Whatever else we do, whatever metaphysical view gets us there, the first order of business has to be shackling women. We always have to make sure women don’t have too many rights. We have to make very damn sure they’re not as free to decide how to live their own lives as men are.
We have to carve away their genitals so that they won’t have sexual feelings.
In the rural areas of Egypt, in Upper Egypt, however there is scant respect for the law. You hear the words “tradition”, “custom”, “honour” uttered like a mantra when people justify their decision to circumcise their daughters.
The belief there is that it is the female who is sexually rampant and that her sexual desire must be arrested at a young age, before she can disgrace the family.
It is important that she loses that part of her body that awakes sexual desire. If not, she may play with herself or ask a boy to touch this part for her, not specifically a stranger, but one of her cousins for instance, and she might enjoy it,” Olla told me. “When she feels the pain of it she will be more careful about this part.”
We have to give a fertilized egg full human rights so that the woman the egg is inside of will lose many of her human rights.
Virginia lawmakers took a step on Tuesday toward trying to outlaw abortion by approving “personhood” legislation that grants individual rights to an embryo from the moment of conception.
The Republican-controlled House of Delegates voted 66-32 in favor of defining the word person under state law to include unborn children “from the moment of conception until birth at every stage of biological development.”
The woman that putative “person” is occupying becomes less than a person; she becomes an incubator, with truncated rights over her own body and life.
Whatever else you do, keep those women down.
GAH! I spent last night in a pretty pissed off mood over the shit going on in Virginia right now. It’s not just personhood either, they have passed a bill REQUIRING that women undergo an invasive trans-vaginal ultrasound before having an abortion. An amendment was offered that would require the patient to consent to the procedure…
IT WAS REJECTED. You don’t want to be penetrated by an ultrasound device for an entirely medically unnecessary procedure? Tough shit, according to the Virginia legislature. They even rejected an amendment that would have allowed doctors to make a determination as to whether or not such an ultrasound would even produce a visible image, and not perform the procedure unless it would.
With the personhood bill, there was an amendment offered that would have at least kept the bill from making hormonal birth control illegal, which was also rejected. This is what happens when Republicans gain enough control of the legislature to push through any bullshit they want.
I don’t even have words for the horrible shit from your first link.
It is the female who is sexually rampant? Or the male who blames the female for arousing him? And why should a woman not have sexual feelings? Oh, because she has to be pure, otherwise you can’t sell her, or you’ll lose your honour in the neighbourhood. Centuries of tradition here. I’m glad people are standing up for their identities.
And why do women need protecting anyway, when there are all these big strong men around to look after them and tell them what to do? Obviously a poor defenceless little egg is much more in need of protection than a woman.
Ugh. So depressing. I don’t know if anyone has had to have one of those invasive ultrasounds before? I suspected that I had ovarian cysts, so I had that done. Twice. It’s not the “squirt the gel on the belly and look at the pictures on the monitor” that they show pregnant women getting on TV and in movies. It is like being raped with the icy cock of Satan. When they say “invasive,” they mean “invasive.” The tech can warn you, but it’s still (Bill Hicks’ shouty voice) THE ICY COCK OF SATAN! It’s awkward, embarrassing, uncomfortable, and messy. And that’s when you need to have it done. Imagine how much worse it would be when a law forces you to do it. Grr. Rage.
I had no idea the FGM rate was as high as 90% in Egypt. I always thought it was a rural thing. That is nauseating.
I’ve had a transvaginal ultrasound, and if I were forced to have it to obtain access to a legal procedure that doesn’t even remotely require it, I think I would feel pretty violated. And it isn’t like Bob McDonnall has any respect for women, so if it passes the legislature, I am pretty sure he would sign it. This is the same man who attended Regent’s and wrote a thesis in which he claimed the working women were detrimental to families. I hate living in this state. Loudoun County freaks out every year at Christmas when their creche can’t be displayed on the courthouse lawn without other displays, which are invariably from our small, but vocal atheist groups.
umm…sorry for the rant on local politics, it just kind of sucks down here sometimes.
@4
The ultrasound bill already passed the legislature, and McDonnell has already said he’s going to sign it.
@5 Must have missed that. Lucky I just got my mirena implant. bastards. My first ultrasound was super painful. I have severe endometriosis, and the tech kept prodding the most painful site to see if anything was visible. I cried in my car for 20 minutes afterwards and not all from the pain. Very invasive, indeed.
I need to move to a more rational state in the worst possible way. Apparently, they have made our gun laws looser too, because Virginia wasn’t already one of the easiest places to buy a gun (guess where the NRA is located?). And we have certainly never been the site of horrific gun violence…*sarcasm*
Hey, why not pass a law demanding all of Virginia’s inhabitants are virgins? That would solve most of this problem within a couple of generations. Maybe the NRA can give some input to the practicalities? Oh, and I suggest they start at the political top and trickle down.
