November 18, 2009 • 22 mins
In this episode, Molly and Cristen take a closer look at the controversial topic of female circumcision, alternatively known as female genital mutilation or female genital cutting.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From House top works dot com. Hey and welcomes podcast.
This is smalling and I'm Kristen Kristen. A few weeks ago,
(00:20):
we did a podcast called Our Circumcision Is Really Necessary.
We talked about male circumcision and promised our listeners that
we would eventually do a subject on female circumcision. Yes,
it's it was. You know, It's not the top of
my list of subjects I'm eager to dive into every
week because it seems very um sad. I guess that's
fair to put, fair to put, and well, it's also
(00:42):
a little easier for us as women to relate to
the concept of female circumcision than getting our foreskin snipped. Um,
so let's die right into it. But that what it
actually is, and I think we should say we were
when we were trying to decide what to call this podcast,
we didn't know whether or not to use the term
female circumcision because not everyone refers to it. Is that
(01:05):
according to the World Health Organization, the u n UM
and a lot of other sources It's referred to widely
as female genital mutilation, but even that term is um
contentious because some people compare it to abortion language. For instance,
like how you have people who are anti abortion or
pro life, you know what I mean, kind of attaching
(01:27):
such a negative connotation to it. It would be like
if you went up to a woman who's going to
get an abortion and say, oh, you're here to murder
your innocent baby. Whereas if you're trying to approach an
African woman and say, you know this, this thing that
you've done historically for centuries is mutilation. This initiation, right, Yeah,
they don't necessarily suis mutilation, so they try some people
try to use terms that make it more neutral, yeah,
(01:48):
like female genital cutting, female circumcision. And usually if you
see the term female general mutilation, it's used by someone
who wants to outlaw the practice, which was sort of
the approach I came with it too. I mean, seems
kind of ridiculous to me as a woman to subject
yourself to having parts of your genitals cut off for
no medical reason. You know, when we talked about male circumcision,
(02:10):
there were some valid health reasons why you would do
that too. For cleanliness, to avoid promosis, so on and
so forth. But um, the question is is there a
medical reason to do this? Yeah, and it does seem
like female circumcision would be a much more painful process.
And this is just me, just my mind. Maybe maybe
(02:31):
I'm wrong. You know, I don't know what Getting your
foreskin cut off feels like it's impossible. Um, but it
seems like removing someone's clitterists would be a lot more
painful than having a piece of skin removed. Now. I
know that there are a lot of nerve endings in
foreskin as well, but the clarterist is a bundle of
(02:52):
nerves that runs like, I think, something like two centimeters
under your skin. And then they might also remove parts
of your labia as well, and there's big problems with
scar tissue, whereas it seems like with foreskin it's a
much easier healing process. But I guess I'm getting ahead
of myself. Okay, you're getting a little bit ahead of yourself.
Because there are four types of female genital cutting that
(03:13):
we found. So let's just let's back up and do basics.
Because what we found when we started researching this is
we do have a very sort of Western approach to
this topic, and it's worth just trying to forget your
personal viewpoints and just look at it as something that happens.
Not that I endorse it, but we're just gonna look
at it as something that happens. Yeah, well, first listen,
maybe Molly, we should say where this happens. Okay, okay, So, uh,
(03:36):
it happens mostly in African countries. UM worldwide, female genital
cutting effects up to a hundred and forty million women,
and that's usually about three million women and girls every year,
according to estimates from the World Health Organization, although those
statistics can be kind of hard to uh quantify, and
this is one of the one of the things the
(03:56):
World Health Organization has been trying to tackle actually finding
out how um these cultures go about actually doing the
circumcision and how many women are subjected to it, right,
And it's getting harder to do that because of this.
You know, if you see, you know, white person with
the clipboard come in and say are you practicing this? Now,
these women know enough to maybe not admit it because
(04:17):
they know the rest of the world frowns on it, right,
And a lot of African countries have UM past laws
outlawing female circumcision, but that doesn't mean that people are
not still doing it because this is an initiation right
that has been practiced for centuries. Right. So, now, what
we learned from the World Health Organization is that the
two big countries for this are Egypt and Ethiopia. UM.
