Ululating (Cheering!)

The most horrific sounds I have ever heard was a BBC recording of some North African women ululating. I sounded like the vengeance of the progeny of the matings of carrion birds and men: women who had had their external genitalia ripped out as girls "to perfect nature" or to make them "marriagable" or whateve the social customs of their ethnicity to prevent them from "coming" (orgasming), ref.: Hanny Lightfoot-Klein's: "Prisoners of ritual".^[2]

So then I am pressured to attend a college graduation ceremony and what do I hear: loud shouting ("cheering"). Almost as bad as ululating. It was intolerable. Educated Westerners, almost ululating. I was used to watching perp(sic) school cheer rallies from a distance, or crazed European soccer nuts on the tele, but here I was immersed among them. I really wanted to get away from it!

People screaming loudly, not thinking reflectively or savoring something. Loud Noise is inconsistent with clear understanding and measured decision and action. It is effecive in setting in motion large muscles in large humbers of living human bodies. Even as a child I never got into cheering anything, but out of fear and embarrassment, I would obligatorily, desultorily clap for what/who ever I was supposed to be cheering for. Go team: Please get it over with!^[1]

+2024.03.20 v075

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Footnotes

↑ It's true: Everybody else would be cheering for one side or the other, one team or the other (generally, the "home" team) → to win (which meant, of course, for the other side to lose, but they did not seem to focus much on that). I would be "rooting" for the game to end and to be able to get out of the damned place before everybody else clogged the exits.
↑ Your Comment on Gambia Moves Toward Overturning Landmark Ban on Female Genital Cutting
The New York Times
4:49 AM (5 hours ago) [+2024.03.19]
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Bradford McCormick | New York
Revoking the ban? I have nothing to contribute to this topic except to recommend the book where I learned about this subject. Hanny Lightfoot-Klein's "Prisoners of ritual". It's a question of humanistic culture versus religious orthodoxy. There is no arguing with intolerant people. Another example of the kind of problem here was the beheading of a Paris school teacher a couple years ago: Samual Paty. A religious fundamentalist decide to sever Mr. Paty's head from his torso for "insulting the Prophet": showing a cartoon in a public school class about freedom of expression where before the lesson Mr. Paty had even urged any student who felt they might be offended to leave the room. Secular "Enlightenment" (like in the U.S. Declaration of Independence) versus Divine Revelation of True Believers in traditional cultures. From a secular "enlightenment" perspective, a woman's ability to enjoy her body is important; for a religious "Believer" things like saving immortal souls is important even if they have to be burned at the stake for heresy or be genitally mutilated to make them clean and marriageable.
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"An influential imam in the Muslim-majority country took up the cause and has been leading calls to repeal the ban, claiming that cutting – which in Gambia usually involves removing the clitoris and labia minora of girls between the ages of 10 and 15 – is a religious obligation and important culturally." ("Gambia Moves Toward Overturning Landmark Ban on Female Genital Cutting", NYT, March 18, 2024, Ruth Maclean)

Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole!		Tehran, Iran. Fountain of fake blood in cemetery for soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88).