Thursday, June 29, 2006

 

Taking Action for the Women of the World

I always find it interesting to look at the list of “Most Popular” articles in The New York Times online edition—it’s a little window into the preoccupations of the target audience of The Times (educated, upper class, privileged).

For several days now, Number One on the list has been the article “Modern Love: What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage,” Amy Sutherland’s account of how, using techniques she learned at a facility for training wild animals, she overcame ennui and annoyance in her marriage, and trained her husband to behave better.

“The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers,” Sutherland says, “is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

“Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.

“I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.”

Now, I admit that I read this article with interest, and saved it in my Times file so I could refer back to it if needed. Sure, the American wife needs all the advice she can get, and positive feedback seems like a good idea, if nothing terribly novel.

But it just astonishes me that with all that’s going on in the world, Sutherland’s article is the most popular article the Times has printed in the last four days!

It must be because all of us privileged New York Times readers prefer not to think about all the real news that’s been going on these last few days. Who would want to confront the re-ignition of the Israeli-Palestinian war, or the grim statistics coming out of Iraq, or the continued inaction of the world community in the face of genocide in northern Africa? Who would want to contemplate global warming, or pesticide residues in fruit and vegetables, or the accelerating extinction of species on this planet?

The temptation to escape, especially for those of us comfortable enough to be able to do so, is always present. But I stubbornly persist in believing that it’s still not too late to turn this civilization around—that all it takes is sufficient will, and human beings can reverse the tide of destruction we’ve started.

In Oakland last week, I met an inspiring woman who has refused the path of escapism and apathy, and is working hard to improve life for women on this planet—not by “training” their husbands one by one, but by mounting an aggressive campaign to make family planning accessible to everyone.

Jane Roberts, a retired tennis coach and French teacher, read in the news one morning in 2002 that the Bush Administration had reneged on its commitment to contribute $34 million to the UNFPA, the population fund at the United Nations. Most of us, reading that, would have muttered a quiet curse and gone on to the next story.

Not Jane Roberts. Working with Lois Abraham, she launched a campaign called “The 34 Million Friends of UNFPA,” which is pledged to raise $34 million from Americans, $1 at a time.

“I knew I had to do something when the decision came down from Secretary of State Colin Powell on July 22, 2002,” Jane recalls in her book 34 Million Friends of the Women of the World. “A letter to my Congressman wasn’t enough. A letter to the editor wasn’t enough either. A brainstorm came to me at 3 a.m. as I lay awake, anger simmering in my brain. Why not, I said to myself, ask 34 million of my fellow Americans who appreciate their contraceptive choices and doctors in the delivery room, to chip in a dollar?”

The UNFPA was initially simply bemused by the idea, but agreed to allow Jane and Lois to circulate a letter on the web calling for donations. Stirling Scruggs, former director of the Information, Executive Board and Resource Mobilization division of UNFPA, recalled that “some in UNFPA were doubtful about such a grassroots movement. They thought it would last a few weeks, and that the two women would tire and it would end quickly. That is until bags of mail started piling up at UNFPA’s mailroom.”

Within months, the campaign reached its first $150,000, most of it coming in cash, in small bills. Now at the four-year mark, Jane Roberts and Lois Abraham have raised over $3 million for UNFPA, and the work goes on.

When I had dinner with Jane in Oakland, both of us exhausted after two days of intense participation at the National Women’s Studies Association conference, we talked about our mutual passion for improving the conditions for the women of the world, especially those women who have the least, in terms of education, health care, and opportunities for advancement. My admiration for her grew as we talked.

This is a woman in her sixties, who could be spending her time reading novels by the pool, but instead has chosen to trot around the country and around the world trying to galvanize others to take action to give women more control over their reproductive health, and to combat violence against women, female genital mutilation, rape as a weapon of war, early marriage, obstetric fistula, and other grave problems that women face today.

It has been proven that as women’s education and social standing goes up, fertility goes down. Women who are able to exert control over their reproductive health almost always want to do so—the grim statistic, quoted by Jane Roberts in her book, that around the world 40 women per minute seek unsafe abortions, speaks volumes.

