FGM

I was finishing up Kristoff's Half the Sky last night and the tail end of that book touches on FGM, or female genital mutilation. Formerly referred to female circumcision, that term was discarded because it did not convey the horrors and torture enacted in the procedure. In the most liberal of communities, girls usually before the age of 10, are taken by other women and have their clitoris cut off with knives that have not been properly sanitized. Many areas go even further and cut off the labia, and some places even sew up the vagina, leaving only a small hole for menstruation.

It's hard to even read about it with being appalled. Yet women in these cultures not only do it to each other, but girls even ask to have it done to them.

Can there be a universal right without encroaching on cultural beliefs? Does fighting for equal status of men and women mean being ethnocentric? Should we try to simply provide clean razors for this "circumcision" so that infection will be reduced, or should we try to stop the practice altogether and risk being seen as arrogant and egocentric?

In Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery," a town gathers together one day every year and one person is randomly selected to be stoned to death. The kids all get excited for the day by collection rocks to throw, and nobody every stops to question the barbarity of the practice. It's just what they do.

For how long did the world view slavery as just a cultural practice, just something people did, something that would never change? How long did China continue to bind the feet of their daughters?

Cultures change when education prevails. FGM may be how things are done in certain parts of the world, girls and women may even support the practice, and resent American involvement. But that doesn't make ignorance any better.

This isn't a matter of cultural ideals.

This is a matter of human rights.