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circumcised??
hi i read your thing to the woman who was circumcised. and you seem to know a lot about it. so i know what they do when they circumcise boys, but what do they do to the girls, and why's it so horrid
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Hi. This is a mostly Islamic tradition performed in places like Egypt. What happens is that when a girl reaches a certain age (the questioner was 6 years old), the mother, (or in the questioner's case aunts), take the girl either into a room of her own house or into the city to a "booth" or rarely (3%) to a hospital. They do rituals, with prayers, and the adults hold the girl down while others pry her legs apart and hold her. Then either a barber, a midwife, or another untrained person uses knives, scissors, or sharpened glass to cut out the girl's clitoris, her labia majora, and sometimes her labia minora. She is given no choice in the matter and no anesthetic. You can imagine the pain of surgery without anesthetic, but the clitoris is a group of very sensitive nerve endings. Sometimes her vagina is sewn shut or her labia are cut and sewn so they heal together and barely allow for the drainage of urine or menstrual fluid. The idea is that when those women get married, their husbands will literally rip them open and they will be sure that they are getting virgins. That ripping open is also extremely painful. This is all done by people whose mindset is that women are property of men. They should not enjoy their sexuality and for a woman to enjoy sex is 'wrong.' It's a thought pattern that stems from the idea that women are stupid and can't take care of themselves. They are inherently dirty. They must be 'purified' so they can be worthy of a man who will take care of them.
Not only is the 'surgery' traumatic, but it's done under non-sterile conditions. Girls lose a lot of blood. A lot of them die. Those who don't go through a painful recovery. Then they're left with debilitating scars. They get more infections and have a higher risk of complications and death during childbirth. The area where they used to have the clitoris is often chronically painful when they sit down or during sex.
It's just a bad, bad thing. Here's a wikipedia article.
[Link](Mouse over link to see full location)
Please feel free to ask me more if there's something you don't understand.
Sabine
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