“The fact that clandestine abortions are rampant shows utter contempt for the lives and full humanity of the female sex,” says Roberts. The UNFPA does not fund abortions, but it does fund reproductive health care and contraception all over the world.

Maybe we can’t do anything today about ending the violence in the Middle East, or stopping the genocide in Darfur. But there is something we can do for the women of the world. We can become one of their 34 million friends by contributing to the 34 Million Friends Campaign. Surely we can all spare $1?


Saturday, June 24, 2006

 

Don't Miss "An Inconvenient Truth"

Al Gore’s new documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” is really a must-see. Like Michael Moore’s documentaries, Gore's film is an unabashed polemic. He is determined to raise public awareness about the impending global climate crisis, and he does an amazing job at making and presenting his case.

The film is based on a slide show presentation that Gore has delivered, he says in the film, “more than a thousand times” in towns and cities across the world. There is also a companion book which has just come out, containing many of the same images from the slide show and film, and going into slightly more depth on some of the issues.

Basically, in all three media, Gore’s message is the same: human activity on the planet is endangering the global ecosystem in ways that may quickly become irreversible.

To me, the scariest image he presents is the chart of carbon dioxide levels over the past 650,000 years (as determined by scientists taking ice core records in Antarctica). Laid out before you is a record of previous Ice Ages and warm spells, which occur at fairly regular intervals every 100,000 years or so. At no time in the past 650,000 years did the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere exceed 300 parts per million.

Today, Gore shows, we are rapidly closing in on 400 parts per million. In less than 50 years, if the current rate of global warming continues unabated, our atmosphere will contain more than 600 parts per million of carbon dioxide.

“There is no fact, date or number [in this chart] that is controversial in any way or in dispute by anybody,” Gore asserts in the book commentary that accompanies this dramatic chart. “To the extent that there is a controversy at all, it is that a few people in some of the less responsible coal, oil, and utility companies say, ‘So what? That’s not going to cause any problem.’ But if we allow this to happen, it would be deeply and unforgivably immoral. It would condemn the coming generations to a catastrophically diminished future.”

Gore’s presentation goes on to show how we can measure demonstrably that global warming is occurring rapidly (a point also shown by Elizabeth Kolbert in her series of New Yorker articles on the topic, now published as a book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury, 2006).

He points to 2005 as the hottest year since temperatures were reliably recorded, in 1880, and argues that it is no accident that we’ve seen a surge in violent storms like Katrina as the oceans heat up.

He shows, with satellite images, photographs and charts, that the polar ice caps are indeed rapidly melting, along with all the remaining glaciers and snow-capped peaks in the world. If the current rate of melting ice continues, the oceans will rise 20 feet, deluging many low-lying countries and changing the coastlines of every continent. Millions of people who rely on glacial melt to feed the rivers that provide water for drinking and a multitude of other uses will find themselves acutely short of fresh water within the next 50 years.

Coral reefs will die off, touching off imbalances in the entire ocean-based food chain. “We are facing,” Gore says, “what biologists are beginning to describe as a mass extinction crisis, with a rate of extinction now 1,000 times higher than the normal background rate.”

Diseases and infestations are becoming ever more severe—one dramatic photograph Gore shows is of a few of the “14 million acres of spruce trees in Alaska and British Columbia that have been killed by bark beetles, whose rapid spread was once slowed by colder and longer winters.”

As the film goes on, the news gets worse and worse. You can tell from Gore’s face that he doesn’t enjoy being the bearer of such bad tidings. You can tell that the only reason he’s up there in front of us doing his damnedest to get our attention is because he cares so deeply for the planet and all its denizens, including us, that he feels he has no choice.

Indeed, in the film Gore comes off as more human than he ever appeared during his presidential campaign in 2000, and also more heroic. He is a lonely prophet for our times, and he is someone we need to be listening too.

My only disappointment with Gore's crusade is that he does not go far enough in casting blame on the politicians and corporate leaders who have gotten us into this mess. He talks about the logging of the rain forest and shows us dramatic pictures of clearcuts in places like Washington state or the Amazon, but doesn’t talk about the timber companies that have lobbied hard to maintain their right to clearcut, and played hardball with activists who have sought to bring attention to their destructive activities (see, for example, Julia Butterfly Hill’s foundation website for information, Circle of Life.org).

