Brutality in Cameroon: The Barbaric Practice of Breast Ironing

Originally published on July 29, 2010 at David Horowitz’s NewsReal
_____________

breast-ironing

Little girls in Cameroon are being betrayed by their own mothers. Using piping hot stones, women “iron” their pubescent daughters’ breasts to destroy any visible sign of budding womanhood. Some of the victims of this torture are as young as nine.

The scars are horrific.

Women say it is love that drives them to brutalize their daughters this way, that they just want to protect young girls from being raped or becoming pregnant at an early age. Instead, they end up with daughters who are both mutilated and pregnant. Not only are the girls disfigured, but many suffer infection, pain, psychological distress, and damage to the breast tissue that can cause lactation difficulties and perhaps even breast cancer.

As with female genital mutilation, girls are having their bodies violated in unthinkable ways in order to control their sexuality. Why bother to address a high teen pregnancy rate with education about sex and birth control when you can scald away the flesh from your daughter’s chest? And of course, it’s easier to blame little girls for being too enticing than it is to repair a culture in which rape and assault are prevalent.

Please watch the documentary embedded below for more on this cruelty. (Note: The video contains some nudity.)

Via The Frisky.

The next time you hear a so-called feminist demanding the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act or exploding with outrage at the inhumanity of being forced to pay for abortion, remind her that the systematic abuse of women and girls is real. She’s just never experienced it.

August 27, 2010 · Filed Under Feminism, Misogyny, Women

1 Comment 

Reminder: Nikki Haley is a Secret Muslim Whore

Originally published on July 24, 2010 at David Horowitz’s NewsReal
_____________

nikki-haley-bikini-burqa-cartoon-robert-ariail

Nikki Haley whupped a whole lotta good ol’ boy ass in the South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary, trouncing her establishment opponents at the polls and leaving behind a battered pile of the state’s nastiest corruptocrats and sleazebags. And boy are they pissed.

Now, just a month after Haley’s victory, one Republican cartoonist has emerged from his gutter to dredge up the same vile race-baiting and sexism that failed to derail her primary campaign. In a cartoon published Tuesday (pictured above), Robert Ariail portrays the Indian-American gubernatorial candidate as a bikini-clad pageant queen in the first panel and a niqab-clad Muslim in the second. The cartoon explicitly echos previous race-, religion-, and gender-based attacks against Haley, a practicing Methodist raised in the Sikh tradition by her immigrant parents.

Ariail depicts Haley as a radical Muslim posing as an all American pageant contestant so she can put one over on voters. He claims that’s totally different than when State Senator Jake Knotts described Haley as “a raghead that’s ashamed of her religion trying to hide it behind being Methodist for political reasons.”

The cartoon on Ms. Haley is, I think, pretty straight forward: It contrasts her campaign’s message of open government and transparency ( which I support) with her recent closed-door meetings, her refusal to release House e-mail accounts and her explanations on consulting fees and what she did to earn them. The cartoon is neither salacious nor an ethnic or religious slur. I came up with the idea of her as “Miss Transparency” wearing the title sash and bikini and chose the burqa as the best clothing metaphor representing the opposite of transparency. The burqa is a visual metaphore I’ve used before to make similar points.

Let’s get this out of the way right now: no one in South Carolina has taken greater risks to improve government transparency than Nikki Haley. These unimaginably titillating messages that might or might not lurk in her email archives are part of a manufactured controversy, one that provided an excuse for Ariail to revive the “Nikki Haley is a slutty secret Muslim” meme with his cartoon. He continues:

It is not about Ms. Haley’s religion- after all, she was a Sikh, not a Muslim, before she became a Christian. Anyone who claims this cartoon is an ethnic or religious slur is deliberately misconstruing its simple, issue-oriented meaning.

