Philosophical Vegan Forum

Footsoldier: Nice video and modified story reading by the fire. I feel like the end of the story in your case though is that billy and Jane perform genital mutilation on their own child.... this would be a fair swap to my original story in which the anti cannibal ring activists later eat the dead child.

Me: Much appreciated. However if I had ended the story like that it would have just been the same story almost word for word with the same effect of implicitly shaming people for actions which could mistakenly be attributed to furthering a harmful culture. So, for your story analogy, carnism/specieisism & freeganism, but in mine sexism & girls pressured into shaving their legs.

With the video I made I wanted to make explicit that you can have all the same intense disgust reactions to an evil action done without people's consent like killing children to eat them, and similarly with genital mutilation. But that the comparison to eating rescued human meat doesn't follow for all rescued animal products because you can have healthy human cultures rescuing animal products in which no one is suffering a worse quality of life worrying about their interests being disrespected after their death. In the same way as you can have people choosing to shave their legs without harming anyone regardless of if there exists a harmful patriarchal culture which pressures some people to do it, like with forced genital mutilation.

So you can imagine that the parents getting FGM performed on their daughter is one trajegectory the parents could have gone down if you like, but my story diverges into a tale about how instead they simply had to deal with their daughter asking to be able to shave thier legs, and how it's different in the same degree to genital mutilation as freeganism is to cannibalism.

Here's how I’d have ended the story if I followed your advice to explain what I mean:

"
It’s such a shame that the girl had to die, such a shame, but she’s dead now, do you have a slot to fit in our 18 year old daughter with an undiagnosed mental disability for genital cosmetic surgery, we’re sure she wants the surgery as she read about it in a magazine.

The doctor obliged and gave their daughter the surgery, by the bedside of their daughter Jane said to Billy it's so tragic that that evil genital mutilation ring killed that girl, but at least we stood up to an evil patriarchal culture.

And we’re not going against our daughers wishes either, we don’t know for sure the magazine is giving her unhealthy beauty standards.

And clear they were because that night Jane and Billy could sleep soundly with good consciences knowing that their daughter didn’t explicitly tell them the magazine made her feel ugly if she didn’t get the surgery, so they weren’t contributing to the patriarchal culture by dismissing her wishes because she was a girl.

That day was another victory for women’s rights.
"

I think the sky burial was a much better analogy for opportunistic freeganism than comparing the shaving of one's legs to genital mutilation