Monthly Archives: February 2001

Camille Paglia on “The Vagina Monologues”

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In her latest Salon.Com column, Camille Paglia dismisses the “garish visibility” of Eve Ensler and “The Vagina Monologues.”

The perversion of feminism that Ensler represents — turning Valentine’s Day, the one holiday celebrating romantic harmony between the sexes, into a grisly memento mori of violence against women — has been well demonstrated by the ever-alert Christina Hoff Sommers, who gave early warning in her Feb. 11 article in the Wall Street Journal last year (as well as in her campus lectures, media appearances and an article in the Feb. 8 USA Today). That the psychological poison of Ensler’s archaic creed of victimization is being spread to impressionable women students is positively criminal.

…That in the year 2001 the group chanting of crude four-letter words for female genitalia is viewed as some sort of radical liberation implies that the real issue in the “Vagina Monologues” isn’t male oppression but bourgeois repression — the malady of the dainty, decorous professional class that was created in the first century after the Industrial Revolution.

Like Paglia I’m not quit sure how an auditorium full of people chanting “cunt” — as 18,000 people did at Madison Square Garden this month — is empowering.

Sources:

The Bush look. Camille Paglia, Salon.Com, February 28, 2001.

Clit Club. Sharon Lerner, The Village Voice, February 14-20, 2001.

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Utah Begins Crackdown on Polygamy

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Ahead of the 2002 Olympics, Utah has begun a crackdown on polygamous marriages. Although Utah agreed to outlaw polygamy as a condition of its statehood, the state has for the most part not prosecuted those who still enter into marriages with multiple partners.

Advocates of polygamy claim the government is persecuting them in much the same way it used to persecute homosexuals, while opponents of polygamy say the practice needs to be outlawed to protect young girls. Who is right?

Both sides are correct. First of all, the government should have no say in how consenting adults choose to live their lives. The Supreme Court in 1879 ruled that polygamy is not a Constitutionally protected exercise of religious freedom, but it clearly erred in that decision in much the same way it erred in ruling that the state had a compelling interest in outlawing consenting homosexual relationships.

In 1972 the Supreme Court ruled that Amish children could not be forced to attend school on religious grounds which is inconsistent with the 1879 polygamy ruling, as one of the dissenting judges pointed out.

Polygamy between consenting adults — just like marriage between people of the same sex — should be legal.

On the other hand, what passes for polygamy in Utah often bears a greater resemblance to child sexual abuse than anything else.

Consider Tom Green, 52, who has had 10 wives and has been charged with bigamy and child rape among other things. Green is accused of having sex with one of his wives, Linda, when she was only 13. As prosecutor David Leavitt told the Dallas Morning News,

…this is a man who has taken 13- and 14-year-old children, deprived them of any education, married them, impregnated them, required the state to pay the bill [Green's family is a big client of the welfare system] and has raped a 13-year-old girl. If we can’t prosecute for conduct like Tom Green’s, we have no business prosecuting crime.

Green’s case is not an anomaly. His prosecution follows on the ground-breaking 1998 prosecution of David Ortell Kingston who was sentenced to up to 10 years for incest and unlawful sexual conduct with his 16-year-old niece who was allegedly his 15th wife.

When his niece fled the marriage that had been arranged by her father, John Daniel Kingston beat his daughter and returned her to David Kingston.

These sort of practices with minors are unconscionable and have absolutely no place within constitutional protections for relationships between consenting adults. Neither, however, should our anger and disgust at the exploitation of these young women allow us to go further and advocate criminalizing consenting relationships between adults merely because they involve more adults than the state deems “normal.” Those sorts of decisions should be left up to individuals rather than the government.

Source:

Trial to test Utah’s 104-year-old ban on polygamy. The Associated Press, November 26, 2000.

Polygamy backers claim Utah bill infringes on religious freedom. The Associated Press, February 13, 2001

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Drug Addict Charged With Killing Her Fetus

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South Carolina is on the cutting edge of a controversial practice that will someday be decided by the Supreme Court — can women who take illegal drugs during her pregnancy be charged with child abuse?

South Carolina considers a fetus in the third trimester to be a person. As such, the law considers a woman who takes an illegal drug in the third trimester to be administering drugs to a child — a form of child abuse.

In May, South Carolina plans to place Regina McKnight on trial for the second time on charges that she smoked crack cocaine throughout the third trimester of her pregnancy which caused her unborn child to be stillborn. Among other crimes, McKnight has been charged with homicide.