Oh, of course. Can’t you see? The cartoon wasn’t about religion because the enlightened Mr. Ariail knows the difference between Muslims and Sikhs. That’s why he couldn’t possibly have intended his cartoon as a dog whistle to alert the state’s bigots that Nikki Haley is different and ethnic and not really one of us. And it never crossed Ariail’s mind that depicting Haley in a niqab was awfully reminiscent of the “raghead” incident (or that drawing her in a bikini next to the words “what she promises” would remind his audience of the Haley sex scandal that wasn’t).

Spare me.

There are dozens if not hundreds of simple, reliable visual metaphors to convey lack of transparency. Either Robert Ariail is the most tone deaf cartoonist in the business, or he deliberately attempted to stoke doubt about a female candidate of Indian descent in the minds of bigots. The former is unlikely. A talented two-time Pulitzer finalist like Ariail doesn’t achieve that level of success without a keen eye for subtext and nuance in politics.

Tapping into ethnic and religious bigotry is a repugnant political tactic. Fortunately, South Carolinians have proven it’s an ineffective one as well.

August 27, 2010 · Filed Under Misogyny, Nikki Haley, South Carolina

Comment 

Sarah Palin is Pat Buchanan in Drag?

Originally published on July 19, 2010 at David Horowitz’s NewsReal
_____________

austin-powers-man-baby

“That’s not Sarah Palin. It’s a man, baby!”

Is there a new Austin Powers film hitting the theaters? No, that’s just the catty sentiment in Eleanor Clift’s oh so magnanimous Newsweek column welcoming conservative women into the “feminist” fold. And Sarah Palin isn’t just any man: she’s anti-Semitic Holocaust revisionist Pat Buchanan. In drag.

Desperate to contribute something new to the earthshakingly important national conversation on whether Palin and her “mama grizzlies” are allowed to call themselves feminists, Clift offers conservative women a grudging olive branch slathered in sneering contempt:

Thirty years late to the battle for women’s rights, they’re claiming the mantle of feminism.

It’s nice they’re embracing feminism after demonizing the term for so long, and I welcome them to the arena. Let’s see if they can do for women what their sisters on the left have done since the ’70s, breaking down the barriers for women in all areas of American life including politics.

I think we know where Clift can stick that olive branch.

Clift’s phony magnanimity doesn’t begin to mask the true purpose of her column: to continue the Left’s mission to destroy Palin with hateful smears and weaponized misogyny. Using an unnamed Republican as her mouthpiece, Clift opts for a bizarre twist on the tired “Bush in a skirt” attack:

A Republican source says Palin is nothing new, she’s really Pat Buchanan in drag—the same issues except that her reality show is a lot more gripping. The media went overboard for Buchanan in 1996 when he won the New Hampshire primary, defeating establishment favorite Bob Dole. But the insurgent campaign of a former Nixon speechwriter can’t compare with the ongoing soap opera of the Palins. Bristol and Levi together again!

When I ran the Palin-as-Buchanan theory past another Republican, a woman this time, she said that was an insult to Buchanan, who is deeply serious and has thought about these issues. She doesn’t agree with his conclusions, but he rode the rocket at a moment in time, just as Palin is poised to do.

When Pat Buchanan is stuck for a column idea, he regurgitates al-Qaeda propaganda or spews Holocaust revisionism and calls it a day. Sarah Palin is a tireless supporter of Israel. Buchanan compared the “Free Gaza” flotilla passengers to civil rights protesters. Palin denounced the “vicious thugs” for their staged provocation of our ally.

Pat Buchanan’s name is nearly synonymous with Nazi apologia. He defends Nazi war criminals, lauds Hitler’s “genius,” and rants about Jewish conspiracies. His vile, anti-Semitic columns are an embarrassment to the Right. (Is it any wonder MSNBC keeps him around?)

Anyone else having trouble seeing the similarity between Palin and Buchanan?

