- 30 Dec 2023 23:04
#15300156
It's very common in much of the Muslim World.
By some estimates, 50% of women in Egypt have had their private parts mutilated, usually done when they were a child of the age of 9 or 10.
In Somalia, 98% of women have been subject to genital cutting.
And with large numbers of refugees fleeing Somalia into Western Europe and the United States, it's happening there too.
"Female genital mutilation still rampant here"
The Horrors of Female Genital Mutilation have come to the UK, Ireland, and Sweden
Female Genital Mutilation on the Rise in the U.S.
American-born woman, daughter of immigrant parents, was forced to undergo "circumcision" when she was 7 years old
(UNDERGROUND: Risk of FGM Increasing for Women in the U.S., says CDC , ABC News, June 22, 2016 )
Women's Health:
'My Clitoris Was Cut Off When I Was 11'
"You never really get over female genital mutilation. You just learn to live with it."
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/ ... -survivor/
Ever wondered what it's like for a woman who's been "circumcised" ?
It's not good.
Someone cut out a significant part of me: A woman on what it's like living with female genital mutilation
My mother and I did once speak about what happened to me when I was seven. I was sixteen, and a woman within earshot at my Houston mosque had asked the woman next to her if her daughter had the “operation” already, and if she’d gotten it done in the U.S. or back in India.
I’m not sure what I googled, but three hours after returning home from mosque I had words to describe what had happened to me: female genital cutting, clitoridectomy, female genital circumcision. Later that night, I sat with the illicit copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that my American aunt had given me. My aunt was born in the United States, and realizing that her Western agnostic upbringing was startlingly different from mine, she gave the book to me while visiting one Christmas, gently telling me that she was around for any questions I may have. One of the things the book suggested was to put a hand mirror between my legs. In the harsh lights of my bathroom, looking at the pictures, I realized that there was something horrifically different about what I had between my legs.
Over the next few weeks, the Internet gave me a sense of outrage that I wasn’t prepared to handle. I latched onto the most controversial name for what had happened to me: Female Genital Mutilation, or FGM.
I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know that my mother might have lived her entire life without finding pleasure in sex. This terrified me. What if this was my future too?
“Have you ever even looked at your clitoris?” my roommate asked. I felt something squeeze deeply inside of me and I began crying, tears trickling down from my eyes as I clamped my lips shut.
My roommate encouraged me to go see an ob/gyn at the school. I ended up in stirrups only twenty minutes after walking in, and when the doctor finally arrived. “Let’s have a look,” she said, using the same no-nonsense tone I remembered from the lady from my childhood, the one who cut me. I clamped my knees together and started bawling. She was in her late fifties and had seen enough during her quick glance to make a correct assumption about why I was crying. “When did this happen? How long did it hurt? Are you able to wipe yourself with toilet paper without discomfort?” The doctor admitted up front that she didn’t know much, but said that taking a closer look might help her out. By the time I finally let the doctor take a look, she let out a long, low breath. “What I can tell you is that there is a lot of thin scar tissue, most of which looks extremely painful,” she said. “This doesn’t look like a full clitorectomy,” she added, explaining that while she’d never seen one before, it looked like a partial cut. “Did a medical professional do this?” she asked as I shook my head.
During college, I’d figured out that getting to orgasm wasn’t going to be easy. Even when I attempted to pleasure myself, any wrong move, any sudden accidental movement, would shoot pain inside of me. The scar tissue was tender and grew inflamed quickly. The skin sloughed off easily sometimes and it was quick to bleed. I kept this information close to my chest, hardly ever mentioning it to anyone. After college, when I finally had sex for the one and only time, I told no one that it had been a disaster, that the pain had been so bad that it hurt to pee for weeks afterwards.
The first and only time I had sex it did not go well. I was twenty-two, a late bloomer by most of popular culture’s standards, and for the year my boyfriend and I had been dating, we’d skirted around the issue. He’d repeated that he was willing to wait, however long it might take me to be ready, and I’d chafed at his understanding. “Don’t you want me?” I asked after another false start, our breathing heavy. He rolled off me gently, panting. “It didn’t seem like you wanted it,” he replied. He was right. I’d clenched every muscle in my thighs and squeezed my eyes shut when his hand climbed above my knee. That’s when he stopped.
After a year of dating him, I decided that I needed to get the act over with. “I don’t want you to stop even if I look like it’s hurting me,” I told him. He grimaced, but I repeated the statement again and then again. His quiet acquiescence was disarming, so I gripped his wrists tightly and stared at him directly. “I need you to do this for me,” I told him. By the time his body was positioned over mine, we’d moved from the couch to the bed. I closed my eyes, feeling my nostrils flare as I breathed in slowly, counting to control my heartbeat and the nausea welling up inside me: IN one, two three; HOLD one, two three; OUT one, two three. After a couple of minutes we were technically having sex. Pain shot up my body. I could feel it in my teeth and in the muscles of my jaw. My insides felt like they were being scraped out by sandpaper. The pain was everywhere; I couldn’t figure out what hurt and where. After a couple of thrusts, he withdrew, unfinished, kissing my forehead gently.
