I don’t know about “idiots” but bias towards women was obviously real and prevalent. Treating the idea that that might have influenced medical literature as a “meme” is slightly bizarre to me.
We run in different circles I guess.
EDIT: Relatedly, The Guardian article sites the statistics about female genital mutilation. And you might think, how could people in this day be so cruel? Well, in some (but not all) of those cultures, such as parts of West Africa, female sexual pleasure is highly valued, a clitoral circumcision involves removing the clitoral hood only, similar to circumcision for men, and is viewed as enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex, an act that lacks any negative connotations. Now, embedded in that narrative might be a deeper, more subtle bias against women, but by not appreciating and grappling with that dynamic you're ignoring and diminishing how many women in those cultures understand feminism, which is its own anti-feminine and culturally centric (i.e. "colonial") bias.
Here's a couple of articles by one of most vocal supporters of FGM in West Africa:
* https://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/hurray-for-bondo-women-...
* http://www.fuambaisiaahmadu.com/blogs/my-response-to-fuambai...
And some skeptical but engaging discussions about her views:
* https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/TMR/article/...
* https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau6.3.011
The second link of the four is a response to the last.
I was sloppy in being too specific in saying removing the clitoral hood was sometimes justified as enhancing oral sex. Now that I think about it, that might be one of the views regarding labial extension, which is often lumped in with FGM but obviously quite different from cutting the clitoral hood. The claims about enhancing sexual pleasure I think largely came from more polemical literature, as well as some English-language African feminist blogs and bulletin boards, and I would suspect those views may be, at least to some extent and in their specificity, recent revisionist justifications. In African discourse there's a reactionary vein that pushes against Western criticisms of traditional African practices, and one of the ways to do that would be to subvert the paternalistic disgust about FGM by explicitly arguing the practice promotes one of the West's other ideals, sex positivity.
To be clear, I'm not trying to defend any of this. Just trying to point out that the West's exceedingly simplistic and categorical perspective hides a very strong cultural prejudice, as well other problematic assumptions about how and why these practices persist.
This sounds like the same sort of bullshit used to promote male circumcision. How about we just stop performing unnecessary surgery on our children? If someone wants to mess with their own junk, they can do it when they become an adult.
If you can imagine that forced genital mutilation without anesthetics lacks negative connotations, as long as it's "for her eventual pleasure".
Good Lord.
Negative connotations and actual negativity are two separate things. Alcohol tends not to have negative connotations whereas things that are better for your health and less addictive, cannabis, magic mushrooms, have negative connotations.
Alcohol is also terrible. Nicotine is terrible. Even caffeine can be terrible if you become too dependent on it without realizing. Harm reduction is a thing that can make things less terrible but most users don't practice it. That's the real terror IMO.
> Negative connotations and actual negativity are two separate things. Alcohol tends not to have negative connotations whereas things that are better for your health and less addictive, cannabis, magic mushrooms, have negative connotations.
This is just legal vs illegal. Which is pretty much how morals are decided these days, especially for the non-autistic / "neurotypical" population
Give it a break. Nothing isolates "neurodivergent" people from the rest of society faster than treating neurotypical people as a morally inferior out-group.
While I have many autistic friends from abusive living situations that were forced to accept how things were, I find that the autistic people I meet still tend to be much more varied than the non-autistic. Though I don't know for sure whether this is a side effect of their neurotype or of their societal treatment.
You omitted "self-reinforced stereotype" from that list.
My view is that circumcision is negative. I disagree that it has negative connotations though.
Do we have different understandings of what connotation means? I would say in most of the western population having a glass of wine in the evening would be seen neutrally. Having a joint less so. I'm not saying having a joint is bad. But connotations are about the unspoken things, I'm not saying it, it's inserted by people based on their biases.
I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Things that society decides are immoral become illegal and visa versa.
Fwiw I'm Autistic, so I don't know if the last comment was aimed at me, and whether I should class it as a compliment.
> My view is that circumcision is negative. I disagree that it has negative connotations though.
It certainly has negative connotations for me. But, if you are saying it does not have negative connotations in general because it is still widely practiced rather than widely condemned, then I would be inclined to agree. But the wording of your comment implied there is essentially no contest whatsoever, which is why I wrote to clarify that IME it's only "most" people who don't have an opinion on it (or maybe even support it), and that I and many I know do have strong opinions against it.
> I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Things that society decides are immoral become illegal and visa versa.
That is absolutely not how e.g. the war on drugs started. For example, LSD can be fairly safe when used responsibly (and basically won't directly kill you), however when the wrong people were having fun with it, it was made illegal to target them. I don't think "society" made this determination; just the then-president. Research into psychedelics is finally starting to carve out specific paths to limited legalization, but I honestly think that safe psychedelics should be OTC, and harm reduction should be an encouraged practice, rather than sort of black-market knowledge that is only discoverable by the savviest users.
> Fwiw I'm Autistic, so I don't know if the last comment was aimed at me, and whether I should class it as a compliment.
Honestly it was mostly aimed at my friend group. I've found it difficult to connect with non-autistics because I primarily deal well with explicit logic. It could be that similar intellects are just formatted differently, but I've been unable to tell if a lack of struggle / lack of awareness of struggle actually equates to comparable skill because I can't seem to interrogate them properly. They're all-but inscrutable to me. And as far as I know, they're the source of most of the surface-level generally-accepted stereotypes that quickly break down or are flat-out wrong. I don't know that they're inferior in any way, but they rarely seem to have anything interesting for me (as that would usually make them neurodivergent).