Female Genital Mutilation: The Horror – THE HORROR!
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the worst
SEXUAL PARADOX archive
and ABC News
Today, an estimated
130 million women,
averaging 6000 a day
have undergone sexual
mutilation.
It is performed in
many African countries,
including Sudan, Somalia,
Ethiopia, Kenya, and Chad.
It is also a tradition among
Muslims in Malaysia
and Indonesia,
and in a number of
countries in the Middle East,
including Egypt, the UAE,
and parts of rural Saudi Arabia.
Coptic Christians in Egypt and
animist tribes in Africa as well
as Muslims,
undergo the ritual.
Subincision is also practiced
by some Amazonian tribes.
(Link below)
It appears to be driven originally by men’s
desire to have power over womens’ sexuality
to remove fear of paternity uncertainty by
keeping women chaste and uninterested
in love affairs,
but the practice has become so old and
rooted that it is now perpetuated by women
upon women in many places.
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Female circumcision is frequently described as an
“age-old Muslim ritual,”
when in fact it predates Islam and is even believed to be pre-Judaic.
Strabo claimed that
“the Egyptians circumcised their boys and girls as do the Jews”.
The Virgin Mary was likewise said to have been circumcised.
Islamic tradition also says it was practised by Sarah on Hagar and that afterwards both Sarah and Abraham circumcised themselves by order of Allah.
There is no evidence any of Muhammad’s wives or daughters were circumcised.
There is no mention of it in the Koran,
and only a brief mention in the authentic hadiths, which states:
“A woman used to perform
circumcision in Medina.
The Prophet said to her:
‘Do not cut severely,
as that is better for a woman and
more desirable for a husband.’
But because of this still debated hadith,
some scholars of the Shari school of Islam,
found mostly in East Africa,
consider female circumcision obligatory.
The Hanafi and most other schools maintain it is merely recommended, not essential.
The small girl’s torn genitalia are stitched with thorns and her legs tied together to reduce blood loss.
Many die.
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The majority of rural Egyptian
women are still circumcised.
Here they remove only the clitoris;
they do not do the much more extensive procedure,
but even so,
there are many problems.
Infection, bleeding, urinary tract damage,
sepsis, even death.
More than 90 percent of Sudanese women undergo the most severe form of circumcision,
known as “pharaonic,”
or infibulation,
at the age of seven or eight,
which removes all of the clitoris,
the labia minora, and the
labia majora.
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The sides are then sutured together,
often with thorns,
and only a small matchstick-diameter
opening is left for urine and
menstrual flow.
The girl’s legs are tied together
and liquids are heavily rationed
until the incision is healed.
During this primitive yet major surgery,
it is not uncommon for girls,
who are held down by female relatives,
to die from shock or hemorrhage
of the vagina, urethra, bladder,
and rectal area may also be damaged,
and massive keloid scarring can
obstruct walking for life.
After marriage,
women who have been infibulated
must be forcibly penetrated.
This may take up to forty days,
and when men are impatient,
a knife is used.
Special honeymoon centers are built
outside communities so that the
screams of the brides will not be heard.
Sometimes the husband traditionally
runs through the streets with a
blood-stained dagger.
Waris Dirie had to be operated on as an adult before she could have sexual relations.
Dirie’s mother believing she was doing the best thing for her daughter,
walked her into the brush,
held her down and told her to bite on a root.
A gypsy woman cut at the lithe girl’s genitalia,
using a dirty, broken razor blade.
.
“I heard the sound of the dug blade
sawing back and forth through my skin,”
The woman used thorns from an acacia
tree to puncture holes in her skin
and sew her up,
leaving a tiny hole the diameter
of a matchstick,
through which urine and menstrual
blood could dribble.
“My legs were completely numb,
but the pain between them was so
intense that I wished I would die.”
Five-year-old Waris was left in a
hut to recuperate her infibulation.
Two cousins died from infection.
Uncircumcised girls are seen as
unclean and treated as outcasts.
For more than 20 years Dirie
suffered health problems from
her radical circumcision.
Menstruation was a long,
agonizing process each month,
as the menstrual blood backed
up in her body.
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It’s when we touch on the subject
of sex that Dirie becomes agitated.
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“Please,”
she implores,
“lets not talk about that.
Just use your imagination.
I will never know the pleasures
of sex that have been denied me.
I feel incomplete,
crippled and knowing that there’s
nothing I can do to change that is
the most hopeless feeling of all.
.
When I met Dana,
I finally fell in love and wanted to
experience the joys of sex with
a man. But if you ask me today,
“Do you enjoy sex?”
I would say not in the traditional way.
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I simply enjoy being physically close
to Dana because I love him.
It never gets easier.
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It is emotionally draining to talk
about something which has been
locked deep for so long.
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The hardest part is to start
somewhere.
Everybody is waiting,
they don’t know what to do.
The West are aware of the problem.
But they’re told to back off,
it’s none of your business.
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The face of pain and
the implements
of destruction.
Hawa Adan Mohamed was
born and raised in Somalia.
