"WOMEN = HUMAN ? Are They Ready ? by Jo Campbell
The first report I heard of genital mutilation -- a.k.a. female circumcision -- was from a male colleague who had served with our news agency in Somalia.He told a circle of aghast women -- that was in the 1960s -- about the Somali custom of removing from young girls the clitoris and most of the labia. Then, he said with what I thought was quite unbecoming relish, the vaginal opening was sewed up with just enough left unstitched to permit the cyclic fluids to pass.
Our narrator waxed lurid with the details of surgical "instruments" made up of rusty scissors, broken glass or old razor blades. He grew lyrical about the stitchings with threads taken from old, worn-out clothing and with needles, God knew how old, rusty and dull.
Who did these things? The girls' female relatives, he said with spite. We were expected to despise the women who perpetrated these customs, but there was more to it than the simple facts.
We learned from African friends that women made sure their daughters and grand-daughters were mutilated in this manner because an untouched girl was literally unmarriagable. Her virginity was regarded as suspect without these barriers to sensation and to penile passage. And in those days, there was nothing else for a young woman in many parts of Africa and the Middle East to be but married; some man's chattel. Socially and economically, she had no other place in the village. A woman alone was a victim, socially superfluous; profitable only if sold as a slave by her family.
But marriage? We wondered in horror how that was possible with the vagina so barricaded.
Our folk-lore expert licked his lips as he explained, it was considered a challenge to the groom to overcome this obstacle. The prima nacht was supposed to last until the conquest, in fact, and a flag was raised over the aqal to signify the triumph of penis power.
Through the international meetings of women under the auspices of the United Nations, most of us have learned more about these "cultural mores" which our country and others have ignored for so long. Isn't it interesting that the "cultural" matters we are urged to respect all involve brutal treatment of women?
But in Beijing last year the theme was that women's rights are human rights. Now this advances the radical concept -- brace yourself -- that women are human. There are legions around the world who have not yet accepted this premise.
Female Genital Mutilation in Africa and the Middle East follows foot-binding, exposing girl babies on the hillside, aborting fetuses of girls, selling little girls as slaves in China, executing unfaithful wives in Saudi Arabia, burning low-dowered brides and killing girl-bearing mothers in India. (Didn't anyone tell them about the male and the Y chromosome?)
Now that a woman from Togo has come to the US shores and asked for political asylum as she seeks to escape from mutilation, the Pooh Bahs of our immigration department say that her plight is not "political."
Oh, really? Well, what is "political" about such mutilation? It is domination of women's lives -- presuming the women live through the deed. Without the mutilation, the woman is unacceptable as a marriage partner. Without marriage, she has no place in her society. Okay, so what opportunity does the mutilation provide for her? The possibilities of being sold into marriage or concubinage. The possibility of death or crippling from infection.
The one woman who reached our shores was fortunate. She had financial resources and education. She knew how to escape and had the funds with which to do it. So, we put her in prison because her cause was not sufficiently political. Wonderful.
Had she been a man escaping from slavery in Mozambique or Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, we would have given him sanctuary without a hitch.
American women? Don't get too smug about our good fortune. Did you know that mutilation was practiced in the United States as late as the first decade of this century? It was in a health book published in 1903 that I saw it: a recommendation of "clitoridectomy to calm down the woman who is excitable, inclined to run away and become a nurse."
What?
Yes, we are past that for the moment, but look who's in power. The people who put the woman from Togo into prison, that's who.
We could be next.
Vote.
May 12, 1996 Jo Campbell Ecotopics International