From the Boston Herald:

A Boston man who failed the Massachusetts bar exam has filed a federal lawsuit claiming his refusal to answer a test question - related to gay marriage - caused him to flunk the test.

Stephen Dunne, 30, is suing the Massachusetts Board of Bar Examiners and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, claiming the “inappropriate” test question violated his religious convictions and his First Amendment rights. Answering the question, Dunne claims, would imply he endorsed gay marriage and parenting.

The suit also challenges the constitutionality of the 2003 SJC ruling that made Massachusetts the nation’s first state to legalize same-sex marriage.

Dunne, who describes himself as a Christian and a Democrat, is seeking $9.75 million in damages and wants a jury to prohibit the Board of Bar Examiners from considering the question in his passage of the exam and to order it removed from all future exams.

The lunacy of Dunne’s position is obvious; because a lawyer disagrees with the law doesn’t exempt her from knowing the law. Dunne’s moral claim — that answering a factual question about a law implies agreement with the law — is similarly groundless.

This illustrates the sense of entitlement held by many fundamentalist Christians today. Consider the fundamentalist pharmacists and emergency room doctors who refuse to fulfill the duties of their job, but push for laws exempting them from the consequences of that decision; or the Christians who have objected to biology exams that ask questions about evolution.

No one can force Dunne to answer an exam question he prefers to leave blank. But being Christian shouldn’t exempt Dunne from having to pass the bar exam if he wants to practice law. Unfortunately, Dunne’s attitude — which can be summed up as “let’s make a special law exempting Christians from the ordinary consequences of not meeting requirements” — seems increasingly common among right-wing Christians.

UPDATE: Zuzu at Majikthise continues the mockery. As does Daddy, Papa and Me.

On Pandagon, Amanda relates what she calls some good news: Egypt has outlawed FGM.

From the article:

Officially the practice, which affects both Muslim and Christian women in Egypt and goes back to the time of the pharoahs, was banned in 1997 but doctors were allowed to operate “in exceptional cases”.

On Thursday, Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali decided to ban every doctor and member of the medical profession, in public or private establishments, from carrying out a clitoridectomy, a ministry press official told AFP.

On the Pandagon thread, a commenter called Dan writes: “Obviously, banning FGM is always a step in the right direction…”

I am not convinced that this is obvious. Nor am I necessarily convinced that this outcome is good news.

Some Background
One thing that one learns in the study of anthropology is that culture is a holistic entity. That means that you can’t split it up into tiny bits and interact with those bits piece by piece. You can’t hold up — say — dowry burnings and say “this is what dowry burning is, this is what it means” outside the context of the rest of the culture, anymore than you could hold up “I Love Lucy” to people who didn’t understand Western gender roles or Western materialism or a Western sense of humor and expect them to understand it.

Female genital surgeries (FGS) are the same way; they exist within a cultural context that gives them meaning. The cultural contexts are different, so the meanings are different.

Let me take a brief digression to deal with the issue of terminology. I’m going to call the procedures FGS, which is the term that an anthropologist friend of mine favors when he teaches Intro to Anth. FGS is not a perfect term. However, it is an attempt to ameliorate some of the problems with other terms. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a term that many African women, and others, object to as stifling conversation because the term itself is alienating and inflammatory. Female circumcision is inaccurate, and leads to a false equivalency between male and female circumcision since it creates an ersatz linguistic link between the two procedures.* FGS is an attempt at a middle ground.

Female genital surgeries exist in many different forms, in many different cultural contexts. Here are some of the physical manifestations of the surgery:

• Nicking of the clitoris or removing the tip of the clitoris - relatively unusual
• Clitorodectomy - the most common form of FGS, involving removal of the clitoris. Often practiced along with the removal of the labia minora. May or may not be accompanied by a procedure intended to kill the clitoral nerve, such as pressing hot needles into the affected area.
• Infibulation - the removal of the clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora. The inner walls of the vagina are scraped and then sewn together, leaving a hole as small as a woman’s pinky finger. This procedure can make menstruation and urination very difficult and lead to an increased probability of health complications like uterine prolapse. Tough, inelastic scar tissue is unyielding, making birth a dangerous process. Infibulated women must be cut open for sex and birth, and are often resewn afterward.

FGS are also done for a variety of reasons. Each culture that practices FGS will be practicing its own variation — in terms of what the surgery consists of, and why it is done. For this reason, it’s very difficult to talk about FGS as a monolith. And there’s a good reason for that. FGS are not a monolith.

For instance, it’s not uncommon to encounter feminists arguing that FGM is done to eliminate female sexual pleasure, or to prevent women from cheating. FGS are not done solely for either of these reasons, although they are some of the reasons stated by some cultures.

