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?