An article about the emergent scandal of medicalized FGM is much too coy: The point of the procedure is to assure that, their whole lives long, the women of Africa and Asia (230 million of them are currently walking around without sex organs) are guaranteed never to have even a teeny weeny blip of sexual pleasure. Total erotic numbness is the prescription, which your local doctor will happily fill for you. You can talk morals, virginity, the community, all you like. It ain’t none of that, really. It’s the amputation of the clitoris, and with it the death of erotic sensation forever. Some docs will sew your vagina shut too, just for good measure.

Until you understand that for hundreds of millions of human beings around the globe the thought of their daughters having the capacity to experience sexual pleasure is such an atrocity that they’d rather rip out their genitalia than run that risk, you’ll never get anywhere with this vile behavior. It really is there that you have to work: Just as public disgust with smoking decreased its prevalence, so disgust with violent hatred of female sexuality must be publicly expressed.

… here.

Triumphal sadism as a way of life. Hard to know how you do anything about that.

‘It is a thing of pride and recognition … [G]irls who are mutilated have become women.‘

Or, you know, babies who are mutilated have become corpses.

Laws don’t mean shit if you don’t enforce them.

… stand for the hundreds of millions of women around the Muslim world getting their clits ripped off and their vaginal lips stitched closed at birth.

Franchement, Dear Reader, UD can barely stand to cover the ongoing sickening global atrocity of FGM; but when a newborn bleeds out because her sexual organs were slashed to bits in the name of Allah, it’s kind of hard to keep quiet. At least this event is disgusting enough to get significant world coverage; at least the three lower than dirt women who held down an infant and slit her up the middle and watched her die have been charged.

But it’s Gambia and listen. You don’t know shit about little Gambia, but close to one hundred percent of its babies and girls get their genitals slashed off.

Oh Egypt? Egypt, you say? Pretty much the same statistic there, guys. And Egypt’s all big and we’ve heard of it and all. Same slitting them down the middle.

Oh England? Really?? England tries hard to detect and punish FGM among its Muslim population, but unless a hospital ends up with a bloodied dead baby nothing much will be detected.

… FGM kills 44 000 girls each year according to recent research, which analysed 15 African countries. This means that FGM is a bigger cause of death than malnutrition, measles, meningitis, HIV/Aids, and many other health threats for girls in the 15 countries studied... The global figure for deaths from FGM is likely to be much higher than 44 000, when all populations are included—particularly those from Indonesia, Somalia, Somaliland, and Sudan, which have a high prevalence of FGM... [The practice is still legal in] Mali, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Somalia.

… for people to stop castrating five year old girls.

‘To an American like me, appalled by the practice [of female genital mutilation] and allowed to listen in [to what West Africans say about it], the conversation reflected something hopeful — not only [a girl named] Sesay’s resistance but also the way that more girls are pushing past the taboo of talking about female genital mutilation, or F.G.M. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to report on the practice, because traditionally it has been unmentionable, but it seems to be losing its silencing power. In a journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia, I found some young women were reluctant to discuss the topic, but many others were willing to candidly discuss it...

[I]nfections are common but often go untreated because of the insular nature of the societies. Girls sometimes die … and then are buried quietly and secretly…

F.G.M. is so horrific and widespread that it should be much higher on the global human rights agenda. To their credit, organizations like the United Nations Population Fund, UNICEF and U.N. Women have long spoken out against the practice, as have many aid groups…

When someone like Sesay opens a biology textbook, she learns about infection and scar tissue and trauma. But she also absorbs a far more dangerous idea in the eyes of the cutters: that she has a right to say no. And that is the quiet revolution already underway — in classrooms, in whispers among friends, in small communities like Sesay’s, where a daughter brings to the table the talk of girls’ rights.‘

The UN has set a ridiculous target of ending female genital mutilation by 2030, and it’s time to get honest: If you can’t end the practice, at least end that target. In the few countries where the village butcher faces possible (faintly possible) criminal charges, much of the activity has simply been medicalized: doctors do it in their offices, like America’s own Hopkins med grad, Jumana Nagarwala, who did it right here, in and around Detroit, and who, with the help of Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, beat the charges against her, and I assume is still at it.

Hell, Gambia almost legalized it last year. Entire religious communities in Africa and Asia make FGM the very core of their tribal practice: No initiation without it. European countries with significant immigrant/Muslim communities are always putting this and that set of parents in jail, or deporting this or that young man found to have transported his twelve year old bride to be back to the homeland for cutting. It don’t make no nevermind – the global slashing at clitorises and vaginal lips and surrounding tissues thrives.

