"Abdoulie Fatty, one of Gambia’s most prominent imams, previously told The Washington Post that cutting is necessary to 'balance the feelings of a woman'..."

"... because 'in sex, women’s power is more than men’s power.' In one of the more explicit — and widely shared — moments of the year-long debate, Fatty also gave specific tips on one of Gambia’s most prominent shows about non-clitoral means of pleasuring women, including kissing their earlobes. Listening to such comments was 'embarrassing,' said Imam Baba Leigh, one of the religious leaders in Gambia who has campaigned against FGM. Leigh said FGM is in no way required by Islam. 'Are you telling me that God doesn’t know what is the right limit for a woman to enjoy? And you know it better? That is ridiculous,' he said when asked about Fatty’s statements. 'Allah knows what is suitable.'"

From "Female cutting debate in Gambia takes surprising turn: To women’s pleasure/The debate about female genital cutting has led to an open discussion about sexual pleasure in Gambia, with women buying sex toys and men learning about foreplay" (WaPo).

"He looked at her in disbelief, she recounted, as if he couldn’t believe she’d called the police over such a matter and asked: 'Why are you acting like you’re not a Muslim?'"

From "As Gambia weighs end to genital-cutting ban, this girl was cut behind mother’s back/The West African country could become the first in the world to overturn a prohibition on female genital mutilation" (WaPo)(full-access link).

Fatty, the imam promoting the ban’s repeal, appeared to refer to Fatou’s story in a sermon earlier this year, saying that a woman who takes her husband to court should be “ashamed.” Fatty compared her story with that story of a “good woman” who refused to take her husband to court even after he beat her so badly she lost four teeth.

UPDATE: "Gambia will maintain its ban on female genital cutting following a historic decision by the National Assembly on Monday that marked a victory for women’s rights advocates in this West African nation" (WaPo).

“I am relieved but sad that we had to be taken through this torment,” said Fatou Baldeh, a Gambian activist and survivor who has received international attention for her advocacy against the practice. “I am so proud of Gambian women for not giving up. We refused to let go.”

"One of the most enduring public images of Ms. Schroeder is of her crying when she announced in 1987 that she would not run for president."

"At an outdoor event in Denver, she choked up with emotion, pressed a tissue to her eyes, and at one point leaned her head on her husband’s shoulder. The episode outraged some feminists, who said her tears had reinforced stereotypes and set back the cause of women seeking office. It was an ironic charge against a woman who had done so much to promote that cause. Ms. Schroeder was the first woman elected to Congress from Colorado and the first to serve on the Armed Services Committee. She had to fight blatant discrimination from the start, facing questions about how, as the mother of two young children, she could function as both a mother and a lawmaker...."

From "Patricia Schroeder, Feminist Trailblazer in Congress, Dies at 82/Ms. Schroeder, who had a long career in the House, helped steer passage of legislation on family leave, pregnancy discrimination and other progressive causes" (NYT).

That indelible crying:

Cleese doubles down.

I think it's legitimate to prefer one culture to another

For example, I prefer cultures that do not tolerate female genital mutilation.

Will this will be considered racist by all those who hover, eagerly hoping that someone will offend them - on someone else's behalf, naturally https://t.co/4WbZDFjs3o

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) May 30, 2019

"If we stop FGM, we will need strong men and we don't have men of that sort."

"He said it was therefore better for women to undergo FGM 'to reduce a woman's sexual appetite' - an act, he argued, that would encourage women to 'stand by their man.'"

The words of an Egyptian politician named Elhamy Agina, as reported and (I think) translated by a website called Egyptian Street. Even if he said it — and, obviously, it's a horrible thing to say — I find it hard to credit the translation with the phrase "stand by their man," which I think only came into common parlance through the Tammy Wynette song, "Stand By Your Man." And yet the phrase from the song was virulently propagated — criticized by feminists, scorned by Hillary Clinton — so maybe it took root in Egypt to the point where it could be part of everyday political chatter.

"Gynecologists Kavita Shah Arora and Allan Jacobs said procedures that slightly changed the look of a girl's genitalia without damaging them..."

"... were comparable to male circumcision or cosmetic procedures in Western countries like labiaplasty. Laws against mild modifications were 'culturally insensitive and supremacist and discriminatory towards women,' they wrote in the specialist journal, which is published by the British Medical Journal."

