvine511]

this is the worst troll of any thread ever

it's deeply (ha!) ironic and gets at an issue that gets tossed around here quite a bit -- where does someone's right to freedom of religious expression trump someone's right not to be discriminated against?

if my religion tells me that gays are bad, then can i have the right to fire them or bar them from housing because i simply want to express my religious beliefs?

etc.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

But as sulawesigirl said, it's not a religious practice. But just one more thread to turn into something about that I suppose..

And I think that could be an alter, for whatever that's worth

 

[yolland]

Actually, FGM is not a religious belief. It is a cultural practice. There is nothing in the Koran that says that it is necessary or even recommended. Indeed in some African countries, the imams have played a key role in educating the populace as to how the practice could actually go against the principles of Islam.

Not to mention it's also widely practiced by Christians and followers of animist or traditional religions in countries where it's prevalent in general; a glance at the UNICEF data (.pdf) (see especially Table 1C, p. 34) will quickly demonstrate that.

While the legal ban is an important step, many countries where FGM is widely performed already have laws against it anyway, but these are in practice often very difficult to enforce and have had only limited effect.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Yes. But that freedom wouldn't extend to harming another individual. In the case of FGM it involves the harm of a minor for religious reasons (and I think the same of male circumcision - although different threshold of harm) but it's quite different from excercising control of who one does or does not want on their property.

I think that enlightened people should take a stand against religious minded barbarism through avenues such as speech. Just because my own ethic would grant the right for people to be bastards doesn't mean that I support their action or intent (a concept that some can find hard to grasp). It also doesn't entitle people to use the tools of the state to pursue their relgious agenda.

And back OT tribal practices like this aren't stamped out by force, education can be much more effective.

 

[deep]

it's deeply (ha!) ironic and gets at an issue that gets tossed around here quite a bit -- where does someone's right to freedom of religious expression trump someone's right not to be discriminated against?

if my religion tells me that gays are bad, then can i have the right to fire them or bar them from housing because i simply want to express my religious beliefs?

etc.

So what branch of Christianity do you want to follow.

"Love one another".

or

"If a man lie with a man."


I can't count the times I have read in here from Christians
that tell me they are to
hate
the sin.
and we all know it impossible to separate who they call the sinner from the hate

as for female circumcision

Sayyid Azim/Associated Press

Masai girls join hundreds of Kenyans during the Anti-Female Genital Mutilation run in Kilgoris, Kenya, on April 21. At least 2 million girls are at risk of undergoing the mutilation practice each year. The process may have lifelong health consequences.

By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY The Associated Press

June 2, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST

NAIROBI, Kenya — Trying to stop a bloody ritual undergone by millions of Muslim women in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world.

“The guiding factor is always Islam,” says 34-year-old Maryam Sheikh Abdi, who grew up in a region of northeast Kenya where 98 percent of girls are believed to undergo the procedure, a genital mutilation sometimes called female circumcision. Women believe “the pain, the problems, the bleeding — they are all God’s will.”



With age-old cultural roots, female genital mutilation is practiced today in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt and other parts of the Arab world such as Yemen and Oman.


Ibrahim Lethome, legal adviser of Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, said

“I have met a medical doctor who allows” the procedure, he said. “Even educated people believe Islam demands it.”

 

[martha]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that any step at all that helps prevent a child's sexual organs from being cut and mutilated is a good step. I really don't care whose religious "rights" get trampled in this case. I really don't. If the women want to have it done when they're adults and can make that decision for themselves, then they can go for it. But to allow men to take knives to the most intimate parts of a girl's body is barbaric. And to excuse it in the name of God is pathetic.

 

[sulawesigirl4]

While I am completely and totally behind FGM becoming a thing of the past, I think it is worth noting that it most cultures it is not the men doing this to women. It is the women doing it to each other. Grandmothers and mothers perpetuating what was done to them upon their daughters. Peer pressure of the most gruesome kind. And it has nothing to do with true religion and everything to do with people's perception of "morality". Thing is, if they bothered to read their Koran, they wouldn't find this practice there. It's a cultural thing that has been going on for a long time and has found legitimization using religion as an excuse. But there is no excuse for it.

