Category: culture

Kathleen Stock on female genital mutilation, cultural relativism, and a recent (odious) paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics

December 20, 2025 • 11:00 am

Over at UnHerd, philosopher Kathleen Stock, formerly of the University of Sussex, critiques a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics that I discussed recently, a paper you can read by clicking below. (You may remember that Stock, an OBE, was forced to resign from Sussex after she was demonized for her views on gender identity. These involved claims that there are but two biological sexes, and her cancellation was largely the result of a campaign by students.)

As I said in my earlier post, this paper seems to whitewash female genital mutilation (FGM), and does so in several ways. The authors think that the term “mutilation” is pejorative, and is more accurate and less inflammatory than saying “female genital modification”, which covers a variety of methods of FGM, some much more dangerous than others, as well as cosmetic genital surgery on biological women or surgery on trans-identifying males to give them a simulacrum of female genitalia. (There is also circumcision, which some lump in with the more dire forms of FGM.)

The Ahmadu et al. paper also notes that anti-FGM campaigns in Africa, where the mutilation is practiced most often, have their own harms. As Stock comments in the article below,

And so our co-authors — the majority of whom work in Europe, Australasia, and North America — tell us that anti-FGM initiatives in Africa cause material harms. Supposedly, they siphon off money and attention that could be better spent in other health campaigns, and they undermine trust in doctors.
They also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

And if you don’t believe Stock, here’s a small part of the section of the Ahmadu et al. paper trying to push the word “trauma” out of descriptionos of FGM:

Most affected women themselves rarely use the word ‘trauma’ to describe their experiences of the practices. If they describe the experiences in negative terms, they may use words such as ‘difficult’ or ‘painful’, but some of them may simultaneously describe the experience as celebratory, empowering, important and significant. This may even accompany experiences of pain, but this pain, when made sense of in its cultural context, does not equate to trauma.

Researchers and clinicians often use the mostly biomedically based DSM-5 (the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) to assess trauma, with a focus on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While narratives of women who have experienced a cultural or religious-based procedure may contain descriptions of symptoms that fall into the PTSD nosological category (such as ‘unwanted upsetting memories’, ‘negative affect’, ‘nightmares’ or heightened sensations, vigilance or sleep disturbance), the cross-cultural validity of PTSD as a construct and its use in migrant populations has been widely contested, because it applies Western cultural understandings to people who do not necessarily equate the experience of pain as directly causing trauma.

That is first-class progressive whitewashing! As Stock describes :

[Anti-FGM campaigns] also cause young women to consider genital cutting as “traumatising” in retrospect, we are told, where they would not otherwise have done so. Even though some who have been subject to it can experience “unwanted upsetting memories, heightened vigilance, sleep disturbance, recurrent memories or flashbacks during medical consultations”, there is allegedly no actual trauma there, until some foreign aid agency tells them so.

Finally, Ahmadu et al. note that anti-FGM campaigns, and the term “mutilation”, have led to unfair stigmatization of some groups in the West that practiced FGM in their ancestral countries (and still practice it in the West, though to a much lesser extent). You could argue, for example, that it leads to bigotry in the West against those of Somalian ancestry, as FGM is rather common there. And I agree that it’s unfair to stigmatize an entire group because some of them practice FGM. Only the perpetrators should be punished and the promoters rebuked. But the practice should be loudly decried, and aimed at communities who employ it.

In her article, Stock rebukes the article as a prime example of “cultural relativism,” the view that while people within a given culture can judge some acts more moral than others, considering different cultures one cannot judge some as having behaviors more moral than do others.  One might, if one were stupid, criticize this as forms of ethical appropriation. So, say the relativists, we shouldn’t be too quick to judge those in Somalia who practice infibulation of young women.

You can read Stock’s article by clicking below, but if you’re paywalled you can find the article archived here.

Stock is not a moral relativist, at least when it comes to genital “modification,” a term she opposes.  I’ll put up a few quotes, but you should read the whole piece, either online or in the archived version:

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.

Similarly, the authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining. Some genital modifications enhance group identity, they say, and a sense of community belonging. And as with euthanasia and prostitution, they want us to ignore the inconvenient downsides. But at the same time, there is a philosophical component here mostly absent from parallel campaigns. It’s cultural relativism — which says that strictly speaking, there are no downsides, or indeed upsides, at all.

That is: from the inside of a particular culture, certain practices count as exemplary and others as evil. Yet zoom out to an omniscient, deculturated perspective upon human behaviour generally, and there is no objective moral value — or so the story goes. All value is constructed at the local level. Worse: when you zoom back into your own homegrown ethical concerns after taking such a trip, they seem strangely hollow. Like an astronaut returning to Earth after having seen the whole of it from space, everything looks a bit parochial.

Stock lumps the authors into three groups, which she calls “the Conservatives” (no genital surgeries of any type), the “Centrists” (okay with circumcision for males but no surgery on females), and “Permissives” (people who think that “it is up to the parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm.” [that quote is from the Ahmadu et al. paper]. These conflicting views lead to the tension that Stock and others can perceive in this paper. What are the sweating authors trying to say?

Cultural relativism, while in style among progressives, is a non-starter. You can see that by simply imagining John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” and ask imaginary people who have not been acculturated to look at various cultures from behind that veil and then say which culture they’d rather live in. If you are a young girl, would you rather be in Somalia or Denmark? If you’re gay, would you rather be in Iran or Israel? And so on.  Here’s Stock’s ending where she asserts that not all forms of “genital modification” should be lumped together or considered equally bad:

Meanwhile in the Anglosphere, anti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.

