On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, frank scott wrote:
> "as we rightly protest female circumcision in africa what's the left's
> take on the male version, practiced widely in the west?"
>
> this vote for : disgusting, barbaric, fanatic, superstitious,
> ritualistic nonsense...
>
It's pretty easy for us to rhetorically strut around assuming our moral superiority, but anybody's who has seriously studied FGM knows it's a convoluted tangle of ethical ambiguities.
Consider: 1. The practices are accepted by, carried out by, and encouraged by the vast majority of women in these societies. It is not something men "do" to them; it is part of what these women identify as womanhood. Yes, it's hard to us to believe, but mothers do this to their daughters willingly: according to their cultural standards, this is what it means to be a good mother.
2. Our condemnation of this practice is, as a number of women in these societies have pointed out, yet another example of how Western values and beliefs are positioned as the standards by which all societies should be judged. It's more or less the kissing cousin of the "Africans don't really have civilization because they don't have cities like we do" argument. For a number of African activists, the major problem here is Western ethnocentrism, not FGM.
I hesitate to post this because FGM provokes such visceral reactions in people; it creeps me out too. However, there's a little more to the issue than primitives with spears mutilating their women.
Miles