I was alerted to this palaver by this
excellent blog post about the recent
controversy over the film. Asides from the Snopes email going around, there seem to be other, less salubrious ones being sent. Including such lovely passages as:
If you decide that you do not want to support something like this, I suggest that you boycott the movie and the books. I googled a synopsis of THE GOLDEN COMPASS. As I skimmed it, I couldn’t believe that in a children’s book part of the story is about castration and female circumcision.
Now, if you google "female circumcision golden compass" .. you get pages of people freaking out about this.
"But just to give you a snippet of what is in Pullman’s books: an ex-nun calling Christianity a convincing mistake, two characters representing Adam & Eve kill God (called YAHWEH) in the end, and there’s a story about castration & female circumcision."
"If you Google the synopsis of the book version you will read such topic as castration and female circumcision. Whether these concepts enter the movie series I don't know, but why would you want to take your kids to learn something like that."
So where have they got this idea from? The Sparknotes summary apparently:
Lyra [the protagonist]’s discovery of Tony Makarios helps her to understand that the Gobblers are cutting children’s daemons[2] away from them in a procedure they call Intercision. Intercision is like castration, in which a young boy’s testicles are cut off so that he never reaches male maturity. Intercision also recalls female circumcision, in which a girl’s clitoris is removed so that she cannot experience the full intensity of sexual pleasure. Both castration and female circumcision are religious in origin. Both practices respond to a religious demand that some natural part of a person be removed in order to prevent sexual pleasure. Intercision is also religious and anti-sexual. It is performed by the General Oblation Board, which is a branch of the Church in Lyra’s world, and it is intended to prevent the onset of “upsetting emotions†and allow children to grow up without ever feeling passion. Lyra knows Intercision is wrong, although she isn’t exactly sure why it’s wrong. For Pullman, sexual experience is an essential part of becoming a full-grown human, despite the confusion and pain it can cause.
What utterly facile and horrible people these are.