Rather than be a relativist about morality, it makes more sense to be a pluralist. There are different virtues for humans to aspire to, and they can’t be ranked. Sometimes there are clashes between them, resulting in inevitable trade-offs (honesty vs kindness; loyalty to family vs to one’s community; and so on). There are very few cost-free moral choices in this life. Equally, some virtues will vary according to cultural backdrop. The local environment may partly influence which virtues are paramount. For instance, family obedience and respect for elders will be stronger in places where close kinship ties help people to survive.

But still, there is always a limit on what behaviours might conceivably count as good; and that limit is whether they actively inhibit a person’s flourishing, in the Aristotelian sense. The most drastic and bloody forms of FGM obviously do so. They lead a little girl to feel distrust and fear of female carers; predispose her to infections and limit her sexual function for life; cause her pain, nightmares, and panicky flashbacks for decades.

With minimally invasive genital surgeries involving peripheral body parts, matters are not so clear. But whatever the case about those, you can’t just assume in advance that all genital modifications are equal, so that discriminating between them by different legal and social approaches is somehow “unfair”. If cultural relativism were really true, there would be no such thing as unfairness either. It would just be empty meaninglessness, all the way down. Academics with heroic designs on the English language should be careful not to fall into ethical abysses, even as they tell themselves the landscape around them is objectively flat.

Here Stock comes close to equating “more moral” with “creating more well being,” a position that Sam Harris takes in The Moral Landscape, and a position I’ve criticized. But here the niceties of ethics are irrelevant. There is simply no way that forcing FGM upon girls can be considered better than banning it.

“Progressives” appear to whitewash female genital mutilation

December 17, 2025 • 10:20 am

This is an example of how horrible cultural practices are excused—or made to seem less harmful—by “progressives” (read “the woke”) when they’re characteristic of minority groups. In this case the practice is one of the cruelest and most misogynistic forms of behavior around—female genital mutilation (FGM), especially in its most damaging form, infibulation (there are three forms of FGM; see below).  I

This issue came to my mind when I saw this tweet:

Here’s the article in the Times of London referred to in the tweet; click to read.

 

And that led me to an essay in the Journal of Medical Ethics (below) highlighted in the above article.

The Times article above seems toi me a pretty accurate characterization of the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) article, though a bit hyperbolic:

Laws that ban female genital mutilation (FGM) are harmful and “stigmatising” towards migrant communities, academics have claimed in a British Medical Journal publication.

The essay argues that criticism of FGM, which involves cutting or removing females’ genitals for non-medical reasons, is “sensationalist” and based on “racialised stereotypes”.

It draws an equivalence between FGM in Africa and a trend for cosmetic genital procedures in the UK and US whereby women undergo surgery to create a “designer vagina”.

The article was published in the BMJ’s Journal of Medical Ethics, and its 25 co-authors include academics at the University of Cambridge, the University of Bristol and Brighton and Sussex Medical School.

FGM has been illegal in the UK since 1985, but remains commonplace in areas of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, with the highest prevalence in Somalia.

It can cause severe pain, harm and long-term health problems, and organisations including the United Nations support bans and recognise it as a violation of women and girls’ human rights.

However, the article suggests that laws that ban FGM, including in the UK, are “causing harms to people” and can “objectify girls and women as passive victims”.

It says: “Laws against ‘FGM’ in Western countries have resulted in the marginalisation of migrant communities, reinforcing exclusionary practices and contributing to their social stigmatisation. While intended to protect, such legislation can serve as a tool of exclusion, deepening the divide between these communities and the broader society.”

The article claims that critics of FGM “ignore similar practices that have long been customary in powerful countries of the Global North”. It compares FGM to a rare type of cosmetic surgery called labiaplasty, which is offered by surgeons in Western nations.

Now if you read the original article below, you’ll see that though the authors admit here and there that female genital mutilation is harmful, their purpose is really to rename it, as “female genital modification as well as to reduce bigotry against cultures that practice FGM.

This authors argue that conflating FGM with other forms of genital surgery, such as that performed on transgender males or females in the “Global North” causes confusion and confused social policy. They also say it leads to discrimination against people who practice it in their native countries in the “Global South”, like Somalia, but after those people immigrate to the “Global North”.  Yes, they do say FGM is harmful, but so are these other surgeries, including circumcision.  But the article’s real result, I think, is to de-stigmatize the practice as a whole when the authors try reduce discrimination against cultures that practice FGM in their native lands.

A few quotes from the essay above:

One might also point to the tyranny of ‘types’ promulgated by the standard tale. Despite being the least common, infibulation (the sewing together of the outer labia, type 3) has come to stand for all forms of female genital practices in the popular imagination. Thus, communities that practise other forms, such as some Shia Muslims, who reportedly excise a small amount of skin from a girl’s prepuce, the so-called clitoral hood, as a religious duty and rite of inclusion, are immediately deemed ‘mutilators’.35 While some Shia and some Sunni Muslims argue that a notion of gender equality underlies the practice—in communities where both boys and girls undergo ritual circumcision—the use of the term ‘mutilation’ shuts down meaningful dialogue.

In contrast, boys who undergo circumcision, whether performed by so-called traditional operators or medically trained personnel, are rarely considered victims of mutilation, and the various forms of male genital practices—some as altering as infibulation—elude equivalent scrutiny.

. . . . Recent quantitative and qualitative research reveals that affected migrants who expect a permanent future in the Global North overwhelmingly opt to stop their cultural or religious female genital practices. Nevertheless, the belief persists that migrants are committed to preserving these traditions, and stories of ‘FGM’ practices after immigration abound in public discourse and news reporting, despite a lack of evidence, and indeed evidence to the contrary. Such misrepresentation and stereotyping fuel suspicion towards minority communities and families, resulting in harmful consequences for the girls and families involved.