At the age of 8 she underwent the
most radical form of mutilation
practised infibulation.
Performed by her aunt in a small village,
the procedure was carried out
without anesthetic,
using basic cutting tools and thorns.
She lost an older sister who
died after the operation.
“In Somalia, circumcision is
such a deep deep part of a girl’s life.
From the moment we are crawling
we know about circumcision,
we know that our grandmother
and mother and sisters are circumcised
and we look forward to it being done.
.
Back then,
no one would even dream of
not being circumcised.
If a mother doesn’t get her
daughter circumcised,
her daughter will be an outcast,
no one will marry her and everyone
would think she is a prostitute
so it is a very difficult situation
we can’t be angry at anyone,
because the mothers’ intentions
are good.”
In 1995 she returned home,
despite civil turmoil, to help her
country women deal with circumcision.
“I was devastated by what I saw.
It seems that we have gone
back 40 years.
Girls were being infibulated
every day with razors and thorns.
Two young girls recently died
following the procedure and yet
still many don’t question it.
My dream is that in my lifetime
there will be young girls living
in the heart of Somalia who can
run free and play without pain,
without the cruel and devastating
effects of circumcision.
Even just a few. Even 10.”
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At the age of 18 Zebebu Tulu
was kidnapped by her future
husband, Getachew (Getu) Moneta,
and taken to his brother’s home.
Such forced unions are not
uncommon in Ethiopia,
where men often have near-total
control over women’s lives.
Tradition forbade the tearful Zenebu
from returning to her parents and
the pair was married after negotiations
between the two families (NZ Herald).
Nawal el Sadaawi has been a prominent
campaigner against female circumcision
which has brought her the ire of the mullahs.
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The Naked Face of Eve contains several
commentaries on female circumcision:
“My blood was frozen in my veins.
It looked to me as though some thieves
had broken into my room and
kidnapped me from my bed.
They were getting ready to cut my
throat which was always what
happened with disobedient girls like
myself in the stories that my old
rural grandmother was so fond
of telling me.
I strained my ears trying to catch
the rasp of the metallic sound.
The moment it ceased,
it was as though my heart stopped
beating with it.
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I was unable to see,
and somehow my breathing seemed
also to have stopped.
Yet I imagined the thing that was
making the rasping sound coming
closer and closer to me. …
At that very moment I realized that
my thighs had been pulled wide apart,
and that each of my lower limbs
was being held as far away from
the other as possible,
gripped by-steel fingers that never
relinquished their pressure.
I felt that the rasping knife or
blade was heading straight down
towards my throat.
Then suddenly the sharp metallic
edge seemed to drop between my
thighs and there cut off a piece of
flesh from my body.
I screamed with pain despite the
tight hand held over my mouth,
for the pain was not just a pain,
it was like a searing flame that
went through my whole body.
After a few moments,
I saw a red pool of blood around my hips.
I did not know what they had
cut off from my body,
and I did not try to find out.
I just wept,
and called out to my mother for help.
But the worst shock of all was
when I looked around and found
her standing by my side.
Yes, it was her,
I could not be mistaken,
in flesh and blood,
right in the midst of these strangers,
talking to them and smiling at them,
as though they had not participated
in slaughtering her daughter
just a few moments ago.”
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Elizabeth Lloyd in making a case that female orgasm is just for women to have fun with no reproductive value has claimed that FGM has little effect on fertility:
Women who have had FGM do suffer a significantly increased fertility risk.
Women who have had the procedure are more likely to need Caesareans and the death rate among their babies is up to 50% higher,
WHO said in a new report.
The study, reported in the Lancet,
involved 30,000 African women
(BBC “Female circumcision
‘birth risk’ 2 June 2006).
A study by Jones et al. in Burkina Faso also found that women who have been cut are more likely to experience obstetric complications,
a 1998-1999 NHRC study found that women who were circumcised married earlier than uncircumcised women,
and that circumcised women had greater total fertility than uncircumcised women.
Another study based on DHS surveys in the Central African Republic,
Côte d’Ivoire, and Tanzania found that,
when controlling for confounding socioeconomic, demographic and cultural variables,
circumcised women, grouped by age at circumcision,
did not have significantly different odds of infertility nor of childbearing than uncut women
(emphasis added, Larsen and Yan, 2000).
.
(Elizabeth F. Jackson, Philip B. Adongo, Ayaga A. Bawah, Ellie Feinglass, and James F. Phillips,
“The Relationship between Female Genital Cutting and Fertility in Kassena-Nankana District of Northern Ghana,”
Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Philadelphia, PA, March 31-April 2, 2005, p. 4)
It is clear that,
patriarchal societies that diminish or eliminate women’s capacity for orgasm,
by genital cutting or any other means,
also have an agenda to make women bear more children – i.e. more ‘reproductively successful’.
FGM occurs because men fear,
not without good reason,
that female arousal does influence reproductive choice.
See also the Dogons (p 138), the Shipibo (p 170) and the Sunna (p 278).2004
An international conference on female genital mutilation has ended in Kenya with a fresh call to ban the practice.
