But specifically raped?

At times, yes. Women aren't always raped in power plays either, but as long as the power players are sexually oriented towards them, it'll play a large part. Seeing that removing the gender to which the power players are oriented does not stop demonstrating power through sex tells me it's not all about gender.

Which, really, is my point. It's about power. Gender is secondary, when it does rate.

The former head of a national program formed to target child sex predators pleads no contest to to charges of exposure of sexual organs to a 16 year old. Yay people!

Jars, I agree that female circumcision is perpetuated by women and deeply engrained in the culture and has to do with status and all those things. And those are good things to know in order to end it well and truly and effectively rather than just drive it underground.

But ending it is key.

Cultural respect is grand 99% of the time. Even here it is a grand way to end fgm.

I don't think the groups of societies that usually undertake female circumsicion are medically aware enough of the consequences to truly understand them,

Actually, I don't think that's completely true. The main purpose of female circumcision is to decrease and control a woman's sexual desire.

Which, really, is my point. It's about power. Gender is secondary, when it does rate.

In regards to domination in general, sure.

But in regards to rape specifically, how can you say gender is secondary when NOBODY is raping the pizza boy?

I don't think the groups of societies that usually undertake female circumsicion are medically aware enough of the consequences to truly understand them

I'm fairly contemptuous towards proponents of female genital mutilation, but I don't think for a second they haven't noticed the significant consequences.

how can you say gender is secondary when NOBODY is raping the pizza boy?

First off, I think it's pretty likely at least one person's raped a pizza delivery boy. The pedant in me requires I state that.

I do feel completely comfortable in the position that correlation is not causation. Just because it happens more often to women doesn't mean it happens more often because we're women. That is my point. It doesn't make me safer walking to my car to look at it from my angle, but I was never arguing that it would.

But ending it is key.

I think this is a wonderful idea, but that saying 'this is bad and wrong and you must stop it because it disgusts me' is very much the wrong way to go about it. Education within these societies, by these societies is key, and hopefully with more education, the problem will eradicate itself.

Education within these societies, by these societies is key, and hopefully with more education, the problem will eradicate itself.

What triggers the education?

You say. And I think. But us thinking that has no bearing on what the people doing it think.

Given the enormous lifelong risks to the health and even life of the girls subjected to it (everything from a lifelong increased risk of UTIs to no possibility of sexual intercourse without pain to a much higher than usual risk of death from blood loss or massive infections during childbirth to death from infection following the clitoridectomy), I seriously don't think it matters what the people doing it think.

It has zero, absolutely zero, health benefits and a huge mass of associated increased risks and likelihood of complications, and it destroys these girls' ability to experience sexual pleasure, or indeed to experience vaginal intercourse as anything but agonizingly painful. There are plenty of non-Western cultural practices that I'm uncomfortable with that I can also see as defensible within their cultural context, but clitoridectomy just isn't one of them.

Female circumcision is almost always performed by a female and in the lowest economic and educated strata of the societies in which it's performed. It's as much an issue of education and economic oppression as it is one of female oppression.

I fully admit to having no idea how clitoridectomy started, but I do know that all of these factors play into it as it's been practiced over the last few decades: (1) In a culture where women are not generally expected to play any important role in village life outside their families, the women who perform this procedure are held in high esteem; they carry on a tradition, they make the local girls marriagable, they're respected by everyone (except the handful of girls and parents who have always resisted the procedure) -- it's a heady shot of power and respect, and the women who carry it out have been very resistant to giving it up because, as their lives are presently structured, it's this or nothing; (2) girls who resist it and families who support them (and there are a few, and always have been) are shunned; the families can't marry their daughters off, the girls are ridiculed and treated like pariahs; (3) there are added economic consequences to #2, because the societal expectation generally is that an unmarried woman resides with her parents; unless she has the wherewithal to pick up and leave altogether, an unmarried woman is her parents' property and responsibility forever.

Which is to say, I pretty much agree with your last sentence, but the fact that it's performed by women doesn't hold water with me at all as any kind of cultural justification.

And it's worlds, worlds away from male circumcision, which slightly decreases male sexual pleasure but, except when botched horribly (the complication rate is difficult to track, but the American Academy of Family Physicians did a compendium study of studies and found reported rates ranging from 35% to 0.1%, the majority being bleeding), does not eliminate it or replace it with excruciating pain, and is thought to be associated with a decreased risk of UTIs in infancy and decreased risks of penile cancer and HIV transmission in adulthood.

Which is not to say that an uncut man is not a wholesome and lovely thing, gorgeous to look upon and touch and taste, because he very frequently is. However, the average circumcised man's quality of health and sexual life are so much better than those of the average woman with a hacked-out clitoris that there's really no comparison between the two.

I agree with Jars that change has to come from within the society. We can offer pressure to change and support and whatever is needed, but we can't step in and force it to happen. Otherwise it smacks too much of the Neocon's worldview of "We know what is right for you and we're going to make you do it" and we all see how well THAT worked out.