A sad reminder, on Women’s Day, of the enormity of this problem. I’ve followed global efforts to end it, and I must say we’re getting nowhere.

https://iwpr.net/global-voices/tanzania-inside-trade-body-parts-driving-fgm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfZWp-hGCdA&list=RDUfZWp-hGCdA&start_radio=1

Fatma, don’t lose that pussy!
Its market price is hot
Send it off to a trader
They pay a lot

Fatma don’t lose that pussy
That you cut with a dirty knife
It’ll make a magic potion
And a bloodied clitless wife

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Shouldn’t the mutilated women, children, and babies get - as it were - a cut?  The scheme seems a mite unfair.  They after all are supplying the raw materials.  

Gambia can’t wait to bring back FGM.

For few, read tens of millions of course… The indispensable Kathleen Stock scathes through the now-notorious defense of FGM in a once-respectable British journal…

[A]nti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.

Believe it, baby. Believe it. The world is full of people who praise god when parents shear off their newborns’ clitorises and sew shut their labia.

What’s hard to believe is that a British medical journal published a bunch of these people. A King’s College London professor writes:

 “I previously lived & did research in West Africa, working for an NGO that tackled female genital cutting. The British Medical Journal has published a ‘puff piece’ promoting FGC, saying it’s perfectly fine for the community (not the individual) to control her body.

“The article blames Western media for causing harm by wanting to tackle FGC. Nowhere does it mention that this is intended to reduce pleasure and maintain patriarchal control. Publishing this, academia is really digging its own grave.”

British academia digging its own grave by caving to moral degenerates is, you know, just what British academia does. God forbid we should intervene in its beautiful folkways.

A lot of Liberians like cutting off clitorises, and they don’t appreciate it when people try to stop them. It is good and great to castrate female babies, and if you disagree with this you’re going to hear from a lot of disgruntled people who are happy to point out that Liberian culture founds itself on bloody disfigurement.

Beyond disgusting.

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?