From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Ceremony Suggestions?
Date: 15 Oct 92 13:59:52 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

altheimm@nextnet.csus.edu (Murray Altheim) wrote:
[ I wrote:]
>> What you're describing here is "infibulation".  There are a lot of cultures
>> that do only the milder forms of female circumcision, down to a small nick
>> in the clitoris.  (This is not to say that any of them are a good idea, but
>> it doesn't help to make it look like these differences don't exist).
>> I've read one woman from East Africa pointing out that compared to what the
>> world economic system is doing to millions of African women - starving them
>> to death - infibulation is peanuts, and the Western feminist obsession with
>> this practice is just sick hypocrisy.
> I've read "one woman from East Africa"!!!

By which I simply meant that I had a specific and forceful article in mind.
You don't have to read much African feminist writing to realize that this
is hardly some obscure minority viewpoint.


> unless we all just ignore Janis' statements regarding the various
> mutilations forced upon millions of women as the idle rantings of
> a delusionary thinker, we all must come to grips with this as fact.

It is fact.  What she wrote does happen the way she said it.  The point is
what to do about it.  As Janis says, it's not a specifically pagan custom;
it's done by Muslims, Pagans and Christians alike (also, I think, by the
Falasha Jews, but I'm not sure about this).  So it doesn't have directly
ideological religious motives.

Nor is it straightforwardly imposed by male power; it's always performed
by women and at women's request.  Most African women would regard it as
incomparably crueller *not* to do this to their daughters; this because an
uncircumcized girl is unmarriageable and hence headed for whatever
miserable end usually befalls social outcasts.  That *does* have something
to do with male power, but it's male *economic* power in an impoverished
and hierarchic society, not outright coercion.  It's a rational thing for a
mother to do to her daughter within the predicament an irrational economic
world system has got them in.  And that world system benefits any Westerner
who uses soap or drives a car; these are made from African products (palm
oil, chromium) that Africans have been cheated of a fair price for over the
last generation.  If an unmarried African woman could survive on her own -
which she usually can't now, and isn't likely to as long as the New World
Order survives - this disgusting practice would vanish overnight.  As would
the incomparably more disgusting practice of starving millions of women to
death just because transnational corporations can't make money out of them.
So it's not like there is even a dilemma here; the same solutions are
indicated for the grotesque-but-secondary problem of female circumcision as
for the catastrophic one of genocidal capitalism.

-- 
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