For the Kikuyu in Kenya, who practice clitorodectomy, FGS is practiced as a rite of passage in order to create a more visible separation between men and women. The clitoris, or masculine part, is removed to make the woman more womanly (conversely, the foreskin which is seen as being like the labia, is removed to make men more manly). Therefore, any attempts to eliminate FGS among the Kikuyu will have to react to these cultural motivations.

It would be inappropriate for the same solutions to be attempted among the Kikuyu as would be used in infibulation-practicing East African countries like Ethiopia and Somalia, countries that are very patriarchal and have clear interests in establishing inheritance laws. Unlike the FGS practiced by the Kikuyu, Ethiopian and Somalian infibulation appears to arise from an interest in protecting paternity rights (Carolyn Martin Shaw). They want to make sure that inheritance goes to genetic sons. Women - often upper-class women - bear the brunt of this (as they did in Europe with chastity belts, in the middle east with seclusion, in China with footbinding) because the patriarchy (supported by both men and women) views them as vessels for heirs. Reducing their ability to become pregnant by men who are not their husbands makes it more likely that inheritance will go to genetic heirs. Cultural practices grow around this desire. Later, these practices are fetishized.

Clitorodectomy and infibulation are both practiced by some cultures that believe the touch of a woman’s uncircumcized genitals will sap a man of his ability to hold an erection, cause hydrocephally, and/or kill any infant the woman bears. This myth is enduring. You may think that decades of interaction with white women who are uncircumcized and yet able to bear children would have shaken the myth, but this is often not the case. White women often choose not to bear children or to bear very few children, which means that white women are often seen as infertile. Thus it is possible for African women from FGS-practicing cultures to interact with uncircumcized white women and still believe that circumcision is necessary for fertility.

The point of all this is: FGS is not something that exists in isolation. It exists for particular reasons. You don’t get rid of those reasons by changing the law. All you do is create a situation in which the reasons still exist (need for a rite of passage, to ensure paternity, to ensure fertility), but the traditional method of meeting those needs has been outlawed.

Laws Against FGS Analogized to Laws Against Rape

On a Feministe thread about the ban, Jill writes in defense of the law. “I don’t think anyone is saying FGM is going to disappear,” she writes, acknowledging that the ban will not be a cure. She goes on to say, “But it is important that they’ve outlawed it, since that reflects a profound social shift, and it allows people to be prosecuted for it… Rape laws don’t get rid of rape, but I’d rather have them than not.”

I think Jill is erring in comparing FGS to rape. FGS is a culturally sanctioned, overt part of how the society functions. Rape is at best a covert part of our cultural function. While it holds up patriarchy by limiting women’s movements, it also subverts patriarchy because it is a threat to paternal property. FGS is not like that.

In my opinion, a better analogy would be to compare FGS to - say — capture marriage as its practiced in Nepal, in which a young man kidnaps a young woman and marries her by force. To western eyes, these marriages look superficially abhorrent (and they’re certainly not 100% good). But we’re missing the subtleties of the capture marriages. These marriages are often arranged before hand and approved by both families as a way of allowing a young couple to marry when they do not have the financial resources to put on a huge wedding. In many (I think most) capture marriages, the woman is not actually in danger, or experiencing surprise; she feigns both ritualistically. However, the bride is not always told of the capture marriage beforehand. Capture marriages are a culturally sanctioned process which serves particular culturally sanctioned purposes (allowing a way for the children of families who have fallen on hard times to marry), and which puts the interest of families above the interests of the woman.

It would be possible to make laws against capture marriage, in ostensible defense of the woman’s independence. However, the kinds of laws that tend to get enacted in situations like these are made with a western gaze. We see the surface effect of a capture marriage and apply it to known situations — the biblical Sabine women of Roman mythology, for instance. We aren’t looking at the reasons why capture marriages exist, or how they are rooted in the culture. Addressing the symptom by making capture marriages illegal may actually make the situation worse for women.

And this is what we have seen, time and time again, with regard to legal remedy for FGS.

A Brief Overview of Some Historical Consequences of Outlawing FGS

Missionaries who got down to Africa really didn’t like FGS. Well, I don’t either. Many of them did what seems like the logical thing to do when you are in ostensible control of a group of people who are doing something that you think is a major violation of human rights, moral decency, and God’s law. They decided to ban it.

Early bans had a number of consequences (not all of which occurred in all places).

