fls said:
So the survey says that more woman had clitoridectomy than clitoridectomy plus excision, for those countries that gave information that was detailed enough to differentiate the two. One can then say that prepuce was removed in those women, but one cannot say the clitoris was or wasn't. There's no reasonable way to make that distinction based on the procedure. Information from other surveys consistently talks about removal of the clitoris, so I'm reluctant to assume that most of the time it is done in such a way as to miss the clitoris all together.
I see what you're saying and agree. There isn't any evidence either way that I know of, but there's certainly a good chance that removing part of the clitoris doesn't impact sexual function (of the pleasure variety) in a fundamental way, too, though.
It seems like it would, but it seems like male circumcision would have a more striking effect on that, as well, so who knows?
My position is that bodily integrity is a basic human right for both genders, so I guess I need convincing that the most common (or very common, either one will do) forms of FGC are "worse" than male circumcision before I'll let it go when someone wants to draw a line in the sand and say "this one is ok, this one is bad".
The distinction seems to be based more on assumptions and cultural bias to me at this point.
Unless I've missed something, which is possible.
Well, again I'd be happy to discover otherwise. But I can't assume women are free to refuse consent given the descriptions of the relative positions of men and women in these cultures. And if concern over "getting laughed at in the locker room" is enough to get women in our culture to consider circumcising their son, how can "can never get married or have any functional role in our society" not be considered excessively persuasive to an African woman?
I know there are some cultures where the social ramifications would be that extreme, but are you sure it's a majority of the ones that practice it?
It makes sense that the "that's the way it's done" excuse is the one most commonly given, since I think that it's the same thing that drives male circumcision in the US. Because I think parents in the US are free to make the choice without risk of economic or social hardship for their child or themselves, changing their opinion is a good way to change the practice.
I think the social (and possibly economic, even) hardships for some people in some American religious subcultures could be quite impressive. They don't talk about that aspect much, but I sort of sense that it has to be there.
For the non-religious, in all reality, there are no cultural repercussions, but it is assumed that there would be. This is false, but parents still believe that it's true. In the other thread several posters
seriously argued that intact men would basically never be able to partake in the normal variety of sexual experiences. And I think they seriously believed that it was/is "the truth".
A social scientist from another culture could survey the attitudes of American parents and it would really look...bizarre.
It seems more "oppressive" when you see it coming from Africa in surveys about FGC attitudes and beliefs, because it gets mixed in with other bona fide manifestations of gender inequality, and I'm not sure how to separate those overlapping influences even in my own mind. But still...there's a lot of "sameness" there between "them" and "us".
I don't think we can change practice in other countries if we ignore the underlying differences in the consequences of non-compliance for women.
For the cultures where those consequences are real, yes.
And those cultures do exist, for sure. I'm not convinced that's the reality a
majority of the time, though.
Maybe I was hoping for a little carryover.