He talks about destructive mining and agricultural practices, but again, points no fingers at the companies who are the worst culprits. No mention is made of giants like Monsanto, for example, which is behind the spread of GMO seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides through the world.

He does take the Bush administration to task for putting greedy short-term gains above longterm, sustainable energy solutions. Officials in the Bush-Cheney administration, Gore says, “have attempted to silence scientists working for the government who, like James Hansen at NASA, have tried to warn about the extreme danger we are facing. They have appointed ‘skeptics’ recommended by oil companies to key positions, from which they can prevent action against global warming. As our principal negotiators in international forums, these skeptics can prevent agreement on a worldwide response to global warming,” as has happened with the Kyoto Treaty, which Gore helped to draft. The Kyoto Treaty has been ratified by 132 nations, but not by the United States or Australia.

Both the book and the film end on a note of hope, which is most welcome after the depressing and shocking information Gore has presented. Gore shows that with the implementation of fairly simple policy measures, including increased vehicle fuel efficiency, more efficient use of electricity in heating and cooling systems, increased reliance on renewable energy technologies like wind and biofuels, and stronger pollution controls on power plants and industrial activities, we could reduce carbon dioxide emissions to a point below 1970s levels.

What’s needed above all is the political will to accomplish the changes in policy, and that’s where we, the citizens come in. Both book and film end with a long list of what we can do to work towards change. All of this information is available on the accompanying website, Climate Crisis.org.

Truly this is an issue that puts all our other concerns in stark perspective. “This is what’s at stake,” Gore concludes. “Our ability to live on planet Earth—to have a future as a civilization.”

We cannot afford to let things slide any further.

PS: After this renewed and much more intimate exposure to Al Gore Jr., I would vote for him again for President in a heartbeat. Will he run? Could he win? It remains to be seen.

PPS: An interested, related video discussion is available from YouTube.com.


Tuesday, June 20, 2006

 

Living Feminism at the NWSA

Just back from a trip to northern California for the National Women's Studies Association conference. The NWSA is the only national organization dedicated to Women's Studies professors and Women's Center directors, and for me it was exhilarating to be in such hardy feminist company for a few days. Being an "out" feminist is often a lonely post, and women's studies is hardly the most admired academic discipline, so to feel the power of numbers and solidarity was definitely invigorating.

The conference opened with the keynote from Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's beautiful young daughter, author of the anthology To Be Real, the very first of the "Third Wave" anthologies of the 1990's, and Black, White and Jewish, a memoir of growing up bi-racial, bi-coastal, and bi-cultural in the 1980's. Rebecca is a practicing Buddhist (she named her son Tenzin, after the Dalai Lama), and in good Buddhist fashion she did not give many answers, but she did pose some interesting questions.

She posited that the feminist movement has been "plagued by divisiveness," and is now "stalled." Part of the blame, she said, is the movement's "unhealthy success model," wherein "women who are successful politically are broken personally." It is crucial to the movement that:
Each of these points names a familiar problem of the feminist movement over the years. The NWSA itself has long been criticized by women of color for not being inclusive enough. The question of how to bring men in effectively as allies remains unsolved. There is a tendency in the feminist movement, as in many other movements, to gravitate around a celebrity "star," and give up individual agency in the spell of her orbit. And Rebecca Walker, as a "movement child" who criticized her own parents pretty harshly in her memoir for their neglect of family in favor of political engagement, came out strongly on the final point: that "children cannot survive on political theory."

Walker's advice for how to address these issues was unsatisfying for many in the audience. She was criticized for focusing too much on the biological family; several women stood up to argue that the biological family needs to be redefined, that ties of affiliation (the family we choose, rather the one we were born into) are at least as important as biological ties.

Walker stood her ground. "We have become too invested in not talking about the power of the biological family," she said. "The deconstructed family can be over-idealized."

As she went on, Walker injected a note of urgency to her speech, which was largely delivered verbatim, without reliance on notes. "I'm very concerned about the survival of humanity, and about the survival of what makes us human--compassion," she said. "The feminist movement is behind the times now, we need a true visionary plan of action to make us relevant again. And it's important to focus on the children or we're going to lose them, as we are losing them now."