• Circumcision began to be performed on younger and younger girls. Because it was less likely that missionaries or western colonial agents would be messing in the lives of infant or very young girls, and because infants and very young girls would be less likely to understand what was going on well enough to discuss it with missionaries or western colonial agents, it made sense to do it on younger girls. (Here, again, we reach the problem with discussing FGS as a monolith. Some cultures started out performing FGS on younger girls. But many didn’t, and many of those started performing the surgeries on younger and younger girls.)

  Why is this a problem for women? Among other things, it decreases the likelihood of sexual function. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya, circumcision rituals were proceded with kinds of genital stimulation and body play that appear to have been intended to teach women how to orgasm once they had been cut. Adolescent girls and boys would wrap their bodies in tight strips of leather and rub up on one another. This kind of all-body stimulation is likely to have been instructive in helping women adjust to the altered physical sensations of a circumcized body. When circumcisions are done at a younger age, these kinds of rituals are likely to decline or disappear altogether.

  Women are also much more likely to acheive sexual pleasure after circumcision if they have orgasmed before circumcision. This is, obviously, more likely to be the case in girls who are adolescents than girls who are toddlers or infants.

  Circumcisions and younger ages also contribute to:

• The destruction of social practices that surround circumcision, such as coming of age rituals, that provide context and meaning to the procedure. These contexts may not have anything to do with sexual pleasure (which is why I’m making this its own category), but are likely to have to do with community building and the function of a healthy culture. Destroying these rituals, but KEEPING the circumcision, is the opposite of good. The better option, of course, is to figure out how to keep the rituals while changing their object (as some activists have worked on doing).
• Circumcision was often driven underground, to be done in private, furtive spaces, which makes it difficult for the procedures to be done in clean, healthy ways that minimize risk to the girls.

Perhaps the most important effect of banning FGS is that it created a dichotomy, the effects of which activists are still dealing with today. It underlined the idea that female genital surgeries are African, and not practicing female genital surgeries is American. Not to practice female genital surgery is to capitulate to colonialists. To practice FGS is to be genuinely African.

When Western feminists insist on framing the discourse about FGS on our terms, we make this problem worse. When we emphasize statements like, “African women are being denied sexual pleasure,” as if it were the worst part of the situation, we grind home this dichotomy.

It has been repeatedly proven to be much more effective to talk about FGS in terms of women’s and children’s health. FGS kills women and children. According to a study linked by Feministe last year, women who’ve undergone infibulation are 50% more likely to die or to lose their infants than women who have not. Women who’ve undergone clitorodectomy are 15% more likely to die or to lose their infants in childbirth than women who have not.

This is the kind of information that tends to persuade women, because it is culturally situated. It addresses what they are worried about. Sexual pleasure tends to be coded as decadent and western. It is therefore not only not of concern, but can be specifically opposed. It’s therefore not always useful to talk to African women about it. Our insistence on framing the narrative in our terms can damage African women’s actual lives.

Because while sexual pleasure is a big deal, in my personal opinion, poor childbirth outcomes are probably a bigger deal. Spreading HIV through the use of dirty razor blades is a bigger deal. Injury and lameness are bigger deals. Uterine prolapse is a bigger deal. Death is a bigger deal.

There are real world harms to the ways in which westerners have typically framed debates about FGS. The dichotomy I mentioned earlier, where FGS is coded as genuine, African, and anti-colonial, gained teeth during the pan-African movement. Since that time, in some places, FGS has become a marker of cultural superiority. Cultures that did not practice FGM have taken it up, in order to emulate other cultures that are considered more prestigious. And other cultures that did not practice FGM have taken it up, specifically in order to show that they are African and anti-colonial. Our attempts to legally ban FGS have not lessened cultural attachment. They’ve increased it.

The Egyptian Ban, in Particular
Read the rest of this entry »

My story, “A Letter Never Sent,” is up at the Konundrum Engine Literary Review.

(I’m not posting all my work here, by the way, just that work which engages issues I think may be of interest to liberals.)

Comments on this story are tentatively open to everyone, but I’m not going to be tolerant of stuff that’s nasty toward male or female victims of sexual abuse. Be respectful of the intended audience of this blog.

Before I put up the full post on the Supreme Court decision on voluntary desegregation programs, I want to briefly discussion the dimensions of of residential segregation. Segregation is a really hot topic in sociology these days. This is probably true for a few reasons, including the fact that it is fairly easy to measure with statistics and it’s one of those areas where we still have significant progress to make.