I sat in the bed, allowing myself to cry for the first time since we’d begun talking about sex. For the first time since I’d admitted to him that I might never be able to enjoy a sexual experience. That when I was younger, someone had taken a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me.
http://www.firstpost.com/living/someone ... 49655.html
In these parts of the world, if the parents don't choose to have their daughter subjected to circumcision it's common for another family member to grab the girl and make sure it gets done:
Zameena, a young mother of a five-year-old girl did not want her daughter circumcised either. She refused outright when her mother-in-law said she must continue with a practice that is part of traditional culture.
But the older woman went ahead anyway.
"I was furious when I returned home to find my daughter, then 3 months old, howling in pain," she recalls. "I am helpless when members of my family still believe that it is part of our religion."
http://www.ipsnews.net/1996/08/sri-lank ... rcumcised/
If you thought Female Circumcision is always the choice of the parents, guess again
Parents decide they want to break from tradition and not circumcise their daughter. Guess how the community responded.
Man received massive beating for trying to protect his daughter from getting circumcised
Olalowo Hammed Olalekan and his wife, Modinat, were harassed after being pressured repeatedly by family members and members of their community to bring their daughter for circumcision as usual with traditional requirements.
According to NewTelegraph, the couple have reportedly fled the shores of Nigeria for the safety of their children.
When he tried to escape to meet his family after sending his wife and children off, Hammed said i was attacked and beaten to the point of death, by my kinsmen and community members for refusing to subject my daughter through the female genital mutilation.
He added that he was left to die after the massive beating.
Olalekan said, “I thought I had died. I was bleeding all over my body with swollen face and cuts on my body. What I experienced from them is not what I wish anybody.”
“If it were my wife or children, they may not have survived it. I was on my way home, when some men began taunting me for not allowing my daughter to be circumcised, rather aided their disappearance.” He concluded.
http://tweakinggist.com/2016/08/05/man- ... rcumcised/
Even older girls are not always safe.
This girl was 21 when her father planned to get her cut and have her married off to some man they had never even met.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... nline.html
By some estimates, 50% of women in Egypt have had their private parts mutilated, usually done when they were a child of the age of 9 or 10.
In Somalia, 98% of women have been subject to genital cutting.
And with large numbers of refugees fleeing Somalia into Western Europe and the United States, it's happening there too.
"Female genital mutilation still rampant here"
The Horrors of Female Genital Mutilation have come to the UK, Ireland, and Sweden
Female Genital Mutilation on the Rise in the U.S.
American-born woman, daughter of immigrant parents, was forced to undergo "circumcision" when she was 7 years old
(UNDERGROUND: Risk of FGM Increasing for Women in the U.S., says CDC , ABC News, June 22, 2016 )
Women's Health:
'My Clitoris Was Cut Off When I Was 11'
"You never really get over female genital mutilation. You just learn to live with it."
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/ ... -survivor/
Ever wondered what it's like for a woman who's been "circumcised" ?
It's not good.
Someone cut out a significant part of me: A woman on what it's like living with female genital mutilation
My mother and I did once speak about what happened to me when I was seven. I was sixteen, and a woman within earshot at my Houston mosque had asked the woman next to her if her daughter had the “operation” already, and if she’d gotten it done in the U.S. or back in India.
I’m not sure what I googled, but three hours after returning home from mosque I had words to describe what had happened to me: female genital cutting, clitoridectomy, female genital circumcision. Later that night, I sat with the illicit copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that my American aunt had given me. My aunt was born in the United States, and realizing that her Western agnostic upbringing was startlingly different from mine, she gave the book to me while visiting one Christmas, gently telling me that she was around for any questions I may have. One of the things the book suggested was to put a hand mirror between my legs. In the harsh lights of my bathroom, looking at the pictures, I realized that there was something horrifically different about what I had between my legs.
Over the next few weeks, the Internet gave me a sense of outrage that I wasn’t prepared to handle. I latched onto the most controversial name for what had happened to me: Female Genital Mutilation, or FGM.
I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know that my mother might have lived her entire life without finding pleasure in sex. This terrified me. What if this was my future too?
“Have you ever even looked at your clitoris?” my roommate asked. I felt something squeeze deeply inside of me and I began crying, tears trickling down from my eyes as I clamped my lips shut.