(04:40):
But that about it's twenty eight countries that are over
that are affected. When they do it kind of depends
on the country and the community. Mostly it's girls under
the age of fifteen. UM. In Egypt, the girls are
between five and fourteen. In Yemen, girls may not even
be two weeks old. So it really depends on you know,
a lot of factors usually relate to these cultural you know,
(05:03):
standards about when they actually do the procedure. So for
an idea of how this actually happens the procedure in
the settings UM, I'm going to refer to an article
about it in the New York Times, and this took
place in Indonesia, UM. And basically there is a small
group of women who they aren't health workers or anything
like that they handle the circumcision. And in this in
(05:28):
this instance, it was sponsored by something called the Oslon Foundation,
which is an Islamic and educational and social services organization
that basically sponsors these kind of mass female circumcision days
for girls to come in and um have parts of
you know, they're they're clearterests and labia snipped off and
they said that. Um. Basically, the procedure takes just a
(05:50):
few minutes and there is little blood involved. And then afterward,
the girl's general area is swabbed with the antiseptic bedading
and she has in help back to her held back
into her underwear, returned to a waiting room where she's
given a small celebratory gift, which is usually fruit or
donated piece of clothing, and she's offered a cup of
milk for refreshment. And that's it. But then you also
read um situations where girls are like literally held down um,
(06:14):
sometimes against their will and and you know, subjected to
this and that there is blood. You know. I found
it interesting how many accounts say, oh, you know, it's
just like it's just like a nail clipping, that's how
much skin they take off. It's just you know, the
tip of a leaf or the tip of your fingernail,
whereas others you read some of these accounts and they
just talk about how there's just blood everywhere. So it
seems like it can be done different ways a lot
(06:35):
of different places, and it's it's hard to know which
to believe a little bit right, well, and that's why
I think the World Health Organization has broken down UM
female circumcision or female genital mutilation into four separate categories.
UM kind of broken down by I guess, the severity
of the procedure. So there are four types. Apparently the
(06:56):
most common form of this, representing about the cases is
UM taking out the clitterest and the labia manora. And
then the more extreme version UM is called infibulation, and
it accounts for cases globally, and this is removal of
all external genitalia and stitching up the vaginal opening in
some cases just leaving you know, a mastic size hole
(07:18):
for everything that needs to come out down there. UM.
They may cauterize or burn the clitterest and surrounding tissue,
scrape the tissue surrounding the vaginal orifice UM, and introduced
corrosive sub substances or herbs into the vaginant to cause bleeding,
and it'll UM sort of tighten it up, I guess,
so that they can sew it closed. Yeah, and UM,
once infibulation happens, that doesn't mean that, I guess once
(07:41):
So a girl gets married obviously, like she's going to
have sex with her husband, and he probably can't put
his penis through a magetic size hole, so it's going
to rip that open. And sometimes some women will even
have that stitched that closed again. Right. There are some
cultures where you know they they might and sew it right,
but where she gives birth and then as soon as
(08:02):
the baby's out, so it right back up again. Now
let's talk about cultural arguments for some arguments for why
female circumcision happens, because some people think that UM, there
are benefits for women UM. According to the New York
Times article that I referenced earlier, UM, one of their
sources says that it stabilizes a woman's libido because basically,
(08:23):
if her um genitals are not really functioning, I mean,
if she especially if she's one of the who had
the infibulation process happened, UM, there's no way that she's
going to be able to have sex and people not
notice it. UM. And then also it will make a
woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband,
probably because he will know that she is a virgin
(08:44):
and then three it will balance her psychology, right, And
that was actually one reason why they did them. At
some point UM in the nineteenth century and the United
Kingdom they used to do um female circumcisions. It was
weird for epilepsy and then just for libido purposes. Well
because if you were member from our male Circumcision podcast,
UM back in the Victorian era, male circumcision was thought
(09:05):
to be a cure for masturbation because they thought the
masturbation made you insane. Yeah, I would not have mine
to live in that area. But also some um cultures
do this because they believe that the clitterest is a
male vestigial organ, that it's basically like a mini penis,
and that by cutting it off it reinforces to a
girl that she is a woman, that it instead of
(09:27):
taking away a woman's essential femininity, it kind of gives
it to her because they're getting rid of what they
see is this thing that you don't need and that
makes you man like. Yeah, And there have been you know,
anecdotes from uh from the different sources that we've read,
from women who were not initially circumcised, and would the
other girls would make fun of them for looking like weirdos,
(09:48):
for having you know, this in their minds. Kind of
many many peace yea. And in some cultures they don't
take it. You know. I didn't go through all the
four in depth, but there is one where they just
sort of prick it and it's like a ritual drop
of lud and it's still intact. It's just you know,
it's just reasserting that you're a woman now by you know,
taking that crop of blood. Yeah. So it really wasn't though,
(10:10):
until I'd say the turn of the century that Westerners
realized that this was going on. And then in the
past couple of decades we have seen a lot of
effort on the part of the U N and the
w h OW to go in and stop it, because
in their eyes, this is a very dangerous brutal practice
that is happening to millions of girls every year, and
(10:32):
it is leading to health problems, problems with childbirth, and
they think they're also psychological problems linked to it, and
so they want to go in and they want to
stop and that's one of the main reasons why fifteen
African countries now outlaw in the first place. And so
there was this landmark study UM and the British journal
the Lancet that went in and compare the women who
had undergone the circumcision with those that hadn't, and they
(10:55):
found that the infants of the mothers who had had
the procedure, um, you know, it was just del a
bad hand from birth, The usually had an increased risk
of death. There were increased risk of childbirth problems. UM. Basically,
the more that had been affected, the more complications you
were likely to have. And this was sort of the
first study to say, hey, there's a health reason for
not doing this. Yeah, and this was the largest of
(11:16):
its kind because in addition to even even being able
to go in and quantify like how many women are
being circumcised every year, UM, it was a lot harder
to go in and actually track long term health problems.
