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Looking at the global picture the anti-FGM movement is gathering force. I wonder how many more generations of girls and young women will have this barbarous act performed on them.
This is another of those things about some cultures' approaches to gender that fucking baffles me. It is so counterintuitive at a species level. Like parents driven by honour to douse a daughter in petrol and set her alight because she looked at a boy a couple of times and dishonour in the eyes of the community means a kind of social death for families. FGM, practiced in cultures that have as one of their central family goals the production of healthy babies, particularly sons, runs utterly counter to those goals. In order to control the sexual urges of girls and make them pure mothers and wives, they inflict physical injuries which massively increase the chances those women will be infertile, or unable to bear a healthy child.
What the almighty fuck was going through the minds of the people who first decided this would be a cracking good thing to do to their little girls?
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