Despite its appalling political cowardice – its announcement that it will refuse to call mutilation mutilation, but will instead call it cutting – the New York Times seems to have allowed the truth – the true word, mutilation (“[F]emale genital mutilation is the accepted term, and it’s the term WHO uses. Mutilation shows the gravity of the practice. You’re damaging healthy tissue and altering it in ways that may be permanent, for no medical reason.”) – to slip through in at least this one column. This remarkable column.
FGM is a cultural practice with one key aim: To control an emerging woman’s sexuality by physically removing the most sensitive part of her anatomy. In the back-and-forth dialogue on FGM over its religious association and clinical definition, there is one psychological aspect of FGM that continues to be ignored: sexuality as voice. A woman’s ability to feel and express herself is an extension of her voice. When little girls are stripped of their ability to feel, and are later shamed for expressing (or wanting to express) themselves sexually, it’s a form of mental abuse that silences the most primal form of communication: sex. It strips them of their ability to discover themselves before they have even reached the threshold of womanhood.
In these cultures, girls are cut off from themselves psychologically and spiritually far before the barbaric genital mutilation takes place. Girls are violated at the earliest age, trained to be obedient and submissive.
Shireen Qudosi really gets at it.
Don’t forget to add to this picture of womanhood the burqa: Female Oral Mutilation.
May 8th, 2017 at 8:33AM
I don’t know, UD. According to speaker after speaker at our commencement, it’s all about total acceptance and actively embracing diversity of all kinds.
May 8th, 2017 at 8:51AM
tp: I think that’s changing. Slowly.