And and like you said, I mean even just considered
the issue of someone who has an infibulated vagina where
they have, like you said, a match stick size hole
(11:37):
for everything to come out. Um, there are problems with
menstrual blood getting caught up in there. Basically their your
rethroll opening is covered up um, and so you have
repeated urinary tract infections that are common. Stones may form
in theory ARETHRA and the bladder because of obstruction and infection. UM.
It's it's not not a good thing. But that's the thing,
(11:57):
you know, when I was starting to research this, that's
what I knew of this procedure, that it it raised complications,
it was painful, um, so on and so forth. And
we hear about these organizations just want to go in
and stop it. And I think that, you know, from
a Western point of view. You know, we've heard so
much about not wanting just to please your husband to
have a surgery that just you know, makes it more
(12:18):
pleasurable for a man um that you know, I expected
to find a lot of things about how to stop it,
and I did want to point out something we found
UM on Tyrney Lab in New York Times a writer
named Flambie ahmadu Um. I'm probably not pronouncing that right,
but she was a native of Sierra Leone and grew
up in America, so she had the same maybe western
(12:39):
point of view that I did. But she went back
Gierra Leone as an adult to undergo the right and
so she wrote sort of a compelling reason for why
it happens, and she says, we're overwhelmed with these images
of how barbaric it is, and that what you know,
the press and people don't want us to know is
actually that you know, even though those problems can happen,
they can just as easily not happen. Yeah, well she is.
(13:01):
She is also making the point that, um, we are
not looking at we're not approaching this from a cultural standpoint.
We're just seeing, you know, something that we consider to
be primitive and brutal without taking into account that this
is an important initiation, right for a lot of women.
I mean, it's kind of like if if you think
about how widespread male circumcision is for Jewish people and
(13:24):
how how widespread is among among Muslims. Mean, it's a
very important ritual part of becoming a man, you know,
and and it's the same thing here. Yeah, it doesn't
seem as pretty by any stretch of the imagination. But
she's arguing that we we are being very very western,
far too western about this, and um, and not taking
(13:45):
into account the important history behind it, right, And so
they were suggesting that instead of going to these countries
and saying, hey, don't do this, or just have a
health practitioner do it instead. UM, a good compromise might
be UM asking for ways in which a female can
have a greater right to choose whether she wants the
procedure or not. You know, the people who tend to
(14:06):
get put in our newspapers are girls who are held
down against their will and had the had the operation.
Whereas you know, if if a girl really wants to
do this to become a woman, that should be her choice.
And of course it's sminty. We're all about a woman's
choice and that's something you know. They're there are people
and who argue the same thing for male circumcision as well.
I say, wait, if you if you have a baby,
(14:26):
just let him grow up and decide whether or not
he wants his foreskin. And she's kind of saying the
same thing. And of course the most interesting part of
that Tyranney Lab blog Molly was reading the comments because
people could not get their heads around this idea that
female circumcision might be an okay thing. They're just we're
(14:47):
just too uncomfortable with it, right. I you know, sometimes
I'm listening to what I've been saying in this podcast,
I'm like, I can't believe I'm saying this. Of course
you shouldn't, you know, cut off a woman's genitalia. But
I do think that her essay was sort of eye opening,
and you know, we were reading our nicles and what
she said is true that people who are profiled in
these stories have horror stories well, and and I do
think to what we we need to point out one
(15:08):
thing that she highlighted UM. She referenced that the World
Health Organization study that was published in the Lancet which
really got it, really put genital female genital mutilation UM
into the headlines and got people really thinking about it.
And she points out that in the w h O
City not a single statistically significant difference was found between
those who had type one genital surgery UM versus no surgery.
(15:33):
And so she's basically saying that, yes, there might have
been these differences in infant weight and uh prenatal prenatal
death rate for UM for women who had UM children
after they were circumcised, but that the result the gap
wasn't that big. It was basically writing home about yeah, yeah,
that we were basically slanting the statistics to write the
(15:56):
story that we want to hear, which is, this is
a brutal practice. We need to go in and stop
it and save these poor African women. Which yeah, I mean,
having that attitude at anything usually gets you in trouble,
right and Molly. Right after I read that essay, I
clicked over to a Newsweek article profiling a woman who
lived and grew up in Molly. And she was circumcised,
(16:18):
and now she's in living in the US, and she
had reconstructive surgery for her her clitterists in her labia
because she had the infibilation process done. And the article
even mentions that while they were doing the process, they
had to take out that um, the ash or whatever
kind of dark substance they put into the vagina too
(16:41):
to make it bleed. That stuff was still in there
um when they did the reconstructive surgery. And and I
and I understood what the what that cultural anthropologist was saying,
because the Newsweek article was so like, oh, let's rescue this. Know,
this poor poor African woman from her from her applied
to this, this brutal practice. She comes over here and
(17:02):
finds this very kind American gynecologists who does this surgery
for free, and um, you know it, I got, I
got what she was saying. Yeah, and you know the reason.
