“
And yet, despite repeated assurances that women aren't particularly sexual creatures, in cultures around the world men have gone to extraordinary lengths to control female libido: female genital mutilation, head-to-toe chadors, medieval witch burnings, chastity belts, suffocating corsets, muttered insults about "insatiable" whores, pathologizing, paternalistic medical diagnoses of nymphomania or hysteria, the debilitating scorn heaped on any female who chooses to be generous with her sexuality...all parts of a worldwide campaign to keep the supposedly low-key female libido under control. Why the electrified high-security razor-wire fence to contain a kitty-cat?
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Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality)
“
I feel that God made my body perfect the way I was born. Then man robbed me, took away my power, and left me a cripple. My womanhood was stolen. If God had wanted those body parts missing, why did he create them?
I just pray that one day no woman will have to experience this pain. It will become a thing of the past. People will say "Did you hear, female genital mutilation has been outlawed in Somalia?" Then the next country, and the next, and so on, until the world is safe for all women. What a happy day that will be, and that's what I'm working toward. In'shallah, if God is willing, it will happen.
”
”
Waris Dirie (Desert Flower)
“
The African specialist Nahid Toubia puts it plain [when speaking of female genital mutilation]: In a man it would range from amoutation of most of the penis, to "removal of all the penis, its roots of soft tissue and part of the scrotal skin.
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V (formerly Eve Ensler) (The Vagina Monologues)
“
There is no “universal moral urge” and not all ethical systems agree. Polygamy, human sacrifice, infanticide, cannibalism (Eucharist), wife beating, self-mutilation, foot binding, preemptive war, torture of prisoners, circumcision, female genital mutilation, racism, sexism, punitive amputation, castration and incest are perfectly “moral” in certain cultures. Is god confused?
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Dan Barker (Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists)
“
From stalking to chastity belts to female genital mutilation, throughout history men have tried to control women’s sexuality and reproductive choices. And women have developed several strategies in response: contraception, abortion, clandestine affairs, mariticide (killing one’s husband), and infanticide.
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Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
“
Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia, where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam. Uncircumcised girls will be possessed by devils, fall into vice and perdition, and become whores. Imams never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel)
“
Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life. The disease is pervasive, from the weird obsession with virginity and the one-way birth canal through which prophets are “delivered,” through the horror of menstrual blood, all the way to the fascinated disgust with homosexuality and the pretended concern with children (who suffer worse at the hands of the faithful than any other group). Male and female genital mutilation; the terrifying of infants with hideous fictions about guilt and hell; the wild prohibition of masturbation: religion will never be able to live down the shame with which it has stained itself for generations in this regard, anymore than it can purge its own guilt for the ruining of formative periods of precious life.
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Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
“
If women were as libidinous as men, we’re told, society itself would collapse. Lord Acton was only repeating what everyone knew in 1875 when he declared, “The majority of women, happily for them and for society, are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.” And yet, despite repeated assurances that women aren’t particularly sexual creatures, in cultures around the world men have gone to extraordinary lengths to control female libido: female genital mutilation, head-to-toe chadors, medieval witch burnings, chastity belts, suffocating corsets, muttered insults about “insatiable” whores, pathologizing, paternalistic medical diagnoses of nymphomania or hysteria, the debilitating scorn heaped on any female who chooses to be generous with her sexuality…all parts of a worldwide campaign to keep the supposedly low-key female libido under control. Why the electrified high-security razor-wire fence to contain a kitty-cat?
”
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Christopher Ryan (Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships)
“
As a pregnant urologist,… I was often asked by hospital workers and physicians if I was going to circumcise the baby. I always answered a simple “no” immediately, without adding the unnecessary caveat that I already knew I was carrying a girl. Knowing that in some parts of the world circumcising girls (female genital mutilation) is as common a practice as circumcising boys, I wanted to use this to spark rethinking every chance I had. When the questioner would find out I knew I was having a girl and tried to use that to explain my choice to not circumcise, I told them, “I wouldn’t circumcise if the child were a boy, either.
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Adrienne Carmack (Reclaiming My Birth Rights)
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I don’t think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, or of female genital mutilation, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that moral relativism does nothing to diminish a person’s commitment to making the world a better place.2
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Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values)
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Why are so many Americans for male circumcision but against female circumcision? Both are equally cruel and barbaric traditions.