, , ,We have written this critique to expand that conversation. Over the past four decades, great damage has been done to the process of rational policy formation by misleading and sensational media coverage of affected women from practising communities in the Global South. In concert with anti-FGM activist organisations, mainstream newspapers in North America, Europe and Australia have firmly fixed in the minds of their readers a typifying ‘dark continent’ ‘female genital mutilation’ image based on the atypical practice of infibulation, which should not be confused with the far more common forms of female genital practices that continue to prevail in many African and South-East Asian societies, and which are gaining in popularity among cosmetic surgeons and majority populations in North America and Europe (although never under the label ‘genital mutilation’—the expression ‘designer vagina’ is sometimes used).

Additionally, while reading the mainstream media coverage of ‘FGM’, one would never know that the custom does not selectively pick on women. Almost without exception, wherever there are female genital modifications, the local social norms regarding genital alteration are gender inclusive or gender equal and approvingly call for male genital modifications as well. Political patriarchy may have rather little to do with it.

Now FGM is illegal everywhere in the “Global North”, and this article says that the practice here is very rare. There are actually three main types of FGM as classified by WHO. All are harmful, and I list them below. First, though, is the practice really rare in the “Global North”? It’s very hard to find data as cases are, for obvious reasons, not often reported.  I first consulted ChatGPT, whose data must of course be taken with a grain of salt. But it does give references, a few of which I’ve checked to see if they say what they’re alleged to say; the ones I’ve checked do.  I also add below a link from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has founded an anti-FGM organization (she was a victim) and she gives statistics as well.

First, from the bot, when I asked it “how common is female genital mutilation in the West”?

Female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) is much less common in Western countries than in the regions where the practice has traditionally been concentrated (mainly parts of Africa, the Middle East, and some countries in Asia), but it does occur in the West — largely within migrant and diaspora communities from countries where FGM is prevalent. World Health Organization+1

Here’s an overview of how common it is in the West:

📊 General Western Prevalence

  • Overall Western prevalence is low compared with high-prevalence countries in Africa or the Middle East. In most Western populations, FGM is very rare or nearly absent overall, and national prevalence rates are typically well below 2 % of the general female population. However, estimates can vary based on methods and data limitations. Political Islam Center

🇪🇺 Europe

  • At least ~600,000 women and girls residing in European countries are estimated to have undergone FGM, with an additional ~130,000–190,000 girls and women at risk in some European Union countries. FGM/C Research Initiative

  • The largest numbers of FGM survivors in Europe are found in the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. FGM/C Research Initiative

  • Because most European countries do not collect comprehensive health data on FGM, these figures are estimates drawn from community surveys, health systems data, and extrapolations. End FGM

🇺🇸 United States

  • Estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the U.S. either have undergone FGM or are at risk, mostly because they or their parents come from countries where the practice is common. PRB

  • For example, one estimate identified over 500,000 women and girls at risk or already cut based on countries of origin with high FGM prevalence. Political Islam Center

🇨🇦 Canada and Other Western Countries

  • Canada and other Western nations also report thousands of women and girls who have undergone FGM, again primarily within immigrant communities. For example, the CSPII FGM Index estimated Canadian prevalence at around 0.47 % of the female population — substantially lower than in high-prevalence countries. Political Islam Center

🧠 What This Means

  • In the general Western population, FGM prevalence is very low because the practice is not part of mainstream Western culture or norms.

  • Most cases in Western countries occur in migrant communities from regions where FGM is traditionally practiced.

  • Due to legal bans and active public health and human rights efforts, Western countries also focus heavily on prevention and protection to reduce incidence.

In the Anchorage Daily News, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes what’s indented blow, making claims about people living with FGM in the U.S. It’s not clear how often the mutilation was done before immigration, but I suspect that a lot of it is done in America, especially because you don’t have to have it done by a doctor. See below.

. . . . Alaska is one of nine states without a specific FGM ban, and the costs of that inaction are real. According to a groundbreaking study published by AHA Foundation in 2023, 10,020 women and girls in the Western United States have ancestral ties to countries where FGM is practiced. Of these, approximately 2,780 are at high risk of being cut or already living with FGM and 750 are living with Type III FGM, the most severe form, in which the genital area is sewn almost completely closed. A significant percentage (23.2%) of the Type III FGM population is living in Alaska. These survivors face chronic pain, complications during childbirth and lifelong trauma — often without access to medical care or emotional support.

Perhaps I should have put what follows up first, but here are the four types of FGM classified by The World Health Organization (WHO). Hirsi Ali refers above to three forms; she’s talking about the first three.

The World Health Organization (WHO) classified FGM into four broad categories in 1995 and again in 2007:

Type I: Partial or total removal of the clitoris and/or the prepuce.

Type II: Partial or total removal of the clitoris and labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora.

Type III: Narrowing of the vaginal orifice by cutting and bringing together the labia minora and/or the labia majora to create a type of seal, with or without excision of the clitoris. In most instances, the cut edges of the labia are stitched together, which is referred to as ‘infibulation’.

Type IV: All other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, for example: pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization.

FGM is condemned by a number of international treaties and conventions, as well as by national legislation in many countries. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being,” and this statement has been used to argue that FGM violates the right to health and bodily integrity. With FGM considered as a form of violence against women, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women can be invoked. Similarly, defining it as a form of torture brings it under the rubric of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Moreover, since FGM is regarded as a traditional practice prejudicial to the health of children and is, in most cases, performed on minors, it violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child. An interagency statement on FGM, issued by 10 UN organizations, was issued in 2008.

Now all are harmful, and the first two either completely remove or considerably diminish the possibility of any sexual pleasure, which is one of the reasons they’re done. So all three are harmful.

What about circumcision? I’ll leave that aside for this post as it’s not as harmful as these forms of FGM, and isn’t banned. But many readers feel that that, too, is genital mutilation, and one can make the case that it shouldn’t be done until the prospective circumcisee is old enough to give permission. If people want to discuss that, please do so in the comments.

