Sometimes the way a news story is written pisses me off as much as the events being reported:
Egyptian girl dies in circumcision
Sat Aug 11, 7:50 PM ET
CAIRO, Egypt – A 13-year-old Egyptian girl has died during a circumcision operation, two months after the death of another girl prompted health officials to ban the widespread traditional procedure, local media said Saturday.
These people have such a fucked-up, medieval concept of “virtue” that they willingly rob their daughters of their sexuality by ripping out their clitorises.
But the subject of this rant is how the mainstream media wraps these barbaric atrocities in euphemisms:
Female Circumcision
Female Circumcision
Female Circumcision
Female circumcision. Say it enough and it sounds almost harmless, like removing a boy’s foreskin. No big deal. Circumcision. Ho hum, move along. That’s the power of a euphemism. Use an easier, softer, gentler word or phrase. Wrap a horrible barbarity in a euphemism, and you can make it sound almost normal.
Of course, the word “circumcision” is meaningless when applied to a female, because circumcision refers to the foreskin — something females don’t have. You might as well start calling castration a male hysterectomy.
“Female circumcision” is nothing but a made-up, bullshit word.
How about you reporters start calling it what it is:
Imagine cutting off half a boy’s penis so he doesn’t feel sexual sensations anymore, and imagine performing this horrible GENITAL MUTILATION to preserve the boy’s “virtue”. The same basic thing is being inflicted on these girls by their families. But the reporters don’t call it female GENITAL MUTILATION. They call it “female circumcision”.
The first step in stopping the problem is facing it. And to do that, you need to be able to describe it using accurate language.
Tags: barbarians, euphemism, gripe, Islam