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Oliver Markus Malloy (Inside The Mind of an Introvert: Comics, Deep Thoughts and Quotable Quotes (Malloy Rocks Comics Book 1))
“
But Dracula, the book, the myth, goes beyond metaphor in its intuitive rendering of an oncoming century filled with sexual horror: the throat as a female genital; sex and death as synonyms; killing as a sex act; slow dying as sensuality; men watching the slow dying, and the watching is sexual; mutilation of the female body as male heroism and adventure; callous, ruthless, predatory lust as the one-note meaning of sexual desire; intercourse itself needing blood, someone's, somewhere, to count as a sex act in a world excited by sado-masochism, bored by the dull thud-thud of the literal fuck. The new virginity is emerging, a twentieth century nightmare: no matter how much we have fucked, now matter with how many, now matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freedom) or passion or promiscuous abandon, no matter how often or where or when or how, we are virgins, innocents, knowing nothing, untouched, unless blood has been spilled – ours: not the blood of the first time; the blood of every time; this elegant blood-letting of sex a so-called freedom exercised in alienation, cruelty, and despair. Trivial and decadent; proud; foolish; liars; we are free.
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Andrea Dworkin
“
While [female genital mutilation] may have not originated with Islam, it has become an integral part of the religious practice in many regions tied to notions of male dominance and control of female sexuality.
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Darrel Ray (Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality)
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And perhaps most awkwardly, they have been left unable properly to explain why, internationally, half the population in a given culture might be disproportionately subject to specific experiences like rape, sexual slavery, female genital mutilation, honour killing, female infanticide, banishment to menstrual huts, surrogacy tourism or death by stoning for the act of adultery. Clue: it’s not possession of a female gender identity.
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Kathleen Stock (Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism)
“
Some of the regressive customs found in Muslim-majority countries, such as female genital mutilation and “honor killings” of unchaste sisters and daughters, are ancient African or West Asian tribal practices and are misattributed by their perpetrators to Islamic law. Some
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
These tribal wars, like the practice of circumcision, are brought about by the ego, selfishness, and aggression of men. I hate to say that, but it’s true. Both acts stem from their obsession with their territory—their possessions—and women fall into that category both culturally and legally. Perhaps if we cut their balls off, my country would become paradise. The men would calm down and be more sensitive to the world. Without that constant surge of testosterone, there’d be no war, no killing, no thieving, no rape. And if we chopped off their private parts, and turned them loose to run around and either bleed to death or survive, maybe they could understand for the first time what they’re doing to their women.
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Waris Dirie (Desert Flower)
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In Somalia, like many countries across Africa and the Middle East, little girls are made "pure" by having their genitals cut out. There is no other way to describe this procedure, which typically occurs around the age of five. After the child's clitoris and labia are carved out, scraped off, or, in more compassionate areas, merely cut or pricked, the whole area is often sewn up, so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made of the girl's own scarred flesh. A small hole is carefully situated to permit a thin flow of pee. Only great force can tear the scar tissue wider, for sex.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel)
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there is a pervasive assumption among anthropologists that a population’s long-standing beliefs and practices—their culture and their social institutions—must play a positive role in their lives or these beliefs and practices would not have persisted. Thus, it is widely thought and written that cannibalism, torture, infanticide, feuding, witchcraft, painful male initiations, female genital mutilation, cermonial rape, headhunting, and other practices that may be abhorrent to many of us must serve some useful function in the societies in which they are traditional practices. Impressed by the wisdom of biological evolution in creating such adaptive miracles as feathers for flight or protective coloration, most scholars have assumed that cultural evolution too has been guided by a process of natural selection that has produced traditional beliefs and practices that meet peoples’ needs.
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Robert B. Edgerton (Sick Societies)
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My goal in changing how the world thinks about religion is not to make people stop believing in a god or gods; I care little for what people desire to believe in their own private lives. However, I care deeply about what they do with those beliefs. If their religious beliefs teach intolerance and hatred, are used to support war, genocide, female genital mutilation, honor killings or laws that protect or honor such rituals or beliefs, then we have a problem and I will stand up against every such instance and fight it with every means available to me.
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Dan Arel (Parenting Without God: how to raise moral, ethical and intelligent children, free from religious dogma)
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One of the most popular genital surgeries is labia minora reduction. When a similar procedure is performed on healthy girls in some African countries as a coming-of-age rite to control their sexuality, Westerners denounce it as genital mutilation; in the U.S. of A., it's called cosmetic enhancement. But both procedures are based on misogynist notions of female genitalia as ugly, dirty, and shameful. And though American procedures are generally performed under vastly better conditions (with the benefit of, say, anesthesia and antibiotics), the postsurgical results can be similarly horrific, involving loss of sensation, chronic pain, and infection.
