Academic Betrayals: When Sanitized Language Sanctions the Mutilation of Girls
I challenge a privileged British Medical Journal essay that argues against what should be a Universal Human Right: Sexual pleasure.
Sometimes I swear no one hates women more than women.
I came across an extended essay in British Medical Journal arguing against the cultural ‘insensitivity’ and ‘harms’ produced by anti-Female Genital Mutilation campaigns globally. Twenty-five contributors ‘critically examine’ the ‘harms’ they say emerge from the campaign to end the practice of physically altering, often without anesthesia or hygienic conditions, female genitals from infancy to adulthood.
Twenty-three contributors are women.
They claim the conversation is “driven by a heavily racialised and ethnocentric framework,” which they claim has contributed to “the erosion of trust in healthcare settings, the silencing of dissenting or nuanced community voices, racial profiling and disproportionate legal surveillance of migrant families.” They also conflate what is often done without consent to an adjacent but consensual practice in the West: Genital cosmetic surgery.
The authors argue, somewhat correctly, that FGM doesn’t necessarily stem from ‘patriarchal control’, and correctly note that we can’t be sure how or why the at-least 3,000-year-old practice began in multiple times and places. It may have originated with a desire for males to control female sexuality by making relations unpleasant, and to ensure paternity. The Egyptians, as some scholars believe, may have originated the practice as a marker of the aristocracy. In sub-Saharan Africa it may have started as a puberty rite, similar to male circumcision. In some cultures, FGM is said to make the woman look ‘cleaner’; whether it came from male preference or a desire to one-up the competition is lost in the mists of time.
Today, brains that haven’t been morally nuked by a female-driven obsession with ‘tolerance’ ask the glaringly obvious question the BMJ contributors didn’t.
Why is FGM acceptable for largely powerless ‘racialized’ females but not for Western women?
Western academics like the BMJ contributors hew to a santized language of ‘decolonization’, ‘anti-racism’ and ‘migrants’ rights’ to defend FGM, while accepting a system of healthy female sexuality granted to Western women and girls but not to those unfortunate enough to be born in places where FGM is considered decidedly groovy.
How privileged. I believe Rob Henderson would call this a ‘luxury belief’.
FGM has always been the rage in parts of the world with demonstrably fewer women’s rights: Somalia, Guinea, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. To be fair, some of its greatest defenders are the women who live there who seek to conserve ancient practices and resent foreign interference. Here’s where it becomes easier to, in popular progressive parlance, accuse them of ‘internalized misogyny’. Everyone needs a scapegoat, and when you’re powerless in your own culture, you can at least oppress other women. Especially if you’ve already been oppressed yourself by the lady with the knife.
The authors correctly note that not all FGM practices are extreme; in fact, some are relatively non-invasive, like symbolic nicking or cutting rather than mutilating flesh. One must wonder, though, whether the native defenders have ever questioned it, or whether women who were themselves subjected to FGM and have never known sexual pleasure can understand what they’re denying to their daughters. Or whether they do know—because they themselves were cut after discovering female pleasure, on their own or with friends, or because they’ve heard the stories, or others enjoying female sexual pleasure.
The article never asks, “Are women in these cultures capable of making edified decisions about their daughters’ sexuality when they’ve never been allowed to experience it themselves?”
Little girls in FGM-friendly countries have been known to badger their mothers to get the procedure, complaining of schoolyard bullying for not being ‘clean’. The pressure is intense to become a ‘woman’ rather than remain a ‘girl’, and with the procedure also comes elevated status, gifts, celebrations, and other public positive reinforcement. They’re in no way old enough to understand what they’re giving up; or the lifetime of pain and health problems that awaits if the procedure is performed to the extreme, or improperly.
They can’t conceive of pushing a baby out of a mutilated passage.
The article disingenuously compares cultural FGM to Western cosmetic surgery practices. But their argument is strongest when they compare it to what’s permitted, applauded even, in Western culture; when young people are permitted to engage in ‘bottom’ surgery for sex transition.
It’s weakest by not asking another glaringly obvious question: Who’s forced to engage in genital alteration: Western children encouraged by the school system, social contagion and progressive parenting, or little girls pulled into a ‘purifying’ or ‘cleansing’ ritual without being told how they’ll be ‘cleansed’? Or who don’t understand what this entails as an adult?
A similar hotly contested debate is happening within our own culture: Whether even Western children possess enough agency to make cosmetic decisions about their bodies. Loss of the human right to sexual pleasure is indeed a risk with sex transition bottom surgery, supported by damning admissions in the WPATH Files clarifying that the transactivist group acknowledged children might well lose the ability to achieve orgasm, or even enjoy sex at all; that they couldn’t truly comprehend potentially permanent decisions about their bodies that would change when they hit puberty, and adulthood, and wanted to start a family—and might not be able to.
Never does the BMJ’s anti-anti-FGM article explore the ethics of making children wait until the age of majority to make the FGM decision for themselves. Nor do they ask the most important question.
Is sexual pleasure a universal human right?
Would any of those BMJ authors support their five-year-old daughter’s ‘right’ to be ‘cleansed’ of her most sensitive vulva if she said she wanted it? What if their government passed a law making it legal?
What if she said, “I want to be a boy,” versus “I don’t like the way my wee-wee looks”?
Her body, her choice, right?
No.
Not until she’s eighteen, at least. The age of majority.
