How is it possible for left wing men to defend female genital mutilation?

[HerBeatitude]

There's a good article here about Ken Livingstone's support for a leading proponent of FGM and some of the comments afterwards made me really pissed off - things like "think of the bigger picture, we need to get the tories out, stop attacking Ken"

In other words, women really aren't important, stop mithering and line up behind us, you can make the tea at the revolution comrade.

I'm beginning to think Tory men are more attractive than lefty ones, really I am. Am not sure if they are more likely to have pecs, but at least they talk bullshit about everything, not just about women.

That lecturer sounds like he may be one of these entitled public schoolboy types who look down on women and the underclass. They still exist unfortunately.

Solid tell us about the Nation of Islam bloke, that sounds like it could be fascinating. What did you say to him and is it repeatable?

I spose they would have made bloody ugly earrings, though, Riven. What a knob.

I teach adults on a second-chance access to HE course and I revel when they get into university. Esp the universities that are really hard to get into.

Riven is this Cambridge?

Shadow Cabinet is 4:3 male:female. There are 16 men to 12 women. Which is reasonable at those numbers but isn't a 50/50 split.

bloody hell Riven, that's the sort of thing that happened when I was at Oxbridge in the 90s but you would have thought it would have stopped by now. FGS! It's 2010!!!!

(would love to know who your dd's grandfather was now though....)

When my sis went to the Cambridge open day, het group was crossing a quad as part of a college tour with a student rep, when a college-scarved Hooray Henry bounded up to them and said to the rep, "Gosh, are these the new bugs? I say, it's lucky you came this week: the dreadful oiks from the state schools are coming next week!". Silence. "Um, Henry, these are the oiks..."

She went to Reading.

the, not het. Shows how good my education was.

Is your dd going to report him to her grandad so next time he meets him at a posh uni do he can say 'Ah, I hear you have been expressing some slightly unconventional views?' It is v unprofessional of the lecturer to say that kind of thing, as well as being wankerish.

your ds1's evident ability to make his own decisions will no doubt stand him in at least as good stead in his career as an Oxbridge degree would....

'She has gone and joined the Women's groups so with a bit of training she will then hunt him down and remove his nuts.'

yayyyyyyy!
the next generation of feminists are going to be better dressed than ours. Never mind.

I wonder if there is a revival in university women's groups, mirroring the wider feminist revival.

Ken Livingstone is, and always has been, more concerned with the possesion of power than anything else - and his scornful attitude to the people that he expected to elect him shows his sense of entitlement to that power.

although if you are a philosophical social relativist FGm does pose some problems - as if you just want to say 'it's wrong' then you have kind of ditched the notion that there is only right and wrong relative to the societal context. I don't think a politican (with no allegiance to social relativism AFAIAA) should have that kind of problem - it's wrong, so no reason for Ken not to say so!

God that story about Ken Livingstone in the swimming pool is absolutely shocking.

What sort of man would have such an inflated sense of his own importance that he would bother to do such a thing?

What an absolute knob. (Or is it nob?)

i think my willingness to go with social relativism stops at the border of bodily integrity and informed consent, and the idea of mutilating the bodies of small girls as an accepted cultural practice frankly makes me want to run amok with a machine gun. as it does any right thinking person.

and many, many men are utter knobs: the position on the political spectrum that they occupy doesn't really seem to mitigate their knobbery in any way

herB, going with knob here

Yeah, it has a k, and he is one!

www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/uk/legis/num_act/2003/ukpga_20030031_en_1.html&query=genital+and+mutilation&method=boolean#l1g1

www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/uk/legis/num_act/2003/ukpga_20030031_en_1.html&query=genital+and+mutilation&method=boolean#l1g1

Don't know what's going wrong with my pasting.

Go to www.bailii.org and search Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 if you are so inclined.

Part of the problem is that the parts of the left have forged some horrible alliances. The SWP jumped into bed with clerical fascists to form Respect (it was at that point that it's leadership said that equal rights for women and gays were "shibboleths" and less important than making common cause), and parts of the Labour Party (cf. Ken) have similar relationships, as the shambles in Tower Hamlets is showing.

So white women in the Labour Party agree to throw their brown sisters under the bus in exchange for the brown men's votes. And because the Labour Party has conspired to remove the secret ballot from women (by making it trivially easy for a patriarchal man to force his wife and daughters into handing over postal votes, which are now available on demand) brown men in many case command more than one vote. To her credit, Salma Yaqoob has spoken out about FGM and postal voting, but she's very much a voice in the wilderness on the left.

Aaargh! its, not it's.

Ah well, what can you expect from George Galloway.

What a prick that man is. Another lefty mysogynist.

I wonder if it's time to form a women's party? I don't want to vote for any of these pricks.