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.

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

THe codicil was intended to be perpetual.

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.

Correlation doesn't always equal causation, but sometimes it does.

(pendant note: fake numbers)

A million non-prisoners are raped. Ten of them are men raped by men. Five of them are men raped by women. Three of them are women raped by women. The other 900,000+ are women raped by men. It's not "more often" its "almost always". There is SOME reason for this amazingly disproportionate result. Occams razor arguably indicates that gender has something to do with it.

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.

It's bad and its wrong and they must stop it because it disgusts me and anybody with half a brain both in and outside of the society. Cultural understanding affects how one changes it (supporting movements within rather than getting all white knight and imperialist) but not that one changes it.

And the problem doesn't eradicate its self. It's brave people in the society its self that eradicate the problem.

There is SOME reason for this amazingly disproportionate result. Occams razor arguably indicates that gender has something to do with it.

And just as arguably it argues for any given other commonality between the victims that is perceptible to the perpetrators.

I have offered one, but just one you don't agree with. I don't know if Occam likes either of us any more than the other.

I believe Occam would say that he likes both of you. And carrots.

It's brave people in the society its self that eradicate the problem.

Yes, this. In the society itself. We can lead by example, yes, but I don't think I have any more right to step into that culture and say something is wrong than I do into American culture because I think capital punishment is wrong.

I don't think I have any more right to step into that culture and say something is wrong than I do into American culture because I think capital punishment is wrong

Does education from without count as stepping in? Boycotts? Political sanctions?

I would say that those are external pressures which might trigger change from within for what we see as the better, which would be a good thing, but that those things might also have no or the opposite effect. What they probably will do is assuage the guilt of people on the outside. If they also cause societal change that benefits people within, then so much the better.

eta that on that note, I'll have to go to bed, as I have a project to write tomorrow. Which this discussion has actually been quite helpful in framing for me.