Our Evil

Once again, I'm caught up in cultural relativism. And more to the point, I'm caught up in this same cycle of "I'm trying to be a savior-But why am I trying to do that if the world is self destructing anyway-and if the world is self destructing I guess it doesn't matter what I do, so I might as well go on trying to be a savior."

What?

So I'm sitting in a talk today at a global health conference* about FGM/C (female genital mutilation/cutting). FMG/C has been on the global health/violence against women agenda for the past twenty years, at least. I remember in high school at a Model UN meeting (I'm a nerd, I know), we debated FGM. 16 years later, the arguments haven't really changed all that much. FGM is de facto violent, but it's a cultural practice that's very important in some societies, and who are "we" to try to eliminate/regulate it.

Today, I had the same internal struggle I had years ago, before I was filled with all kinds of new knowledge and, truthfully, rhetoric. Cutting girls genitals so that they do not enjoy sexuality, so that men can subjugate then, so that they do not feel pleasure and want to have sex, so that women have sex simply to procreate at their husbands will....all inherently non-acceptable. But then, if women don't get cut, they are social outcasts as adults; men won't marry them; and their families are shunned.

Okay, so this has been going in circles for a long time now. What to do? What to do? Not so much what I was interested in today.

What I was thinking about what how we in the western world automatically critique this kind of cultural oppression, but what is there in our society that we overlooked that is just as oppressive to women?

How about the social messaging that if we aren't crazy thin, then we won't be accepted by society and men won't marry us? Isn't that horribly destructive, as well? Don't women in our cultural have their families pressuring them to lose weight, etc, so that they'll be accepted?

What else? I guess our forms of oppression are a lot less overt, but they are there, for sure! And I think that we should be careful about judging the rest of the world before looking at our own evils.

(*incidentally, why are there never any talks about developed countries at global health conferences? as if we are not included in "global". why aren't these conferences just called "developing country health conference"?)