The main reason that that woman in the newsweek article
wanted to do this was to have romance with her husband.
She'd had two children but just did not find sex satisfying. Um.
(17:23):
But to go back again to the tyranny lab, the
woman writes that what Westerners don't want to consider is
that there are people who have the surgery and have
sexually fulfilling lives. There are some who have orgasms, and
there are some that don't. But the same could be
said of people who are fully intach down there. Sometimes
you have an orgasm, sometimes you don't write and I'm
not I don't think that anyone listening to this should
(17:44):
misinterpret what we're saying as me and Molly advocating female
circumcision or female genital cutting, whatever you want to call it. Um,
I think it's just important to look at all sides
of the argument, because our perspective looking over there might
not be the same for a young girl growing up
in Sudan. Right and so UM, I did read a
few ways of how in communities where they do want
(18:06):
to stop at things that have been most effective. Have
been trying to find another ritual you can do to
mark womanhood. Um, so just realizing that it does have
that cultural impact and also showing um, I was reading
that showing males videos about female self esteem was also helping.
And that just plays into the issue of choice. I mean,
(18:27):
if it's going to help your self esteem to go
through the same thing that you know women before you have,
then then you're probably going to have a better experience
with it, Whereas if you don't want to do it,
it's gonna hurt your self esteem. And um, they have
gotten cultures that still practice that have gotten better about
having actual health care workers performed the operation rather than um,
(18:47):
just random women from the village. You you probably been
doing it a long time, but probably aren't very medically trained.
And um. Some of the articles also noted that younger
women are more opposed to it the more basically, the
more educated the women are, the less they wanted to happen, Right,
But I mean that gets into the point of if
they're educated and have money of their own, then they
(19:09):
don't necessarily rely on a man, whereas the man may
need this as proof. Yeah, so I think they've given
the best overview we can without without continuing to go
in circles about what men and women want, which could
take is um. So let us know what you guys
think about the issue UM and as always, you can
email us at mom stuff at house stuff works dot com.
(19:29):
I think we've got time for one or two emails,
don't you, Kristen. Yeah, I've got an email here from
Patricia and she wrote in about our recent episode on
whether or not men and women feel pain differently, and
she says, I have two children and although that was
very painful, I would have to disagree and that it
was the most painful thing that I've ever been through. Patricia,
(19:51):
You're a strong woman. I would have to say that,
hands down, I would rather go through labor than have
a toothache. Having a toothache is horrible. It makes all
of your teeth hurt, and the whole side of the
face it's on, hurts to drink, eat brush, and if
it's really bad, orts to breathe. A scale of one
to ten, ten being the most painful, one being the least,
I would have to read labor and childbirth as an
(20:12):
eight point five in a toothache on a ten, But
maybe that's just me. My labor was I would say,
pretty normal without any complications. Well, you know that's good
to know myself. Yeah, child birth might be less painful
than a toothache, because I have had some pretty bad toothache. Yeah,
they hurt. Thank you, Patricia. All right. Our next emails
(20:33):
from Heidi, who's running about vampires. Um. She said that
she thought it was interesting how we mentioned Edward Angel
and Bill Compton but didn't mention Jacob, Spike and Eric.
And I will say we have gotten tons of emails
on behalf of Jacob and Eric. Apparently we like some
shape shifters. We did not consider that they are the
winners here. Um. She writes for me, the latter three
are the drool objects. And I had to think about
(20:55):
why that was. Partly that they are batter boys, but
I think it most because I found that the heroine
in each case it was more herself with them than
she was with the main love interest. Bella is much
more interesting and seems to talk more, and we discover
more about what she wants in life as opposed to undeath.
When she is with Edward, Buffy loses herself completely an angel.
But with spikes. She is her true warts and all,
badass kicking babe. And in the books, Suki is not
(21:17):
lost in Eric. In fact, she is much more herself
with Eric than with Bill. I think I like them
more because in each case, the heroin does not idolize
the guy. She sees him for who he truly is,
while with the main love interest it seems more pedestal like,
which I thought was a pretty pretty great perspective on
those guys. So that's what we've got for listener mail today.
If you've got something to say, email us at mom
(21:37):
stuff at how stuff works dot com. As always, check
out our blog how to stuff on how stuff works
dot com and Molly, I don't think that you've told
them to go check out our articles as well, also
housed on our stuff works dot com for moralns and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot
(21:59):
com m HM. Brought to you by the reinvented two
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Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From House top works dot com. Hey and welcomes podcast.
