UnHerd
There’s no silver lining to FGM
As Elon Musk longs to conquer Mars, so academics in the humanities dream of putting their footprints all over the English dictionary. The latest target is Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). According to a new article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, we should rebrand this as the less alarming “genital practices”. To use the word “mutilation” is to unfairly stigmatise the vast spectrum of bodily refurbs that exist out there, many of them personally enriching. Why let a few tortured young girls, permanently maimed by more drastic interventions, cast the rich tapestry of genital remodelling into disrepute?
Progressives are notoriously fond of renaming negatively-coded social practices to make them sound more palatable: “assisted dying” for euthanasia, or “sex work” for prostitution, for instance. The usual strategy is to take the most benign example of the practice possible, then make that the central paradigm. And so we get images of affluent middle-class people floating off to consensual oblivion at the hands of a doctor, rather than hungry, homeless depressives. We are told to think of students harmlessly supplementing their degrees with a bit of escort work, not drug-addicted mothers standing on street corners. Perpetually gloomy about human behaviour in other areas, when it comes to sex and death the mood becomes positively Pollyanna-ish.
https://archive.ph/3RnLu