Campaigners urged more countries to ratify the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa adopted in July 2003.
It has so far been ratified by just three states, Rwanda, Libya and Comoros.
Although female circumcision is banned in 14 African countries,
including Ethiopia, Uganda, Ghana and Togo,
the practice is still widespread.
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Male Mutilation,
Sperm Competition
and Polygyny
Circumcision and other forms of ritual male genital mutilation can leave a man vulnerable to infection and even death.
There may be an evolutionary explanation, according to Christopher Wilson, of Cornell University.
It could function to reduce a young man’s potential to father a child with an older man’s wife.
Sperm competition theory predicts that males will evolve ways to ensure that their sperm,
and not another male’s,
fertilises a female’s eggs.
Genital mutilation, in this view,
is just another way to win the sperm war.
Male genital mutilation makes it less likely that a male will manage to father a child with another man’s wife.
In some forms of mutilation, such as subincision,
cuts are made to the base of the penis,
which causes sperm to be ejaculated from the base rather than the end,
and is performed in several Aboriginal Australian societies.
In some African and
Micronesian cultures,
young men have one
of their testicles crushed.
Circumcision is one of the less painful forms of mutilation,
but it is also less effective at reducing sperm competition, however,
that the lack of a foreskin could make ejaculation slower,
meaning brief, illicit sex is less likely to come to fruition and lead to a pregnancy.
Younger men, Wilson says,
submit to having their reproductive ability reduced because they benefit socially from the older men,
by forming alliances, and by gaining access to weapons, or tribal status.
The older men have also gone through the ritual,
and seen their own reproductive effectiveness reduced.
But if a man with, several wives wants to ensure that any children his wives produce are his,
there is pressure to make sure other men can’t successfully impregnate them.
The husband’s own reproductive ability is impaired,
but continuous and repeated access to his wives makes up for it,
while any genital mutilation is a greater handicap to an interloper trying to sneak brief occasional sex with his wives.
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“An older married man must form alliances,
or associate with younger or unmarried men at some point, and it would be better to associate with and invest preferentially in those who are least likely to threaten his paternity,
especially in societies where cuckoldry is rife,”
says Wilson.
“Men who demand genital mutilations as part of the price for alliance and investment would be less vulnerable to exploitation of such relationships and loss of paternity to peers.”
If the sperm competition theory is correct,
Wilson reasoned, then male genital mutilation should be more common in societies where men tend to have multiple wives,
especially those in which the wives live apart from the husband.
The mutilation would also probably be carried out in a public setting,
witnessed mostly by other men,
and performed by a non-relative.
Men who refused would face social sanctions.
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Societies that enforce mutilation may be more stable because of less conflict over paternity.
Wilson then searched anthropological databases and found that his predictions were borne out: 48% of highly polygynous societies practice some form of male genital mutilation,
and in societies in which wives live in separate households that increases to 63%.
Only 14% of the monogamous societies in the database practice male genital mutilation.
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(Comment from Moon reader MARIKA below)
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Thank you very much
for posting this article.
This is an extremely EVIL and
HORRIBLE ACT OF TORTURE AGAINST
THE FEMALE HUMAN RACE THAT MUST
BE STOPPED FOREVER IN IT’S VERY
PRIMITIVE, DECITFUL AND BARBARIC
TRACKS.
What needs to be done is that
organizations that are against FGM
need to go to the places
where FGM is practiced and
EXTREMELY EDUCATE
the people about the unspeakable
physical, mental and spritual effects this
has on a female victim and NEVER,
EVER PRACTICE THIS
EVIL TORTUROUS ACT AGAINST
ANY WOMAN EVER.
And to the very unfortunate poor
women that have been ” circumcised”,
there is A WONDERFUL organization called
Clitoraid that raises money to help build
“pleasure hospitals” in Burkina Faso to
help women rebuild thier clitoris’s
that have been victims of FGM.
I really HOPE this very wonderful
organization goes global to help women
rebuild what was
evily taken from them.
Here is the link to their holy good organization.
http://www.clitoraid.org/news.php
MAJOR THANKS TO MARIKA
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clitoraid link
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Female Genital Mutilation
Good cause, BUT far more men have their genitals mutilated in the world with MAINSTREAM ACCEPTANCE and ADVOCACY. If you are against FGM, you must also be against MGM. I am against both.
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etherspirit - January 26, 2009 at 10:37 pm |
just gotta say i really love your blog! keep the good work up!
Orgasmen - January 26, 2009 at 11:15 pm |
There was a story on the news I heard as I was driving into work this morning. In the Washington, DC area, there has not been much of a flu outbreak in Maryland or the District proper. However, Virginia has been hit relatively hard. Of course, this isn’t really as dire as it could be. Not a huge epidemic of massive proportions. Just people getting sick.
J. Martin - February 5, 2009 at 5:50 am |
[...] though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few moments ago.” FGM Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Liberty is facing death by a thousand [...]
Thousands of girls mutilated in Britain « Islamophobes United - March 29, 2009 at 7:08 pm |