Do you know what an obstetric fistula is? I sure didn’t before I lived in Niger. It’s not really a term we hear often in North America. This is primarily because most of us have access to pretty great health care, but also probably because most of us don’t give birth before we are in our late twenties.
Nicholas D. Kristof, journalist and co-author of Half the Sky describes the situation of a patient with obstetric fistulas in an article he wrote called New Life for the Pariahs:
This is a childbirth injury, often suffered by a teenager in Africa or Asia whose pelvis is not fully grown. She suffers obstructed labor, has no access to a C-section, and endures internal injuries that leave her incontinent — steadily trickling urine and sometimes feces through her vagina.
She stinks. She becomes a pariah. She is typically abandoned by her husband and forced to live by herself on the edge of her village. She is scorned, bewildered, humiliated and desolate, often feeling cursed by God. Continue reading
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Permission To Laugh?
Gordon and I have talked about offensiveness as far as stand-up comedy, and came to the general consensus that if you’re mocking the perpetrators of rape and racism you are doing a good thing. You can joke about hot-button issues if you’re not demeaning them, if you’re using satire and not just being an uncouth [and unfunny] person. You are permitted to broach these topics because you are doing so in a respectful manner.
Now, from time to time I like to peruse the funny pictures on the popular image hosting site imgur, which I continue to pronounce “im-gur” in spite of being directly told I was wrong on the site’s FAQ. Part of what makes the site so popular is its community, responsible for the comments on various images being rewarded by “upvotes,” mostly due to their level of wit.
There is another scale of judgement when it comes to doling out internet points, however, and it directly ties into what I was writing about offence and comedy. See the image below:
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Posted in bizarreness, Comedy, internet, morality
Tagged burka, comedy, comments, common consensus, downvotes, funny, guilt, hilarious, humour, image, Imgur, internet, internet points, joke, jokes, mob mentality, Muslim, offence, offended, offensive, offensiveness, okay, opinion, permission, picture, Ricky Gervais, unfunny, upvotes