Resolved: FGM is a crime against humanity and the pinnacle of sexism in practice.

[Magiver]

@wmfellows

I understand the difference between a couple of religious scholars issuing an opinion and the entire religion.

I never said it did. You are inserting your own bigotry. In response to a post by Capitaine Zombie who said it isn’t a Muslim practice I said that was not entirely correct.

I also cited my position and went on to say: “Clearly the practice has religious origins stemming from the middle east and it goes back in time to the region and various religions associated with the region”.

I’ve stated that this predates both Islam and Christianity. It is clearly a social practice but as such it has been addressed and deemed preferable by major Muslim clerics of the region. That gives more weight to the social pressures involved with the practice.

[wmfellows]

Your backpeddling revisionism is duly noted

@Magiver

… It is clearly a social practice but as such it has been addressed and deemed preferable by major Muslim clerics of the region. That gives more weight to the social pressures involved with the practice.

In fact you’ve been spinning a line of distortion riding the religious bigotry hobby horse.

EG “deemed preferable by major Muslim clerics of the region”= one hadith that’s evidently disputed (the Wiki page makes that clear), and rather than region, we’re talking about one country, Egypt.

Of course you also stuck in distortions such as

@Magiver

Clearly the practice has religious origins stemming from the middle east a… .

and

@Magiver

… But unlike the Christian religion, Islam is structured as all encompassing social/political entity and as such weighs in on all manner of society with Fatwas. It is only in the 21st century that they have reversed the earlier Fatwas encouraging the practice.

A whole string of partial, distorted statements. In fact from the very wiki page you linked to we can see in fact that contrary to your heavily spun and distorted presentation (pretending Egyptian statements are general):

"Yusuf ibn Abd-al-Barr comments: “Those who consider (female) circumcision a sunna, use as evidence this hadith of Abu al-Malih, which is based solely on the evidence of Hajjaj ibn Artaa, who cannot be admitted as an authority when he is the sole transmitter. The consensus of Muslim scholars shows that circumcision is for men”.[27]

Ibn Abd al-Barr was born in 978 and died in 1071

Yeah, they waited until the ***21st century… ***. In fact it’s clear that this wasn’t a well-supported practice and from an early date, heavy weight scholars came out against it.

So you’ve continued to exagerate the Muslim support while hand waving away the Coptic and Tawehedo church complicity over centuries.

[wmfellows]

In tooling about I ran across this (PDF, long) paper on female circumcision, an investigation of actual drivers / expectations in Ghana, which is a useful antidote to the simplistic “men force it on women” (it looks more like, as the French say, a dialogue of the deaf:

Likewise, a study in the eastern part of Ethiopia indicated that FGM is becoming less of an issue for marital reasons but men still appear to prefer marrying circumcised women.16 Marriage in the African traditional system is an important element of life and is tied to traditional practices such as FGM. As a result women often cannot ignore but go through pain to achieve fulfilment in their lives. Men and their preferences towards circumcised women may have contributed to the perpetuation of the practice of FGM in Africa. In Sudan, a study on male attitudes towards FGM
showed that 35% of young men and 80% of grandfathers preferred to marry a circumcised woman.17

In Ethiopia, women believed that men fully support the practice and also thought that
men preferred to marry circumcised women because the women would then not be sexually overactive and unfaithful.16 This has made women believe that if men would openly state a preference to marry non-circumcised women, FGM would probably cease, since the tradition per se has no value.

However, findings from a study in Sudan revealed that most young men would have
preferred to marry a woman without FGM, giving sexual satisfaction as the reason for that response.17 Another view on men’s position about the practice was drawn from a survey conducted in Sudan in 1994, with husbands who had one
infibulated wife and one noninfibulated wife. Eighty nine percent of the husbands stated emphatically that they preferred nonexcised or sunna-circumcised (mild type) women sexually.6

It follows that male experiences with circumcised women could contribute to the
eradication of the practice. If their beliefs and attitudes towards the practice were widely known, false expectations related to FGM would be halted. To date little research has been done to substantially guide policymakers. Although men
are seen as role players in perpetuating the practice of FGM, little is known in Ghana about the factors associated with their preference for circumcised women.

Interesting reading, the findings btw suggest that higher education men and women strongly trend away, and preference seems to be largely … inertia of tradition.

[Stoid]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

It might be dominated by men, but not all men dominate it. That’s the distinction you’re missing out on.