This is smalling and I'm Kristen Kristen. A few weeks ago,
(00:20):
we did a podcast called Our Circumcision Is Really Necessary.
We talked about male circumcision and promised our listeners that
we would eventually do a subject on female circumcision. Yes,
it's it was. You know, It's not the top of
my list of subjects I'm eager to dive into every
week because it seems very um sad. I guess that's
fair to put, fair to put, and well, it's also
(00:42):
a little easier for us as women to relate to
the concept of female circumcision than getting our foreskin snipped. Um,
so let's die right into it. But that what it
actually is, and I think we should say we were
when we were trying to decide what to call this podcast,
we didn't know whether or not to use the term
female circumcision because not everyone refers to it. Is that
(01:05):
according to the World Health Organization, the u n UM
and a lot of other sources It's referred to widely
as female genital mutilation, but even that term is um
contentious because some people compare it to abortion language. For instance,
like how you have people who are anti abortion or
pro life, you know what I mean, kind of attaching
(01:27):
such a negative connotation to it. It would be like
if you went up to a woman who's going to
get an abortion and say, oh, you're here to murder
your innocent baby. Whereas if you're trying to approach an
African woman and say, you know this, this thing that
you've done historically for centuries is mutilation. This initiation, right, Yeah,
they don't necessarily suis mutilation, so they try some people
try to use terms that make it more neutral, yeah,
(01:48):
like female genital cutting, female circumcision. And usually if you
see the term female general mutilation, it's used by someone
who wants to outlaw the practice, which was sort of
the approach I came with it too. I mean, seems
kind of ridiculous to me as a woman to subject
yourself to having parts of your genitals cut off for
no medical reason. You know, when we talked about male circumcision,
(02:10):
there were some valid health reasons why you would do
that too. For cleanliness, to avoid promosis, so on and
so forth. But um, the question is is there a
medical reason to do this? Yeah, and it does seem
like female circumcision would be a much more painful process.
And this is just me, just my mind. Maybe maybe
(02:31):
I'm wrong. You know, I don't know what Getting your
foreskin cut off feels like it's impossible. Um, but it
seems like removing someone's clitterists would be a lot more
painful than having a piece of skin removed. Now. I
know that there are a lot of nerve endings in
foreskin as well, but the clarterist is a bundle of
(02:52):
nerves that runs like, I think, something like two centimeters
under your skin. And then they might also remove parts
of your labia as well, and there's big problems with
scar tissue, whereas it seems like with foreskin it's a
much easier healing process. But I guess I'm getting ahead
of myself. Okay, you're getting a little bit ahead of yourself.
Because there are four types of female genital cutting that
(03:13):
we found. So let's just let's back up and do basics.
Because what we found when we started researching this is
we do have a very sort of Western approach to
this topic, and it's worth just trying to forget your
personal viewpoints and just look at it as something that happens.
Not that I endorse it, but we're just gonna look
at it as something that happens. Yeah, well, first listen,
maybe Molly, we should say where this happens. Okay, okay, So, uh,
(03:36):
it happens mostly in African countries. UM worldwide, female genital
cutting effects up to a hundred and forty million women,
and that's usually about three million women and girls every year,
according to estimates from the World Health Organization, although those
statistics can be kind of hard to uh quantify, and
this is one of the one of the things the
(03:56):
World Health Organization has been trying to tackle actually finding
out how um these cultures go about actually doing the
circumcision and how many women are subjected to it, right,
And it's getting harder to do that because of this.
You know, if you see, you know, white person with
the clipboard come in and say are you practicing this? Now,
these women know enough to maybe not admit it because
(04:17):
they know the rest of the world frowns on it, right,
And a lot of African countries have UM past laws
outlawing female circumcision, but that doesn't mean that people are
not still doing it because this is an initiation right
that has been practiced for centuries. Right. So, now, what
we learned from the World Health Organization is that the
two big countries for this are Egypt and Ethiopia. UM.
