There was a really interesting article in American Sociological Review 61 (6) 1996 by Gerry Mackie, illustrating the similar reasoning for footbinding and FGM, and how the succesful eradication of footbinding could be used as a template for ending FGM. Obviously ending a practice is not a matter of a Western nation sweeping down and dictating what is right or wrong, but at the same time just as no one would defend footbinding or try and mollify the physical and psychological effects that it had on women, it is ridiculous to defend FGM simply because it is a tradition.

(outsiders can help African women by providing) “moral encouragement”

I didn’t mean like “we’re more moral than you, so we’re going to encourage you morally,” more like when your friend is breaking up with her boyfriend and one offers “moral support.” I do think it’s helpful for people – particularly physically present people – to support women in their choices. At least, my acquaintances who’ve worked in refugee camps in Africa seem to have found their presence and support helpful in enabling African women to act in ways that are not culturally sanctioned.

I don’t know if people think I’m apologizing for FGS. I don’t personally think I am. I believe the practice should be eliminated, preferably by the people involved. People from the outside can provide tools that can help those people — such as education about sex and health, economic support, and moral encouragement.

I also believe that stopping FGS will not be easy. Taking a hard line on this issue has repeatedly caused very bad outcomes. In order to stop FGS, people will have to work within the cultural framework to lessen cultural attachment to FGS. Otherwise, you get shit like the operations being done in incerasingly unsafe environments (when you ban it from hospitals), to increasingly younger girls (when you make it illegal, because very young children have less oversight), in less public arenas (when it’s illegal, to keep it out of sight), and by cultures who never did it before but who want to disidentify with westerners.

We have to pick our methodology. Our methodology must be respectful. That doesn’t mean that FGS is okay. It isn’t.

Shannon W.,
Thanks for the link. I agree that western feminists working with local groups is the best way to go.

To some of the questions that were directed to me:

“So why would you use the term “surgeries” to refer to it?”

I find the use of terminology in re: female genital surgeries to be uniformly problematic. Female circumcision illicits erroneous comparisons. I was using female genital mutilation this summer until an anthropologist friend of mine argued that this term is a barrier to conversation with African women, who as I’ve noted, really can’t be alienated from this discussion – after all, it involves their bodies! Female genital surgeries sounds like a good compromise to me at this time. It certainly isn’t perfect, and I may choose to use different terminology at another time.

“And so what rationale is then offered for a clitoridectomy? Some sort of warped sense of asthetics?”

Aesthetics are an issue to the people involved, but they aren’t what I was referring to. In the culture I was talking about, women and men are made, not born – a concept I imagine most of us can get down with. Ritual often deals with psychological symbol. In this case, clitorodectomy creates a woman by cutting out her male part. It’s a coming of age ritual. Men undergo a parallel one by being circumcised (which, of course, is a significantly less problematic procedure).

This symbolic level is where some of the effective ways of changing the practice come from – the culture develops a new way of ‘making’ women that doesn’t involve cutting. That lessens cultural attachment to FGS by providing an alternative way of acheiving the goal.

Obviously, this doesn’t work in the cultures where the overt goal is to eliminate sexual feeling or to make it impossible for women to have vaginal sex before marriage.

“I’m sorry, but positive social benefits? A bonding ritual centered on sexual mutilation yielding positive social benefits? Like what? ”

It’s not the sexual mutilation that yields the positive social benefit, but the rituals around it. This is why it’s a bad thing that these rituals have been mostly eliminated in many places.

These are often coming of age rituals when done to adolescents, and coming of age rituals are useful and important for many peoples. They are also ways of creating group identity and marking, physically, who is in the group and who isn’t. These rituals are also useful and important for many peoples.

Now, in places where the procedures are illegal, they are often done to very young girls who don’t understand their cultural significance. They are performed divorced from the rituals that impart that cultural significance. And they are surrounded by silence because no one wants to attract the wrong kind of attention.

It was often the case that laws against FGS were passed by colonial states, supported by missionaries. When the colonial governments were overthrown, the rituals were often lost. So even though in many places FGS is no longer illegal, the procedures are still done the way they were done when FGS was illegal. Which means that simply making the practice illegal without making the attendant cultural changes yielded no net benefit and some net loss.

The adolescent going through clitorodectomy used to suffer horrible consequences and come out as a clearly defined cultural woman who was marked as and bonded to her group. Now, she comes through just suffering horrible consequences.

I can tell you with certainty the effect of having mine cut off, and it would involve a screwdriver through someone’s neck.

Wouldn’t have to save sperm, either. They can be tapped via needle aspiration, any time. Some people do that for assisted reproduction.

Just sayin’.

It sounds to me like they invited all women giving birth to singleton babies at the study centers to particpate, so I don’t think they deliberately made each group equal, except insofar as they might have chosen their study sites to try to make the groups fairly equal. I don’t know why the prevalence is so different from the WHO’s figures, though. Between the two I would tend to trust the WHO’s figures.