Drawing on the work of her mentor bell hooks, whom she invoked several times, Walker argued for a position of "radical openness" to new ideas, and a focus on results. "We must assume responsibility for communicating our agenda, and own our power to create language that will have the impact we want," she said. She suggested that feminists focus on "communicating with people outside our rarified environment," in strong, accessible language that will help us "reach the Baptists in Arkansas--that's who we need to reach."

At the other end of the conference, and in an entirely different register, was the talk given by M. Jacqui Alexander, the dynamic Black Caribbean feminist now teaching at the University of Toronto. Alexander's talk, delivered in an incantatory style that had the audience roaring with appreciation, focused on the specifics of our political moment, and how feminists need to respond.

"U.S. feminists have been neglectful in taking on the state," Alexander asserted. "Do we want a free-market feminism, or a liberatory feminism? The real question is, since we know that there is no theory that is not autobiography, are we prepared to live differently?"

This question echoed Walker's focus on "living feminism," but where Rebecca talked about giving time to her child, Alexander's talk was dedicated to the bigger picture.

"Who should be the subjects of feminism? The most marginalized--that is to say, the lives of most of the people in the world," Alexander insisted. "We don't have to rescue Third World women, or use them as case studies--we need solidarity, and it doesn't happen behind our desks."

Alexander picked up on the remarks of an earlier speaker, Native American activist Andrea Smith, who described American higher education as "the academic industrial complex." "Are we going to continue to disappear into detention centers in Women's Studies?" Alexander demanded. "And what about the militarized zones inside ourselves? Who is denied entry there?

"The academic industrial complex requires a profound silence that it defines as collegiality," she said to loud applause. "The question is, what are the costs? We chase citizenship and entry at institutions that want to deny us entry," she continued, alluding quietly to her own unsuccessful battle for tenure at The New School in New York. "We can be disappeared instantaneously on our own campuses. The constant potential for disappearance should not make us disappear others, and we should not disappear ourselves.

"The question we need to ask ourselves is, what kind of patriot are you going to be?"

Alexander concluded by calling for what she called a "poetics of landscape," in which feminists "tell the stories of our lives, in order to create habitable spaces where the analytic, the political and the divine can all mingle. We need to allow ourselves to be moved sufficiently to act," she said. "We need to lay siege to Empire--to shame it, to mock it, and ultimately to transform it with the fiery power of our own stories. "

Taken together, Walker and Alexander re-validated the longstanding feminist mantra that "the personal is political." We cannot "do politics" in the world without starting at home--home defined both as our own families and communities, and our nation in the global community.

At the very last plenary session of the conference, Julia Sudbury, a young Black transnational feminist whose personal trajectory has taken her from Nigeria, to London, the U.S., Canada and back again to Mills College in Oakland CA, gave a rousing talk about the dangers of Empire, at home and abroad. Discussing the "transnational military prison industrial complex," she decried "penal warehousing" as a means of dealing with unemployed youth, with $60 billion a year spent on prisons in the U.S. alone.

"We need to remind ourselves that all social justice issues are feminist issues," she said. "Our task as Women's Studies teachers is to engage students as agents of resistance, here, where they are. We need to challenge them to understand their position in Empire, and translate their anger into action."

Interestingly, Sudbury ended on the same note as Alexander did: invoking the spiritual as part and parcel of the political. "Bringing the sacred into political vision is a transgressive act today," she said. "We can't abandon the language of the sacred to the state-sanctioned religions. We need to come out spiritually as radical political people, to our students and to others. We don't have to leave ourselves at the classroom door."

All I can say to that is--Amen!

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

 

The Personal as Political, from Global to Local

Lately it feels like life is unfolding on three distinct levels. Let me give you a snapshot from each one.

On the global level, I am aware of increasing violence and dispair every day. Random missiles fly between Israel and Palestine, knocking out families on the beach or little girls on their way to school. Howls of vengeance rise up from the smoking ruins, and mingle with the screams of suffering civilians in nearby Iraq, where the killing of bystanders has become so routine the foreign press hardly bothers to report it anymore. In Guantanamo, desperate hunger strikers are tied to chairs and forcefed through their nostrils. Over in Africa, millions of children die each year from totally preventable diseases, while their parents succumb by the millions to the scourge of HIV/AIDS.