(04:40):
But that about it's twenty eight countries that are over
that are affected. When they do it kind of depends
on the country and the community. Mostly it's girls under
the age of fifteen. UM. In Egypt, the girls are
between five and fourteen. In Yemen, girls may not even
be two weeks old. So it really depends on you know,
a lot of factors usually relate to these cultural you know,
(05:03):
standards about when they actually do the procedure. So for
an idea of how this actually happens the procedure in
the settings UM, I'm going to refer to an article
about it in the New York Times, and this took
place in Indonesia, UM. And basically there is a small
group of women who they aren't health workers or anything
like that they handle the circumcision. And in this in
(05:28):
this instance, it was sponsored by something called the Oslon Foundation,
which is an Islamic and educational and social services organization
that basically sponsors these kind of mass female circumcision days
for girls to come in and um have parts of
you know, they're they're clearterests and labia snipped off and
they said that. Um. Basically, the procedure takes just a
(05:50):
few minutes and there is little blood involved. And then afterward,
the girl's general area is swabbed with the antiseptic bedading
and she has in help back to her held back
into her underwear, returned to a waiting room where she's
given a small celebratory gift, which is usually fruit or
donated piece of clothing, and she's offered a cup of
milk for refreshment. And that's it. But then you also
read um situations where girls are like literally held down um,
(06:14):
sometimes against their will and and you know, subjected to
this and that there is blood. You know. I found
it interesting how many accounts say, oh, you know, it's
just like it's just like a nail clipping, that's how
much skin they take off. It's just you know, the
tip of a leaf or the tip of your fingernail,
whereas others you read some of these accounts and they
just talk about how there's just blood everywhere. So it
seems like it can be done different ways a lot
(06:35):
of different places, and it's it's hard to know which
to believe a little bit right, well, and that's why
I think the World Health Organization has broken down UM
female circumcision or female genital mutilation into four separate categories.
UM kind of broken down by I guess, the severity
of the procedure. So there are four types. Apparently the
(06:56):
most common form of this, representing about the cases is
UM taking out the clitterest and the labia manora. And
then the more extreme version UM is called infibulation, and
it accounts for cases globally, and this is removal of
all external genitalia and stitching up the vaginal opening in
some cases just leaving you know, a mastic size hole
(07:18):
for everything that needs to come out down there. UM.
They may cauterize or burn the clitterest and surrounding tissue,
scrape the tissue surrounding the vaginal orifice UM, and introduced
corrosive sub substances or herbs into the vaginant to cause bleeding,
and it'll UM sort of tighten it up, I guess,
so that they can sew it closed. Yeah, and UM,
once infibulation happens, that doesn't mean that, I guess once
(07:41):
So a girl gets married obviously, like she's going to
have sex with her husband, and he probably can't put
his penis through a magetic size hole, so it's going
to rip that open. And sometimes some women will even
have that stitched that closed again. Right. There are some
cultures where you know they they might and sew it right,
but where she gives birth and then as soon as
(08:02):
the baby's out, so it right back up again. Now
let's talk about cultural arguments for some arguments for why
female circumcision happens, because some people think that UM, there
are benefits for women UM. According to the New York
Times article that I referenced earlier, UM, one of their
sources says that it stabilizes a woman's libido because basically,
(08:23):
if her um genitals are not really functioning, I mean,
if she especially if she's one of the who had
the infibulation process happened, UM, there's no way that she's
going to be able to have sex and people not
notice it. UM. And then also it will make a
woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband,
probably because he will know that she is a virgin
(08:44):
and then three it will balance her psychology, right, And
that was actually one reason why they did them. At
some point UM in the nineteenth century and the United
Kingdom they used to do um female circumcisions. It was
weird for epilepsy and then just for libido purposes. Well
because if you were member from our male Circumcision podcast,
UM back in the Victorian era, male circumcision was thought
(09:05):
to be a cure for masturbation because they thought the
masturbation made you insane. Yeah, I would not have mine
to live in that area. But also some um cultures
do this because they believe that the clitterest is a
male vestigial organ, that it's basically like a mini penis,
and that by cutting it off it reinforces to a
girl that she is a woman, that it instead of
(09:27):
taking away a woman's essential femininity, it kind of gives
it to her because they're getting rid of what they
see is this thing that you don't need and that
makes you man like. Yeah, And there have been you know,
anecdotes from uh from the different sources that we've read,
from women who were not initially circumcised, and would the
other girls would make fun of them for looking like weirdos,
(09:48):
for having you know, this in their minds. Kind of
many many peace yea. And in some cultures they don't
take it. You know. I didn't go through all the
four in depth, but there is one where they just
sort of prick it and it's like a ritual drop
of lud and it's still intact. It's just you know,
it's just reasserting that you're a woman now by you know,
taking that crop of blood. Yeah. So it really wasn't though,
(10:10):
until I'd say the turn of the century that Westerners
realized that this was going on. And then in the
past couple of decades we have seen a lot of
effort on the part of the U N and the
w h OW to go in and stop it, because
in their eyes, this is a very dangerous brutal practice
that is happening to millions of girls every year, and
(10:32):
it is leading to health problems, problems with childbirth, and
they think they're also psychological problems linked to it, and
so they want to go in and they want to
stop and that's one of the main reasons why fifteen
African countries now outlaw in the first place. And so
there was this landmark study UM and the British journal
the Lancet that went in and compare the women who
had undergone the circumcision with those that hadn't, and they
(10:55):
found that the infants of the mothers who had had
the procedure, um, you know, it was just del a
bad hand from birth, The usually had an increased risk
of death. There were increased risk of childbirth problems. UM. Basically,
the more that had been affected, the more complications you
were likely to have. And this was sort of the
first study to say, hey, there's a health reason for
not doing this. Yeah, and this was the largest of
(11:16):
its kind because in addition to even even being able
to go in and quantify like how many women are
being circumcised every year, UM, it was a lot harder
to go in and actually track long term health problems.