When or where did “all” come into the discussion? Nothing is ever “all” (or very little is ever “all”). I certainly never said anything like “all men” do anything, much less dominate society and culture. But among the human beings who do dominate and control the societies we’re talking about, all of them are male.

Untrue. People have shown that some women independently think it makes their daughters have better character to be mutilated. You’ve just rejected their first-hand experiences, ostensibly because they don’t conform to your Men=Bad, Women=Good narrative.

Incorrect. I specifically addressed the additional reasons sometimes given for the practice in the part you deleted from the post you quote:

The fact that women have found ways to make it ok for themselves by tacking on additional justifications for it doesn’t mean women would ever want it independent of the necessity for it in order for females to marry…making it a male requirement.

As I said, there has been no evidence that women would choose it independent of the male requirement. (Or a belief in the male requirement… as wmfellows post shows, male attitudes are changing. Time to get the word out.)

@alphaboi867

I’ve been with both cut and intact guys and IME the intact ones do seem to have greaty sensitivity, at least during oral sex. I’ve also found that oral sex is a bit more fun to perform on an intact guy.

Yup. So are handjobs, big time: no need for lube with the handy dandy sleeve! Well, that’s not always true… some men stretch so tight when erect that they might as well be circumcised.

[j666]

@levdrakon

Read the OP’s cite. That’s my cite. Of note:

Sure sounds like it’s intended for the woman’s health and well being to me. Interesting too, that to make a woman clean and beautiful it is necessary to remove the unclean male parts. That’s actually more penis and male sexuality hate.

The quote section sounds nothing like health and well-being to me. It sounds like fear and disqust of sexuality to me.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Stoid

Incorrect. I specifically addressed the additional reasons sometimes given for the practice in the part you deleted from the post you quote:
As I said, there has been no evidence that women would choose it independent of the male requirement.

Your “addressing” of it constituted a wild-ass rationalization of facts that don’t concord with your worldview, with zero evidence to back up the rationalization; I rightly ignored it. There’s no evidence that women wouldn’t choose it independent of the male requirement, either.

[Magiver]

@wmfellows

Yeah, they waited until the ***21st century… ***. In fact it’s clear that this wasn’t a well-supported practice and from an early date, heavy weight scholars came out against it.

I posted a series of Egyptian Fatwas in the 20th century in post 79. The last one approving of FGM was in 1981. It was reversed in 2007.

@wmfellows

So you’ve continued to exagerate the Muslim support while hand waving away the Coptic and Tawehedo church complicity over centuries.

I’ve exaggerated nothing and cited everything I said. You have failed to document a similar Christian doctrine. The only hand waving I did was to use your exact words against you in debate form. The fact is that Muslim leaders in the region took FGM and codified it.

Your need for a tit-for-tat comparison to Christian doctrine makes no sense. They are different religions and interact differently on a social scale. The level of codification for daily life is simply higher in the Muslim religion than most others. It just makes sense that they addressed this formally when it was brought before them and deferred to local custom. It also makes sense that in the 21st century they reversed their position in light of a shrinking planet and modern interaction with the rest of the world.

[Stoid]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Your “addressing” of it constituted a wild-ass rationalization of facts that don’t concord with your worldview, with zero evidence to back up the rationalization; I rightly ignored it.

The one constant in every culture where FGM exists is the component of male preference. Therefore, to feebly assert that some women choose it for reasons that are completely unconnected to that constant is completely nonsensical.

Apart from the simple common sense that it’s painful, unpleasant, destructive and dangerous, therefore making it inherently unappealing,the absence of societies practicing it free of male desire for it says everything: if women were inclined to pursue it on their own, they surely would have done so somewhere by now.

Until you can locate that elusive group of empowered females lining up to slice off their clits because they find it so rewarding, unhappy men be damned, I think I am right to ignore your wild-ass guess that such an alternate universe exists. Particularly since your track record of evidence for pretty much anything I can recall you saying lately is holding steady at nonexistent.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Stoid

The one constant in every culture where FGM exists is the component of male preference. Therefore, to feebly assert that some women choose it for reasons that are completely unconnected to that constant is completely nonsensical.

It’s a good thing I never said that. When I said that some women independently think it’s worth doing, I did not of course mean with no historical connection to male preference. That would be absurd, since male preference shapes female sexual behavior and vice versa. I was responding to your absurd bizarro world in which that was no longer the case.

