Specifically about Women

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5 Comments

Comment by shanghaiwu on April 6, 2009 at 11:14am

powerful words and thankyou

Comment by Victoria Morphy on April 6, 2009 at 10:25am

Thank you for sending this text. It serves to remind us all that there are plenty of issues and battle fronts for those of us who live privileged and 'relatively" free lives to take action over. May we all (humans) come to an understanding that our capacity for nurturing is greater than we believe, take action and make this world a better place, while we still have it!

Comment by shanghaiwu on April 4, 2009 at 12:03am

great to join you

Comment by Warchild Bender on September 18, 2008 at 10:20pm

Virginity, circumcision and shame

When man’s role in procreation was realised, and his control of it enshrined in the marriage contract, woman’s previous important role in religious ceremonies began gradually to be destroyed too. Today’s major religions are controlled almost exclusively by men. Christianity and Islam - the two biggest world religions, which together inform the spiritual and moral lives of half of the world’s people - both have a ruling male deity (God the Father and Allah), male prophets (Jesus the Son. John the Baptist, Mohammed) and male priests. Women are denied a place in the priesthood and often excluded from parts of the mosque. Together, religion and marriage combine to remove woman’s power to decide when, whether and with whom she will have sex, and what form that sex will take.

Female circumcision is the most extreme way of ensuring virginity and fidelity. But there are many others - guilt, honour, shame, for instance - all of which have the backing of male-controlled religion to ensure that women adhere to the terms of the marriage contract.

There are two major types of female circumcision. Its milder form - sunna - is ‘excision’, where all or part of the clitoris. and sometimes the internal vaginal lips, are removed. In the second, more radical, type of operation - ‘Phaoronic circumcision’ - all of the external genitalia are removed and the outer vaginal lips sewn shut (‘infibulation’). leaving just a tiny opening through which urine and menstrual blood can pass. In Mali, Sudan and Somalia the majority of women are infibulated. In fact at least 74 million woman and girl-children are circumcised in Africa alone.

Though it has become closely associated with the Islamic religion, female circumcision dates back over 2,000 years. to before the birth of Islam. And in many Muslim countries - Pakistan, Iran. and Saudi Arabia, for instance - the practice is almost unknown. In fact, female circumcision has occurred at some time in every continent of the world, sometimes quite independently of its link with Islam.

As recently as the 1930s, for example, female circumcision has been recorded in India, Australia, Mexico. Peru and Brazil, In late nineteenth-century Europe too, and up to 1937 in the US, circumcision was regularly used by doctors to ‘treat’ nymphomania and masturbation and prevent hysteria.

The aim of the operation - and of that part of religious morality that tends to uphold it and other less drastic restrictions of woman’s sexual pleasure - is to ensure that sex, for women at least, is linked with procreation, not enjoyment. If women enjoyed sex they might be tempted to have intercourse outside the marriage contract, thereby undermining a husband’s control over her children.

I like this writing.
حاکمیت طالبان تخریب شوند، بزرگ‌ترین تندیس‌های to you all

Comment by Warchild Bender on September 18, 2008 at 8:00pm

تندیس‌های بودا در بامیان تندیس‌های بزرگی بودند که در دل کوه در استان بامیان افغانستان ساخته شده بودند. این دو تندیس به بلندای ۵۳ متر و ۳۵ متر، در کنار مجموعه‌ای از بناهای تاریخی در این محل برای زمانی طولانی از جاذبه‌های اصلی گردشگری در افغانستان بودند
تندیس‌های بودا در بامیان، تا قبل از آنکه در زمان حاکمیت طالبان تخریب شوند، بزرگ‌ترین تندیس‌های بودا و بلندترین مجسمه‌های سنگی در جهان محسوب می شد