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Julia Scheeres
“
Who do I write for? I thought about this again and again over the next few days until the answer crystalized in my consciousness. I write for all readers. But my primary interest is in representing the complex but universal experience of Somalis. I do this because the media representation of the global Somali community is one that is carved out of derivative clichés crammed with pirates, warlords, terrorists, passive women and girls whose entire existence seems to be nothing more than a footnote on the primitive dangers of female genital mutilation. I write because I want to give a long-overdue voice to a community that has experienced a tremendous array of challenges but who constantly face these challenges with the most wicked sense of humour, humility and dignity. My father always used to tell me that in our culture, the done thing when you’re facing hardship and your belly is empty is to moisturize your face, comb your hair, press your clothes and step out into the sun with your sense of humanity intact. It’s a lesson I’ve carried with me to this day.
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Diriye Osman
“
But there is also (though much of this is kept from us, to keep us intimidated and without hope) the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against the endless wars (I think of the Russian women in the nineties, demanding their country end its military intervention in Chechnya, as did Americans during the Vietnam war); the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination—we see, for instance, the new international movement against female genital mutilation, and the militancy of welfare mothers against punitive laws. There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color. In the United States, we see the educational system, a burgeoning new literature, alternative radio stations, a wealth of documentary films outside the mainstream, even Hollywood itself and sometimes television—compelled to recognize the growing multiracial character of the nation. Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as “a permanent adversarial culture” challenging the present, demanding a new future.
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
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the New York Times gave clitorectomies its tacit approval. In January 2008, it painted a rosy picture of the ritual in a piece that never mentioned the pain, bleeding, and infections that often result from it. Female genital mutilation is not the only horrific Islamic custom that is coming West; the number of honor killings is skyrocketing in Europe and America. But genital mutilation is spreading at an alarming rate. It has been reported that thousands of girls in the United Kingdom have been mutilated and the authorities can’t (or won’t)
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Pamela Geller (Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance)
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The inspiration for "Cornflake Girl" came from a conversation she was having with a longtime friend about female genital mutilation in Africa, specifically how a close female family member would betray the victim by performing the procedure. Tori has said that growing up, the name they gave to girls who would hurt you despite close friendship was cornflake girls
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Tori Amos
“
The last stage of a Muslim takeover is the most chilling,” he concluded. “It ends with the establishment of a totalitarian Islamic theocracy, a government in which Islam becomes an all-encompassing religious, judicial, political, and cultural ideology. Shariah becomes the ‘law of the land,’ with all non-Islamic rights cancelled. Under shariah law, barbaric practices like female genital mutilation, amputation, stoning, execution of apostates and homosexuals, and military rape become commonplace. All other religions are outlawed, free speech and freedom of the press are rescinded, and non-Muslim populations are either enslaved or eliminated.” Jacob
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Steve Gannon (Infidel)
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Raised on the meagre rations of the United Nations for their whole lives, schooled by NGOs and submitted to workshops on democracy, gender mainstreaming and campaigns against female genital mutilation, the refugees suffered from benign illusions about the largesse of the international community. They were forbidden from leaving and not allowed to work, but they believed that if only people came to know about their plight, then the world would be moved to help, to bring to an end the protracted situation that has seen them confined to camps for generations, their children and then grandchildren born in the open prison in the desert. But the officials in the grey room saw the world from only one angle.
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Ben Rawlence (City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp)
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This is a speech we've all heard before. From the con artists who aren't like the burglars, who aren't like the armed robbers, who only ever broke a bone if the victim had it coming and the murderers who made 'one mistake' and are forced to pay for it for the rest of their lives. They want to know what you're doing about the real criminals, the rapists and the paedophiles. Who want to know why you're wasting resources on them when we should be tackling female genital mutilation or political corruption
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Ben Aaronovitch (Rivers of London: Detective Stories #2)
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In a country like Britain it has taken decades for opposition to female genital mutilation to be mainstream. Despite being illegal for three decades, and despite more than 130,000 women in Britain having suffered this barbaric treatment, there have still been no successful prosecutions for the crime. If Western Europe finds it so difficult even to confront something as straightforward as FGM, it seems unlikely it will ever be able to defend some of its subtler values in the years ahead.
