Mick Hartley

Janice Turner on that BMJ Medical Ethics paper:

How do you end a hideous form of child abuse? Do you a) strengthen laws, protect victims and prosecute offenders, or b) use abstruse language to muddy the ethical waters, sophistry to turn those fighting abuse into the bad guys so — voilà! — the problem magically disappears?

Nothing has made me angrier this year than the essay published by the BMJ group attacking the global effort to end female genital mutilation (FGM). So angry, I looked up each of the 25 authors and read their other papers, too. From Cambridge to Montreal, Melbourne to Malmo, what privileged self-regard posing as progress.

Questions for these (mainly) white female academics: do you like having a clitoris? Are you entitled to sexual pleasure and giving birth via a vagina that hasn’t been sewn shut? Are you grateful you’ll never hear your daughter scream as she’s pinned down on a bloody table? Then don’t African women deserve the same?…

But liberal “feminism” stays high in the intellectual stratosphere, above the messiness of bodies, pain, fear and blood. Never, ever let postmodernists make policy: they disdain the material world. As shown in 1977, when intellectuals successfully lobbied the French government to decriminalise sex with children because consent, in Michel Foucault’s words, was just a “contractual notion”.

How would the authors see suttee, a Hindu practice banned under the Raj, whereby a widow threw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre? They’d condemn “problematic colonial saviour discourse” and say these women had “agency”, so let them burn.

It’s perhaps worth pointing out that the first name on the list of authors – the lead author – is one Fuambai Sia Ahmadu, from Sierra Leone and now an anthropologist at the University of Chicago:

Ahmadu is known for her work on female genital mutilation (FGM) and, in particular, for her decision as an adult and member of the Kono ethnic group to undergo it as part of initiation into the female-controlled Bundu secret society.

With anaesthetic, I think it’s fair to assume – unlike the overwhelming majority of young girls who are forced to undergo FGM.

So Janice Turner’s characterisation of the authors as “(mainly) white female academics” is accurate, strictly speaking, but a little unfair.

Contrary to the position of the World Health Organization, UNICEF and other UN bodies, she has argued that the health risks of most types of FGM are exaggerated, its effect on women’s sexuality misunderstood, and that most affected women do not experience it as an oppressive practice. Ahmadu’s views are shared by some other anthropologists.

Are we surprised? Anthropologists, eh?