Discalmer: That was a joke! A bad one.
I often wonder why you never hear about wone stockpiling weapons and arming themselves in bands to protect themselves.
As for Virginia, well Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North carolina, Delaware and New Jersey will be doing a lot of medical business.
These fucking people. It isn’t about “babies” or “life”…as Ophelia so eloquently stated, it’s about controlling sexuality, primarily female sexuality. These people are absolutely obsessed with sex. To them, women are both temptresses and gatekeepers–men are both rapacious and easily soothed by a tender, feminine hand. It’s the most juvenile view of sex, a view that sees sex in terms of winners and losers, of pure vs tainted.
‘Virginia lawmakers took a step on Tuesday toward trying to outlaw abortion by approving “personhood” legislation that grants individual rights to an embryo from the moment of conception.’
Just in case conception but not implantation has occurred, Virginia should insist that menstrual blood should always be passed to an undertaker and given a proper funeral.
I’m sure the undertakers would be all for it.
I am so fucking pissed at Richmond that I’m finding it very hard to express the magnitude of my rage while still remaining civilized.
Let me put it this way, though: the clowns running my state are modeling themselves after Mississippi, possibly the most backwards state in the nation. Except this time, they’re not letting us vote on it. What the fuck.
Why is it that
-a corporation is a person,
-a fetus is a person,
but a woman is not a person?
ohioobserver – Men.
I don’t agree with this article and its attempt to make an equivalence between slicing off a little girls genitalia and forcing women to carry a foetus to term.
The fact both are very wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that both are equally grave.
Forcing a woemn to carry to term a pregnancy, although demeaning and very akin to slavery, doesn’t have any real lasting consequences. Pregnancies ( and I’m not arguing for outlawing abortion) are temporary and when finished things go back to normal.
Slicing off an eight year old’s genitalia so that not only does she no longer have the capacity for sexual pleasure, but that every time she’s forced to have sexual intercourse it hurts like hell; that is a whole other order of business.
One other thing; men forcing women to cary a baby to term is offensive and patriarchal, but with FGM this is taken to a whole other level, because the genital mutilation of young girls is often performed by women themselves.
So in the latter case the patriarchy is so internalised and the value of femininity so completely exterminated, that women, without either the presence or the pressure of males, will gleefully slice off each others privates and deprive each other of sexual pleasure.
Imagine millions of millions of women whose identity and gender is so degraded, so erased, that they will willing earse each others genitalia.
Forcing a women to bear a child is morally wrong.
A grown women slicing off a little girls genitalia is a despicable, moral abomination.
There is no real equivalence here. There is no convenient kif-kif, no even-steven.
And if women here think I’m barking up a tree, consider the following scenario: You are living in a patriarchy that requires either one of two things from women. Either they carry a child to term at the behest of men after which they’re free to do as you please, or they have they genitalia sliced off by a scowling hag whose never experienced any sexual pleasure in her entire life.
Were there an equivalence here, then half among you would chose (irreversable) FGM and the other half would chose a 9 month pregnancy, right?
Wrong.
Dear John
Carrying a child to term is NOT a matter with no lasting consequences. In the best of times, you have 20 years hard work ahead of you. In the worst, your own death by child birth. I am amazed that as many women as do, still accept the responsibility.
In a location where laws like this exist, the only solution is to vote with your feet.
I am beginning to feel that the deep south never got over slavery, and since it’s politically incorrect to have field niggers any more, they will train all their women up into the roll.
And, to the general readership, my apologies for feeding the troll.
There is female circumcision in South East Asia too but of the least damaging variety where there is just a nick to the clitoris. The practice is on the rise in Indonesia with growing religiosity but a shroud of secrecy hangs over it. Many Malay-muslim women in Singapore are thus ‘circumcised’. I didnt know anything at all about it until a few years ago when I asked a female ustaza (religious teacher) about it. She herself was circumcised and said that most Malays – about 70% followed the practice though it was not considered necessary by the religion. It is odd how a practice that is deemed unnecessary by Islam is transmitted through that same religion.
Carrying a child to term does or at least can have permanent consequences for the woman’s body. A nurse made a mistake in my first delivery and I ended up with a permanent partial loss of feeling. A friend of mine ended up requiring surgery to have normal bowel function restored and her deliveries were completely normal. When teenagers are required to give birth permanent damage is more likely and more likely to be severe. I leaned towards being against people having abortions (although not making them illegal) until after I’d been through my first pregnancy. I could never force that on anyone for any reason now.
Dear John
Carrying a child to term is NOT a matter with no lasting consequences. In the best of times, you have 20 years hard work ahead of you.