Now onto one form, infibulation, which I hadn’t read about in detail before. The details came from the following tweet:

Here are the details from that tweet. NOTE: THE BIT IN ITALICS IS DISTURBING AND YOU MAY NOT WANT THE DETAILS:

I just read in more detail about female genital mutilation, which Somalis perform on 99% of girls in their country.

It’s possibly the worst thing I’ve ever read.

Here it is below so you can read it too; although I would advise you not to.

But it is important to understand how alien and horrible Somali culture is.

These are acts such that if they happened to a single Danish girl in Denmark, they would be rightfully seen as the most gruesome and grotesque mistreatment ever. It would be a news story running for decades, and the perpetrator would be the most hated man in the country.

This is what every family in Somalia inflicts on their daughters.

Not 5000 years ago in the bronze age. Right now. The Somali immigrant that came here last week had this done to his daughter.

“The process begins with the girl being forcibly restrained; often held down by several female relatives, including her mother or aunts, to prevent movement amid her screams and struggles. The excisor, using crude tools like a razor blade, knife, or broken glass, starts by slicing off the clitoral glans (the sensitive tip of the clitoris) and the surrounding clitoral hood, exposing raw nerve endings and causing profuse bleeding as blood spurts from the severed arteries. Next, the labia minora (the inner vaginal lips) are completely excised, followed by the labia majora (the outer lips), with chunks of flesh being cut away in jagged, imprecise strokes, leaving behind a mangled, bloody wound where the vulva once was. Shock sets in from the excruciating pain, described by survivors as feeling like being torn apart alive, with waves of burning sensation radiating through the body.

Once the removals are complete, the excisor repositions the raw edges of the remaining labia majora and stitches them together over the vaginal opening using thorns, acacia needles, or coarse thread, creating a tight seal. This narrows the opening to the size of a matchstick or pinhole, just large enough for urine and menstrual blood to trickle out slowly, often leading to immediate complications like urinary retention, where the girl strains in agony to pass even a few drops. The stitching is done without regard for hygiene, increasing the risk of tetanus or other infections as pus forms in the festering wound. If the girl faints from blood loss or pain, she’s revived with slaps to continue the ordeal.

Immediately after, the girl’s legs are bound tightly together from hips to ankles with ropes or cloth strips to immobilize her and allow scar tissue to form over the next 40 days, during which she lies in excruciating discomfort, unable to move without tearing the stitches. Swelling balloons the genital area into a throbbing, inflamed mass, and fever often spikes as infection takes hold. Hemorrhage can be fatal if not stemmed, sometimes by packing the wound with herbs, animal dung, or ash, which only exacerbates the sepsis. Survivors recount nights of unrelenting torment, with the pain so intense it induces vomiting, hallucinations, or loss of consciousness.

The aftermath is a lifetime of suffering: the scarred seal must often be cut open (deinfibulation) for intercourse or childbirth, reopening old wounds and risking further tearing, excessive bleeding, or even death during delivery. Menstrual blood pools behind the barrier, causing chronic infections and foul odors; urination becomes a drawn-out, burning process; and sexual activity turns into a source of dread, with friction against the rigid scar tissue feeling like sandpaper on raw skin. Psychological scars run deep, manifesting as PTSD, depression, or a profound sense of bodily violation.”

Again, this is the most brutal form of FGM. Presumably most readers know why FGM is performed. It is “cultural,” but the cultural reasons are often explicit. It’s done to preserve virginity for marriage, as in some cultures you have to be a proven virgin to be married. It’s also done to control women’s sexuality so they don’t experience too much (or any) sexual pleasure; presumably this keeps them from wanting sex.

At any rate, although I’m not implying that the authors above are justifying FGM, I think they are minimizing its harms by saying that it leads to bigotry against people from cultures that practice FGM, even when they’re immigrants.  Read the paper if you wish and see if you agree.  But for sure people must agree that FGM has to stop; it’s the medical equivalent of wearing burqas, but much, much worse. The WHO is doing what it can to stop the practice, but it’s still very common in some places.

Everyone, and not just feminists, should be aware of it and speak out against it at appropriate times.  No, we shouldn’t demonize, say, the Somalis in America just because FGM is common in Somalia.  But I think it does no good at all to try to change the words to “female genital modification.”

Somebody asked Grok about the frequency of FGM in the U.S. and I have put the answer below the fold Again, it is hard to estimate numbers or frequenies.

Click “Continue reading” to see what Grok says:

Continue reading ““Progressives” appear to whitewash female genital mutilation” →

Are you a racist if you like big butts?

January 8, 2023 • 1:15 pm

How can you not like Kat Rosenfield when she’s named “Kat,” is Jewish, and has the ability to write a trenchant but also funny review of a book on how white people are not allowed to either like big butts or (if a woman) have one, for it’s a form of racist cultural appropriation. Twerking is out too.

The book under consideration is called Butts: A Backstory, and you can click on the cover to go to the Amazon link (yes, the title and graphics are clever):

 

You can read Kat’s Unherd review by clicking on the screenshot:

Kat gives the book a mixed review. The bit about the documented racialization of oversized derrieres, particularly in the 18th and 19th century, is pretty horrifying, especially the story of the South African black woman Sarah Baartman, who was exhibited as an inferior specimen of human for her rear pulchritude. But if big butts were racially denigrated then, author Heather Radke says that they’re welcome now among some white people, and gives examples like Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, and so on. “Twerking,” too, has been taken up by whites. And it’s the white appropriation of the butt fetish that is, well, problematic:

Rosenfield:

To be fair, it surely is not Radke’s intention to inculcate racial anxiety in her reader: Butts feels like a passion project, deeply researched and fun to read, offering a deep dive into the history and culture of the human rear end, from the Venus Callipyge (from whose name the word “callipygian” is derived) to Buns of Steel to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s seminal rap celebrating all things gluteal. It is a topic ripe for well-rounded analysis, so to speak. But having been written in the very particular milieu of 2020s America, Butts unfortunately falls victim to the contemporary vogue for viewing all matters of culture through a racial lens. The result is a work that not only flattens the butt, figuratively, but makes the book feel ultimately less like an anthropological study and more like an entry into the crowded genre of works which serve to stoke the white liberal guilt of the NPR tote bag set.