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Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam)
“
I feel that God made my body perfect the way I was born. Then man robbed me, took away my power, and left me a cripple. My womanhood was stolen. If God had wanted those body parts missing, why did he create them?
I just pray that one day no woman will have to experience this pain. It will become a thing of the past. People will say "Did you hear, female genital mutilation has been outlawed in Somalia?" Then the next country, and the next, and so on, until the world is safe for all women. What a happy day that will be, and that's what I'm working toward. In'shallah, if God is willing, it will happen.
”
”
Waris Dirie (Desert Flower)
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All healing is essentially the release from fear.
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Patricia Robinett (The Rape of Innocence: Female Genital Mutilation & Circumcision in the USA)
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God's will for you is perfect happiness.
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Patricia Robinett (The Rape of Innocence: Female Genital Mutilation & Circumcision in the USA)
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When we feel love, we are naturally kind and generous. But when we feel frightened, we get out the big guns -- to ostensibly defend ourselves! -- and sometimes we shoot ourselves in the process. We push good, kind, loving people away, scare friends off, rejecting them first, fearing that they will reject us.
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Patricia Robinett (The Rape of Innocence: Female Genital Mutilation & Circumcision in the USA)
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Cutting flesh hurts, she says, but words cut too. Words can cut as deeply as knives. Please be kind.
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Patricia Robinett (The Rape of Innocence: Female Genital Mutilation & Circumcision in the USA)
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Tom's parents were growing old and one of his sisters had cystic fibrosis, so he moved back to Denver to spend some precious time with his family. I moved into town where I shared a house with a businesswoman, her son, and a foreign student from the university.
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Patricia Robinett (The Rape of Innocence: Female Genital Mutilation & Circumcision in the USA)
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Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
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Patricia Robinett (The Rape of Innocence: Female Genital Mutilation & Circumcision in the USA)
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Like the clichéd serial killer, Gosnell kept souvenirs of his crimes. All of those little baby feet in formaldehyde-filled glass jars were trophies. Kareema Cross was so disturbed by them that she took photos of them as far back as 2008. If anyone from the Pennsylvania Department of Health had bothered to inspect the Women’s Medical Society, they would have seen them at once. Gosnell didn’t hide them. But the feet were not his only trophies. Gosnell also collected pictures of women’s genitals. He snapped pictures when his patients were unconscious during their abortions. Steve Massof testified that he often saw Gosnell take out his cell phone and take pictures, ostensibly for “research” or for “teaching.” Gosnell was not in fact conducting any research that Massof was aware of, nor did he teach. The doctor told Massof that he had an academic interest in female genital mutilation...
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Ann McElhinney (Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer)
“
To this hyperaerobicized, kale-munching crowd, Annie’s spare tire was about as funny as cancer or female genital mutilation.
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Kathy Cooperman (Crimes Against a Book Club)
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Some nouns: glass, scissors, razors, acid. Some verbs: cut, scrape, cauterize, burn. These nouns and verbs create unspeakable sentences when the object is a seven year old girl with her legs forced open. The clitoris, with it's 8000 nerve endings, is always sliced up. In the most extreme forms of female genital mutilation (FGM), the labia are cut off and the vagina is sewn shut. On her wedding night, the girl's husband will penetrate her with a knife before his penis.
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Ruth Barrett (Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights)
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Sankara argued that a society that oppressed women couldn’t be a successful one, and committed himself to women’s rights: banning forced marriage, polygamy, and female genital mutilation. He argued that the poorest on the globe were the most vulnerable to climate change and started a tree-planting initiative to stop the encroaching desert.
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Lauren Wilkinson (American Spy: a Cold War spy thriller like you've never read before)
“
New Haven psychologist Lisa Cross believes that it is no coincidence that these body-control syndromes occur more often in women than in men, and that they all tend to have their onset in adolescence. From birth to death, Cross argues, a female's experience of her body is far more confused and discontinuous than a male's: from her partially hidden genitals to the pain and mystery of menstruation to the abrupt and radical changes in body contours and function associated with puberty and childbearing to the symbiotic possession of her body by another life during pregnancy and breast-feeding. As a result, some women see their bodies as fragmented, foreign, unfamiliar, frightening, and out of control—as object, not subject, as Cross puts it. Add in social and cultural pressures—which lead teenage girls to define their bodies by their attractiveness, while boys define theirs by strength and function—and it is easy to understand what a perilous passage puberty can be for young women. In fact, it is puberty that first introduces bleeding and body fat into a girl's life, two very powerful symbols of the loss of control over her body. The psychological chasm between body and self widens when girls must negotiate these challenges in an environment fraught with the pain and terror of physical or sexual abuse or unempathetic parenting. "Self-cutting and eating disorders, as bizarre and self-destructive as they can appear, are nonetheless attempts to own the body, to perceive the body as self (not other), known (not uncharted and unpredictable), and impenetrable (not invaded or controlled from the outside)," Cross theorizes.