And and like you said, I mean even just considered
the issue of someone who has an infibulated vagina where
they have, like you said, a match stick size hole
(11:37):
for everything to come out. Um, there are problems with
menstrual blood getting caught up in there. Basically their your
rethroll opening is covered up um, and so you have
repeated urinary tract infections that are common. Stones may form
in theory ARETHRA and the bladder because of obstruction and infection. UM.
It's it's not not a good thing. But that's the thing,
(11:57):
you know, when I was starting to research this, that's
what I knew of this procedure, that it it raised complications,
it was painful, um, so on and so forth. And
we hear about these organizations just want to go in
and stop it. And I think that, you know, from
a Western point of view. You know, we've heard so
much about not wanting just to please your husband to
have a surgery that just you know, makes it more
(12:18):
pleasurable for a man um that you know, I expected
to find a lot of things about how to stop it,
and I did want to point out something we found
UM on Tyrney Lab in New York Times a writer
named Flambie ahmadu Um. I'm probably not pronouncing that right,
but she was a native of Sierra Leone and grew
up in America, so she had the same maybe western
(12:39):
point of view that I did. But she went back
Gierra Leone as an adult to undergo the right and
so she wrote sort of a compelling reason for why
it happens, and she says, we're overwhelmed with these images
of how barbaric it is, and that what you know,
the press and people don't want us to know is
actually that you know, even though those problems can happen,
they can just as easily not happen. Yeah, well she is.
(13:01):
She is also making the point that, um, we are
not looking at we're not approaching this from a cultural standpoint.
We're just seeing, you know, something that we consider to
be primitive and brutal without taking into account that this
is an important initiation, right for a lot of women.
I mean, it's kind of like if if you think
about how widespread male circumcision is for Jewish people and
(13:24):
how how widespread is among among Muslims. Mean, it's a
very important ritual part of becoming a man, you know,
and and it's the same thing here. Yeah, it doesn't
seem as pretty by any stretch of the imagination. But
she's arguing that we we are being very very western,
far too western about this, and um, and not taking
(13:45):
into account the important history behind it, right, And so
they were suggesting that instead of going to these countries
and saying, hey, don't do this, or just have a
health practitioner do it instead. UM, a good compromise might
be UM asking for ways in which a female can
have a greater right to choose whether she wants the
procedure or not. You know, the people who tend to
(14:06):
get put in our newspapers are girls who are held
down against their will and had the had the operation.
Whereas you know, if if a girl really wants to
do this to become a woman, that should be her choice.
And of course it's sminty. We're all about a woman's
choice and that's something you know. They're there are people
and who argue the same thing for male circumcision as well.
I say, wait, if you if you have a baby,
(14:26):
just let him grow up and decide whether or not
he wants his foreskin. And she's kind of saying the
same thing. And of course the most interesting part of
that Tyranney Lab blog Molly was reading the comments because
people could not get their heads around this idea that
female circumcision might be an okay thing. They're just we're
(14:47):
just too uncomfortable with it, right. I you know, sometimes
I'm listening to what I've been saying in this podcast,
I'm like, I can't believe I'm saying this. Of course
you shouldn't, you know, cut off a woman's genitalia. But
I do think that her essay was sort of eye opening,
and you know, we were reading our nicles and what
she said is true that people who are profiled in
these stories have horror stories well, and and I do
think to what we we need to point out one
(15:08):
thing that she highlighted UM. She referenced that the World
Health Organization study that was published in the Lancet which
really got it, really put genital female genital mutilation UM
into the headlines and got people really thinking about it.
And she points out that in the w h O
City not a single statistically significant difference was found between
those who had type one genital surgery UM versus no surgery.
(15:33):
And so she's basically saying that, yes, there might have
been these differences in infant weight and uh prenatal prenatal
death rate for UM for women who had UM children
after they were circumcised, but that the result the gap
wasn't that big. It was basically writing home about yeah, yeah,
that we were basically slanting the statistics to write the
(15:56):
story that we want to hear, which is, this is
a brutal practice. We need to go in and stop
it and save these poor African women. Which yeah, I mean,
having that attitude at anything usually gets you in trouble,
right and Molly. Right after I read that essay, I
clicked over to a Newsweek article profiling a woman who
lived and grew up in Molly. And she was circumcised,
(16:18):
and now she's in living in the US, and she
had reconstructive surgery for her her clitterists in her labia
because she had the infibilation process done. And the article
even mentions that while they were doing the process, they
had to take out that um, the ash or whatever
kind of dark substance they put into the vagina too
(16:41):
to make it bleed. That stuff was still in there
um when they did the reconstructive surgery. And and I
and I understood what the what that cultural anthropologist was saying,
because the Newsweek article was so like, oh, let's rescue this. Know,
this poor poor African woman from her from her applied
to this, this brutal practice. She comes over here and
(17:02):
finds this very kind American gynecologists who does this surgery
for free, and um, you know it, I got, I
got what she was saying. Yeah, and you know the reason.
