There are communities that still practice FGM (Female Genital Mutilation). It can be called female circumcision or female genital surgery. No matter the name, it is controversial. No matter the controversy, it's still the excision of a decidedly female organ from the female body. It is the removal of an organ whose sole purpose is to derive pleasure. No other human organ's function is solely for pleasure. The clitoris contains 8000 (that's EIGHT THOUSAND) nerves while the head of the penis contains merely half. Stop for a moment and think about what that means. Women's bodies are designed not for the giving of pleasure to men, but to the receiving of pleasure. Women's sexuality is indeed sacred. And yet the practice of FGM continues to this day depriving young women and girls of the experience of their own sacred femininity. And as much as this seemingly barbaric act is shunned by the whole of Western Society, there are women in these very communities who defend its practice.
Now we can rationalize the practice all we want. Most of the women who defend it insist that a girl must be "clean" she must be marriageable. If a woman is not desirable to a man by undergoing this procedure she can run the risk of exile from her community and it can very well cost her her life. Mothers bring their daughters to elder women to be cut, to be mutilated because they are doing what they feel is in the best interest of their daughters - for not only their success within their social group, but for their very survival. And while this practice may ensure their membership, and hence their survival, in their social group: the bottom line is that someone else is benefiting from their loss. The men who will marry them have absolute sexual dominance over these women. And depending on how extreme the practice is, sex becomes a painful ordeal that they must suffer.
But further, many of the women who defend this practice do so because they feel that going through this rite to adulthood is a bonding experience for each of the girls involved. They endure tremendous pain and come through the shared experience with a new sisterhood around them. Each girl is now a highly ranked member of her social group. She is, well, a woman. And it is the pain itself that they endure and conquer that is the thread that binds these women together in sisterhood.
I have my own sisterhood. We are natural mothers who have endured the most wicked of pain. And we are eternally bonded in the torment. We have each have had excised from our bodies something even more symbolic, more evident, of our womanhood. We live daily with the unimaginable pain of having lost our precious children to Domestic Infant Adoption (DIA.) And some of us for the very same reason that these other women on another continent endure the pain of FGM. We have to be marriageable. We have to be proper members of our society. We have to sacrifice in order to just survive. And we can rationalize this practice - the practice of excising and infant from his mother's body - any way we want but the bottom line is still the same: someone else is benefiting from our pain. Someone else has supreme dominance over the most sacred act of womanhood.
It matters not what the justifications are. She's too young. She needs to go to college. She doesn't have any good job prospects. She isn't emotionally stable. She doesn't have enough money. All of these are messages to a woman that she is not good enough. She, who she is at a fundamental level, is not worthy of motherhood.
The real difference in this analogy is that FGM is practiced in order to rid a woman of an unwanted biological organism to be discarded as trash. DIA is practiced in order to rid a woman of the most precious biological organism to be sold to desperate couples for cash. And while I can let go of my Western bias and work to understand why women would subject other women to FGM I am unable to accept the Western bias that allows women to subject other women to DIA.
With the uproar over FGM, I cannot for the life of me understand why there isn't the very same outcry over DIA.
More on this later...
