Women aren't news
Is it my imagination, or do threats to men's bodies, fertility or reproductive capacity generate far more sympathy and interest than when the subject is a woman?
First, there's the by now infamous case of John Wayne Bobbitt, who received international media fame and (quite a substantial) fortune after his wife cut off his penis after enduring years of gross physical and sexual abuse. Media coverage focussed not on the years of abuse suffered by his wife, Lorena, or more generally on violence suffered by women, but on his personal story.
Then there was the case last year of Rugby League player Andrew Ettinghausen, who received a large amount of money in compensation for the publication of a photo of him in the shower, which he claimed exposed a shadowy image of his penis. Again, we were subject to detailed accounts from ET himself, the photographer and countless legal minds and investigative journalists' opinions on this terribly important case.
During the Lorena Bobbitt trial, a metro daily featured a cartoon with a gaggle of journalists stationed outside the courtroom, awaiting the verdict. A voice in the crowd inquired, "Why don't we have this many journalists in Bosnia?" Another answered, "Why? Did a man get his penis cut off in Bosnia?"
Yes, male genital mutilation and/or humiliation is big news. It's bigger than war, bigger than death, bigger than tours by heads of state.
Last week SBS featured, for the second time, a program which explored the issue of female genital mutilation through a discussion of Alice Walker's book Possessing the Secret of Joy, in which Walker faced up to the argument that, as a North American woman, she has no right to oppose African culture. The program enlisted the opinions of feminist activists in a number of countries. Its overwhelming conclusion was expressed by Alice Walker herself at the end of the program: "Women's bodies should not be mutilated. Period."
In more than 40 countries around the world, women are mutilated in a practice condemned by human rights and feminist organisations. In 1969 Egyptian feminist Nawal el Saadawi published Women and Sex, in which she wrote about her own circumcision and put the subject into a broader feminist framework.
The practice involves carving up women's genitals and places them at risk of severe infection and in some cases death. The World Health Organisation estimates that 90 million girls and women alive today have endured the procedure and that 2 million more girls do so each year. The procedure limits women's ability to enjoy sex, threatens their ability to carry a pregnancy to term and have a normal childbirth, and causes agonising and ongoing pain and health risks.
Media coverage of this practice is proportionally incredibly small. Given the number of women and girls to whom this occurs, it should require daily national and international headlines in the press, on television and radio. This obviously isn't happening. Apparently, women just aren't news.
By Kath Tucker