Then there's the national level. Here in the U.S. cancer is epidemic, asthma and diabetes are on the rise, and the drug companies are making out like bandits, selling us not only chemotherapy, bronchodilators and insulin, but also anti-depressants, sleep aids, and Ritalin by the ton for our stressed-out children. Wages are stagnant and consumer debt is ever-rising, as our taxes go to pay the war machine rather than the social good of our people. The politicians seem ever more plastic, ever less genuine--the real ones, like Howard Dean, who was accompanied on the campaign trail by a wife in sneakers, seem doomed to failure, while the most diabolical, like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove, go laughing all the way to the bank.

And then there's the personal level, where something totally different is going on. For the past couple of weeks I've been focused on celebrating my firstborn son's graduation from middle school (a big deal, as he's leaving the Waldorf school that has nurtured him since the age of three, the teacher who has guided him since first grade, and the classmates who have become his family). I've hosted my in-laws from Mexico for a week, and worked at odd moments to prepare my paper for the National Women's Studies Association convention, which I'll attend this weekend. I've been taking advantage of brief breaks in the prevailing rainy weather to plant my vegetable garden, weed out the perennial beds, and get some geraniums into pots on the deck, and I'm trying to find homes for the two affectionate, hungry stray cats that have taken up residence on my porch. Tonight I'll celebrate my mother's 66th birthday with her, and next week begins a round of routine doctors' visits for the kids.

Compared to the global and national levels, where everything seems to be spinning out of control, in a constant state of crisis, my personal preoccupations seem so middle-class and pedestrian. But I am also aware of working hard in my personal life to build a protective cocoon of normalcy, seeking to counteract the constant bombardment of negativity emanating from the larger world.

Psychologist Kaethe Weingarten of Harvard, in her book Common Shock, talks about how witnessing violence impacts us, even if the violence is not done directly to us. All of us who bear witness to the grisly battles unfolding on the world stage feel something akin to post-traumatic stress syndrome, she maintains, which we must work through and try to channel into positive action, lest it fester within us and turn to self-destructive poison.

I may not be out sabotaging whaling ships with Greenpeace, or blowing up SUVs with ELF, or even standing on the White House steps with the women of Code Pink, but I am with them all in spirit as I seed my cilantro and plant zinnias in the backyard, as I read a chapter from Narnia to my seven-year-old at bedtime, and drive my older son to a rendezvous with his very first girlfriend. I am constantly aware of my own miraculous good fortune, to be able to peacefully raise my family and plant my flowers while billions of people suffer "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" on a daily basis.

It's clear to me that those of us who live charmed lives like mine have a responsibility to do our utmost to put our good fortunes at the service of others. We all have gifts to make use of and to offer to the world. And the world-- she needs us now.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

 

Witch Hunt at Duke? Really?

Conservative columnist David Brooks of The New York Times has really outdone himself this time with his latest column on the scandal over the alleged violent sexual assault of a Black woman at a lacrosse team party at Duke University last winter.

When the story first broke, the details were indeed scandalously unsavory. “Officials are investigating the incident as first-degree forcible rape, common law robbery, first-degree kidnapping, first-degree sexual offense and felonious strangulation,” reported The Times on May 16, 2006.

That’s right, forcible rape and strangulation. If you remember, the woman (a dancer who was paid to perform at a party held at a house rented by three team members) was forced into the bathroom and held in place by her neck while several lacrosse team members brutally gang-banged her.

According to The Times, “The woman told the police that she and another woman went to the house expecting to dance for 5 men at a bachelor party and instead found more than 40....She said that almost immediately upon performing, the men started taunting them with racial epithets. The women left shortly thereafter…but they were persuaded to return after one of the men apologized.”