For the most part, sociologists are interested in residential segregation, which simple means refers to the racial/ethnic mix of blocks, neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan areas. We tend to be less concerned with segregation as a legal concept, and it seems that a minority of sociologists studying segregation focus on school segregation or segregation in other social institutions such as churches and families.. I suspect that we don’t focus as much of school segregation because it is so highly correlated with residential segregation. I think too often people start by looking at school segregation, but they ignore the fact that more integrated neighborhoods would lead to more integrate schools. I suspect that people don’t focus on residential segregation because it is much harder to challenge, and it’s much more firmly entrenched (at least it is in recent history).

So what are the dimensions of residential segregation. The Census Bureau website identifies 5 major dimensions of segregation: eveness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering.¹ Each one of these measures a slightly different element of segregation, and some cities may do well on some measures and poorly on others. One major weakness is that the census doesn’t give segregation data for whites in it’s general report on housing segregation, so the data is lacking in that area.

Eveness

Evenness refers to the distribution of a particular population group.

The most widely used measure of evenness and the most-widely used measure of residential segregation, in general, is dissimilarity. Conceptually, dissimilarity, which ranges from 0 (complete integration) to 1 (complete segregation), measures the percentage of a group’s population that would have to change residence for each neighborhood to have the same percent of that group as the metropolitan area overall.

For example, if a group has a dissimilarity score of .75, then 75% of the people in that group would have to move for the group to be evenly distributed throughout the given area. The table below highlights the eveness for major racial and ethnic minority groups in the US, keep in mind the closer the number is to one the more segregated the group is.

Exposure

Exposure measures potential contact with other groups, and it is measured with the isolation index, which measures how much contact people have with members of their own group. It is also between 0-1, and higher number mean high segregation.

Concentration

Concentration measures “the relative amount of physical space occupied” by a group. Generally, concentration figures are based on a group’s relative density in a particular area, usually a city or a metro areas. If a group is more segregated it is more dense. In the tables below, I have recorded the Census figures for the delta index, which measures concentration and has figures between 0-1, with those closer to one indicating more segregation. This index measures the proportion/percent of people who would have to move to have a group be distributed across a given area without having greater density in any place. This may sound similar to eveness, but it is different because it is measuring spacing, not percents.

Centralization

Centralization measures how closely a group is to the center of an urban area. This is measure is useful because many cities currently have a pattern, which some call the “chocolate city vanilla suburbs” phenomenon. In these metro areas, the cities are predominantly people of color and the suburbs are predominantly white. Of course, some day the US could also have the reverse pattern as they do in places like Paris, where ethnic and racial minority groups are concentrated in suburban ghettos.

Absolute centralization examines only the distribution of the minority group around the metropolitan area center and varies between -1 and 1. Positive values indicate a tendency for group members to reside close to the center, while negative values indicate a tendency to live in outlying areas as compared with the reference group. A score of 0 means that a group has a uniform distribution throughout the metropolitan area.

As you read the table below keep mind the numbers closer to zero mean less segregation, and those closer to 1 or -1 mean more segregation.

Clustering

The final dimension is clustering, which “measures the degree to which minority group members live disproportionately in
contiguous areas.” For this, the Census Bureau uses the spacial proximity measure, which

basically measures the extent to which neighborhoods inhabited by minority members adjoin one another, or cluster, in space. Spatial proximity equals 1 if there is no differential clustering between minority and majority group members. It is greater than 1 when members of each group live nearer to one another than to members of the other group, and it is less than 1 in the rare case that minority people lived nearer, on average to nonminority people than to members of their own group.

A Few Trends Of Note From the Graphs

Looking carefully over the graphs, we can see a few trends of note. First, across measures of segregation there have been some declines in segregation for Blacks and American Indians from the 1980 to 2000. The declines are modest, but nevertheless, they are declines. For Asians and Latinos, the trends are more mixed. In a few areas there has been lower segregation, and in other areas there are no changes or increased segregation depending on which measure is used. Some of the increases of lack of changes for Latinos and Asians is likely attributable to the large increases in their populations.² Overall, African Americans are by far the most segregated racial minority group.³ American Indians and Alaska Natives are the least segregated racial minority group and Latinos, and Asians fall somewhere in between.

I think this is very important background information that needs to be addressed before we can adequately discuss school segregation, so keep these figures in mind as we go on to discuss school segregation.

1. Iceland, John, Daniel Weinberg and Erika Steinmetz. 2000. US Census Bureau, Series CENSUR-3, Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation in the United States: 1980-2000. US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC. (back)
2. Their rates of intermarriage have also decreased from 1990-2000. (back)
3. I would really like to see data for whites here because I would suspect comparable figures. (back)

While looking for something else, I ran into Why can’t the United States stop circumcising boys?, an interesting essay by Robert Darby. Widespread male circumcision is a phenomenon that, in wealthy countries, has happened almost exclusively¹ in English-speaking countries, and that has faded in every English-speaking country but the USA, where the majority of boys are still circumcised.