At this point I was starting to fall in love with Rosenfield, but she kept on stoking the ardor with her insistent anti-wokeness:

The concept of cultural appropriation has always struck me as both fundamentally misguided and historically illiterate, arising from a studied incuriosity about both the inherent contagiousness of culture and the mimetic nature of human beings. But when it comes to the remixing of thing such as textiles, hairdos or fashion trends across cultures, the appropriation complaints seem at least understandable, if not persuasive: there’s a conscious element there, a choice to take what looked interesting on someone else and adorn your own body in the same way. Here, though, the appropriated item is literally a body part — the size and shape of which we rather notoriously have no control over. And yet Radke employs more or less the same argument to stigmatise the appropriation of butts as is often made about dreadlocks or bindis.

The book is insistent on this front: butts are a black thing, and liking them is a black male thing, and the appreciation of butts by non-black folks represents a moral error: cultural theft or stolen valour or some potent mix of the two. Among the scholars and experts quoted by Radke on this front is one who asserts that the contemporary appreciation of butts by the wider male population is “coming from Black male desire. Straight-up, point-blank. It’s only through Black males and their gaze that white men are starting to take notice”. To paraphrase a popular meme: “Fellas, is it racist to like butts?”

But if it’s racist to like big butts, why are so many white people either getting butt implants or taking pride in their derrieres? It seems that Radtke is conflating racism with cultural approprition. Both are “moral errors”, but really it’s only the first.

First of all, buttophilia is not a new thing; there have always been a subset of men who like an ample bottom, and there’s nothing wrong with that, for there’s a subset of men who favor any given female body part. (Rosenfield notes the theory that the bustles of earlier times were designed as a superliminal stimulus to appeal to those who favor large rears.)

But there’s also no doubt that there’s recent cultural appropriation, as in white rapper Iggy Azalea’s astounding increase in bum girth, one suspects through surgery. If a love of big butts is racist, there’s an awful lot of white people who favor them!  Again, things that are really considered racist are not culturally appropriated, no matter who appropriates them.  I suppose that Radtke’s thesis, although she mentions cultural appropriation, is that women who strive for big butts are, à la Rachel Dolezal, trying to be black, and that is somehow a form of racism. But that doesn’t explain why some white men like big butts.

It’s all a mystery, but Rosenfield still writes well about it:

By the time Butts comes around to analysing the contemporary derriere discourse, its conclusions are all but foregone: the political is not just personal, but anatomical. The book calls multiple women, including Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, and Miley Cyrus, to account for their appropriation of butts, which are understood to belong metaphorically if not literally to black women. The most scathing critique is directed at the then-21-year-old Cyrus, whose twerking at the VMAs is described as “adopting and exploiting a form of dance that had long been popular in poor and working-class Black communities and simultaneously playing into the stereotype of the hypersexual Black woman”. The mainstreaming of butts as a thing to be admired, then, is the ultimate act of Columbusing: “The butt had always been there, even if white people failed to notice for decades.”

There is also the curious wrinkle in Radke’s section on the history of twerking, which credits its popularisation to a male drag queen named Big Freedia. The implicit suggestion is that this movement style is less offensive when performed by a man dressed as a woman than by a white woman with a tiny butt.

On the other hand, now that the fad is “healthy at any size,” how can there be an ideological stigma against large bottoms?

. . . Ironically, the author of this book is herself a white woman with a large backside, a fact of which she periodically reminds the reader. And yet, Butts thoroughly subsumes its subject matter into the cultural appropriation discourse in a way that implicitly impugns all the non-black women who look — at least from behind — a hell of a lot more like Nicki Minaj than Kate Moss, women who perhaps hoped that their own big butts might be counted among those Sir Mix-a-Lot cannot lie about liking. It is worth noting, too, that the women hung out to dry by this argument are the same ones who other progressive identitarian rhetoric almost invariably fails to account for: the more it indulges in the archetype of the assless willowy white woman, the more Butts excludes from its imagination the poor and working class — whose butts, along with everything else, tend to be bigger. It fails to account, too, for those from ethnic backgrounds where a bigger butt — or, as one of my Jewish great-grandmothers might have said, a nice round tuchus — is the norm.

And the last paragraph is great:

All told, Butts offers an interesting if somewhat monomaniacal look back at the cultural history of the derriere. But as for how to view our backsides moving forward — especially if you happen to be a woman in possession of a big butt yourself — the book finds itself at something of a loss. Those in search of body positivity will not find it here; Radke is firm on this front, that white women who embrace their big butts are guilty of what Toni Morrison called “playing in the dark”, dabbling thoughtlessly with a culture, an aesthetic, a physique that doesn’t really belong to them. The best these women can hope for, it seems, is to look at their bodies the way Radke does in the final pages, with a sort of resigned acceptance: her butt, she says, is “just a fact”. On the one hand, this is better than explicitly instructing women to feel ashamed of their bodies (although implicitly, one gets the sense that shame is preferable to the confident, twerking alternative). But after some 200 pages of narrative about the political, sexual, cultural, historical baggage with which the butt is laden, it feels a bit empty, a bit like a cop-out. It could even be said — not by me, but by someone — that Butts has a hole in it.* [see below]

In the end, it seems as if Radke’s message is that it’s not really racist to like big butts if you’re white, but you better not get one or engage in twerking.  That’s reserved for ethnicities whose women naturally have large rumps; in other words, whites of a callipygean bent are engaging in cultural appreciation, and that’s wrong. But I’ve never seen a form of cultural appropriation that I’d criticize, and this one is no exception. Let a thousand butts twerk!