And yes, yes – keep funding grassroots efforts… But UD wonders whether an additional effort might be a good idea. Among Western elites, a depraved form of relativism, plus an understandable eagerness to look away – far away – from this repellent and disturbing behavior, has meant that people with money and power have long since backed off from FGM. Of course they don’t want to think about the fact that huge, huge, numbers of people in the world believe female sexuality to be an unspeakable abomination which must be rooted out, dug out, ground out, gutted, at the cost of lifelong pain/debility and grotesque deformation. And the sooner the better – there is no lower age limit to the practice. Britain has seen several cases of parents slashing their infants.

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It’s I dunno you know just really uh icky … almost kind of unbelievable that hundreds of millions of men in the world think the possibility of women deriving sexual pleasure is a demonic nightmare which must be fought with every sharp stone we can muster. Think of Norman Bates slashing at Marion Crane, only for Marion Crane substitute an unanesthetized splay-legged eight year old being slashed repeatedly between her legs. Yuck. You and I live in a pretty world where we’d really rather not…

What if the anti-FGM forces targeted us? Made a real effort to make us care?

They gave this fucker four years for conspiring to commit female genital mutilation, but under the Unduly Lenient Sentence (ULS) scheme it’s been increased to seven years. I trust England will deport him after he’s served his sentence.

And because countries are slashing children at younger and younger ages (an ironic result of the success of anti-FGM campaigns in reaching older girls), it’s not unusual to see mutilated infants in Europe and America.

The incidence of the practice is astonishing:

Somalia (99 percent), Guinea (95 percent), Mali (85 percent), Sudan (87 percent), Egypt (87 percent), Sierra Leone (83 percent), and Eritrea (83 percent). 

Note Egypt. There goes the argument that it’s confined to chaotic third world locations.

These are countries where people think God commands them to bloody and disfigure infants. I know you’re too disgusted or morally relative or in denial or indifferent to think it happens here, but I’d ask you to recall Hopkins-educated Dr Jumana Nagarwala, who along with other slashers continues to bring the benefits of FGM to all parts of this great nation.

It’s normal, he explained in his defense against a criminal sentence for planning a child’s genital mutilation and then forced marriage to him (he’s 47; his would-be slave is described only as a child, but knowing this world as UD does after years of blogging about it, I’m gonna guess she’s around nine), normal to perform sexual amputation of a child and then marry her.

Can you imagine more total possession of a slave? And of course he’s right. Hundreds of millions of little girls around the world have their sex organs pulled off and are then married off. 230 million have had FGM done, in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Well, but Europe. Hm, Europe. Everybody knows it goes on in certain neighborhoods, but it’s hard to prove if the child-slayers don’t leave chatty messages about it on their phones, the way this guy did.

America? Remember Johns Hopkins’ finest – Jumana Nagarwala. And we couldn’t even convict her. I’m sure she’s long since sharpened her scalpel again.

A nice little PhD student in nice little Nottingham arranged to have the clitoris and vaginal lips of a child ripped off, after which he would force her to marry him, a 47 year old male stranger.

He will go to jail.

… — the idiots almost legalized female genital mutilation — The Lancet runs an editorial which will really annoy Alan Dershowitz and other FGM enthusiasts.

Elimination of FGM has primarily focused on the role of traditional cutters—community elders with no medical training. What has been largely ignored in FGM elimination campaigns is the increasing role played by trained medical professionals. An estimated 52 million girls and women have been subjected to FGM at the hands of health-care workers—one in four cases. This medicalisation is gaining traction. Sudan, Egypt, and Indonesia have some of the highest percentages of medicalised FGM. The involvement of health-care workers not only promotes the false belief that FGM is safe, but also normalises and thereby perpetuates the practice, hindering elimination.

So ladies, take your pick: Filthy slashers, or killer docs.

“We are clear that the fact that FGM is considered appropriate within such cultures can be of no relevance to the seriousness of the offence. The practice is criminalised by UK law.”

And with that, a British court tossed out a mutilator’s attempt to shorten her seven year sentence for taking a THREE YEAR OLD overseas to have her clitoris sawed off.

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And see the reason the judge’s comments went to culture is that the woman’s attorney said you know I mean in her culture I mean it’s absolutely fine to do this to babies! She had to or she’d have been ostracized! It’s that important.

So if it’s that important you shouldn’t mind spending a few years in jail for it. I mean, you must be really popular in your baby clit slitting culture now.

FGM comes back to Gambia.