There’s no comparison. Eleanor Clift is simply playing the Left’s Mad Libs-style smear game:

[conservative woman we hate] is [nasty conservative man] in [something that confers faux femininity]

The blanks were there; Clift just filled them in:

[Sarah Palin] is [Pat Buchanan] in [drag]

This is an insult used time and again to delegitimize women on the Right by turning them into mannish faux women. Nikki Haley is “little more than Mark Sanford in drag,” Carly Fiorina is “Dick Cheney in a skirt,” and Sarah Palin is all of the above and more: George Bush in a skirt, Dan Quayle with an up-do, and of course, Dick Cheney in lipstick.

See the pattern?

Only “progressive” women qualify as Real Women; Palin, Haley, and other “mama grizzlies” are merely masquerading as female by decorating themselves with skirts, up-dos, lipstick and other trappings of womanhood. The goal of this misogynist attack is to dehumanize the target by casting her out of her very gender.

Clift takes this strategy one step further by smearing Palin as a sub par transvestite version of one of the most detestable men on the American Right. She pretends to welcome Palin into the leftist sisterhood, hoping Palin will take the bait and subject herself to a good ol’ fashioned hazing.

Not. Gonna. Happen.

Sarah Palin and the nation’s conservative women aren’t looking for Eleanor Clift’s approval. We don’t need permission to use the feminist label that’s been trampled and abused by the Left during their multi-decade assault on women via Big Daddy Government. And we’re not fooled by thinly veiled contempt couched in condescending acceptance of mama grizzlies.

So, Ms. Clift, forgive us if we don’t accept a slimy little olive branch from the person who once named Cindy Sheehan “Woman of the Year.” We’re doing just fine without you.

Update: Doug Brady at Conservatives4Palin.com reminds us, “This isn’t the first time the Palin-obsessed Clift has tried to tie her to Buchanan.” Read the whole thing at C4P.

August 27, 2010 · Filed Under Liberal Absurdity, Misogyny, Sarah Palin

Comment 

Mark Morford: Conservative Women Are “Pseudo-Women” and “Bitches”

Originally published on June 28, 2010 at David Horowitz’s NewsReal
_____________

mark-morford

Mark Morford, misogynist Obama worshipper

Mark Morford’s San Francisco Chronicle column is what a leftist’s diary might look like — if that leftist was a horny 14-year-old with a man-sized crush on Obama and a predilection for verbally abusing conservative women. Hmm. Scratch that. Morford’s column is exactly what a leftist’s diary would look like.

You might recognize Morford as the drooling Obama fetishist who proclaimed candidate Obama a “rare kind of attuned being” and a “Lightworker.” Or perhaps you remember his enlightened progressive description of “docile doormat” Laura Bush as “the ideal Republican wife: Prim, sexless, nearly useless, lets the men do the real thinkin.”

So really, who better to appoint himself this week’s Grand Arbiter of True Feminism?

Finding few reasons to gush about the Obama presidency, Morford’s current mission is to expose the “perverted kind of new womanhood” of Sarah Palin, Meg Whitman, and Nikki Haley. Ladies of the Left beware! warns Morford. The success of these “largely insufferable” conservative women comes packaged with a “s–bag of downsides, drawbacks, jackals and bitches.”

You kiss your mama with that mouth, Mark?

After a handful of slobbering sentences about progressive men with “perfectly sculpted genitalia” (no, I’m not kidding) and several more about their fat and sweaty Republican counterparts, Morford uses his column to explain that conservative women aren’t allowed to be feminists and don’t actually qualify as women anyway:

Witness, won’t you, the zeitgeist’s nightmare trifecta of largely insufferable women, the Sarah Palin/Carly Fiorina/Michele Bachmann hydra-headed hellbeast of pseudo-women, one part huge cash reserves, one part evil grammar-abusing ditzball psychopath, one part sassy misinformed moxie, overlaid with wonky ideas of motherhood, love of guns and ignorance of sex and reproductive rights.

