FGM

Sorry I haven't been posting, things have been kinda nuts lately. But I'm alive, and giving you this little story to sink your teeth into. Enjoy!

I was in my sociology class a while back, and we were talking about FGM, or Female Genital Mutilation. This is a practice done in some third world African and Middle Eastern countries, and as I understand it, it involves removing the clitoris and labia, and then the genitals are stitched shut leaving only a small opening for urine and menstral blood to pass through, and scar tissue is encouraged to form. This often results in a number of nasty effects. When the girl gets married, the opening is widened to accomodate her husband, and it is widened even further when she gives birth. After she delivers the child, the vagina is stitched shut again, causing more scar tissue to form. Many women die from this, or live very painful and debilitating lives because of it.

So anyway, we were discussing this practice in my sociology class, and one of the students piped up, even had a valley girl tone in her voice, no joke. "Umm, they do that in America too, in like, the BDSM community, yeah, like, women do that for their masters to show their devotion and submission to them." I whipped around and looked at this girl and then whipped back. It took all of my self control not to bitch her out right then and there. Everything I had not to rip her throat out for uttering such stupid and ignorant words.

Now, I understand that the leather community isn't the right group to head the equal-rights-for-alternative-lifestyles movement. The world really isn't ready for us, but we are not that bad. Now, I've heard some horror stories, like the one about some idiot woman pouring hot oil, like, hot cooking oil that was being heated on a stovetop and pouring it on some poor unsuspecting man. People like that are stupid and ignorant and they are the ones who give the scene a bad name. But never have I heard of anyone in the scene, here or anywhere else, chopping away at a woman's genitals like it was a steak. Never ever ever. Now, maybe I'm ignorant, my experiences in the scene are certainly limited to the few years I've been here and the small number of people I've become friends with in that time. I know people who have been in the scene for a lot longer than I have, and they are good kind people who would only hurt a fly if it said 'please', but they would never ever do something so horrible to someone.

So yeah, I was completely caught off guard by this statement, and all I could do was raise my hand and recite a little fact from a medical journal I had read. "Umm, yeah, the last documented case of genital mutilation performed by a doctor was in 1958 on a 5 year old, it was a clitorectomy. Since then any procedure relating to the removal of any part of a healthy woman's genitals has not been performed by anyone with a sane head on their shoulders." I hated that I couldn't rip her to shreds, hated that I had to protect my anonymity.

I called up Terra later on, totally dumbstruck by this girl's idiocy. "Are there kinky people that do this? No one has ever proposed cutting my snatch off in all the time I've been doing this. So I need to know, are there people that do this? Because they need to be stopped. They need to be stopped right now Terra. I'll buy the bus tickets, we'll find these people and slap them." She was just as flabbergasted as I was, neither of us could figure out where this little fact had come from. We finally just let it go into the ether, helpless to change the flow of bad information, lest we pay of the price of exposing ourselves. It really is a pity though.