Wedding bell blues

[Botnst]

A White Wedding
Roger Sandall

Can it be true? Did a woman anthropologist actually compare the ceremony at which young Masai girls are genitally mutilated to "a white wedding"?
Yes she did. It's true. The anthropologist's name is (or was) Melissa Llewellyn-Davies MFA. In case you're wondering, the initials do not stand for Master of Fine Arts; they stand for Marxist Feminist Anthropologist. Ms Llewellyn-Davies compared genital mutilation to a white wedding in her chillingly misleading narration for the film Masai Women, a Disappearing World production. You can buy it today from CD Universe for $13.49.

I was reminded of this episode when Ayaan Hirsi Ali passed through Sydney recently. It should be said that on the subject of female genital mutilation, and the cultures where this abhorrent practice is found, her own writing in Infidel and The Caged Virgin is the place to start. The general circumstances in which helpless girls have the labia minora, clitoris, and sometimes more than this inadvertently cut off could not be better described and explained. Moreover, Ms Hirsi Ali also tells us that it is still practiced by Somali and Moroccan immigrants in Europe today.

But it's Ms Llewellyn-Davies we're concerned with here. Her film was made at a time when interviewing indigenous informants was relatively new, and was felt to add authenticity—as it usually does. If the purpose is to honestly elicit information it can be valuable. If on the other hand it is used for political purposes by the film-maker it may add nothing useful whatever. Ms Llewellyn-Davies' purpose in Masai Women is to deliberately misrepresent a cruel and painful tribal custom, so instead of asking the Masai girl herself how she feels about it, she seeks the opinion of a traditionalist Masai woman who is all too keen to draw a confusing veil of romance over the whole thing. Ms Llewellyn-Davies then uses this interview to distract us from the bloody centerpiece of the event.

Mind you, our MFA never speaks of "genital mutilation": this ugly phrase never passes her lips. Instead she talks loftily about "the female circumcision ceremony"—but what on earth is that? For most of us "female circumcision" hovers vaguely between anatomical improbability and oxymoron, and is rather puzzling. Secondly, she uses blandly euphemistic imagery to distance, neutralise, and conceal the gory surgical aspect of the occasion. For a girl, she tells us,

"clitorodectomy is her farewell to childhood, and also to her family village because she will leave to be married soon afterwards. The ceremony is thought to transform a giggly girl into a mature and thoughtful woman."

No doubt it does. Most of us would stop giggling. In fact, some of its victims not only stop giggling, they later die or suffer the misery of life-long urinary and vaginal complications. Next we see a young girl being prepared for the operation and a few close-ups of her head being shaved. She looks tense, anxious, bewildered, and on the edge of tears. At this point the cine camera image abruptly stops. The photographic record stops. The live sound stops. Regarding the grim ongoing reality of the event, the screen goes blank. (Is this perhaps what Jean Baudrillard meant by the "extermination of the referent"? Certainly the referent—ie, the "giggly girl"—is not just silenced but eliminated.) After a number of scenes in which she is seen looking confusedly toward the camera, no doubt wondering if these white British film-makers are going to be there all the time, she "bids farewell to childhood" by abruptly disappearing into the darkness of a mud-floored hut.

More at: http://www.rogersandall.com:80/Spiked_White-Wedding.php

[Benzadmiral]

I'm glad to see somebody (Mr. Sandall) isn't just swilling the Kool-Aid. He's daring to question the Feminist Party Line and its continual attempt to paint everything good about marriage and Western life as evil and destructive.

These harpies conveniently forget or ignore the fact that it's our (supposedly "patriarchal") Western society that gives them the leisure to film such tripe.
.

[Honus]

Originally Posted by Benzadmiral

...He's daring to question the Feminist Party Line and its continual attempt to paint everything good about marriage and Western life as evil and destructive...

You say that as if it is unusual to find anyone to take that position. I think you would be hard-pressed to find many people who disagree with Sandall.

[Kuan]

Can she be serious? Let's cut off your penis, it's like getting married.

Problem with analogies in general is, there has to be an immediate "aha!" reaction. People have to see the similiarities immediately when they read it. I suppose I could stretch my imagination, but neither a clitorodectomy nor a white wedding symbolize a spiritual passage, nor represent a turning point, to adulthood.