These, along with Meg “I’m a Billionaire!” Whitman and Nikki “Sarah Palin hugged me!” Haley, et al, are the apparent “champions” of a perverted kind of new womanhood, some sort of mutant breed who claim it’s entirely possible, even desirable to be “pro-life and pro-feminist,” which is a bit like saying you’re “pro-oil spill and pro-environment.”

In other words: Sorry, no. No f–ing way. This is the rule: You do not ever get to say you’re any kind of feminist or champion of women and mothers everywhere, and in the same breath add that you also believe no woman should have control over her reproductive powers and, by the way, poor immigrant women should be sent back to Mexico and guns should be legal for all.

Another day, another tiresome attempt to dehumanize conservative women and belittle their accomplishments with absurd caricatures, vicious insults, and largely insufferable prose.

But at least Morford’s portrayal of successful conservative women as “some sort of mutant breed” of “pseudo-women” was condemned by the feminist Left, wasn’t it? No, as usual a man who calls himself progressive gets a free pass on misogyny as leftist women lap up puddles of his hateful venom.

A Jezebel writer calls his piece “a thoughtful column.” “Love this thoughtful and insightful rant,” writes Caitlin Kelly at True/Slant. British journalist Alison Clarke thinks Morford is “just plain wrong,” but only because he fails to acknowledge that enlightened feminists like her already know that conservative women are “a whole delightful s–bag of downsides.”

Men on the Left have had it affirmed for them time and again that misogyny is perfectly acceptable – even desirable – as long as women on the Right are the targets. Even public rape fantasies about conservative women are excused. As long as these men are good little lefty foot soldiers, they’re welcome to direct all manner of misogyny toward women who fail to toe the line on abortion, gun control, and illegal immigration.

So, Mark. As long as we’re making up rules, here’s one for you: You do not ever get to create feminist litmus tests, and in the same breath call Sarah Palin, Nikki Haley, and others pseudo-women and bitches.

I think it’s clear who the real anti-feminist is.

Update: Sister Toldjah also has a few choice words for Mark Morford.

August 26, 2010 · Filed Under Conservatism, Election 2010, Feminism, Liberal Absurdity, Misogyny, Nikki Haley, Sarah Palin, Women

Comment 

Object to Prostitot Culture? You’re Probably a Racist Prude

Originally published at David Horowitz’s NewsReal
_____________

Decked out in flashy burlesque costumes, five dancers mouth sexually suggestive lyrics as they writhe and shimmy across the stage.   The audience hoots and hollers as they gyrate to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”

If you’ve seen the viral video then you already know: these YouTube sensations are just eight and nine years old.

The sight of a talented youth troupe thrusting their hips in shiny red hot pants prompted many commentators to condemn the parents and teachers involved.  But not everyone was on board.  In a Salon column last week, an infuriated Ada Calhoun ripped into critics for their “hysteria” and “moral panic” over the YouTube clip.  And the icing on her lily white cake of predictability?  If you criticize the video, you’re a racist.

But let’s start with Calhoun’s first beef with those of us who find the video disturbing. “Can we stop yelling at young women to put their clothes back on?” she asks.

These aren’t “young women.” They’re little girls who need to have their talent nurtured by responsible adults willing to set boundaries.  Instead, they’re being exploited by people catering to some Mohammedan fantasy.

No serious commentator yelled at the kids “to put their clothes back on.” The criticisms were directed at parents, choreographers, and anyone else who pretends that young talent can’t be nourished without rummaging through Dita von Teese’s wardrobe.

Calhoun’s next argument is that you should shut your hysterical neo-Victorian trap if all you can do is whine about kids today boppin’ to their doggone rock and roll records. “In every era, there are moral panics about girls; they all project the same tone of hysteria and the same cultural amnesia,” she writes.

