A woman on what it's like living with Female Genital Mutilation

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/som...g-with-female-genital-mutilation-2049655.html

 

ICE Raises Awareness at Airports About FGM...

ICE Raises Awareness at Airports About Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting
August 1, 2018 | — In an effort to raise awareness about the brutal practice of female genital mutilation (or cutting) in some foreign countries and by certain communities in the United States, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division’s Homeland Security Investigations has launched Operation Limelight at multiple airports around the country.

See also:

Vagina rejuvenating therapies 'pose serious risk'
31 July 2018 - Women are being warned against risky cosmetic "rejuvenating" procedures to reshape and tighten the vagina.

 

US, UK Step Up Cooperation Against FGM...

US, UK Step Up Cooperation Against Female Genital Mutilation
September 06, 2018 — Authorities in the U.S. and Britain are stepping up cooperation to tackle female genital mutilation, staging joint operations at airports in London, New York and elsewhere to raise awareness of an issue that affects millions of girls and women worldwide.

 

Two sisters die after undergoing FGM in Somalia...

Two sisters die after undergoing FGM in Somalia, campaigner says
Fri September 14, 2018 - Two sisters have died in Somalia from complications that arose after undergoing female genital mutilation, according to Hawa Aden Mohamed, who campaigns against the procedure.

 

Diversity is her vagina's strength.

 

I'm a man this is my issue - lets see they cut my penis up when I was a newborn with no say. Maybe it would be better if they did this in the hospital or whatever shortly after birth that would then be the same thing. I for one want to ban all cutting of the genitals until someone is eighteen then they can opt for it or not.

 

FGM: 'It's like neutering animals'

Asked about the extent of her mutilation, she said: "My husband always says 'nothing is left of you'."
Hawa's husband said FGM had destroyed his marriage. "I was not aware of this when I married her. If I had known, I swear to God even if they paid me $10,000 I would not have married her. Because it is a problem for me.
"This circumcision is similar to neutering animals," he said. "It's a major problem. There is no sensation. It feels like lying next to a cold fish."​

https://www.theguardian.com/society...enital-mutilation-film-changing-kurdistan-law

 

Burkina Faso botched FGM leaves 50 girls in hospital...
Exclamation
Burkina Faso botched FGM leaves 50 girls in hospital
17 September 2018 - Around 50 girls are being treated in hospital in Burkina Faso after botched circumcisions, or female genital mutilation (FGM), a minister says.

 

Talk about stuff that makes you just want to pummel someone's face in.

Savages.

 

Please don’t compare useless foreskin to a clitoris

 

How about all those useless folds of labia minora skin that surround and cover her clitoris?


I'll divert you to some other threads on this discussion:
Should we allow female circumcision?
For those of you who think circumcision isn't comparable to female genital mutilation

 

It’s the clitoris they circumcise so women are denied sexual pleasure

 

In Liberalism multiculturalism trumps women's rights.

Multiculturalism is post modernism.

People who believe in post modernism believe everything is relative and there are no objective truths.

Well, I don't believe in multiculturalism.

I believe it's always wrong to abuse a child and all cultures are not, 'relative.'

For example, I don't believe a culture in Africa that practices female genital mutilation is equal to a culture in the West that does not.

There are actually feminists who defend female genital mutilation.

Rather than going to a country where women are truly oppressed by shariah law et cetera, and working for women's rights, Feminists in the west are working on the really important things, like how women are portrayed in make believe video games.

 

Please don't comment on the utility of a part of a man's body

 

There are actually men who believe rape is good...so?shall I say men think rape is good?
Obviously you know nothing about feminism and what women are doing in other countries. No wonder Trump loves his base so much...they stay ignorant I guess because women don’t like to be portrayed as victims in video games involving violence, it means we are in different to women oppressed in other countries. One of the things you obviously can’t understand is that women can multitask

 

There are degrees of FMG, clitoris only, clitoris and outer labia, here, let the diagram show you. And yes, the last one is stitched up, leaving a small hole for urination and the monthly cycle. It is a horrifyingly barbaric practice. Child abuse in the extreme.

 

I'm reluctant to post this here because it makes me very angry thinking about it:
https://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/a19042103/female-genital-mutilation-survivor/

 

it should be a crime for parents to mutilate little babies privates.... if they want to do it they can choose to do it to themselves when adults, long past time to outlaw these so called circumcisions

and this goes for both little girls and little boys

 

FreshAir, it is a crime in most countries now, it is just rarely prosecuted, including in the U.S.A. and Europe.
Prosecutors are reluctant to go hard after the mothers, because they see it as a "cultural tradition" and try to be culturally sensitive.
When they try going after the doctors, the doctors claim that they were only doing it because if they felt if they didn't they were afraid the family would try to do it themselves and botch the procedure.

When women in the U.S.A. and Europe take their young daughter back home on "a little vacation" and the daughter comes back genitally cut, the mother could claim that another family member, an aunt or grandma did it without the mother's permission, and sometimes they are telling the truth.

 

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-l...e-circumcised/​

 

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/m...t-circumcised/


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/arti...er-online.html​

 

Look, this is 'Africa' - it's the sort of thing they do there. Get over it, because nothing will ever stop the practice. Odd that it should be gender-biased though, especially when the main advocates and practitioners of this mindless ritual are of the female gender? Is that weird or what?

 

Half of those links I posted did not take place in Africa. This is a much wider problem that's taking place across the world in a belt that stretches from Africa through the Middle East, all the way to the farthest stretches of Southern Asia, across the Muslim World. Although not all of the cases in Africa are muslim, and some of the worst cases are in Africa.

Also FGM is prevalent throughout most countries in the Muslim World, but not every muslim country practices it. It's mostly in a geographic belt that runs closer to the south.

Also many of the maps you see underestimate its prevalence, or do not indicate its presence in countries where it is happening but in small numbers.

 

The main thrusts of my post were A) To the best of my knowledge it's mostly prevalent in Africa, and B) To make the personal observation apropos the bizarre female connection. That instead of condemning the atrocity, they actually condone and perpetuate it upon their own kind?