Female Genital Mutilation: Attempting to Repair the Damage
Although the traditions do not depend entirely upon religion, followers of this practice frequently use religion as a justification. It is the followers, then, that have made this a religious issue and caused incalculable harm to women in the name of traditional practices. Finally, though, there may be a means for repairing at least some of the damage and helping women get sexual pleasure in life again.
Surgery to reopen the vagina and mitigate the medical complications of genital cutting has long been available. But in Burkina Faso, where as many as 75% of women are thought to have had their clitorises cut, a relatively new procedure is being offered. Clitoris-reconstruction surgery aims to restore sexual sensation to women who have been mutilated. A year after it was introduced, more than 100 women have elected to have it performed, according to Michel Akotionga of the Yalgado Ouedraogo University Hospital in Ouagadougou. Unlike surgery to reopen the vagina, which is free in Burkina Faso, clitoris reconstruction costs about $150 in a public hospital and up to $400 in a private clinic.
The technique is possible because most of the clitoris resides inside the female body. In cases where the entire external part has been severed, some 2cm is removed but a further 8-10cm remains embedded internally. Surgeons pull it out and stitch it to the skin. Nerve endings in the new protrusion help to create the secretion and engorgement in the genitals that prepare a woman for sex. Unfortunately the technique used by the Burkinabe doctors does not restore sexual sensation completely, because the pressure-sensitive tip of the clitoris is lost.
Source: The Economist
There are some concerns about this surgery because if a surgeon isn't properly trained — and not many are — they could cause even more damage. Some also apparently wonder if perhaps the existence of reparative surgery will make it easier for parents to justify female genital mutilation in the first place. After all, if the cutting can be fixed later, why not do it now "just in case"?
Despite such concerns, it's really a positive step forward that this procedure was developed. I wonder, though, what religious leaders think about it and what sorts of reactions they have offered. The long-term goals need to be to end the practice entirely and ensure that people who promote it would be treated like someone recommending that infants have a finger removed as a sacrifice to some ancient deity.
Comments
This is a *very* good start. Happier individuals are a good goal, too, and this also threatens misogynists.
I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the early/mid 1980s in Kenya where the practice, though still common with most ethnic groups, seemed to be on the way out. But most all of my female students (I taught high school in a very isolated area)in ethnic groups where this was traditional had had it done. And all of these young women seemed to think it was a good thing.
There it was refered to as female circumcision and seemed to have more of a cultural justification than a specifically religious one. While the term genital mutilation is more accurate, the term circumcision points to the use of the practice as a marker of the transition from childhood to adulthood for both women and men. Hence, efforts to get rid of the practice have to deal with the local ethnic view that you are not an adult without circumcision. (This has also been the cause of no small amount of etnic conflict as those groups who circumcise have traditionally regarded those who don’t as being tribes of children. Those groups that don’t have not appreciated the condescending attitude).
By the way, from my conversations with some of the men, the feminist perspective on this as being a way to repress female sexuality is certainly well-supported. Several said to me that it was important that women not enjoy sex very much as they might want to do it when their husbands were away.
Fortunately, at least where I was (and I have spoken to Kenyan friends about ths since then) the practice seems to be dying out with increasing modernization. But I am not sure that the rest of the local patriarchal ideas are doing the same.
>By the way, from my conversations with some of the men, the feminist perspective on this as being a way to repress female sexuality is certainly well-supported. Several said to me that it was important that women not enjoy sex very much as they might want to do it when their husbands were away.
This is pretty much the cause of all female sexual oppression. I recall when I was in college anthropology courses that they discussed the significance of this. If a woman has a baby, she knows she is the mother. But nobody knows who the father is (historically–we now have DNA, I get that). So, in the past, if a woman was unfaithful, her husband might end up rearing someone else’s kids, and leaving all his hard earned goods to those children in the way of inheritence.
Female infidelity has definitely been viewed in masculine terms historically–as an affront to or a crime against the husband first and foremost.
*sigh*
Tracieh,
I noticed the same thing. However, in societies where paternity is not important (mainly matrilineal kinship systems and some of the small foraging societies)very often women’s sexuality is not repressed or restricted.
That was one of the things that horrified the anthropologist Malinowski about the Trobriand Islanders whose women could be sexually aggressive.
I also remember reading a quote (wish I could find it now) from someone in a native american group to an early European explorer. The European was horrified that wives on occasion had sex with other men and objected that you couldn’t be sure who the father was of any resulting children. The native American replied that he loved all of his village’s children, not just his own and hence was not concerned and didn’t understand the European’s objection.
My own reading of snippets of the earliest known eastern Mediterranean history suggests many of the earliest societies there were matrilineal. Many scholars rejected the notion that they were matriarchal. But at the very least womens’ sexuality and motherhood were celebrated in ways where women often had considerable autonomy and influence, sometimes in ways that many would find shocking today.
This is one of those instances where I wish I had Mr. Peabody and the Wayback machine to be able to go back and see what that might have been like.
This is an old article, but I’m curious.Regenerative medicine has done a a lot of progress remaking sexual parts.Could they find a way to regenerate a clitoris and labia?I know they could,(they remade a vagina and penis)but could they reattach it without desensatizing the parts?