McKnight’s first trial ended in a mistrial earlier this year after jurors admitted they had performed searches on the Internet about homicide by child abuse.

Feminists argue that the statute, if interpreted in this way, is so broad that it could be used to charge any woman who doesn’t follow precisely what the state thinks is the best pre-natal care.

Writing for Women’s ENews, Siobhan Morrissey, notes a previous case in which a woman spent 40 hours in labor and yet still refused to undergo the Caesarian section operation that her attending physicians recommended. In that case, doctors feared the fetus might be put into distress and considered invoking the child abuse law to force the woman to undergo the surgical procedure. She gave birth to a healthy child, however, before the law could be invoked.

South Carolina has also engaged in some extremely questionable law enforcement activities. In a case taken up by the Supreme Court, a South Carolina hospital took urine samples from pregnant women seeking prenatal care without their consent or knowledge. The hospital notified police about any women whose urine test showed evidence of drug use.

And, of course, there is the ever-present fear among feminists that laws that treat a fetus — even a late third-term fetus — as a person is the first step on the way to outlawing abortion.

Certainly some of South Carolina’s actions seem questionable, but at the same time if late third term abortions are ethically questionable — and polls show that most Americans are extremely uncomfortable with such abortions except to save a mother’s life — then smoking crack while in the 8th month of pregnancy seems equally questionable. Moreover, illegal drug use can do irreparable harm to what is essentially a fully formed human infant capable of living outside of the womb not to save a mother’s life or health, nor to erase the stigma of rape or incest, but simply to satisfy an addict’s need for drugs.

Even many hardcore supporters of abortion have come out strongly opposed to something like sex-selective abortion, and one wonders how those folks will oppose mothers who want to abort a female fetus while defending those who would expose dangerous drugs to fetuses that they fully intend to carry to term.

Source:

Cocaine user charged with fetal murder. Siobhan Morrissey, Women’s Enews, February 20, 2001.

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Betty Raidor, Victim of McMartin Preschool Hysteria, Dead at 81

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Betty Raidor, 81, died recently of complications from a heart attack at her Bakersfield, California, home. Raidor was part of one of the most bizarre legal proceedings in U.S. history.

After children at the McMartin Preschool accused her and others of committing rape, sodomy, animal sacrifice as part of satanic rituals, Raidor and six other defendants were charged with numerous counts of child molestation. Their pretrial hearing phase lasted an astounding 18 months — the longest ever for a criminal trial in the United States — before all charges against all but two of the defendants were dropped.

Although charges against Raymond Buckey and his mother, Virginia McMartin, went forward and Los Angeles County alone spent $13.5 million prosecuting the cases, ultimately not a single person was ever convicted from any charge stemming from the McMartin case.

It did however ruin many lives, including Raidor’s who was financially ruined by the cost of mounting a defense and who found herself to be a pariah in her community. The case also helped bring to national attention ultimately false claims of vast underground networks of Satanic cults.

Contacted by The Daily Breeze about Raidor’s death, Charles Buckey — Raymond Buckey’s father — lashed out against the wrongful prosecution of Raidor and others.

How can you put something like that behind you when you lost all your property and everything you have is gone? Can you imagine that happening to a person who is a grandmother? They lost everything they had. The media did everything in its power to find those people guilty. And there were a lot of people in Manhattan Beach who thought they were guilty.

Source:

McMartin defendant Betty Raidor dies. Josh Grossberg, The Daily Breeze, February 23, 2001.

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BBC Profiles An Opponent of Female Genital Mutilation

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The BBC recently ran a profile of Amna Badri, a campaigner against female genital mutilation who herself was a victim of the practice at the age of six in Sudan.

Badri describes her own experience when she and her sister, then only five, were circumcised. Badri and her sister underwent the mildest form of female circumcision in which a part of the clitoris is removed. She describes how she and her sister were teased by other girls who had undergone what is called phoronic circumcision — the clitoris is completely removed and the outer lips of the vagina are sown shut so that only a small area for urination and menstruation is left open.

Badri told the BBC that friends who underwent phoronic circumcision experienced many health problems in later years, as can be imagined, but that for the most part they still supported the procedure,

They had complications starting from when they started their periods. They had a lot of pain because the blood can’t easily get out, also a lot of them had continual abscesses. The most complicated situation is childbirth because they have to be cut open and then they insist on being re-circumcised, stitched up again.