So why the American exceptionalism? Despite the title of Darby’s essay, he doesn’t provide a convincing answer, and some of the possibilities brought up seem unlikely to explain the distinction. (For example, I’m sure that the profit motive is important to circumcision — did you know that hospitals make huge profits selling cut-off foreskins?² — but I don’t see any reason to expect that to be more the case in the US than in other countries).

Darby does suggest a legislative approach to reducing male circumcision, short of an outright ban, which is to stop having the government pay for it. In California, the circumcision rate plummeted once Medicaid coverage ended.

Two things annoyed me about Darby’s essay. First off, the seemingly obligatory passage³ , in any essay objecting to male circumcision, comparing the practice to female circumcision:

The claims of culture are taken very seriously in this age of globalization, but the problem with this particular claim is that it is applied inconsistently. First, there is discrimination based on gender. No matter how important circumcision of girls may be to the cultural/ethnic/religious groups that practise it, American opinion has determined that girls’ bodies are more important than tradition, and that any cutting of the female genitals is Female Genital Mutilation, now banned by law. Secondly, the cultural argument seems to be a one-way street. When faced by parents from circumcising cultures, doctors say they must respect their traditions and accede to their wishes, at least in relation to boys. But when it comes to non-circumcising cultures (the great majority) the argument is suddenly reversed: instead of enjoying automatic respect for their traditions, parents from non-circumcising cultures are pressured to conform to the American norm and to consent to have their sons circumcised, so that they will be “like other boys”.

A more likely explanation than gender-based discrimination is discrimination based on culture (otherwise known as xenophobia); of course we venerate our own cultural acts of child abuse even while correctly disliking the child abuse practiced by other cultures. It’s also the case that, bad as male circumcision is, FGM is in many ways worse; the implicit assumption that the two circumcisions are equivalent (and therefore there is no reason other than sexism that anyone might find FGM more objectionable) doesn’t hold water.

That said, regardless of what US circumcision practice is based on, the effect is a form of child abuse practiced nearly exclusively on boys, and that’s objectionable from a feminist point of view.

Darby also writes:

No matter how many statistics-laden articles get published in medical journals, circumcision cannot shake off the traces of its Victorian origins. It remains the last surviving example of a once respectable proposition that disease could be prevented by the pre-emptive removal of normal body parts which, though healthy, were thought to be a weak link in the body’s defences. In its heyday this medical breakthrough, described by Ann Dally as “fantasy surgery”, enjoyed wide esteem and included excisions of other supposed foci or portals of infection, such as the adenoids, tonsils, teeth, appendix and large intestine.

But circumcision is not “the last surviving” example of such a widespread practice in the US; weight loss surgery is skyrocketing in popularity, justified by unproven long-term preventative effects.

P.S. Also interesting: Darby’s review of the book Madhouse – about Henry Cotton, administrator of a New Jersey asylum, who for decades forcibly removed teeth and other body parts from unwilling patients “for their own good,” and was much admired for this practice.

Cotton was not just a fanatic applying the physicalist procedures of mainstream medicine to the new field of psychiatry, but the embodiment of a deep-seated trend in the medical profession itself: the assumption that if these wise experts think some sort of treatment or procedure is good for you, it is your duty to submit to it, and even that they are entitled–by virtue of their scientific understanding and promise of benefit–to force it on you, with or without informed consent. Throughout his career, Cotton insisted that he was at the forefront of scientific rationality and that his therapies must be enforced because they flowed inexorably, as a matter of mere logic, from the facts of disease as established by the science of which he was the anointed interpreter. He claimed that his approach was based on “scientific medicine,” the germ theory of disease, and “scientific evidence and proof.” His published articles are peppered with terms like “progressive medical men,” “indisputable facts,” “modern medical knowledge”; it hardly needs to be said that they were totally innocent of any ethical awareness.

1. I say “almost exclusively” because I suspect circumcision of boys is widespread in Israel. (back)
2. From Darby’s essay: “In the age of biotechnology and tissue engineering, human body parts have a high market value, and baby foreskins are especially prized as the raw material for many biomedical products, from skin grafts to anti-wrinkle cream. The strongest pressure for the continuation of circumcision may not be from doctors at all, but from the hospitals which harvest the foreskins and sell them to commercial partners. This would explain why so many mothers are still pressured to sign consent forms when they arrive for their delivery.” (back)
3. Although Amanda points out an exception to this rule. (back)