‘Health’ and ‘hygiene’ excuses offered for female cutting are complete bollocks according to the United Nations Population Fund.
Babies can never give consent at all. (I’m against even piercing babies’ ears.)
The BMJ article’s strongest point is actually that, apart from Jewish and Muslim practice, how little public outcry we hear anywhere over male circumcision, which is performed, in the West, on babies, mostly in the United States. In Canada it’s described as ‘rare’ (to which I will merely add, “not in my experience”).
I’m against male circumcision for the same reasons as female: I don’t care about hoary religious practices. It’s barbaric, at least until the age of majority, and the ‘health’ reasons given for male cutting are also debunked.
The female enforcers of patriarchal power
Are human rights universal, or only granted on the basis of birth privilege?
What’s particularly troublesome about the desanitizing, uncritical female academics (and two sycophantic males) of the BMJ essay is the moral cultural relativism focused on ‘racism’ and ‘ethnocentrism’. It demarcates anti-FGM campaigns as targeting the ‘Global South’, which they define as ‘African’, ‘South Asian’, and ‘non-Western’. They compare it to the more consensual cosmetic practices in the less-defined ‘Global North’, vaguely referenced as where the ‘diaspora’ communities go. That would be to the West, mostly located north of the equator.
The language maintains the two-tiered system of West vs East: One set of rules for thee, another for me. Western academics vocalize what they accuse The Patriarchy of doing: Enforcing control over other women’s bodies and denying them sexual pleasure.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Aunts and Wives were willing to exercise, even enjoy, brutal control over their lower-hierarchy sisters because they themselves were brutally controlled and punished by the patriarchal Commanders of the Faithful.
Which makes one wonder just how ‘enlightened’ women from those parts of the world are when they insist on ‘cleansing’ their daughters, who are brought up in a culture that teaches them they’re ‘dirty’ until someone ‘liberates’ them from their ‘ugly’ ladyparts.
No, the BMJ article never raises that question.
The weaponization of ‘progressive’ language by female, and allegedly feminist, academics belies the privileged moral disability beneath.
‘Surveillance,’ ‘racial profiling’, ‘harm,’ ‘decolonization’, ‘ethnocentric’ and other activist terms shield their internalized misogyny—their Orwellian subsconscious belief that some women are more equal than others.
They wield cultural ‘genocide’ accusations as dangerously as a two-year-old with a loaded gun, with results as devastating for non-Western women as for the child’s hapless family.
The ugliest euphemism is ‘cultural sensitivity,’ a term used to defend abhorrent practices entrenched in cultures that aren’t primarily white, ergo ‘oppressed’.
Because a long-established practice is part of a ‘culture’, we should be ‘sensitive’ and not engage in a form of ‘cultural genocide’ by forcing them to change. These sound horribly like excuses to not do anything. “Not my country; not my problem.”
If we applied the feminist ‘cultural history’ to issues closer to home, ‘sensitivity’ looks a lot more—insensitive.
There’s a long cultural history of preventing abortion in the US; of wife- and child-beating; and a no-longer passive tolerance of incest, until the twentieth century. Culture-rejecting feminists drove change on all these fronts. They never considered the ‘cultural practices’ that stretched back farther than the first European footsteps on the Massachusetts coastline. Like the Catholic Church’s teaching from the beginning that abortion was a mortal sin; the Biblical right to physically ‘chastise’ your wife and children; the tacit, if non-Biblical practice of sexual abuse within families.
Who were they to criticize the wife-beaters and kid-diddlers when it was a long, established, cultural practice?
True liberals and conservatives, fighting for genuine social justice, recognize the rights of all humans: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Including orgasms.
‘Cultural relativism’ is a First World privilege for those holding fashionable authoritarian luxury beliefs they don’t believe will ever affect themselves. They permit FGM for one set of girls—notably, black and brown girls, but not for white girls (or children of color fortunate enough to have been born in the ‘Global North’). It’s irredeemably racist. Misogynist. Vulvaphobic.
If women in less-developed, less-educated parts of the world have no right to bodily autonomy before they’re eighteen, then who’s to say any woman does? It becomes easy for autocrats, whether progressive or conservative, to dismantle Western women’s hard-won rights to their body autonomy. Because you know, culture.
You might not be able to easily procure an abortion where you live, but at least your mom can’t drag you to a cutter because she thinks you’ve had too many boyfriends.
You whore.
Reclaiming Universal Humanism
We’ve allowed ‘Global North’ feminists, especially cloistered academics, to get away with their fauxminism long enough.
Real feminists, female or male, can stand up for their faraway sisters (and brothers) who need their support far more than North American women who should be able to fight for and advocate for themselves by now.
This isn’t as hard a battle as you think. We have accomplished much of what we aspired to here in the Global North.
We can remind Western feminists, and especially activism-blinded academics, that women’s rights are all women’s rights, including sexual pleasure, as granted to them by nature. We can speak up for our sisters in the Global South who need our fierceness and protection more than overprivileged, often white, elitists. I’m calling out the servile minions of this ridiculous BMJ article as human moral failures guilty of the filthiest sort of racist hypocrisy.
Not one of them still uncut would be willing to prove their FGM solidarity with their manicure scissors, in the bathroom, by clipping off their clitoris.
If Sudanese women don’t need one, neither do pretty privileged-class academics in their Park Slope or Santa Monica homes with kids in private Montessori schools.
Never say never, ladies.
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