"I felt that women betraying each other was something I was investigating at the time."

Said Tori Amos, explaining the origin of the song "Cornflake Girl":

The idea of that, and how quote-unquote friends can really hurt each other deeply, and the idea that the enemy is out there somewhere, but really, where we get hurt usually comes from people we are close to. So “Cornflake Girl” really was about two women, that one felt that the other had really betrayed her.

The inspiration came from Alice Walker’s book "The Temple Of My Familiar":

In the book, they talked about how young girls would be taken to a place for female circumcision, whether it was out in the desert of Africa or what have you, usually by somebody they trusted. A mother, a grandmother, somebody they loved, and of course the person that was doing this to them, taking them to the whatever you want to call it, the hacker or the mutilator, thought that they were doing the right thing, or else the girl wouldn’t be able to get married. They justify their betrayal, and that was really what prompted the idea of “Cornflake Girl.”

But wait, says Adam (at Throwing Things), what about that story about how "she beat out Sarah Jessica Parker to star in an ad for Kellogg's Just Right cereal?"



Just Right cereal... female genital mutilation... it's hard to imagine a greater disparity in sources for a song. And yet... everything goes into the mix, doesn't it? You read books about all sorts of drastic and dramatic occurrences and your own life ticks on with its miniature but important-to-you events, it all swirls around in your poet-brain, and out pop a song (and, over the years, out pop stories about whether the song came from).

This isn't journalism. It's art, and the only test is: it's a great song.

An Italian gynecologist of Somalian descent, Omar Abdulcadir, proposes an alternative to female genital cutting/mutilation, the NYT reported yesterday:

That alternative, as he described it, would be a piercing of the tip of the clitoris that would draw just a drop or two of blood and would be largely symbolic. He said he would use a topical anesthetic.

Jacob Levy over at Volokh Conspiracy comments:

The question is, soughly, whether the substitution of a relatively humane procedure performed hygenically for a monstrous one performed unhygenically outweighs the cost, i.e. undermining the attempt to stamp out female genital cutting and the attitudes that generate it.

(Soughly? I can't even think what that is a typo for. And why is Volokh Conspiracy already up to Wednesday? They blog fast.) Surely as between the two procedures, it would be better to have the far less extreme one, just as it would be better to be tortured for an hour than for a year. If we could be assured that those who would otherwise have the radical procedure would switch to Dr. Abdulcadir's procedure, and everything else remained equal, we should support this innovation. The first problem is, as the Times article reveals, perhaps no one would move to the middle ground:

Several opponents said immigrants who were deeply invested in tradition would probably deem the alternative insufficient, while immigrants who were liberated from that tradition would feel no need for a substitute.

Sometimes there is no middle ground. The second problem is that becoming involved in developing a middle ground seems to legitimate the evil extreme, and it participates in evil. So we can't trust that everything else would remain equal. Levy has written a book on multiculturalism, which I haven't read, but I rankled at his blogged comment "A Seattle hospital considered doing precisely the same thing a number of years ago, until it was bullied out of it by activists and by Patricia Schroeder."

There is at least a basis for principled disagreement here about whether compromise is acceptable. Those who resist compromise are not necessarily bullies. I'd like to know more about exactly how the "activists" misbehaved, if they did. We may gain from observing the Italian debate.

The Times reports:

Italians are still absorbing [the reality of "sudden demographic changes"] and sifting through the related challenges, both practical and philosophical. A front-page article in the Turin daily La Stampa on Jan. 23 asked why a symbolic alternative to genital cutting would validate that practice any more than the symbolic consumption of the body of Jesus at a Catholic Mass would validate cannibalism.

A closer analogy to communion would be if the symbolic genital cutting was performed on something that wasn't part of anybody's body! And of course there was never any actual cannibalism in the Christian tradition. The original Last Supper used only symbolic bread. There is no belief in the value of cannibalism that communion is honoring! That said, Dr. Abdulcadir's procedure doesn't seem any worse than the sort of body piercings we tolerate people engaging in for all sorts of reasons. We aren't all up in arms about that. There shouldn't be discrimination against the religious motivation.