Unfortunately, I know all too well that however good these laws sound, they aren't really worth the paper they're printed on. This practice will continue until you change the hearts and minds of the people practicing it. And that takes a lot more committment and work and patience and time. I know that when I lived in Mali, all the so-called educated and ruling class folk in the capital would pay lip-service to the idea that FGM is bad while they send their daughters back to the village for a summer break when the procedure is taken care of. God forbid the girl be unmarriagable and "unclean". In the end it really goes back to the idea of women's only value being that of chattel to a male. The whole practice is meant to enforce chastity. If having sex doesn't feel good, then girls won't mess around. The irony is that it's almost the opposite. When I lived in Mali (where 90-some% of the women are circumcised) premarital pregnancies and extramarital affairs were rampant. My theory is that when you take the physical joy out of sex for women, all that sex becomes for them is a tool to get what they want or need. Men are willing to give them presents, support them with money, buy them the things that add up to a lot of status within their society and in turn the women sleep with them. If you're not going to get pleasure from the sex act, you may as well get something more substantial like some bling. So the whole point of the exercise becomes negated. It's so warped and sad.

Yet another reason that women everywhere must have total and unequivocable right to their own bodies.

 

[yolland]

The whole practice is meant to enforce chastity. If having sex doesn't feel good, then girls won't mess around. The irony is that it's almost the opposite. When I lived in Mali (where 90-some% of the women are circumcised) premarital pregnancies and extramarital affairs were rampant. My theory is that when you take the physical joy out of sex for women, all that sex becomes for them is a tool to get what they want or need. Men are willing to give them presents, support them with money, buy them the things that add up to a lot of status within their society and in turn the women sleep with them. If you're not going to get pleasure from the sex act, you may as well get something more substantial like some bling. So the whole point of the exercise becomes negated. It's so warped and sad.

Thank you for the perspective. It's a depressing but intriguing theory, I'd never thought about it that way before (and of course, I lack the on-site experience to have even the slightest grasp of the reality of the various social and cultural situations this takes place in). I do know from having read a fair number of international human rights law articles on the subject that, as you said, the laws too often achieve very little since both the cultural and structural obstacles to enforcing them effectively are enormous. It's true that religious justifications specifically often become attached to the cultural weight these practices carry over time; unfortunately, we seem to have a habit of projecting the associations we have with that from our own cultural context onto other situations entirely and assuming the same strategies we might use here will work there.

oceane, who was living in Gambia at the time, posted an interesting article in here awhile back about a local-culture-savvy, education-based approach to ending FGM that has had, relative to the legal approach, tremendous success in Senegal--I don't know if you saw that or not.

 

[Butterscotch]

The enforcing chastity thing is an insult. So you have to have the only part of the body that gives a female sexual pleasure cut out, and your vaginal opening sewn shut? That has got to be painful, and insulting. It's like calling all females potential sluts! And besides, it's usually a man who forces himself on the girl more than her choosing to become promiscuous. It has always seemed to me it would create a hotbed for dangerous infections inside the girl or woman that could lead to sterility or even death. That alone is a sensible reason for ending the practice.

 

[Bonochick]

this is the worst troll of any thread ever

Deep is not being a troll. Please don't wrongfully accuse members of trolling. Also, if you truly feel a member is trolling, report the post to the moderators so we can handle it.

 

[yolland]

The enforcing chastity thing is an insult.

The means of enforcement in this case is horrifically extreme, but as far as the 'insult' goes, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with many traditional (or not-so-traditional) societies where 'chastity' of women isn't a major concern. That's not difficult to understand; if your daughter gets pregnant outside of marriage (or once married, bears a child clearly not her husband's), than chances are the needed years of material support from the father and/or his family won't be in the offing, and you'll be stuck helping support another kid yourself, while continuing to support a daughter who'll be that much harder to marry off to some desirable match now that she comes with someone else's kid in tow. At least traditional cultures which attempt to strictly enforce monogamy for both sexes make an effort to distribute the misery more equitably, though whether they reliably yield a result any better than the one sula's describing could be debated. Particularly in the absence of widespread and affordable access to effective contraception, publically funded support for single mothers, and paid work opportunities for women, this is simply a basic, irreducible vulnerability of being born female (or having a daughter). Some cultures' traditional patterns of family organization and property inheritance may be more helpful here than others, but the basic concern is a practical and understandable one, unpleasant though the reality may be.