Badri left Sudan to become a political refugee, with her family, in Great Britain in 1997. The BBC reports that she now works with organizations to help women who have been circumcised take advantage of health services, as well as efforts to convince women in Great Britain — where FGM is illegal — not to take their young daughters back to Sudan for the procedure.

Source:

Circumcision: One woman’s story. Cindi John, The BBC, February 18, 2001.

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The Surrendered Wife Phenomena

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Everywhere I turn I seem to run into another profile or interview with Laura Doyle, the author of The Surrendered Wife. I haven’t read the book, but Doyle is kind enough to post the first chapter on her web site.

After describing the problems she initially confronted in her marriage, Doyle writes what she learned from talking to other women about her marital difficulties.

One friend told me she let her husband handle all of the finances, and what a relief that was for her. Another one told me she tried never to criticize her husband, no matter how much he seemed to deserve it. I decided I would experiment with doing things differently in my marriage and hoped that it wasn’t too late for us. I desperately wanted to save the relationship, and I also hoped to save my self-respect, which was fading with each episode of anger and frustration I unleashed on John.

Fortunately, the steps of surrendering helped me with both marital tranquility and self-respect. Today I call myself a surrendered wife because that’s what’s helped me have the marriage I’ve always dreamed of. The same thing will happen to you if you follow the principles in this book.

And what does a surrendered wife do? Let her husband be in charge. More precisely she seems to be advocating that women should aim for an almost child-like trust in their husbands. How does this manifest itself in every day life?

For instance, I thought I was merely making helpful suggestions when I told my husband that he should ask for a raise. When I urgently exclaimed that we should have turned right instead of left while riding in a friend’s car who knew perfectly well how to get to our destination, I reasoned that I was trying to save time and avoid traffic. When I tried to convince my brother that he really should get some therapy, I justified butting into his life as wanting “to be there for him.”

All of these justifications were merely elaborate covers for my inability to trust others. If I had trusted that my husband was earning as much money as he could, I wouldn’t have emasculated him by implying that I found him lacking ambition. If I had trusted my friend to get us to our destination in a reasonable time, I wouldn’t have barked out orders about where to turn, leaving a cold frost on the inside of the car. If I had trusted my brother to make his own way in the world, he would’ve felt more inclined to continue to share the emotional milestones of his life with me.

…

Today I try to relinquish control as much as I can and allow myself to be vulnerable. Unfortunately, I still don’t do this perfectly, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Just making intimacy my priority rather than control by practicing the principles described in this book, has transformed my marriage into a passionate, romantic union.

To be fair to Doyle, she is explicit that women should immediately leave or seek help if they are involved in relationships with men who are abusive, unfaithful, have substance abuse problems, etc. At the same time I can’t help but think that her advice is horrible regardless of whether her advice is taken by men or women.

Her financial advice is extremely wrongheaded. Somebody who feels emasculated and unable to participate in a relationship because his partner suggest he might want to ask for a raise or consider the possibility that his wife might be better at managing the finances sounds like a real control freak (one of Doyle’s core ideas is that men should always handle the finances and that they don’t feel in control if they don’t).

The same thing goes for the bizarre example of Doyle attempting to correct her friend, who while driving made a right turn when he should have made a left. According to a Time magazine profile, in her book Doyle recommends never telling a husband, for example, that he just missed the correct exit even “if he keeps going in the wrong direction … past the state line.” That’s just bizarre.

What strikes me most about Doyle’s advice is that she seems to think that in order to have a healthy, productive relationship a man must be convinced that a woman blindly worships him and always thinks he’s right. Forcing that sort of relationship strikes me as not only demeaning to both parties, but also psychologically unhealthy. People need others to act as a sort of “reality check” and saying that a wife should simply act as a mirror for her husband’s views misses the point of why people enter relationships. Certainly people try to avoid relationships with nagging, disagreeable people, but the alternative of marrying a sycophant seems unappealing as well.

The thing that really amazes me is that such simplistic pop advice is so popular. The Surrendered wife has been selling like crazy, cracking the Top 10 best sellers on Amazon.Com and Simon and Schuster upped the print run of her book to 100,000 which is an extremely high figure for a non-fiction book. That’s a little scary.