Look, if some guy or guys were forcing you to carry a child to term, I doubt you’d stick around for 20 years afterwards and raise something you didn’t want in the first place.
Pregnancies only last 9 months after which life goes on.
Having your privates sliced off is not only permenant, it deprives women of the fundamental human right/capacity to/for sexual pleasure for the rest of their lives.
You live mutilated and often in pain for the rest of your life. Every time you urinate it can burn like hell.
Its right and good to have a go at these ridiculous virginia lawmakers, but I don’t think that those attacks should be done on the backs of tens of millions of women who’ve had all of their sexuality, part of their lives and no small part of their femininity entirely destroyed.
New medical procedures now allow men to carry a child to term attached to the abdominal wall.
Now even I wouldn’t hesitate to carry a child to term in such a manner if the only other option was to have my privates chopped off.
I say that merely to highlight just how different these two aspects of patriarchy actually are.
Suppose feminist groups were sent to Egyps but were only given enough money and resources to attack one of these two aspects of patriarchy; forced pregnancies or genital mutilation.
Which one should be the priority? Which one of the two is, and this by far, the most grevious?
One other thing FGM is almost lways positied as happening “over there”, when in fact it is now becoming widespread in many western countries.
Yet virtually nothing is being said, let alone done about it.
Thousands and thousands of female genital mutilations are now being performed in western countries and NOTHING is being done.
I’ve read articles in which it was claimed the ‘procedure’ had been performed on several 1000 girls in the UK, and yet not a single person has been charged.
But at least here’s one women, in America this time, who’s talked it up… god bless her!
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/york-nightlife-fixture-zelda-kaplan-dies-a-fashion-week-article-1.1023306
Carrying a child to term does or at least can have permanent consequences for the woman’s body. A nurse made a mistake in my first delivery and I ended up with a permanent partial loss of feeling. A friend of mine ended up requiring surgery to have normal bowel function restored and her deliveries were completely normal.
Listen, I really sympathise with you, and I hope that at some point medical treatments or procedures become available that will help you.
I fully realise that pregnancies sometimes have permenant health consequences, but that hasn’t anything to do with either forced pregnancies or FGM.
Yes forcing a women to carry a child to term can SOMETIMES cause permanent damage/pain in some form, but with FGM that is ALWAYS the case
@psocoptera and @James C:
My sincerest sympathies for both of you. I just moved to DC proper last May and looked at places in NOVA before deciding to live closer to work.
Now, though, if I ever decide to move out of the city, it will be to Maryland.
It’s so frustrating that NOVA doesn’t have more influence in the VA legislature.
Except the article doesn’t DO that. It’s possible to talk about more than one way in which women are being harmed without saying they’re entirely equivalent in all ways, you know.
Your deep respect for women is duly noted.
Why can’t people ever deal with more than one issue at the same time without someone jumping in to point out that one in particular is the worst and that we shouldn’t bring it up in the same breath as the others? The expectation always seems to be that we should focus on THAT one to the exclusion of the others, which I’m not down with.
It isn’t either/or ANYWHERE where both exist. They are LINKED and supported by a common idea. Anywhere that both exist, I can almost GUARANTEE that the woman who carries that child to term will NOT be allowed to do as she pleases from that point forward, and for the same reason she’s also likely to have undergone FGM; both of these practices stem from the same ideas, as this article correctly noted, so the priority should be attacking the CULTURAL IDEAS that LEAD to both practices, as WELL as attacking the practices themselves. What makes you think these are separate issues?
In other words John was doing a “Dear Muslima”? :- )
He was, a bit – plus shuddery talk of scowling hags doesn’t help much.
YES. And I’m actually getting a little bit tired of the frequency with which this happens, although I will admit that around here it doesn’t happen with QUITE as much frequency as I’ve seen it happen elsewhere.
We are to repsect some bitter, jaded 60-something women who hacks off the genitalia of 8 year old girls? We are to repsect ‘women’ whose mothers and grandmothers have taught them that female genitalia are repugnant and should therefore be sliced off?
When you are of a mind where mutilating a young girl’s privates makes her more attractive, you don’t need respect.
You need a padded room.
In societies that practice FGM and infibulation and whatever, there are no women.
There are only males…and sub-males.
Once again, I am in favour of abortion; I just don’t agree with drawing an equivalence between mutilating a young girl’s genitalia ( permenant pain,disfigurement and loss of pleasure ) and forcing women to carry a foetus to term, pregnancy being a natural biological function of women, is completely over the top.
The one is so much more grevious than the other, that they can’t even be compared.
It’s a bit like comparing having a broken leg to having a leg amputated.