The evolution of Iggy Azelea’s rear, from an article in (of course) The Sun:

Rosenfield’s last line reminds me of a semi-salacious joke that my father used to tell me when, as a young lad, I was tucked in (he always had a witticism at bedtime):

“Jerry, there’s a good movie on. The ad says “Mein Tuchus in two parts. Come tomorrow and see the whole!”

h/t: Luana

A new New York Times opinion columnist

April 27, 2022 • 10:00 am

by Greg Mayer

Jerry and I have lamented here at WEIT the decline of The New York Times, including its descent into woke ideology and pseudoscience. But we have noted some encouraging shifts in the position of the editorial board, even if they are sometimes confused, and the odious Dean Baquet is stepping down as executive editor. A new opinion columnist, Pamela Paul, has just been added, and her first column is encouraging, as it suggests that the Times may be diversifying its opinion writers beyond its stock conservatives. In the column, she takes on the notion of “lived experience”.

The accompanying illustration is quite clever. If “lived experience” limits our art, then all an artist can do is reproduce a precise image of himself. (The artist looks rather more like a physician from a 1950s cigarette ad than a sculptor, though.)

The central tenet of identity politics is that an individual’s “identity”, primarily “race” and “gender”, defines and constrains an individual’s position in society, both in what that individual will suffer from in an unjust society, and in what that individual may do in a just society. A frequent rhetorical flourish in the assertion of this central tenet is that “lived experience” is the sine qua non of non-problematic expression– unless an individual has the same identity, that individual may not write about, depict, study, evaluate, or otherwise comment on someone who is of that identity, or the identity in general.

Paul disagrees. She begins by questioning her own competency to write about anything outside her experience:

Am I, as a new columnist for The Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?

and notes that to the “establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts” the answer is, increasingly, ‘no’:

It’s the ultimate litmus test: Only those whose “lived experience” matches the story are qualified to tell the tale.

She explains what this means:

So what is this vaunted “lived experience”? You may recognize it by its longstanding name, “personal experience,” or less excitingly, “experience.” But “lived experience,” with its earthy suggestion of authority, says to other people: Unless you have walked in my shoes, you have no business telling my story.

It’s essentially a turf war. Only Latino authors can write novels about Latinos. Only Holocaust survivors can convey the truth of the Holocaust. Only disabled people can portray disabled people. Everyone else is out.

But she does not accept this constriction of creativity and commentary:

This is one point of view, and as with most points of view, some of it is valid. Clearly those who have lived through something — whether it’s a tsunami or a lifetime of racial discrimination — have a story to tell. Their perspective is distinct and it’s valuable.

But it is, crucially, only one perspective. And to suggest that only those whose identities match those of the people in a story — whether it’s the race of a showrunner or the sex of the author of a book under review — is a miserly take on the human experience.

Think about the great art that would be lost if we loyally carried out this rigid identitarian mandate.

There is in her piece one thing that I originally took to be a false step. Early in the piece, she wonders whether Jews are entitled to update “West Side Story”, since it is “fundamentally about Puerto Rican lives”. This statement, taken at face value, displays a shocking ignorance of the play on which it purports to comment. (A sort of ignorance which is, unfortunately, increasingly evident in the pages of the Times.) “West Side Story” is not “fundamentally about Puerto Rican lives”, anymore than it is about “Polish lives” or even “Veronese lives”– it is about human lives. As everyone knows, “West Side Story” is a musical retelling of “Romeo and Juliet”, set in New York in the 1950s. In “Romeo and Juliet”, Shakespeare, an early modern Englishman, mined “Italian” sources for a story set in the Renaissance based on tales that go back to Classical antiquity in Greece and Rome. To locate the heart of this story in any particularity of “Puerto Rican lives” is a profound misinterpretation.

Upon reflection, however, I believe she is merely parroting and parodying the complaints of the woke, and I read this passage as mockery rather than error.

Do read her whole piece, with its salutary thesis that “lived experience” is a “miserly take on the human experience.”

More on “cultural appropriation” of the Chinese dress

May 2, 2018 • 11:18 am

Yesterday I reported on the fracas about a Caucasian woman from Utah, Keziah Daum, who wore a qipao (also called a “cheongsam”), a form-fitting Chinese-style dress, to her senior prom. She found the dress in a vintage clothing store and admired it. For this gross breach of propriety, she was called out by many people for “cultural appropriation.” First, here’s the dress on Ms. Daum:

The qipao is a special dress, one invented in Shanghai in the 1920s and worn by socialites of the upper class. Further, I didn’t think of the possibility that its form-fitting nature may actually have been influenced by Western styles, which becomes more plausible if you read about its origins and alterations (from Wikipedia):

The original qipao was wide and loose. It covered most of the woman’s body, revealing only the head, hands, and the tips of the toes. The baggy nature of the clothing also served to conceal the figure of the wearer regardless of age. With time, though, the qipao were tailored to become more form fitting and revealing.

The modern version, which is now recognized popularly in China as the “standard” qipao, was first developed in Shanghai in the 1920s, partly under the influence of Beijing styles. The streamlined and body-hugging cut of the modern cheongsam was popularized by the socialite and one-time First Lady of China Madame Wellington Koo. Voted several times by Vogue into its lists of the world’s best-dressed women, Madame Wellington Koo was much admired for her adaptations of the traditional Manchu fashion, which she wore with lace trousers and jade necklaces. Cheongsam dresses at the time had been decorously slit a few inches up the sides, but Madame Koo slashed hers to the knee, ‘with lace pantelettes just visible to the ankle’. Unlike other Asian socialites, Madame Koo also insisted on local Chinese silks, which she thought were of superior quality.