Sources:

Wives surrender all to cult of obedience. John Harlow, The Sunday Times (UK), January 7, 2001.

I Surrender, Dear. Tamala M. Edwards, Time Magazine, January 22, 2001.

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Rape on Campus: 1 in 33

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Campus rape statistics have become highly politicized over the past decade. Campus feminists and rape advocates often cite figures claiming that as many as 1 in 4 college women are victims of rapes. Critiques of such high figures, including this author, argue that such statistics are based on problematic surveys that vastly overestimate rape incidence among college women.

The U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice and Bureau of Justice Statistics joined the fray recently with their report, “The Sexual Victimization of College Women.” The report is based on data obtained from interviews with college women. Like a lot of reports, the media chose to sensationalize the reports finding that 13 percent of college women said they had been stalked in the prior year, while downplaying the fact that only 1.1 percent said they had been the victim of an attempted rape, while 1.7 percent reported being victims of a completed rape in the previous year, meaning that about 1 in 33 were the victims of rape or attempted rape in the previous year.

On the one hand the survey backs up other evidence that large numbers of rapes and attempted rapes go unreported to police. On the other hand it also provides evidence that many women’s advocates overestimate the incidence of rape among college women.

Which is not to diminish the extent of the problem. Based on these statistics about 1 in 14 women will be the victims of rape during a four year stay at an American university or college. This is way too high.

Source:

Rape on campus. Geraldine Sealey, ABCNews.Com, January 26, 2001.

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Is Puberty Really Starting Earlier for Girls?

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I consider myself a pretty skeptical person, but I have to confess I accepted at face value claims that girls were reaching puberty. Surely such a claim, based on studies published in some relatively prestigious journals, had a lot of data behind them. Most of the debate in the media over this claim was what was causing early puberty. Environmentalists suggested manmade chemicals as a possible cause, some doctors suggested the high levels of obesity in children, while some feminists and conservatives suggested that the high level of sexual images in contemporary media might somehow be responsible.

It turns out, however, that the alleged evidence for early puberty is severely flawed and the quick acceptance of early puberty may be preventing some girls from obtaining the best health care available.

The New York Times‘ Gina Kolata, who has helped debunk other junk science issues in the past, reported on the debate over early puberty this week. The evidence for the phenomenon is appallingly absent. The claim is based entirely on a single study by Dr. Marcia E. Herman-Giddens that was published in Pediatrics in 1997. Herman-Giddens study looked at 17,077 girls aged 3 to 12. The girls had gone to a pediatricians office from July 1992 through September 1993. Herman-Giddens managed to persuade 225 health care providers at 65 private practices in the United States to evaluate any girls they saw for early onset of puberty.

As she reported in her 1997 article, of that sample population, Black girls began developing breasts at 8.87 years while white girls began developing breasts at 9.96 years. Many pediatrics textbooks, taking these numbers at face value, pushed back the lower end of normal puberty to age 6 for black girls and age 7 for white girls. But did they have a good basis for doing so? No.

The first major problem with the study is that the sample is incredibly biased. By focusing exclusively on girls who were brought to see a pediatrician, it is possible that Herman-Giddens is simply measuring the rate of premature puberty brought on by other health problems. After all, parents who are worried that their daughters are experiencing puberty early are more likely to bring their children to see a pediatrician about that problem. In statistics this is called a selection bias.

The second major problem is that the only marker of puberty for which reliable data exists for a long period of time — the onsent of menstruation — has remained steady for the last 50 years. There simply is no reliable long-term data on the average age that breasts start developing, but there is reliable long-term data for menstruation. That age has remained stable, even in Herman-Giddens study, at 12 years and 8 months for white girls and a bit earlier for black girls. If puberty is starting earlier and earlier it is very odd that the average age of menstruation has remained so consistent.

A group of pediatric endocrinologists wrote a letter to Pediatrics recently lamenting that doctors who believe this data are giving incorrect health advice to young girls. As they note, early puberty can be the result of serious health problems, such as brain tumors and other disorders, but parents who bring in girls who are experiencing early puberty are simply told that this is normal and no further tests or investigation are warranted. As Dr. Laura K. Bachrach told The New York Times, “You don’t just dismiss a child in that age range [under 7]. I think it is potentially medically dangerous.”

Source:

Doubters fault theory finding earlier puberty. Gina Kolata, The New York Times, February 20, 2001.

