The meme is that before [insert your contemporary period] people were so backwards that they would miss something like the clitoris entirely. The meme isn't that people and cultures were prejudiced or biased, but that they were prejudiced in an idiotic way. If you believe that's how prejudice works, then you'll be utterly blind to much contemporary prejudice.

EDIT: Relatedly, The Guardian article sites the statistics about female genital mutilation. And you might think, how could people in this day be so cruel? Well, in some (but not all) of those cultures, such as parts of West Africa, female sexual pleasure is highly valued, a clitoral circumcision involves removing the clitoral hood only, similar to circumcision for men, and is viewed as enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex, an act that lacks any negative connotations. Now, embedded in that narrative might be a deeper, more subtle bias against women, but by not appreciating and grappling with that dynamic you're ignoring and diminishing how many women in those cultures understand feminism, which is its own anti-feminine and culturally centric (i.e. "colonial") bias.

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flotzam 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't type 1a circumcision (removal of the clitoral hood, but not other parts) very rare? At least that's what the Wikipedia article claims, referencing a 2008 WHO report.

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hombre_fatal 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What’s your best source that African FGM is about enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex?

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wahern 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This was several years ago and unfortunately I didn't archive my research. Every year it becomes so difficult to dig up stuff, and I don't have time today to go back down that rabbit hole. (These days I'm much better at archiving stuff.)

Here's a couple of articles by one of most vocal supporters of FGM in West Africa:

* https://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/hurray-for-bondo-women-...

* http://www.fuambaisiaahmadu.com/blogs/my-response-to-fuambai...

And some skeptical but engaging discussions about her views:

* https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/...

* https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau6.3.011

The second link of the four is a response to the last.

I was sloppy in being too specific in saying removing the clitoral hood was sometimes justified as enhancing oral sex. Now that I think about it, that might be one of the views regarding labial extension, which is often lumped in with FGM but obviously quite different from cutting the clitoral hood. The claims about enhancing sexual pleasure I think largely came from more polemical literature, as well as some English-language African feminist blogs and bulletin boards, and I would suspect those views may be, at least to some extent and in their specificity, recent revisionist justifications. In African discourse there's a reactionary vein that pushes against Western criticisms of traditional African practices, and one of the ways to do that would be to subvert the paternalistic disgust about FGM by explicitly arguing the practice promotes one of the West's other ideals, sex positivity.

To be clear, I'm not trying to defend any of this. Just trying to point out that the West's exceedingly simplistic and categorical perspective hides a very strong cultural prejudice, as well other problematic assumptions about how and why these practices persist.

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IAmBroom 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So, you admit you have no evidence supporting your bizarre claims, and aren't defending a practice you claimed was at least sometimes without negative connotations. Gotcha.

	▲	wahern 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My comment about negative connotations was referring to oral sex, where it was claimed the local culture never viewed performing oral sex on women as emasculating, but something men were expect to do. Genital modification itself has to some extent negative connotations everywhere these days, if only because of the influence of Western media, but that has also given rise to a reactionary dynamic that tries to defend these practices using the language of contemporary Western morality, e.g. sex positivity.

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IAmBroom 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> an act that lacks any negative connotations

If you can imagine that forced genital mutilation without anesthetics lacks negative connotations, as long as it's "for her eventual pleasure".

Good Lord.

	▲	benj111 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don't particularly agree with the OP but from my European pov, male circumcision doesn't seem to have negative connotations, certainly not in the US. Negative connotations and actual negativity are two separate things. Alcohol tends not to have negative connotations whereas things that are better for your health and less addictive, cannabis, magic mushrooms, have negative connotations.