When they returned to the house, The Times reported, "Someone closed the door to the bathroom where she was and said, 'Sweetheart you can't leave.' "

Enter David Brooks. “We now know,” he proclaims sententiously, “that the Duke lacrosse players were not the dumb jocks they were portrayed to be. The team has a 100 percent graduation rate.” This is hardly persuasive information to those of us in academia, who know how common grade inflation is, and how athletes can be fawned upon at schools like Duke where sports reign supreme.

But wait, there’s more: these upstanding young men have also been praised by “the groundskeeper and the equipment manager,” Brooks announces; these individuals “described the current team as among the best groups of young men they have worked with during their long tenures at Duke.”

Here we see Brooks busying himself with digging up unimpressive praise from the custodial staff at Duke, while wasting no ink whatsoever on the Black rape victim. Incredibly, Brooks has managed to write a full-length column with only one buried reference to the crime for which three team players, including the captain, have now been indicted.

His only mention of the word “rape” is in paragraph eleven (of 14 paragraphs total), where he says offhandedly: “There may have been a rape that night, but it didn’t grow out of a culture of depravity.”

Who said anything about “a culture of depravity,” Mr. Brooks?

If anyone is engaging in a witch hunt, it’s Brooks himself. Listen to his Inquisitor’s snarl:

“When you look at the hyper-politicized assertions made by Jesse Jackson, Houston Baker and dozens of activists and professors, you see how mighty social causes like the civil rights movement, feminism and the labor movement have spun off a series of narrow social prejudices among the privileged class.”

With one masterful stroke of his pen, Brooks dismisses the work of the three most important social movements of modern times, as having apparently degenerated into no more than “narrow social prejudices” against poor, misunderstood kids like the lacrosse players at Duke.

The fine, upstanding members of the lacrosse team, Brooks says, “were male, mostly white and mostly members of the suburban bourgeois middle class (39 of 54 recent graduates went on to careers in finance. For many on the tenured left, bashing people like that is all that’s left of their once-great activism.”

Well excuse me! In my book, holding young men accountable for their actions is simply the ethical thing to do, and it happens to be the legal thing to do as well. It has nothing to do with “bashing” anyone, and last I looked, there were no witches burning on any pyres.

Dare I suggest that if it had been a golden-haired suburban bourgeois middle class white girl who was raped at the team party, David Brooks and his ilk might not be quite so cavalier about the whole thing? And heaven forbid, if it had been a Black athlete who had done the strangling and raping and sodomizing—Brooks would undoubtedly be singing quite a different tune!

As it stands, the boys’ defenders, Brooks included, are following the standard procedure in these situations: start out by smearing and blaming the victim; then ignore her while glorifying the perpetrators; and above all, slow things down until the case loses momentum, the unpleasantness blows over, and the boys can get on with their gilded lives.

It turns out that the mother of David Evans, the indicted team captain, is chairwoman of the Ladies Professional Golf Association board of directors and founder of the Evans Capitol Group, a Washington lobbying firm. David’s dad is a Washington lawyer. The proud mother accompanied her son to the indictment hearing wearing on her suit lapel a large button emblazoned with her son's photograph and jersey number.

You can just hear the sweet sound of Scotch glasses clinking at the club, as the old boys’ and girls’ network rallies around the kiddies, who were, after all, “just having some fun.”

Tell that to their victim, a single mother who was dancing to support her two children while attending classes at the state university. Fun is hardly the word.


Friday, June 02, 2006

 

Medical Study Confirms Severe Health Risks of FGC

Some important news for millions of women in Africa broke today, but you have to peer pretty deep into the recesses of The New York Times to find it.

Results of the first major study of women who have undergone female genital cutting have been released in the respectable British medical journal The Lancet, and the study confirms what women's rights advocates have been saying for years: that FGC is a serious health issue, not just a benign cultural practice that ought to be left alone.

The study was conducted with the cooperation of 28,000 women in six African countries, from 2001 through 2003. There are currently 100 million circumcised women in Africa, and approximately 2 million girls are cut each year, usually in unsanitary conditions without anesthesia or hygienic medical equipment.

The cutting ranges from full excision, where the labia and clitoris are totally removed, with infibulation, in which the vaginal opening is sewn up leaving only a small hole for menstrual blood to escape, to a modified procedure where just the clitoris is removed, or even just the tip of the clitoris rather than the whole organ. In many North African countries, excision is performed on more than 75% of young girls.

