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A doctor's proposal to start performing a largely symbolic alternative to female genital mutilation in Italy has provoked an outcry from women's rights advocates who say the ritual, which involves the cutting away of part or all of the external genitalia, should not be tolerated in any form.

Somali-born physician Omar Abdulcadir, who practices gynecology at Careggi Hospital in Florence, says many of the 500 new patients he sees each year are immigrants who were subjected to the practice more than a decade ago while still in Africa. He treats them for menstrual problems, chronic infections and other maladies resulting from the crude operations.

Yet for cultural reasons, he says, many of them want their daughters to undergo the same procedure and wind up taking the young girls back to Africa or to illegal and unsanitary clinics in Italy in order to have it done.

Abdulcadir wants to offer an alternative: a mostly symbolic practice that would involve piercing the tip of the clitoris to draw a drop or two of blood. A topical anesthetic would be used

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This was originally in the New York Times, but the archived article costs money. Here's a link to a shorter, free article:

Maybe eventually after doing it that way for a while, parents might even stop bothering to do it at all in a generation or two.

Essentially when you operate there, you are cutting quite close to where people shit and pee to put it bluntly. The infection rate and subsequent mortality would be horrific. Even in societies that don't give a shit about women, they would at least want a significant number of them to survive childhood so their sons could boink and/or marry them

He mentioned in the interview that he was totally opposed to the FGM practice, but was just looking for a way to at least do something to eliminate the horrible suffering that women go through who've been victims of FGM.

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Originally posted by BleedingHeart:
I think I've discussed this before but I doubt that female circumcision was ever as widely practised and as culturally necessary as is made out by its proponents. Essentially when you operate there, you are cutting quite close to where people shit and pee to put it bluntly. The infection rate and subsequent mortality would be horrific.

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I think that female circumcision is probably most likely a 20th century phenomena.

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And really, the way he describes the symbolic circumcision, it's a lot less invasive than the circumcision that Jewish boys have.

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They think it's alright for men to have sexual arousal, but find it disgusting if their wives, daughters have the same feeling! SICK!!!

[ 17 February 2004: Message edited by: Kashla ]

So essentially, in some practices, it's not just one incident of mutilation, but repeated assaults upon the girl/woman. Beyond horrifying. So utterly unnecessary.

Edited: for spelling

[ 17 February 2004: Message edited by: Rebecca West ]

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Originally posted by BleedingHeart:
I think I've discussed this before but I doubt that female circumcision was ever as widely practised and as culturally necessary as is made out by its proponents.

Essentially when you operate there, you are cutting quite close to where people shit and pee to put it bluntly. The infection rate and subsequent mortality would be horrific. Even in societies that don't give a shit about women, they would at least want a significant number of them to survive childhood so their sons could boink and/or marry them

I think that female circumcision is probably most likely a 20th century phenomena

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"Female circumcision" is a misnomer, as it does not resemble circumcision in any significant way.

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Just to be clear - "circumcision" was the term used in the title of the article I linked, which is why I used it in the thread title. I agree its a misnomer, genital mutilation is what it really is.

As for what this particular doctor is doing, I still don't think its right. He may not be doing the actual mutilating, but the thought behind it is still there - that women's sexual freedom is suspect, and needs to be controlled, whether by a symbolic ritual or otherwise.

I see why some people might argue that allowing this doctor to perform this procedure would prevent the more gruesome alternative. However, I am not sure that would really be true. I think that the type of people who would subject their child to this, may not be willing to accept the sanitized version. I understand there is already a 'hierarchy' of FGM, where some communities remove only part of the clitoris and others remove most of the female gentalia to the point where there is only a small hole to pee.

This custom is largely supposed to be about preparing virgins for marriage. Would prospective grooms who believe in this custom be willing to accept someone who has had only a symbolic version of the procedure?

[ 17 February 2004: Message edited by: Skye ]

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Here's a thought, while you're thinking about this stuff and making wildly inaccurate guesses. There are ample resources on the web for information on the issue of female genital mutilation. There's little excuse for ill-informed, half-baked opinions on the subject.

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And we never ever find ill-informed half-baked opinions on the Web.

The point I was trying to make was that FGM is portrayed by its proponents as a centuries old rite of passage for females in their society.

I have no doubt that it has been practised for many years in the past.

However because the mortality prior to asepsis and antibiotics would have been so high, it is highly unlikely it would have so widely practised in the past.

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Originally posted by Kashla:
That is so not true! I've seen a show about it a few years ago (can't really remember about it now, but I remember this...) It's to get rid of their sexual arousal. They lose all feeling of sexual arousal! It would'nt be just like circumcision for boys, but like cutting off their whole friggen "dick", "prick", "cock"...ok penis.

They think it's alright for men to have sexual arousal, but find it disgusting if their wives, daughters have the same feeling! SICK!!!

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I think that female circumcision is probably most likely a 20th century phenomena

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Not true. It was performed in the U.S. for various female maladies up until 1938

from this link: http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/fgm.html

In response to the second question, FGM actually has a very interesting history in the Western world. John Duffy Ph.D., Clinical Professor Emeritus1-Tulane University School of Medicine, and Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Maryland, wrote an article entitled "Clitoridectomy: A Nineteenth Century Answer to Masturbation". This is an article dealing with 19th century moralists who were trying to find cures for the harmful practice of masturbation in men and women. Also, it discusses how clitoridectomy was used as a cure for other "mental diseases". The following quotes are from this article.

