[4241] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: i'm never going to get this paper done...
sorokin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sorokin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Dec 27 12:43:23 1993
Let me guess -- Possessing the Secret of Joy? Yeah -- I know a number of
women who stopped reading it in the middle, and Alice Walker talks about
women fainting when she gives talks on the subject. "They just fall
down" was her phrase, as I recall.
>I hope that sort of mutilation is on the decline.
Not too much, actually. It doesn't exist to a great extent in the US,
but in many countries in Africa virtually every girl is mutilated, and
in some (no, I don't remember which ones) as many as a third of them die
from it. There are a whole lot of women working against it, but since
it's one of the few old African traditions that the British didn't
object to (which says something about the British...) a lot of people
hold to it very strongly.
One of the things that *really* frustrates me is that -- particularly on
the net -- men often spend most of their time talking about it, talking
about how male circumcision is just as bad, which I find nauseating. "Me
too" syndrome.