Why is this done? The most succinct answer is simply, "tradition." It's always been done, and is considered essential to render girls marriageable, which is of course their main function in the societies that practice FGC most religiously. Anthropologists who have looked more deeply into the custom say it has something to do with removing the "male" side of women (the clitoris resembling a miniature penis), so that they will be more docile.

When full excision and infibulation, the procedure serves as an effective chastity belt for young girls, since intercourse becomes excruciatingly painful. I recently read an oral history by a Somali woman, who spoke movingly of the pain of being "devirgined," as she put it; not by her husband, in her case, but by a rapist.

But the largescale study released today provides more than anecdotal evidence of the dangers and pain of FGC.

Elizabeth Rosenthal reported today in The Times that "The study found that the women who had undergone genital cutting of any degree of severity and their babies were more likely to die during childbirth. More extensive genital cutting produced the highest rates of maternal and infant death during childbirth, even many years later.

"The lesser forms of cutting caused about a 20 percent increase in death rates, while extensive procedures caused increases of more than 50 percent.

"By almost all measures studied by the World Health Organization, a history of genital cutting put both mother and baby at risk. Mothers who had had the procedure had longer hospital stays, experienced more blood loss, and were more likely to need a Caesarean section. Babies were nearly twice as likely to require resuscitation at birth.

"The researchers noted that the study almost certainly underestimated the potential for death and damage, because it only tracked women who delivered their babies in hospitals.

"Many women in the African nations where genital cutting is practiced deliver their babies at home, where typically it is not possible to treat medical complications like severe bleeding or to resuscitate an ailing newborn."

One of the most frightening things about this "tradition" is that it is perpetuated by women themselves. Older women do the cutting of young girls (sometimes as young as 5 years old) who are brought to the knife by their own mothers. Alice Walker has written powerfully of this phenomenon in her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, required reading for anyone interested in this issue.

In the course of discussing FGC in my global feminisms classes, I've come to realize that Western women also engage in harmful cultural practices that we pass on to our daughters unthinkingly. Like Chinese women binding their daughters' feet, we accept high heels as "sexy," and pass on this attitude to our children. We also accept the "thin is beautiful" myth, and smile indulgently as our adolescent daughters begin the first of a lifetime of diets. There are undoubtedly many other more subtle cultural practices that we condone without even thinking about their potentially harmful effects.

But female genital cutting does seem like a tradition that's on another level entirely. Cutting off the clitoris, a woman's organ of sexual pleasure? Sewing up the vaginal opening, so that a man must "break in" in order to have sex with his wife? Condemning young women to a lifetime of high risk during pregnancy, in cultures that regard motherhood as the highest calling for women?

Elizabeth Rosenthal doesn't even mention the worst side effect of FGC, fistulas, in which the walls separating the vagina from the urethra and/or bowels are torn during the difficult childbirth that is routine for a "circumcised" woman. Although these tears can be repaired with operations, such medical care is beyond the reach of most African women, who are condemned to a lifetime of ostracization because they can no longer control their bladders or bowels. How awful is that?

I am glad to see that a largescale study has finally been undertaken; glad to see the issue receiving mention in the mainstream press, however buried behind more pressing concerns like the impact of of bone growth drugs on jaw disease (placed on today's front page of The Times, even though the problem affects only 1 to 10 percent of the 500,000 American cancer patients who take the drugs because their disease is affecting their bones).

Some two million African girls come under the circumciser's knife every year. It's now been medically proven that this practice is almost unbelievably harmful.

What is being done? U.N. agencies like the World Health Organization, UNICEF and UNIFEM have been working on this issue for the past ten years or more, aiding local women's groups in providing more educational awareness, as well as pressuring governments to ban the practice (Senegal leads the way, the first African nation to ban excision). American women who care can support the work of these agencies, as well as other NGOs like Women for Women International, which is raising money now to open an office in Sudan.

There's every reason to hope and expect that this practice will come, in our lifetimes, to be relegated to the closet of abandoned curiosities, like foot-binding and lobotomies for "hysterics." The harder we push for it, the faster that day will come.

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