"In 1866, an American journal discussed the work of a British physician, Dr. Isaac Brown Baker, who claimed success at treating epilepsy and other nervous disorders in female patients by excising the clitoris."
"In 1894, Dr. A.J. Bloch of New Orleans, in an article entitled 'Sexual Perversion in the Female' referred to female masturbation as 'moral leprosy'. In one of his cases, he described how a school girl of fourteen suffering from nervousness and pallor had been cured by 'liberating the clitoris' from its adhesions and by lecturing the patient on the dangers of masturbation."

The FGM Network Organization, in an article entitled "FGM: An Introduction", stated the following:

I was reading about the women doctors who perform surgery to repair fistulas in women who have had FGM and who have been shunned due to this condition. Amazing work, they rock.

[ 18 February 2004: Message edited by: Madame X ]

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Not true. It was performed in the U.S. for various female maladies up until 1938

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It is not appropriate to compare medical procedures no matter how stupid and misguided with emasculating a woman for cultural reasons.

Again I strongly suspect that while FGM for religious reasons has existed for thousands of years, its widespread adoption was in most cases associated with wiping out of an entire cohort of the female population and its abandonment.

The advent of relative asepsis and the ability to treat infections has lead to its re-emergence in certain societies.

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It is not appropriate to compare medical procedures no matter how stupid and misguided with emasculating a woman for cultural reasons

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What? The culture at the time dictated that homosexuality was immoral. Masturbation, was seen as sinful. Sexual pleasure, sex outside of marriage by women was wrong. Many of these women were labeled as nymphomaniacs. When women performed behaviors that were seen as accepted or taken for granted, or a rite of passage in men, these behaviors were viewed by the dominant society as maladies or medical conditions.

Clitorectomies and also the removal of the ovaries were "cures" for these 'ailments.'

Later on, lobotomies to cure something called "mad housewife" syndrome.

Cutting the clitoris off has one purpose. To try and eliminatea woman's ability to experience physical sexual pleasure or orgasims by removing the organ thats sole purpose was to provide those feelings.

These actions weren't stupid or misguided, but deliberate forms of control over women's sexuality, their feelings and expressions. That's why it's done in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and its history in the United States and perhaps other nations in the Western hemisphere. To control women's sexuality and sexual expression.

Is it only bad when the so-called developing nations are doing it and not considered barbaric or misogynist(by hiding behind terminology such as "medical practice/procedure" when the Western World did it. Or is it just bad period?

You said that clitorectomies was a 20th century phenomonon. I showed you proof that it was not. These practices had already been around for quite a while.

[ 20 February 2004: Message edited by: Madame X ]

[ 20 February 2004: Message edited by: Madame X ]

I think also that there were also attempts by men to control a woman's reproductive abilities. Either through forced sterilization of 'undesirable' groups, and trying to limit access or legality of abortion or contraception for women in 'desirable' groups.

What's desirable/undesirable being based on society's view of race, class, ability/disability, etc, i.e. sterilization of minority ethnic/racial groups or people below certain IQ levels.

[ 20 February 2004: Message edited by: Madame X ]

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But I'm going deeper in my questions. Obviously it is about controlling women's reproductive abilities. But why would anybody want to do that? It can't be maintaining a population, because many women want children anyway. I suspect even without patriarchy, many women would still have had many children.

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I suspect what Mandos is trying to ask is 'Why would a practice that potentially severely limits population growth develop in any human society?'. (NB: I'm approaching this from a purely functional point of view)

FGM tends to be found in non-state societies (originally, obviously it's been exported by immigration etc). Virtually all non-state societies practice some form of contraception (using the term very broadly), whether this be through infanticide, various physical means of producing abortions, and so on. Many of these practices are highly risky for the woman involved, whether it be undergoing the dangers of childbirth when the child is only going to be abandoned anyway, or risking physical trauma from (for example) placing a board on the pregnant woman's stomach and having someone jump on it to (hopefully) trigger an abortion while (hopefully) not killing the woman in the process. Nasty stuff, all around. Probably the 'best' practices all around are found in some Melanesian groups, where it is considered taboo to have intercourse with one's wife outside of a very restricted time frame (like one month out of the year, that sort of thing), and some subSaharan groups where women nurse their children for very extended periods of time (up to five years), as the nursing renders them less fertile. The reason for these practices is that, in the absence of modern contraception, population growth if unchecked would rapidly exhaust the resource base.

State societies, by contrast, tend to be opposed to contraception as the power of the state is determined by the number of subjects it has, so population growth is encouraged. Also, state societies are generally founded on intensive food production, so they can feed a growing population more easily. State societies also tend to frown on other practices, such as homosexuality, that could potentially serve to limit population growth. We can see the tail end of just such sorts of practices in our own society, where homosexuality and women controlling their reproduction are still fighting for acceptability.

Now, FGM may or may not have developed in the past for those (unstated) reasons, and that's a question for the historians and archaeologists. I'd argue that if it is a recent invention then the argument from contraception isn't correct. But the functionalist explanation for such seemingly-strange practices is generally to check population growth. FGM is just the vicious and nasty tip of the iceberg of the crap deal women have pretty much always gotten through the long centuries.

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How and why did these practices for controlling women's sexuality develop? How was the motivation even originated? Why control women's sexuality...rather than focus on something else?

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Before you read this, this is my opinion as an amateur anthropologist and I certainly don't espouse or defend the views of the societies I am about to describe.

In a nomadic hunter gatherer society, the menfolk often have to spend weeks to months away from their womenfolk who are usually guarded by a few men.

The only way most men will allow that to happen is if they can be assured that their womenfolk won't be boinking other men while they are away.

This is one reason why human evolved primarily monogamous relationships unlike other primates (I know polygamy exists but this is usually an anomaly).