Thank you, gentlmen, both fpb and mindstalk, for prompting to think about my reaction to this eCard again. When I first saw it early last summer I dismissed it as disturbingly silly. It niggled at my thoughts a bit, but, like I said, I mostly dismissed it as not really worthy of my energy. The silly aspect won out in my brain. However, as you both, in your own ways, indicate, it - and the assumptions behind it - deserve more careful inspection.

First let me say that as a middle-aged American woman (I came of age in the late 80s/early 90s), familiar with (and perhaps somewhat jaded to) the random vintage images employeed by someecards and widely distributed on Facebook, I did not have the visceral reaction to the picture that fpb did. I'm not sure I'd seen *that* particular one before, but it didn't strike as any odder than the ones from the 1890s or the 1970s. To read you assessment, sir, was somewhat eye-opening.

However, it was the words that impacted me, particularly the choice of phrase "lady bits". It's a rather childish phrase to employ in a discussion of this importance and that's probably the major reason I initially dismissed it. Furthermore, it seemed to me to be one more example of an all-or-nothing approach the question of women rights: either you agree with the self-appointed guardians of those right *completely* or you are obviously working to undermine them all. Seeing as the feminist movement itself is not united on everything, that's naive position to take, and yet it seems to be the standard position to take these days. The timing of this eCard made me assume it had to do with abortion/personhood question and it's always struck me a little ridiculous to make abortion the linchpin of the women's rights movement, or to use it as a litmus test of the quality of "women's health care", as if women have no other health concerns beside pregnancy. It's seems - ironically - just as reductionist and paternalistic as the position they claim to oppose.

The trouble is if you take the words at face value, you are confronted with a disturbing image - one that is really more truly disturbing than the almost comically macabre image fpb came up (tearing out uteri from living women). Most women don't think of their uterus as their "privates" as it's fully internal. No, they think of the external elements. It's those parts which are, shall we say, "modified" in the practice that called "female circumcision" by those who embrace it and "female genital mutilation" by those who oppose it. Of course, that practice is mostly carried out in parts of Africa and the Middle East which are also predominately Muslim, so it's seen as "Muslim" practice by the west. That brings us to the second irony this eCard brings to my mind: the Muslim boogeyman of modern American imagination. I am constantly hearing from those who would vilify President Obama that he's "really" a Muslim and that he secretly wants to impose both socialism and Sharia (never mind that they are pretty incompatible). Yet here is the spectre of another practice considered to be Muslim being raised by "the other side" (never mind that the fundamentalism they fear is Christian, and has never practiced FGM). In both cases, facts be damned. It's the fear-factor that's important.