Take 1 second (or 60 if you're slower than a neuro gimp), and SIGN this petition.
Call upon the government of Tanzania to halt the on-going genital mutilation of girls and women in the Tarime district.
(click above to go directly to the signature page; or indulge yourself (and me) and read my little treatise on female genital mutilation.
I know exactly where I was standing the moment I learned about this nightmare, a cultural practice, a rite of passage, it's variations in extremes, the death rates, the philistine unsophistication of the doer's butchery, the tacit cultural and cultural antitheses' acceptance of unsurmizable inequities: teen and pre-teen vaginas turned into scar tissue with a pus-filled, sealed entrance... barely the size of a pinhole camera, and that little hole is about the same as her chance of survival - not of her future, not of anything strange or unusual, this is the norm, the expected, dirty scalpels, and unsterile environment.
It's hard to believe there is worse pain than that. It's hard to believe that CRPS, Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome Stage 4, full body, external/internal, is a 24/7 pain that could rival even one second of that on a scientific pain measurement chart.
But female circumcision is not listed. If it were, it wouldn't certainly rise to the top, above finger amputation no Novocaine, natural childbirth, the vast and incurably endless pain of CRPS. And I imagine that in some practicing countries, the men would celebrate this as a victory.
We won! We won!
Lucky to survive, the girl and what parts she has left, what life span she is given, waits to be married.
I could read every article, every
Vanity Fair, the
Koran, every anthropological study or scientific journal, and I will never understand. Why not even a compromise to start with? Why not remove a kidney? Weigh her down with an antiquated chastity belt? Preach safe sex; the beauty of making love,
in love? In how many societies are women all myth, an allegorical Eve? Why do I not feel guilty eating the last apple in the fruit bowl?
This "practice", this keeping of culture, ritual, butcherous belief-system - the antithesis (in my view) of sacred - but not a word turned on the heel of it's latter syllables. She is a SACrificial lamb in a dirt-filled room, watched by family, villagers, and now the remnants - photographed and published in mainstream and English. It is the most extreme variation on the theme.
Infibulation, this is what we have named it - this is what we call it in white talk, West talk, activist mottos ripe with rhyming possibilities for emphasis and memorability only.
She is still a child, waiting, even in severe pain every time she pees, waiting for the naming of the muslim man who will marry her - only if he can break her open. Literally, break her.
Rip apart a body part that once had lips. Imagine this, your lips sliced off, the remaining skin pulled taught and sewn together. No anesthesia. No percocet recovery.
This is called infibulation (a word not even recognized by spell check). A word new to me until I was just passing the latest possible age to be infibulated myself. But I would be stoned instead. That is how a "whore" like me would be treated. What else is there to do to a woman or girl found to be sexually active before, or after the end of marriage?
More than the photographic analogy (the 1993 or '94 Vanity Fair Article that tangled and untangled me for years following,) saturating page upon page somewhere between George Clooney, or some form of Hollywood Beauty was on the cover(I think) and perfumed perfume ads, were these pages, these horrifying pages, scarier than the madman I lived with at 18 with no escape route either. But I had my art.
These women, what did they have? It was easier to figure out what the negatives: the did not have anesthesia, no art involved, nor just reason, no hospital, no novacaine, no options, no choice.
