Now, even here in this grown-up adult forum, I certainly am not going to go off on my tangent and personal take on how I think the male circumcision ceremonies in Africa differ from the sterile, non-ceremonial male circumcision medical procedures of the west and are, for many reasons, superior. Nope.

Most people, when they hear about how these young boys are taken out into the woods by their elders to have their foreskin removed in a huge ceremonial act are horrified by it--and yet, they have no objection to the way it is practiced in the west on infants.

But--back to the point someone made about the difference between FGM and male circumcision, that point is certainly valid: I made that point once about 20 yrs ago in Africa when some white guy was trying to say it was the same thing: I said, I tell you what, you think it's the same? Get up on that table right now and I'm going to cut off your dick with this here swiss army knife. Now we're talking "same thing." He didn't get it.

Has anyone pointed out that there has been some progress in terms of the degree of mutilation involved in FGM, i.e. that some of the truly horrific complete cutting away of clitoral/labial tissue and even of sewing up the vagina has indeed been abandoned; that is, that in some cases, the practice has since been modified and the incisions have become smaller, less debilitating to the sexual function of the women and more  a "symbolic" incision.

Btw, did anyone see the film the Piano Teacher, by Michael Hanecke, based on the novel by the radical feminist Nobel Prize winning author (one of only ten women ever to have rec'd the Nobel in Lit) Elfriede Jelinek? There's a scene in there where the protagonist actually subjects HERSELF to a form of FGM, i.e. slices her own genitals (whether clitoral or vaginal or labial, I know not)....Wonder how that fits into this whole thing. Don't know. Just wonder. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2001.

The film and the novel by the same name is said to be largely autobiographical.

juslilolme at Historical Footnotes