Hysteria? This isn’t some town fight between the Squares and the Drapes or a moral panic about the “sinful gyrations” of Elvis Presley.  The outrage is that parents and teachers are coaching eight-year-olds to mimic sex acts for an audience of cheering adults.   In an era when thong panties come in tween sizes and condoms are handed out at school, there’s nothing prudish or panicky about encouraging kids to be kids.

But even that’s a problem for Calhoun who complains that “almost every article” included the line “Can’t we just let little girls be little girls?”  Is it really beyond the pale to suggest that parents shouldn’t rush their kids through childhood? Isn’t that Good Parenting 101?

Not in Calhoun’s eyes. She wrote an entire book on her parenting philosophy called Instinctive Parenting: Trusting Ourselves to Raise Good Kids. One Amazon reviewer called it “an entire book of excuses for being a bad parent.”

Now let’s return to Calhoun’s delightful charges of racism, quoted at length on the next page because laughter is good for the soul:

Why are there no Op-Eds when black girls dress or dance this way? If the problem is really with girls wearing these outfits, or dancing in this manner, why is it that the hundreds of YouTube videos of black 8- and 9-year-old girls doing their best “Single Ladies” (I just watched a bunch, some from dance competitions and some to the very same song) aren’t cause for alarm? Why aren’t their parents called to the carpet on morning television? Are they not relevant to the discussion for some reason I don’t understand?

And I’m no cultural studies expert, but the indignation over how (white) kids today like to dance (too much gyrating!) sounds an awful lot like the outrage over the effect “black music” had on white America in the 1950s. There is a lot of fear in the discussion of these dance competition girls: fear of sexuality, sure, but also, I think, fear of how diverse pop culture has become.

This could easily be a parody of Greg Gutfeld’s “Gregalogue” commentaries on “Red Eye”: “If you disagree with me, you’re probably a racist homophobe who eats unicorns.”  Incidentally, you know who else cries racism when you object to the exploitation of children? Pedophile activists. Is that who Ada Calhoun really wants to ally herself with?

After smearing everyone who objects to the early sexualization of children as racist, Calhoun demands to know why no one appreciates the girls’ for their talent.  I wonder how she reconciles that with her earlier observation that most writing on this issue includes the “grudging admission that ‘the girls were spectacular dancers.’”

Calhoun finishes her piece by reminding us that we’re all hysterical prudish scolds.

Of course, when these girls are parents themselves, they will be just as horrified by something their daughters are doing — hyper-driving their space-cars in foil miniskirts, say.

It’s just how we are, how we’ve always been, and probably always will be with girls: judgmental, scolding and afraid.

And that, not five young girls’ choreography, is the real shame.

But it isn’t just the choreography, it’s the entire performance.  It’s the skimpy costumes designed to give the illusion of curves where children have none. It’s the sight of children undulating in distinctly un-childlike ways while mouthing lyrics about what men need to do to get laid. What kind of lesson is it to girls that the skimpiest, thrustiest routine wins?

If Ada Calhoun can’t understand the problem, it’s time for her to turn in her feminist card.

—–

Follow me on Twitter and read more of my work at NewsReal.

June 22, 2010 · Filed Under Feminism, Liberal Absurdity, Misogyny

5 Comments 

Female Genital Mutilation, Ivy League Edition

Originally published at David Horowitz’s NewsReal
___________

Should surgeons promote an aesthetic standard for little girls’ genitals? Pediatric urologist Dix Poppas thinks so, and he’s more than happy to slice and dice away any deviations in the size and shape of your daughter’s clitoris.

This elective butchery of little girls isn’t based on the edict of some Muslim cleric in Yemen or Egypt. Instead, this is medical advice from a respected, board certified Cornell University researcher who performs these partial clitoridectomies on infants and children at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Poppas carries out these surgical assaults on girls born with cosmetically atypical genitalia that he deems masculine or ambiguous in appearance.  Some of his patients undergo this cosmetic procedure at under six months of age after Poppas tells their parents that with surgical “correction,” a “normal physiologic, emotional, and sexual development can be achieved.”

