U.N. moves closer to Sudan peacekeeping

Which brings to mind a recent discussion I had with an Arab woman who informed me that clitoridectomy does not harm women.
It was very hard for me to hear such trash falling from the mouth of someone I like a lot and consider intelligent and worldly. But such is the power of patriarchy and patriarchal monotheism - aka religion - in the minds of many women; they believe lies of all sorts.

When I vehemently protested her comments, she responded "sex is in the mind." "That may be," I said, "but orgasm is in the body and if you don't have the parts to have one there isn't going to be much sex in your mind."

It was an awful exchange. I was deeply upset by it.

I felt like a culture warrior.

The culture warrior response confuses me. I like to think of myself as tolerant and blessedly multicultural, free from religion of even the non god sort, but this subject gets my dander waaaay up even as it rouses my wobbling ambivalence.

It's just flat out wrong. If a culture has enshrined such a practice the culture needs to cut it the fuck out, no pun intended.

Brutally desexing someone is bad enough, of course, but nothing is ever as simple as it seems. This is all about controlling and dominating women completely, destroying any autonomy before it can hatch.

If you cut off a little girl's clitoris, she won't masturbate, will she? She won't explore her own body in this way. She won't, in all likelihood, think much about it other than as pain, though she may feel some lack in herself. In fact, I would expect that and deem it part of the purpose of this BARBARITY.

And when she grows up she won't demand good sex or righteous equality from men, because she won't know the difference.

Such mutilation is a political act intended to relieve women of identity, autonomy, power, pleasure and capacity for connection.

Ah, even as I type the Muslim extremists are screaming in the streets about disrespectful caricatures of Mohammed, but they aren't screaming about brutal mutilation of girls.

And CNN is not showing the drawings to which I refer.

I'm very tired of so many folks pandering to and cowering before phallocentric religious nuts who turn the world into a vast, violent hell era after historical era, whether the nuts be Islamic, Christian or some other variety of prayer born illness.

Rummy may yearn for global war, plan for it, budget it and even succeed in creating it, but he and his Nazi brethren will never come close in scope or magnitude to the world wide, multigenerational war perpetrated against women for centuries.
It knows no bounds. And is even considered the natural order.
Ma'as salaama