[zoyd]

To each his own I say. I don't think it's going to keep you out of heaven. My point is that it's not the same as mutilating a female.

Granted. I watched a documentary on it -- 13-year-old girls being lined up and sent into a not-very-sanitary tent, with some old nurse lady with a scary-looking, possibly rusted blade ready to lop off labias left and right. You could tell that NONE of the women were happy about having to endure or perform the 'surgery', if you can call it that. Brutal.

[Melinator]

I studied this topic in a cultural anthropolgy course at University about 15 years ago. The western feminist groups have decried but never put a stop to this practice for one simple reason: it is a practice which finds its strongest support in the elderly female populations of the offending cultures. If it were MEN cutting off the children's genitalia, the feminist howl of pained outrage would be heard on the MOON!

Western feminists make it their business to fight against men, not other women. It is a tenet of modern feminist dogma that men are naturally despicable, and women paragons of virtue and the embodiment of all that is good in the world. Scratching the surface of infibulation reveals that grandmothers and their "sewing circles" are the ones responsible for continuing this barbarity. Public recognition of this fact by the feminists would be inconsistent with and in fact contrary to some of their most fundamental dogma. Therefore, the facts are conveniently ignored while the feminist leaders pay mere lip-service to the need for greater understanding and education for the perpetrators, who, being female, must by definition be victims of some historical male bias inherent in their culture.

Furthermore, the urge to continue this barbarism is almost intractable. In some colonial and formerly colonial cultures, India for example, the practice of clitorodectomy and infibulation were outlawed and made punishable by death once the colonial governments found out what was going on. Despite the law and executions, the practice went on and continues in secret, though has gradually diminished as western influences have brought freedom, education and cultural change.

Why would a grandmother and the other old crones of the neighbourhood want to cut a jagged bloody hole where her grandaughters' external genitalia used to be? I'd say it's because having the same done to them has driven them insane. I'd say because theirs were cut off when they were children, and the thinking is what was good enough for them is now good enough for their daughters and granddaughters. Not just their genitals got mutilated, but their sanity as well.