Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

into a kind of soup. ”S0 In an earlier China (Song dynasty A. D. 20-79),
“Often a daughter-in-law would cut flesh from her leg or thigh to make
soup to feed a sick mother-in-law and this practice became so common
that the state issued an edict forbidding it. ”51The daughter-in-law would
be the most disenfranchised female in a multigenerational family.
The lower value of girls in the home, their only native place, is transcultural:
“Female infanticide has been documented among peoples as diverse
as the Eskimo of the Canadian Arctic and the hunter-gatherers of
the Australian bush. On the South Sea island of Tikopia, live baby girls
have been buried in the earth and covered with stones. In India, they have
been held to their mother’s poisoned nipples. In rural China, they have
been drowned. Even societies that forbid outright infanticide have long
managed to manipulate their sex ratios through neglect. ”52 The neglect includes
too-early weaning, underfeeding, or selling the female infant to the
sex industry, a common practice in contemporary Thailand.
In colonial America, underfed and overworked, “girls sometimes died
at twice the rate of boys from ages one through nine. In Ireland, this pattern
continued well into the twentieth century, and throughout much of
Asia and the Middle East it remains a fact of modern life. ”53 Even in nineteenth-century
England there was “a marked excess of female deaths in
the age group 5-15. ”54
Referring to ancient Islamic practices, Fatima Mernissi writes: “We do
know one thing:. . . it was the mother who buried the little girl alive, although
the decision to do it fell to the father. ”55 The story in the Hebrew
Bible of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac— a sacrifice that God
called off at the last minute— is sometimes used to show the divine will in
human progress: the movement from human to animal sacrifice. Girls, being
neither human nor animal, continue not to matter very much: from
outright infanticide, to hard labor with not enough food, to being prostituted,
to incest, to incestuous or pedophilic rape. Those who value children
most, especially girls, are those who want to commit genocide. They recognize
girls as the future of a people. “Nits make lice, ”56 said a U. S. colonel (in
language that Himmler would replicate) bent on exterminating the indigenous
tribes of North America; or, in the words of a U. S. Klansman whose
agenda was the destruction of a synagogue: “Little Jew bastards grow up to
be big Jew devils. Kill ’em while they’re young. ”57 Dr. Josef Mengele, known
as “the angel of death” in Auschwitz, where he selected who would live and
who would die and conducted torturing experiments on children who were
twins, was described by one survivor as taking “a perverse pleasure in exter-