But is there evidence that girls with large clitorises are at risk of developmental problems?  Not at all, say Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder in a new Bioethics Forum commentary:

For over a decade, many people (including us) have criticized this surgical practice. Critics in medicine, bioethics, and patient advocacy have questioned the surgery’s necessity, safety, and efficacy.  We still know of no evidence that a large clitoris increases psychological risk (so is the surgery even necessary?), and we do know of substantial anecdotal evidence that it does not increase risk. Importantly, there also seems to be evidence that clitoroplasties performed in infancy do increase risk – of harm to physical and sexual functioning, as well as psychosocial harm.

This isn’t the equivalent of surgically treating a disabling cleft palate; it’s the risky, medically unnecessary reduction of a sexual organ.  It doesn’t improve function or hygiene; instead, it jeopardizes future sexual sensation for the frivolous goal of ensuring these girls fit in with the other kids when they play “I’ll show you mine.”

Columnist Dan Savage writes, “There’s lots to be outraged about here: there’s nothing wrong with these girls and their healthy, functional-if-larger-than-average clitorises; there’s no need to operate on these girls; and surgically altering a girl’s clitoris because it’s “too big” has been found to do lasting physical and psychological harm.”  And Slate’s Rachael Larimore observes, “One doesn’t have to be a doctor to realize that this is nothing less than the same genital mutilation that women regularly undergo in Africa and the Middle East. But it’s happening at one of our top institutions of higher learning.”

Indeed, sterile blades and lip service paid to the preservation of clitoral sensation are the only things distinguishing this genital mutilation from the ritual excisions that permanently scar millions of women around the world.

Dr. Poppas contends that his clitoral reduction surgery isn’t misogynist quackery because it utilizes a “nerve-sparing” technique designed to minimize sexual dysfunction.  How does he know? He uses vibrators to stimulate the girls’ clitorises during followup exams.

At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch. Yang, Felsen, and Poppas also report a “capillary perfusion testing,” which means a physician or nurse pushes a finger nail on the girl’s clitoris to see if the blood goes away and comes back, a sign of healthy tissue. Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls. He intends to chart the development of their sexual sensation over time.

I guess that’s one way to explain why you have a lifetime supply of Trojan Vibrating Touch personal massagers stashed in your closet:  “But officer, they’re for the children!”

Unsurprisingly, Dreger and Feder were unable to find another pediatric urologist who uses this “ground breaking” post-surgical kiddie diddling technique.  What’s more, Poppas knows that inflicting this sort of trauma on children is far beyond the bounds of acceptable scientific practice.  That’s why he didn’t bother to obtain IRB approval for his unorthodox use of “vibratory devices.”  Dreger explains:

If he had sought IRB approval for the “sensory testing,” the ethics staff might have sat up and asked him what the heck he thought he was doing to these girls, and they would have tried to make sure the parents were informed about the unknowns and risks, and the girls could have refused to participate.

Perhaps Dix Poppas (whose name could inspire an entire Freudian treatise) thinks his work is so important that ethical boundaries don’t apply. Maybe he’s simply a child molester who takes sadistic pleasure in mutilating and traumatizing the most vulnerable among us.  Either way, we can’t allow his battery of little girls to go on, not for one more day.

Contact:

Rosemary Kraemer, PhD
Director, Human Subjects Protections
Weill Cornell Medical College Institutional Review Board
E-mail: rtkraeme@med.cornell.edu
Telephone: (646) 962-8200

And please call on the American Board of Urology and the American Academy of Pediatrics to condemn Dix Poppas’ unethical research and clinical practices.

Thanks to Rachael Larimore and @sarahbellumd for alerting me to this story on Twitter.

—–

Follow me on Twitter and visit NewsReal to read more of my work.

June 22, 2010 · Filed Under Crime, Health care, Misogyny

Comment 

Next Page →