(I’m curious though about your “one constant.” In what culture do you find prevalent FGM in which it is NOT carried out primarily by women?)

Again, though, you’re oversimplifying things. Sex, and gender relations, are more complicated than your 1960s feminism allows for. Saying that doesn’t excuse any person’s bad behavior, but it does acknowledge agency, and sometimes complicity, among folks who are also oppressed.

[Magiver]

@Stoid

The one constant in every culture where FGM exists is the component of male preference. Therefore, to feebly assert that some women choose it for reasons that are completely unconnected to that constant is completely nonsensical.

It would make sense to address the whole community instead of just women (it can be done separately). If men understood that it affects their marriage then the underlying cause can be addressed. You can’t kill a woman’s sex drive and then expect sexual relations.

[Stoid]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

It’s a good thing I never said that. When I said that some women independently think it’s worth doing, I did not of course mean with no historical connection to male preference.

First, you evidently do not understand what “independently” means. If women “independently” think it’s worth doing, it means that they think so without connection to the male preference.

In other words, if I work in your restaurant where you, for instance, serve dinnersoup in tennis shoes, then come home and desire soup and think “I will serve it in ski boots!” I did not “independently” come up with a damn thing. I put my own twist on your idea.

If I have never heard of you, or your restaurant, or your soup, or anyone else who serves soup in shoes, and one day I think “Man, soup would be tasty coming out of a shoe!”, THEN I have independently come up with the idea of eating soup out of shoes.

So now the question is: did you assert that women independently came up with the idea by the correct definition?

I asserted that no such idea had arisen independently (by the correct definition) in response to your (100% unsupported assertion) that the actual power dynamic at work in FGM is parents & children:

Parents have no independent investment of any kind in seeing their female children’s genitals mutilated for any reason.

“Independent” of:

Males want females to have their genitals altered

In order for the power dynamic to be between parents and children, the parents would have to have a non-male-desire related reason to want to impose this on their children. They don’t. So the “power” is the males who want females circumcised.

Another way to express the idea of independent is to say what I said next:

No one has demonstrated that women would have the slightest interest in pursuing if they woke up one day and found that every male in their society rejected it.

Because if they did wake up in a society where men rejected it and then decided it built character and did it anyway, in spite of males saying no, that would also be “independent” of male desire for it.

You then replied:

Untrue. People have shown that some women independently think it makes their daughters have better character to be mutilated.

Well, by the correct definition, no, no one has shown that at all.
And I said:

As I said, there has been no evidence that women would choose it independent of the male requirement.

And, as we see, there is no such evidence.
Therefore, the “better character” reason is, after all, just an add-on to the real reason: male preference.

Then you said:

There’s no evidence that women wouldn’t choose it independent of the male requirement, either.

There’s also no evidence that people wouldn’t choose to live in jail independent of laws that require them to live there when broken.
There’s also no evidence that people wouldn’t choose to use wheelchairs independent of the need due to disability.
There’s also no evidence that people wouldn’t choose to amputate limbs independent of injury, disease, or body dysmorphia.
There’s also no evidence blacks wouldn’t have chosen slavery independent of whites forcing them to.

In each of the above cases, people in the given situations could tell you real or potential benefits in the situation that they have found, none of which would be sufficient motive for them to choose it independent of the core reason.

Same thing with FGM.

(I’m curious though about your “one constant.” In what culture do you find prevalent FGM in which it is NOT carried out primarily by women?)

You keep returning to this fact as though it means something. It doesn’t: the women are acting as they feel they must because of males. They do not choose it independent of male requirements. So they are no more responsible for it than kapos were responsible for the Holocaust.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

Given how that post started, I doubt it ends well. Lemme know if you’ve got something more productive to say than ignorantly questioning my understanding of a word, instead of following the conversation back yourself to see where you went wrong, mkay?

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Stoid

You keep returning to this fact as though it means something. It doesn’t: the women are acting as they feel they must because of males. They do not choose it independent of male requirements. So they are no more responsible for it than kapos were responsible for the Holocaust.

