Not actually anywhere near the most disturbing thing I read today

but chapter four of Nussbaum's Sex and social justice is about Female Genital Mutilation, and that's just so horrible I don't even want to think about it, much less blog about it. This is from chapter five, which is about the importance of contemporary American feminism. Nussbaum quotes William Kerrigan, an English professor at UM Amherst in 1993.

[T]here is a kind of student I've come across in my career who was working through something that only a professor could help her with. I'm talking about a female student who, for one reason or another, has unnaturally prolonged her virginity .... There have been times when this virginity has been presented to me as something that I ... half [sic] an authority figure, can handle -- a thing whose preciousness I realize .... These relationships exist between adults and can be quite beautiful and genuinely transforming. It's very powerful sexually and psychologically, and because of that power, one can touch a student in a positive way.

I'm speechless. Probably because of the overwhelming nausea.