 

[Butterscotch]

But is a mutilated, sewn up vagina the answer? I don't even want to imagine the periods and the cramps, the discharge, the internal itching, must be torture. And again, the threat of infection being so much greater as you create a literal hothhouse for germs without any exposure to air. Then when she does get to have sex, it will be painful and without pleasure. It's all for the good of the man, and all she gets is suffering. In these days, unlike the ancient times, girls marry much much later, girls will have much longer time to stay sewn up. I'm sorry but it angers me and makes me sick.

 

[yolland]

Of course it isn't the answer, and there's nothing to be 'sorry' for in recoiling at the practice; I certainly didn't mean to suggest either of those things. It's just that discussions of traditional cultural practices which we find repellent and unacceptable can tend to spin off into the stratosphere in terms of what sorts of motives we ascribe to them sometimes. My point was that, as far as it goes, there's nothing shocking or mystifying or sinister about why attempting to regulate and control female sexuality is a near-universal preoccupation of traditional societies. Humans do intellectualize and ritualize things, so you get notions of 'purity' and 'cleanliness' and so on intertwined with what are often essentially practical concerns; that can make them seem all the more foreign to others, though, then there's also the reality that these aspects of our thinking can wind up inflicting cruelties and creating problems worse than any we were trying to avoid.

 

[Butterscotch]

Couldn't they just wait and see IF a girl becomes promiscuous first, before labeling and mutilating them all in advance?

 

[fly so high!]

What ?

banning the right to practice religious beliefs is a great day?

Are you serious?

 

[fly so high!]

Couldn't they just wait and see IF a girl becomes promiscuous first, before labeling and mutilating them all in advance?

OMG.....this thread is doing my head in......over and out.

 

[indra]

Couldn't they just wait and see IF a girl becomes promiscuous first, before labeling and mutilating them all in advance?

By then it's too late and the damage has already been done.

In societies where "purity" of women is a (and possibly THE) major factor in whether or not they have an semblance of a decent life it is imperative there be no "if".

Does that make it right? No, but given the culture it does make sense. And understanding the rationale behind the practice is essential to have any chance of ending the practice.

 

[Butterscotch]

II'm really kind of surprised at how many of you seem to be almost justifying it. We've known basically all along their reasons for doing it, that doesn't change a thing about how barbaric, abusive, and unhealthy it is to a girl. It makes no difference, it still needs to be stopped, now.

 

[Vincent Vega]

No one justifies the procedure itself and everybody has made that very clear.
But there lies some reasoning behind these people carrying out the female circumcision and yolland, sula as well as other poster's tried to explain that.
And like indra said, you need to understand why the circumcision is done in order to teach these people why it's such a bad and cruel tradition they need to get rid of.

 

[Butterscotch]

I do understand it. I always have. It doesn't make any difference. It's still wrong.

 

[Vincent Vega]

That's too high for me.

 

[sue4u2]

*sigh*.. we all wish by just saying that "it's wrong".. would make it all go away. The key factor here Education..
It takes a long time to educate a culture or continent that has practiced a cultural procedure for so long.
Education is changing this mind set - slowly.. yes, but changing non the less.

 

[martha]

II'm really kind of surprised at how many of you seem to be almost justifying it. We've known basically all along their reasons for doing it, that doesn't change a thing about how barbaric, abusive, and unhealthy it is to a girl. It makes no difference, it still needs to be stopped, now.

I have to agree with you here. I guess I expected more outrage, rather than all this "understanding about cultural norms." It is barbaric and it's mutilation done to children.

I do understand the need to educate, but we can wait for that to happen and have another generation of women mutilated in the meantime.