Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Humanity's Worst Enemy: The Software In Your Head

In our workshop (see previous posts), someone has released on our senses the most devastating poem, a horrible truthful poem written too well to deflect. It’s so good, it ought to be the epigraph of Alice Walker’s book, Warrior Marks--

Which deals with the saddest stupidest most unbelievable phenomenon: a hundred million women mutilated, most of then when they were just children, held down for the knife--

A hundred million women. This isn’t the ancient past. Today.

A hundred million, which is a third of the entire population of the United States, cut up badly in their genitals. Without being mutilated, they can’t be married. It's against the rules.

Make sense?

It’s ritual. Culture.

Yes, indeed, that's the justification. It's their C U L T U R E

(Parts of Africa and the Middle East).

Mothers defend it and support it for their daughters. The victims defend it, once they become adults. The screaming terrified 8-year-old having her clitoris cut off (and also most of her labia) gets no say.

In International debates, this horror is referred to as Female Genital Mutilation.

FGM.

To those who support the practice, it is simply a private procedure within a tribe. "Female circumcision." Anyone who says otherwise is spewing imperialist dogma.

Acacia thorns are used to sew the mutilated vagina up. The maimed flesh fuses over time, leaving only a small hole to urinate. This insures virginity. The insurance, in turn, means that the girl is sanctioned by her tribe and someday can marry.

Infections are common. Agony inevitable when the bride is cut open by her new husband, secure in the chastity of his property, and used to breed.

This is hell on Earth. Hell sneaking into society in the form of sexism.

There is a species of ants where the queen mutilates her daughters’ genitals, which in bugs are referred to as a spermatheca. Spermatheca = bug genitals.

Ants do this. Goddamn ants!

So, there it is. Certain ants and certain humans are the only ones to mutilate their daughters’ genitals.

If the girl doesn’t undergo this scarring torture and give up the pleasure of sex for the rest of her life, she becomes an outcast exile scum.

Women are usually the mutilators. Women hold the girl down while a specially ordained priestess-type cuts her, bleeds her, destroys her special gift of joy from the universe. (see Warrior Marks).

Why do women do this to other women, and even to their daughters? Why do they stand before judges and reporters and justify this in all seriousness, adamantly fighting for their right to butcher?

(Important: Not all survivors of FGM think this way)

They were born into it. They were programmed. This kind of programming could be referred to as:

Negative Inculcation.

Negative Inculcation enslaves minds, fosters nightmares.

You and I are programmed too, but the software is different. We think we are superior but our institutions of higher learning came at the price of genocide, plunder and colonization. We swim in a unseen water of presuppositions.

It is possible to break out and think for yourself. And to teach others.

But you will always be a mouthpiece of imperialist lies to those who support FGM.

That concludes my argument. I think I have proven that cultural programming is amazingly dangerous.

2 comments:

  1. Well, I didn't know what to do. I was hit by this very powerful poem, and I needed to rant. I've used the problem of FGM in my ethics courses for years and many of the students are horrified, though some practically shrug it off, appealing to cultural relativism.

    I need to write something happy!

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