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Marilee Strong (A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain)
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One in three African women experiences physical or sexual violence. Because many African countries prohibit abortion on any grounds, even if the mother’s life is at risk, almost one third of all the unsafe abortions that occur in the world each year occur in Africa. Most of the 130 million women alive today who have undergone female genital mutilation live in Africa, and 125 million of the current population of African women were married before the age of eighteen.
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Darrell Bricker (Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline)
“
Conceptual Games. Dr Nathan pondered the list on his desk-pad. (1) The catalogue of an exhibition of tropical diseases at the Wellcome Museum; (2) chemical and topographical analyses of a young woman’s excrement; (3) diagrams of female orifices: buccal, orbital, anal, urethral, some showing wound areas; (4) the results of a questionnaire in which a volunteer panel of parents were asked to devise ways of killing their own children; (5) an item entitled ‘self-disgust’ - someone’s morbid and hate-filled list of his faults. Dr Nathan inhaled carefully on his gold-tipped cigarette. Were these items in some conceptual game? To Catherine Austin, waiting as ever by the window, he said, ‘Should we warn Miss Novotny?’
Biomorphic Horror. With an effort, Dr Nathan looked away from Catherine Austin as she picked at her finger quicks. Unsure whether she was listening to him, he continued: ‘Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life - not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures - in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. What our children have to fear are not the cars on the freeways of tomorrow, but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.’
Sink Speeds. During this period, after his return to Karen Novotny’s apartment, Travers was busy with the following projects: a cogent defence of the documentary films of Jacopetti; a contribution to a magazine symposium on the optimum auto-disaster; the preparation, at a former colleague’s invitation, of the forensic notes to the catalogue of an exhibition of imaginary genital organs. Immersed in these topics, Travers moved from art gallery to conference hall. Beside him, Karen Novotny seemed more and more isolated by these excursions. Advertisements of the film of her death had appeared in the movie magazines and on the walls of the underground stations. ‘Games, Karen,’ Travers reassured her. ‘Next they’ll have you filmed masturbating by a cripple in a wheel chair.
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J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
“
And yet, despite repeated assurances that women aren’t particularly sexual creatures, in cultures around the world men have gone to extraordinary lengths to control female libido: female genital mutilation, head-to-toe chadors, medieval witch burnings, chastity belts, suffocating corsets, muttered insults about “insatiable” whores, pathologizing, paternalistic medical diagnoses of nymphomania or hysteria, the debilitating scorn heaped on any female who chooses to be generous with her sexuality…all parts of a worldwide campaign to keep the supposedly low-key female libido under control. Why the electrified high-security razor-wire fence to contain a kitty-cat?
”
”
Anonymous
“
To this hyperaerobicized, kale-munching crowd, Annie’s spare tire was about as funny as cancer or female genital mutilation. Annie
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Kathy Cooperman (Crimes Against a Book Club)
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The emotional scars of FGM are as deep as the physical ones, serving as a constant reminder of the violation
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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FGM is a cycle of oppression that can only be stopped through education and collective action
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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When you take away a woman’s right to control her own body, you take away her very essence. But reclaiming that power is a revolution only she can lead
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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There is no shame in healing. The shame lies in allowing the silence of abuse to continue.
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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No child should feel the burden of a society’s fear, and no woman should carry the weight of cultural oppression. We must teach them to rise above it.
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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We cannot change the way society views women until we address the mixed messages we send about their value
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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When a girl is forced to endure such a violation, she learns to question everything about herself, her worth, her value, and her power.
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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Through pain, I realized that healing is not just about removing scars; it is about reclaiming the voice stolen from you
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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You can break a body, but you can never break a spirit that chooses to rise despite the hurt.
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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I had to learn the hard way that my body was my own, and no tradition or culture had the right to tell me otherwise.
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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FGM does not just mutilate the body; it destroys self-esteem, confidence, and the sense of being whole
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)
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My journey taught me that the most powerful tool in overcoming trauma is the will to speak, the courage to be heard
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Hagir Elsheikh (Through Tragedy and Triumph: A Life Well Traveled)