People eagerly sought a more modernized style of dress and transformed the old qipao to suit their tastes. Slender and form fitting with a high cut, it had great differences from the traditional qipao. It was high-class courtesans and celebrities in the city that would make these redesigned tight fitting qipao popular at that time. In Shanghai it was first known as zansae or “long dress” (長衫—Mandarin Chinese: chángshān; Shanghainese: zansae; Cantonese: chèuhngsāam), and it is this name that survives in English as the “cheongsam”.

If you click the link on Madame Wellington Koo above, you’ll learn that she served as China’s nominal first lady for a year, but was also an international socialite, living in Paris and New York.  (Her Chinese name was Oei Hui-lan, 黃蕙蘭.) She also frequently wore Western clothes (see photo below), but I suppose nobody accused her of cultural appropriation. Well, that wasn’t in vogue back then (though Ms. Koo was in Vogue as a “style icon”), but my point is that it’s certainly plausible that Koo changed the baggier dress to a form-fitting style because she was influenced by Western dresses. In that case the qipao is itself a form of cultural appropriation that’s been “reverse appropriated.”

US ambassador Averell Harriman (C) greeting people with Mrs. Wellington Koo (L) during a party at the US Embassy in London. January 01, 1946

As for Chinese people wearing jeans, having Western names, and wearing Western suits, a new piece in the Independent explains why that’s okay (click on screenshot):

The author is Eliza Anyangwe, described on YouTube a “Cameroon-born, London-based freelance journalist and founder of The Nzinga Effect.com, a platform to celebrate African women’s stories. She naturalised in Britain but her parents are South African residents, living and working here. She is an example of a phenomena that is called the third culture children, who can’t lay claim to one culture because they are constantly on the move. Eliza joins us in the studio to tell us more about the Third culture Movement.” (my emphasis).  In the video she says that the “third culture” people float between several different cultures, which means they can appropriate elements of any culture. Isn’t that convenient? If I have genes from Ireland, as I might, is it okay if I wear green on St. Patrick’s Day?

As you can tell from Anyangwe’s title, she takes an extreme position—so extreme that she sees wearing a qipao as an element of systemic oppression practiced by whites. But Chinese people wearing suits aren’t oppressing Westerners.  Why? Anywangwe tells us (my emphasis):

Daum does not deserve online abuse, no one does, but the debate her prom pictures have prompted is justified. Cultural appropriation is about power, and to many she’s the embodiment of a system that empowers white people to take whatever they want, go wherever they want and be able to fall back on: “Well, I didn’t mean any harm.”

Yes, the qipao can probably be acquired fairly cheaply anywhere in the world where there’s a Chinese store, and in the same way that jeans are part of US cultural imperialism, there are certainly some in China who would see Daum’s sartorial choice as an extension of Chinese soft power – but whichever way you look at it, it wasn’t “just a dress”.

. . . Of course, it’s not just white people who are capable of appropriation (black people wearing bindis to music festivals has always irked me) – but it is unfair, enraging and a reflection of more deeply rooted inequalities when young people from various ethnic minorities are ridiculed for wearing their traditional dress; when they fight their afro hair into submission or dream of surgery on their eyelids, all so that they fit a white ideal.

Well, there you have it. The adoption of Western clothes by Chinese is the U.S.’s fault—cultural imperialism! But how does that work? Did Levi Strauss force the Chinese to wear their gear? I doubt it. Rather, the Chinese like jeans, either for their comfort or as an appropriation of Western style. Whatever the reason, it’s cultural appropriation—but not to Anyangwe. As the saying goes, “When WE do it, it’s okay!”  Either that or “We were forced to do it by those Western imperialists.”  Her last sentence is simply window-dressing, for the kinds of “black cultural appropriation” she mentions can be imputed to white imperialism.

How ludicrous this is! Are Asians oppressed in the U.S.? And is the qipao an item of clothing ever worn by oppressed Chinese? The answer to both questions is “no.” Anyangwe’s rationale is the same as the rationale for saying that blacks and Hispanics can’t be racist, because racism supposedly equals oppression plus power. To Anyangwe, cultural appropriation equals borrowing plus power. In both cases the “power” part has been added to excuse one group from what they impute to other groups as bigoted behavior. But wearing a qipao is not bigotry—it’s an expression of admiration for a dress style. As Seth Andrews has said, Anyangwe and the other critics of Daum’s dress are practicing “recreational outrage” (something I’ve called “leisure fascism”, but I like Seth’s term better). While some forms of cultural appropriation are worthy of being called out, this isn’t one of them.

For a palliative to the rant of Ms. Anyangwe, read the article below, also in The Independent, by Kassie Draven (click screenshot), who identifies herself as “Samoan, and part German, Dutch and British.”

An excerpt:

The qipao itself was culturally appropriated from Western figure-hugging dress designs as early as the 1920s, and was intended to be a luxurious evening gown. Did Keziah not wear it for its intended purpose? If so, how was she being in any way, shape or form disrespectful?

Personally, I think it’s deeply conservative to tell people what to wear, let alone what they can and can’t enjoy, based on their race or outward appearance. As someone who wants equality for all and for racism to end, I find it worrying to hear people discouraging the mixing and appreciation of other cultures. That mixing is actually the driving force towards acceptance and positive anti-racist change.

No culture is ‘pure’, as in completely removed from influences of other cultures around it. Humans have culturally appropriated ideas from each other since time immemorial. We in the West scoff our Pop Tarts (surely descended from the Cornish pasty? Don’t quote me on that!), use maths (which Arabs developed from the ideas of the ancient Greeks and Indians) and enjoy the comfort of electricity (which many different people from all backgrounds contributed towards harnessing) as we tap away on Twitter, quick to forget that what makes us great isn’t necessarily what makes us different; it’s the things we learn and share among each other despite being different.

In other words, what makes us great is cultural appropriation. To oppose it would be madness.