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Sexual Slavery in the Sudan

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In a recent column for the Village Voice, Nat Hentoff urged the incoming Bush administration to take seriously the long standing reports coming from Sudan of the use of rape and sexual slavery as a weapon of war by the government there.

Ever since it achieved independence, Sudan has seen almost constant civil war. The war falls along geographical and religious divides with the Muslim majority in northern Sudan squaring off against the Christian and animist majority in the south. The government of General Omar Hassan al-Bashir is overtly Muslim, but faces numerous rebel movements in the south.

It has long been known that al-Bashir’s government tolerates the enslavement of Christians and animists, and several American organizations have caused a great deal of controversy by raising money to buy the freedom of slaves in Sudan.

Hentoff writes about recent Christian Solidarity international report that the government’s Popular Defence Forces “systematically gang-raped and enslaved black African women and girls during and after slave raids on villages in southern Sudan…”

Hentoff quotes CSI’s John Eibener saying,

It is the custom for PDF troops to gang-rape enslaved women and girls, and execute those who cannot walk quickly during the forced marches to the north. Once in the north, the slaves are divided amongst their masters and are routinely subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, work without pay, and forced conversions, according to successive United Nations Special Rapporteurs.

Allegations of just such atrocities focused the world’s attention on the conflict in Kosovo, but at least in the United States there has been very little about the ongoing use of slavery and rape by combatant’s in Sudan’s civil war (and a lot of the stories that do make the mainstream media focus on the controversy over Christian efforts to buy Sudanese slaves their freedom).

Source:

Gang rape in Sudan. The Village Voice, February 7-13, 2001.

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The Tragedy of Female Slavery in Ghana

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The BBC recently ran a sad report about the persistence of trokosi — a form of religious slavery — in rural parts of Ghana. Although a law was passed three years ago in Ghana outlawing it, up to 3,000 women are still estimated to be enslaved as a result of the practice.

Trokosi is a religious practice of the Ewe who inhabit Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana. One of the Ewe’s religious beliefs is ju-ju — the notion that the gods punish one person’s sins by causing the death of other family members until the sin is forgiven by the gods. Priests offer to pardon the sin in exchange for some form of atonement.

According to the American Anti-Slavery Group, until the 18th century the offering typically took the form of livestock or other gifts, but that began to change and priests began demanding, and receiving, virgin girls as atonement for the sins of their relatives.

Girls, often under the age of 10, are brought to the priest, ritually stripped of all their possessions, including clothes, and told they have to do anything the priest tells them. Most girls are raped repeatedly.

Technically the girl only has to serve the priest for 3 to 5 years, but the reality is that for many this is a life long sentence. In order for the girl to return to her family at the end of her years of service, her family must pay a redemption fee set by the priest. Not surprisingly, such redemption fees are typically set at prices which the family cannot afford.

To add to the problem, trokosi can be inherited. If a woman dies before her parents can redeem her by paying the priest, they must give him another virgin girl.

It is believed there are up to 4,000 trokosi in Africa, with 3,000 of those in Ghana. As mentioned earlier, Ghana passed a law in 1998 banning the practice but it has persisted, in part due to unwillingness of the government to enforce the law.

The BBC interviewed Hutealor Wede who is a slave to a Ewe priest,

My grandfather had illegal sex with a woman. The gods punished our family. I was the virgin daughter, so I was brought to this village and given to the priest to stop the disasters happening. I have to do everything for the priest. Anything he wants.

Some people, such as Osofu Kofi Ameve, the head of the African Renaissance Mission, defend trokosi and attack those who would outlaw it as imperialists intent on wiping out traditional African religions to establish Western religious. He told the BBC that, “It’s all lies … No woman is a slave in Ghana. Christianity, your Christianity, allows for no other religion. You want to eradicate all African religion.”

Fortunately for the thousands of women enduring such slavery, one of those who does not share this view is the newly elected president of Ghana, John Kufuor, who says he will stop the practice. Kufuor told the BBC, “Young girls should be in educational establishments, not in the harem of some fetish priest.”

Still, at the moment, little has been done to stop the practice except by controversial groups such as International Need and others who have raised money to purchase the freedom of such women. Hopefully Kufuor will follow through and elimination slavery in his country.

Source:

Ghana’s trapped slaves. Humphrey Hawksley, The BBC, February 8, 2001.

The Trokosi: Religious slavery in Ghana. The American Anti-Slavery Group.

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