By Aimah Moiz
Sakina was thirteen years old when the village circumciser came to her house and cut off her clitoris. As she bled and throbbed in pain her mother congratulated her, for she had now officially become a ‘woman’.
Sakina is just one of the 125 million girls and women who have undergone female circumcision. It is a major human rights violation and WHO has made several efforts to eliminate it.
Female circumcision, better known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is a ritual practiced in several African and Middle Eastern countries which involves cutting of ‘excess’ female genitalia. It is usually carried out on young girls between the ages of 4 and 14, often without their consent. As practitioners often belong to the lower strata of society and cannot afford proper health care, the procedure is performed by local women, without the use of anesthesia and using rudimentary tools for cutting such as unsterilized knives, razors and sharpened rocks.
FGM involves procedures such as clitoridectomy (removing the entire, or part of the clitoris), excision (removing the labia minora and the labia majora which are ‘the lips’ around the vagina) and infibulation (narrowing of the vaginal opening). WHO also classifies any other procedure conducted on the female genitalia for non-medical purposes as FGM.
FGM does not have any health benefits. In fact, even if it is performed by a medical practitioner with sterilized equipment, FGM gives rise to urinary tract infections and complications during childbirth often leading to a Vesicovaginal Fistula – a condition in which a woman has damaged her urinary tract and has no control over her urine.
Despite the number of health problems it can lead to, FGM is still continued due to social pressure. Women who undergo it are considered chaste and beautiful, and their demands as brides increase. In these patriarchal societies they often have little value other than gratifying their husbands’ sexual needs and giving birth to their offspring. Therefore, parents strive to do what they can to make their daughters as desirable a match as possible. “Now that you have been circumcised, you can get married,” said Sakina’s mother to her after the procedure had taken place, “because men don’t marry non-circumcised girls.”
Sakina, now 20 and married says she would encourage her own daughters to get circumcised too because she wants them to be happily married as well. She also hopes she will be able to take care of her husband’s sexual needs so that he would not be tempted to marry again or to leave her.
Therefore, we must realize that parents are only doing what they think is best for their daughters to sanctify their marriages and future security. As parents are now more aware of the risks an FGM performed at home poses there is an increasing trend towards medicalization of it. According to WHO 18% of FGM now is performed by a medical professionals.
If increasing awareness can produce that change we can expect that through greater awareness, especially on the part of the men these women subsequently get married to, we can hope to substantially decrease, if not completely eliminate, this practice. However, given that this tradition goes back hundreds of years it will take time to completely change people’s mindsets.
As atrocious as FGM may seem, we fail to realize is that its reach may be far beyond the ‘primitive’ dunes of the Sahara and well into our ‘modern and civilized’ Western world. FGM bears a striking resemblance to the world’s fastest growing cosmetic surgery called Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery (FGCS). FGCS is a medical procedure used to modify the female genitalia in a similar manner to FGM. It involves Labiaplasty (altering the size of the labia minora and the labia majora), Vaginoplasty (tightening the vaginal canal), Clitoral Hood Reduction and de-pigmentation of the genitalia. It should be taken into account that Labiaplasty and Vaginoplasty are essentially the same as Excision and Infibulation, the only exception being that they involve augmentation as well as removal.
Furthermore, given that WHO classifies any procedure conducted on female genatalia for non-medical purposes as FGM, every non-medically required form of FGCS should therefore, also be categorized as it.
It should be added that in some cases, genital surgery can be medically required to reduce discomfort, but in most genital surgeries this is not the underlying motivation.
However, FGCS seems to be growing every year at an alarming rate. The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) states that in 2013 over 5,000 vaginal cosmetics surgeries were performed in the United States, marking an 44% increase from the number of surgeries performed in 2012. When women are asked as to why they would undergo such procedures, they say it gives their genitalia a ‘clean’ look, thereby improving their sex lives. Surgeons argue that, as with the case of any other cosmetic surgery, FGCS boosts women’s confidence and make them feel more empowered.
It is ironic to note that the same practice which is seen as oppressive and barbaric in the East is seen as a mark of scientific progress by surgeons in the West who feel these ‘advanced’ medical procedures are giving women more control over their bodies.
Perhaps we ’empowered’ women may have a lot more in common with those ‘oppressive’ women than we like to think. For one thing, we both seem to be equally insecure about losing our sexual partners. As Afshan Jafar, an American sociologist mentions, women usually make an enquiry for FGCS after their sexual partners pass a derogatory comment. She quotes a doctor who claims “breasts catch a man but a tight vagina keeps him”. The veiled concern of a woman being able to ‘keep’ a man behind this remark seems to be quite similar to Sakina’s concern of her husband not being tempted to leave her.
Jafar also says that FGCS is at a stage now breast implants entered 15 or 20 years ago. “In 15 or 20 years we can expect that parents might be giving FGCS to their daughters as a form of graduation gift, because that is where breast implants are now,” she foresees.The likelihood of this scenario becoming a reality seems to have increased: “Doctors are faced with adolescents who feel somehow that they need surgery to be normal,” reveals Dame Suzi Leather, chair of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Britain. “But the overwhelming majority do not need surgery and fall well within the normal limits,” she adds.
It shows how girls, hardly a few years older than Sakina was at the time of her circumcision, are becoming increasingly aware of their (assumed) bodily imperfections. Perhaps by the time these girls are mothers, they will be amongst those parents who will give FGCS as graduation presents to their daughters.
At the end of the day, any form of non-medically required genital modification, regardless of it being performed at a private cosmetic clinic in New York or in a thatched hut in East Africa, can be seen as a grave attempt made to ease a woman’s insecurity over ‘losing her man’ by having to conform to social beauty standards.
Aimah Moiz, Class of 2017, Major Undeclared, Karachi, Pakistan
This is interesting, disturbing and very well-researched at the same time. The parallel drawn between FGM and FGCS is pretty good and I hope that at some time in the future every one realises that ‘keeping a man’ isn’t what ought to define a woman