Our disrespect is NOT to be focused on whether or not they’ve ever experienced sexual pleasure, and is not to be expressed by calling them ‘hags’. This shouldn’t even have to be explained. You do realize that they are victims of all of this too, right? That they are often performing these terrible acts not because they want to, but because they have no choice? When, exactly, do they cease being victims in this situation, John? I don’t think you know nearly as much about this as you think you do.
NO, they aren’t suffering from a diagnosable mental disorder, they are simply WRONG. Their actions are wrong and the reasoning behind those actions are wrong. As someone who has actually spent time as an inpatient in a mental health facility, I would appreciate your not conflating violent and morally wrong behavior with mental illness. Those who suffer from mental illness are mostly non-violent, and you are putting them (and me) in the same category as those who perform FGM when you talk this way. I don’t appreciate it.
Oh fucking stop.
BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT’S WRITTEN HERE. Since you seem to be ignoring this, PLEASE quote the part of Ophelia’s post that says these two things are equivalent. If you can’t do so, I expect you to cede the point that THIS WAS NEVER DONE.
John – hello? What’s their age got to do with anything?
I’m ancient myself. My blog is the wrong place to rail at women who have made the inexcusable mistake of no longer being 20.
Here’s a surprising little fact for you to consider: it’s possible that you will live to be ancient yourself. Of course, you’re a man, so that makes a difference – getting ancient is much more forgivable in men than it is in women; we all know that. Nevertheless –
I’m not interested in hosting your loathing of ancient women.
Simultaneous commenting FTW!
You said it more better!
Thank you, Ophelia, coming from you that actually means a lot.
It’s quite fascinating how automatic and virulent the loathing of ancient women is.
I once tested a young male friend – a very clever thoughtful guy, albeit a tad spoiled and demanding – by asking him to describe a particular scene in The Shining (the movie) in which a gorgeous naked woman in a bathtub turns into something else when Jack reaches for her. I asked what she turns into. My young friend said “a monster” and then when I said no, he said variations on that. He was stumped.
Very revealing.
Anyway John is a pretty striking example. Omigod the women are 60-something! And of course they’re bitter and jaded! Because all 60-something women are bitter and jaded, as well as unimaginably disgusting.
But how the fuck does he know they even are 60-something? He doesn’t. It’s just a way to say how disgusting they are.
I think there’s also something revealing in the fact that he seems to think FGM is done in order to make the women who undergo it more ‘attractive’, and I think it’s related in that sense to his comments about age. It’s almost like he’s making as many judgements about aesthetics as he is ethics.
“…women who have made the inexcusable mistake of no longer being 20.”
Wow, that is a great way to put it, Ophelia.
I’m going to borrow that phrase sometime.
It’s sad how many people think that way.
More on this theme:
For Elder’s Misdeed, Afghan Girl Pays a Steep Price
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/asia/in-baad-afghan-girls-are-penalized-for-elders-crimes.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
Jeezis. Thanks, Sunny.
And were you a little more clever, you’d realise your brand of politics and your ‘progressivism’ are responsable for the degradation of women’s rights that is now setting in.
When the American Pediatric Assocaition was approchaed to allow a small prick of tghe clitoris ( a prick soon becomes a nick) the NOW organisation was nowhere to be found.
They issued no statement lert alone a condmenation.
Naw, the old grey-haired harpies were nowhere to be found, and do you know why?
Because FGM doesn’t afford them an opportunity to get a jab in at their favoite target: Straight, white, western, conservative, Judeo-Christian males.
Their soft bigotry condemns brown, nmon western women to hell.
That’s the last comment you’re ever going to make here. I let it through to show why.
Wow, what a waste of carbon, that one.
That was the American Academy of Pediatrics, and they revised their policy pretty damn fast when public pressure came down on them about that. So I did a little bit of looking around, and I couldn’t find anything directly from NOW regarding the AAP’s ‘ritual nick’ statements specifically, but they do oppose FGM in all forms. I don’t think it’s really relevant though, since he wasn’t commenting on ‘Say it, Sister!’, this isn’t NOW, and NOW isn’t ‘all progressives and feminists everywhere’.
What a piece of shit. Even if there HAD been some point worth considering in this mess, this statement alone is ban-worthy.
Well, good riddance. This is poorly thought out gibberish, nothing but an absurd ageism/sexism alloy and condescending “if you weren’t so stupid you’d realize how right I am” crap, entirely devoid of relevant content or even an ATTEMPT to address the objections of others. This is throwing insults and ready-made cliche ‘objections’ around and hoping something sticks. John should be ashamed, but I think that might be too much to ask for. Not having to read his insulting nonsense will have to suffice, I guess.
Yup, that’s why that was his last comment here!
Apart from anything else, if he thinks I need instruction from him on taking FGM seriously, he can’t have read anything I’ve ever written.
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