As Elon Musk longs to conquer Mars, so academics in the humanities dream of putting their footprints all over the English dictionary. The latest target is Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). According to a new article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, we should rebrand this as the less alarming “genital practices”. To use the word “mutilation” is to unfairly stigmatise the vast spectrum of bodily refurbs that exist out there, many of them personally enriching.
There are cultural and religious circumcisions performed on boys. There are also “corrective” surgeries on so-called “intersex” children, and cosmetic procedures on Western girls. There are non-Western cultural practices in which the young female vulva is merely “pricked”; or where the labia are only moderately cut. Why let a few tortured young girls, permanently maimed by more drastic interventions, cast the rich tapestry of genital remodelling into disrepute?
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.
I assume that this underlying dynamic is the source of the article’s weird tensions. A staggering 25 authors were involved in writing it, and it shows. Their stated collective aim is to “draw attention to the harms that may be caused by the lack of accuracy, objectivity, fairness and balance in public representations of these diverse practices” of genital modification. Early on in the paper, though, some internal conflicts are professed.
“The authors of the new FGM article are apparently looking for the silver lining.”
A first set of co-authors — let’s call them the Conservatives — declare themselves “morally opposed” to all genital surgeries except medically necessary and voluntary ones, including for young males. Obviously, this puts them at odds with common Jewish practice. A second — we might say, the Centrists — are fine with religious or cultural circumcision for males but not for females. On the face of it, these two groups do not look like cultural relativists at all. For them, the bid to get rid of the word “mutilation” makes no sense. Why not retain it, and simply narrow its sprawling reference, in order to focus on acts of cutting they specifically condemn?
But then along comes a third group of co-authors — let’s call them the Permissives — who hold that “it is up to 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”. This group also seems to have decided that genital cutting for cultural reasons involves relatively negligible harm, even in apparently severe cases. As is typical in disagreements between academics, it appears the Permissives ultimately took charge of the situation. Out went the term “mutilation”. Anti-FGM laws in Western countries got a similarly dismissive treatment, as did anti-FGM campaigns in non-Western ones.
Again, none of this makes sense on paper. The groups I’m calling Conservative and Centrist should surely still have insisted on laws and campaigns against the particular types of cutting they each opposed. Instead, though, the whole group seems to have got collectively stuck in the demand for “a fair and inclusive consideration” of all forms of genital modification. As if dealing with an unequal distribution of sweets amongst children, it asks: why is male circumcision legally permitted but not female? Why are surgeries on “intersex” children allowed in the West, but not cutting practices done for religious or cultural reasons?
It seems to be assumed that there is no non-arbitrary, meaningful answer to such questions, and that the disparity is therefore unfair. Even so, the article might have concluded that “fairness” requires that all such practices be stamped out. It needn’t have suggested we stop objecting to any of them. The brainworm responsible seems to be, precisely, cultural relativism: that nagging sense that you can’t reasonably single out particular kinds of act for approval or disapproval, when all actions are on the same amoral plane.
But while relativism saps you of faith in your own moral judgements, at the same time old habits die hard. Even the most permissive supporter can’t stop proselytising in favour of some behaviours and not others. In practice, avowed relativists in the Anglosphere often end up valuing the practices of non-Western people over their own. 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.
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.