The main reason that that woman in the newsweek article
wanted to do this was to have romance with her husband.
She'd had two children but just did not find sex satisfying. Um.
(17:23):
But to go back again to the tyranny lab, the
woman writes that what Westerners don't want to consider is
that there are people who have the surgery and have
sexually fulfilling lives. There are some who have orgasms, and
there are some that don't. But the same could be
said of people who are fully intach down there. Sometimes
you have an orgasm, sometimes you don't write and I'm
not I don't think that anyone listening to this should
(17:44):
misinterpret what we're saying as me and Molly advocating female
circumcision or female genital cutting, whatever you want to call it. Um,
I think it's just important to look at all sides
of the argument, because our perspective looking over there might
not be the same for a young girl growing up
in Sudan. Right and so UM, I did read a
few ways of how in communities where they do want
(18:06):
to stop at things that have been most effective. Have
been trying to find another ritual you can do to
mark womanhood. Um, so just realizing that it does have
that cultural impact and also showing um, I was reading
that showing males videos about female self esteem was also helping.
And that just plays into the issue of choice. I mean,
(18:27):
if it's going to help your self esteem to go
through the same thing that you know women before you have,
then then you're probably going to have a better experience
with it, Whereas if you don't want to do it,
it's gonna hurt your self esteem. And um, they have
gotten cultures that still practice that have gotten better about
having actual health care workers performed the operation rather than um,
(18:47):
just random women from the village. You you probably been
doing it a long time, but probably aren't very medically trained.
And um. Some of the articles also noted that younger
women are more opposed to it the more basically, the
more educated the women are, the less they wanted to happen, Right,
But I mean that gets into the point of if
they're educated and have money of their own, then they
(19:09):
don't necessarily rely on a man, whereas the man may
need this as proof. Yeah, so I think they've given
the best overview we can without without continuing to go
in circles about what men and women want, which could
take is um. So let us know what you guys
think about the issue UM and as always, you can
email us at mom stuff at house stuff works dot com.
(19:29):
I think we've got time for one or two emails,
don't you, Kristen. Yeah, I've got an email here from
Patricia and she wrote in about our recent episode on
whether or not men and women feel pain differently, and
she says, I have two children and although that was
very painful, I would have to disagree and that it
was the most painful thing that I've ever been through. Patricia,
(19:51):
You're a strong woman. I would have to say that,
hands down, I would rather go through labor than have
a toothache. Having a toothache is horrible. It makes all
of your teeth hurt, and the whole side of the
face it's on, hurts to drink, eat brush, and if
it's really bad, orts to breathe. A scale of one
to ten, ten being the most painful, one being the least,
I would have to read labor and childbirth as an
(20:12):
eight point five in a toothache on a ten, But
maybe that's just me. My labor was I would say,
pretty normal without any complications. Well, you know that's good
to know myself. Yeah, child birth might be less painful
than a toothache, because I have had some pretty bad toothache. Yeah,
they hurt. Thank you, Patricia. All right. Our next emails
(20:33):
from Heidi, who's running about vampires. Um. She said that
she thought it was interesting how we mentioned Edward Angel
and Bill Compton but didn't mention Jacob, Spike and Eric.
And I will say we have gotten tons of emails
on behalf of Jacob and Eric. Apparently we like some
shape shifters. We did not consider that they are the
winners here. Um. She writes for me, the latter three
are the drool objects. And I had to think about
(20:55):
why that was. Partly that they are batter boys, but
I think it most because I found that the heroine
in each case it was more herself with them than
she was with the main love interest. Bella is much
more interesting and seems to talk more, and we discover
more about what she wants in life as opposed to undeath.
When she is with Edward, Buffy loses herself completely an angel.
But with spikes. She is her true warts and all,
badass kicking babe. And in the books, Suki is not
(21:17):
lost in Eric. In fact, she is much more herself
with Eric than with Bill. I think I like them
more because in each case, the heroin does not idolize
the guy. She sees him for who he truly is,
while with the main love interest it seems more pedestal like,
which I thought was a pretty pretty great perspective on
those guys. So that's what we've got for listener mail today.
If you've got something to say, email us at mom
(21:37):
stuff at how stuff works dot com. As always, check
out our blog how to stuff on how stuff works
dot com and Molly, I don't think that you've told
them to go check out our articles as well, also
housed on our stuff works dot com for moralns and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot
(21:59):
com m HM. Brought to you by the reinvented two
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