My roommate encouraged me to go see an ob/gyn at the school. I ended up in stirrups only twenty minutes after walking in, and when the doctor finally arrived. “Let’s have a look,” she said, using the same no-nonsense tone I remembered from the lady from my childhood, the one who cut me. I clamped my knees together and started bawling. She was in her late fifties and had seen enough during her quick glance to make a correct assumption about why I was crying. “When did this happen? How long did it hurt? Are you able to wipe yourself with toilet paper without discomfort?” The doctor admitted up front that she didn’t know much, but said that taking a closer look might help her out. By the time I finally let the doctor take a look, she let out a long, low breath. “What I can tell you is that there is a lot of thin scar tissue, most of which looks extremely painful,” she said. “This doesn’t look like a full clitorectomy,” she added, explaining that while she’d never seen one before, it looked like a partial cut. “Did a medical professional do this?” she asked as I shook my head.
During college, I’d figured out that getting to orgasm wasn’t going to be easy. Even when I attempted to pleasure myself, any wrong move, any sudden accidental movement, would shoot pain inside of me. The scar tissue was tender and grew inflamed quickly. The skin sloughed off easily sometimes and it was quick to bleed. I kept this information close to my chest, hardly ever mentioning it to anyone. After college, when I finally had sex for the one and only time, I told no one that it had been a disaster, that the pain had been so bad that it hurt to pee for weeks afterwards.
The first and only time I had sex it did not go well. I was twenty-two, a late bloomer by most of popular culture’s standards, and for the year my boyfriend and I had been dating, we’d skirted around the issue. He’d repeated that he was willing to wait, however long it might take me to be ready, and I’d chafed at his understanding. “Don’t you want me?” I asked after another false start, our breathing heavy. He rolled off me gently, panting. “It didn’t seem like you wanted it,” he replied. He was right. I’d clenched every muscle in my thighs and squeezed my eyes shut when his hand climbed above my knee. That’s when he stopped.
After a year of dating him, I decided that I needed to get the act over with. “I don’t want you to stop even if I look like it’s hurting me,” I told him. He grimaced, but I repeated the statement again and then again. His quiet acquiescence was disarming, so I gripped his wrists tightly and stared at him directly. “I need you to do this for me,” I told him. By the time his body was positioned over mine, we’d moved from the couch to the bed. I closed my eyes, feeling my nostrils flare as I breathed in slowly, counting to control my heartbeat and the nausea welling up inside me: IN one, two three; HOLD one, two three; OUT one, two three. After a couple of minutes we were technically having sex. Pain shot up my body. I could feel it in my teeth and in the muscles of my jaw. My insides felt like they were being scraped out by sandpaper. The pain was everywhere; I couldn’t figure out what hurt and where. After a couple of thrusts, he withdrew, unfinished, kissing my forehead gently.
I sat in the bed, allowing myself to cry for the first time since we’d begun talking about sex. For the first time since I’d admitted to him that I might never be able to enjoy a sexual experience. That when I was younger, someone had taken a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me.
http://www.firstpost.com/living/someone ... 49655.html
In these parts of the world, if the parents don't choose to have their daughter subjected to circumcision it's common for another family member to grab the girl and make sure it gets done:
Zameena, a young mother of a five-year-old girl did not want her daughter circumcised either. She refused outright when her mother-in-law said she must continue with a practice that is part of traditional culture.
But the older woman went ahead anyway.
"I was furious when I returned home to find my daughter, then 3 months old, howling in pain," she recalls. "I am helpless when members of my family still believe that it is part of our religion."
http://www.ipsnews.net/1996/08/sri-lank ... rcumcised/
If you thought Female Circumcision is always the choice of the parents, guess again
Parents decide they want to break from tradition and not circumcise their daughter. Guess how the community responded.
Man received massive beating for trying to protect his daughter from getting circumcised
Olalowo Hammed Olalekan and his wife, Modinat, were harassed after being pressured repeatedly by family members and members of their community to bring their daughter for circumcision as usual with traditional requirements.
According to NewTelegraph, the couple have reportedly fled the shores of Nigeria for the safety of their children.
When he tried to escape to meet his family after sending his wife and children off, Hammed said i was attacked and beaten to the point of death, by my kinsmen and community members for refusing to subject my daughter through the female genital mutilation.
He added that he was left to die after the massive beating.
Olalekan said, “I thought I had died. I was bleeding all over my body with swollen face and cuts on my body. What I experienced from them is not what I wish anybody.”
“If it were my wife or children, they may not have survived it. I was on my way home, when some men began taunting me for not allowing my daughter to be circumcised, rather aided their disappearance.” He concluded.
http://tweakinggist.com/2016/08/05/man- ... rcumcised/
Even older girls are not always safe.
This girl was 21 when her father planned to get her cut and have her married off to some man they had never even met.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... nline.html
- By Istanbuller
- By KurtFF8