Actually, I’ll address this: you keep mentioning kapos and the Holocaust, as if you’re somehow unaware of Godwin’s law (and yes, this is a clear example of the law). If you can show me a concentration camp in which the kapos were more enthusiastic about committing the atrocities than the Nazi guards were, we’ll concede that point. Several people have pointed out that the most vociferous defenders of FGM are often women. That difference does mean something. Your absurdly simplistic gender analysis doesn’t allow for such complexities, though, so you substitute hollering “Nazis!” for critical analysis.

[Stoid]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Actually, I’ll address this: you keep mentioning kapos and the Holocaust, as if you’re somehow unaware of Godwin’s law (and yes, this is a clear example of the law).

No, it’s not. (You seem to think that just saying things make them so. You need to get over that.)

someone inevitably criticizes some point made in the discussion by comparing it to beliefs held by Hitler and the Nazis.

Comparing the actions of kapos acting under orders is not a comparison to beliefs held by Nazis. Godwin’s law does not apply to any mention of anything connected to Nazis.

But if it makes you unhappy, feel free to substitute soldiers acting on orders, children obeying their parents, or any other party subject to the desires and control of more powerful parties in a given dynamic. Anything they do that is designed to serve the powerful parties isn’t on them, it’s on the powerful.

Several people have pointed out that the most vociferous defenders of FGM are often women. That difference does mean something.

“Several people have pointed out” isn’t a cite to anything. Other people’s comments and opinions don’t pass for evidence here in GD.

By the way, I’ll bet you don’t even know who has offered the evidence that women defend FGM: Me. Although you seem to find more than a few lines of text in any one post too taxing to bother with, if you actually read the material you’ll see the evidence, and you’ll also see why they defend it: because the men won’t marry their daughters if they don’t, and they want their daughters to be married because in their society they don’t see any viable option for a decent life for their daughters that doesn’t feature marriage, and in order to marry, their daughters must be cut…meaning they are vociferously defending the demands of the male power structure.

So no, it doesn’t mean anything.

But if you still think it does, it’s about time for you to say what it is.

And for the record, this is the debate forum. Simply saying what you think and believe over and over again without any attempt to back it up is not debate, it’s opinion and belongs in IMHO. Completely bailing on posts that directly address your assertions isn’t debating, it’s bailing.

If you want to debate, debate. If you want to try and score points by asserting your opinions as though they are facts and avoiding things you can’t understand or answer, then you’ll have to do it with someone else because it’s a waste of my time.

[Stoid]

@Magiver

If men understood that it affects their marriage then the underlying cause can be addressed. You can’t kill a woman’s sex drive and then expect sexual relations.

Dude! Do you honestly think that cultures in which women can be forced to have their genitals mutilated so they can then be essentially sold to a man as his wife include the idea that these women so mutilated and forced need to want and enjoy sex in order for it to occur? Especially since the whole point of the procedure is to kill her desire for sex so she won’t get it somewhere else? Does that really make much sense to you?

That being said, the irony is that it doesn’t necessarily kill the sex drive at all, just makes it damned difficult to satisfy, although, remarkably, not impossible. Some women with the most extreme of all versions have reported being able to orgasm! Some good news anyway.

[Fear_Itself]

@Stoid

Uncut men have far greater sensitivity, no question.

Then thank goodness I am circumcised, 'cuz if my dick was any more sensitive, I would get nothing done all day long.

[Farmer_Jane]

I saw an uncirc’d penis in my Human Sexuality textbook. I was like wtfnoway. And that was that.

[Farmer_Jane]

Women who have their daughters go through any form of genital altering have probably done this themselves. For whatever reason, they’re continuing on. So it’s not going to stop until the mothers stand up and demand something better for their daughters.

Can’t force social change on people. Didn’t work with the English Church, didn’t work the 14 times we’ve tried to instill new governments elsewhere, didn’t work with Communism (x3) and it doesn’t work when you tell employees they can’t discriminate.

[Steophan]

@CitizenPained

Women who have their daughters go through any form of genital altering have probably done this themselves. For whatever reason, they’re continuing on. So it’s not going to stop until the mothers stand up and demand something better for their daughters.

Can’t force social change on people. Didn’t work with the English Church, didn’t work the 14 times we’ve tried to instill new governments elsewhere, didn’t work with Communism (x3) and it doesn’t work when you tell employees they can’t discriminate.

Men who have their sons go through any form of genital altering have probably done this themselves. So it’s not going to stop until the fathers stand up and demand something better for their sons.

What’s your point? You support infant mutilation, you’re as bad as these african women.