Indeed! Although, as I’ve said, some acts of “cultural borrowing” are unsavory, in general it’s not only harmless but salubrious. Opposing things like eating ethnic food or wearing ethnic garb is madness, and Anyangwe is truly mad—in both senses of the term. Those senses, of course, tend to go together.

 

 

The history of urbanization

January 2, 2017 • 1:30 pm

From Metrocosm, and now on YouTube, we have a cool animation of the growth of the world’s cities starting with Eridu, which had attained “city” status by about 3000 BC.

For each city, this map shows the date of the earliest recorded population figure, which is not necessarily the date when the city was founded. The size of each dot corresponds to its population at that time.

By 2030, 75 percent of the world’s population is expected to be living in cities. Today, about 54 percent of us do. In 1960, only 34 percent of the world lived in cities.

Urbanization didn’t begin in the 1960’s. But until recently, tracking its history much further back than that was a challenging task. The most comprehensive collection of urban population data available, U.N. World Urbanization Prospects, goes back only to 1950. But thanks to a report released last week by a Yale-led team of researchers, it’s now possible to analyze the history of cities over a much longer time frame.

The researchers compiled the data by digitizing, geocoding, and standardizing information from past research published about historical urban populations. The result is a clean, accessible dataset of cities, their locations, and their populations over time, going as far back as 3700 B.C.

As the authors of acknowledge, the data has a number of limitations and is “far from comprehensive.” Certain parts of world are better represented than others, and some well known cities do not appear until centuries after they were founded. That said, for such an ambitious project (the historical populations of every city ever built anywhere in the world), I think they managed to piece together an impressive amount of data.

Note the huge explosion of urbanization around 1900 AD:

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Gentiles must cease their relentless cultural appropriation of bagels

April 4, 2016 • 11:00 am

There is much talk about cultural appropriation these days, as oppressed groups are waking up to the great harm that has been done to them by PoPs (persons of power) who simply steal aspects of minority culture. This shameless theft has involved everything from mis-prepared General Tso’s chicken in college cafeterias to Americans being allowed to try on kimonos for fun—and even to dreadlocks being worn by white people.

It’s distressing that this rampant borrowing of foods, clothing, hairstyles, and behaviors from their proper cultures isn’t merely done, but done without acknowledging the oppression that historically weighed on the offended groups. The fact that General Tso’s chicken, for instance, is not a real Chinese dish should not distract us from the fact that it’s regularly enjoyed by Westerners wholly ignorant of the atrocities committed by the Japanese on the Chinese during World War II.

But one oppressed group has been the victim of rampant cultural appropriation without the slightest acknowledgement, recognition, or opprobrium. I am referring, of course, to the Jews.

Although cultural theft from Jews is rampant (look at the Yiddish words and phrases like “oy vey,” “nosh”, and “schmuck” that regularly litter the language of oppressive Christians), I want to mention perhaps its clearest instantiation in America—the pervasive consumption of bagels.

I’ll be brief, but I need to establish three things: Jews are an oppressed minority, bagels are a Jewish food, and borrowing foodstuffs from Jews is clearly cultural appropriation. That appropriation is, by the way, defined in its most Sophisticated Form as follows:

. . . a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.

And let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about Jews not being oppressed, regardless of your take on Israel. Historically, Jews are probably the most oppressed religious group, driven from land to land—and pogrom to pogrom—by Christians who viewed them as killers of Christ. Jews were, of course, nearly exterminated in Europe by the Germans, and still experience discrimination everywhere, including the U.S. Remember that only 0.2% of the world’s population is Jewish (in contrast, 22% is Muslim and 5% is Buddhist), and even in America Jews make up only 2% of the population. (I estimate that at least 94.7% of Americans have eaten a bagel.)

Therefore, any element of Jewish culture taken over by non-Jews is cultural appropriation, pure and simple. One might call it Gentile Entitlement.

I thought of this a few weeks ago when I was in a campus coffee shop and observed several students noshing on bagels with cream cheese—students who were clearly not Jewish. And as they shoveled the snack into their maws, they were just as clearly ignorant of the history behind that donut-shaped bread. How dare they be?

Bagels are an Eastern European Jewish food, and combining them with cream cheese and lox, while a later invention, is clearly a Jewish comestible as well. In an article in the Independent on the offense commited by white people who wear dreadlocks, author Wedaeli Chibelushi notes that the real problem is not just cultural theft, but ignorance of the oppression experienced by the co-opted group:

As the black actress Amandla Stenberg says, “appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in”. By wearing dreadlocks without acknowledging their symbolic resistance, Goldstein reduces cultural power to a “cool” trend.  As part of the oppressive culture, he emulates minority tradition while bypassing the discriminations that comes with it.

But as far as that criticism goes for dreadlocks, it goes ten times farther for bagels. After all, not many white people wear dreadlocks, but nearly every goy eats bagels. Not only that, but even the concept of bagels as Jewish food has been stolen by Gentiles. Take, for example, the offensively named “Einstein Bros. Bagel” chain, a name conjuring up Jews (after all, it brings to mind the world’s most famous Jew after Jesus). But it’s a name that’s wholly confected. There are no Einstein Brothers: the name was made up by the Boston Market corporation to sell bagels.

It’s time to bring this to a halt. If you find yourself craving or ordering bagels, at least be mindful of the two millennia of oppression and bigotry weighing on the people who lovingly shaped each ring of bread. And think about how the genuine article, a small chewy circle, has been completely transformed by goyim into a large circular and tasteless pillow of dough. (The use of steamed rather than fried meat in General Tso’s Chicken pales before such corruption.) If these thoughts don’t occur to you as you have your bagel, you don’t deserve to eat it.

As genuine bagel eaters might say, “Hent avek aundzunder beygelekh.” (“Hands off our bagels.”)

bagel-lox1000a
This is Jewish.