Nothing stirs up controversy like debates about female anatomy, especially the bits to do with reproduction and sexuality. We saw this in Canada with last year’s induction of Dr. Henry Morgentaler to the Order of Canada. Walking past his Bank Street abortion clinic in Ottawa just after the announcement, I saw the usual coterie of conservative Christians marching with their placards on the opposite sidewalk. All were older white men. Meanwhile, the silent liberal majority assumed self-congratulatory airs, having scored a victory on behalf of women’s bodies and the hard-won freedom of self-determination. This is one more degree on the long but ineluctable arc of social progress that saw its beginnings with the suffrage of Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung.
With such success at home, it seems only natural that we share our social gains with the world’s less fortunate—immediately our thoughts turn to Africa; it doesn’t matter where in Africa; it’s all one big clot on the map and it’s all one big groan for help. And so we cry foul (as we surely ought) when the Pope makes highly fallible claims about condoms and HIV/AIDS prevention, we decry our complicity in the DRC’s civil war, and we become apoplectic with righteous anger when we hear lurid tales of female genital mutilation (FGM).
Think of our puzzlement then, when an African woman, Nigerian journalist Gbemisola Olujobi, states that she has undergone such a procedure, yet describes herself as a “sexually fulfilled African woman.” In a July 2, 2009 article posted in TruthDigg, Gbemisola Olujobi shares some puzzlement of her own. Why, for example, is the West obsessed with lurid depictions of village shamans wielding blunt rocks? Readers, who appeared to miss the point, were gracious enough to provide examples of these depictions in the comments following her article:
Does this woman actually have the temerity to compare a minor labia or clitoral hood trim done with informed consent with the act of slicing the labia majora and minora completely off, completely removing the clitoris, and binding everything shut with cactus thorns all so that a new husband years later can cut his wife open so he is sure she (sic) a virgin and know that sex is so horribly painful for her that she won’t possibly cuckold him?
But this depiction is not an African story. This is a Western media story. I mean, really! Cuckold? This is a sensationalized account whose “moral” involves the aggrandizement of Western culture at the expense of what we continue to regard as a primitive and tribal people. Yet the facts indicate that full-blown FGM is exceptional. Most alterations are rituals comparable to the Jewish ritual circumcision of bris (Yiddish) or Brit milah (Hebrew), with no consequences to sexual enjoyment. Nevertheless, NGO’s tend to roll a spectrum of procedures into a single package and sell it all as child abuse. After all, it’s the juicy bits that keep them in funds. For us liberals, righteous anger produces a reflexive hand-in-the-pocket response that simultaneously thwarts our critical faculties, in the same way that we involuntarily salivate when we see road kill from the windows of our SUV’s.
But Gbemisola Olujobi’s deepest source of puzzlement comes from the fact that the same rich whites who fund anti-FGM efforts have started to spend small fortunes (by African monetary standards) making things neat and tidy “down there.” At what point does irony become hypocrisy? White North American’s pay for procedures they condemn in black Africans, and yet the motivation in both groups is identical—aesthetics. But there is a difference. The aesthetics of African women belongs to a tradition handed from mother to daughter for generations and tends to exclude male interests (lurid stories notwithstanding). The aesthetics of North American women has emerged only within the last several years with the advent of hi-def porn. Now, the camera can provide close crisp shots so that women (and their partners) can make comparisons in much the same way that Western women have been driven to self-destructive behaviours by comparing themselves to the ectomorphic body type of runway models. Maybe it’s time we re-examined the definition and etiology of abuse in the FGM issue. Maybe it’s time we tilted the balance of our attention from East to West.
Why have our conversations become so polarized?
Think of the news this year. Think of how the stories have lined up depending upon the source.
aesthetics. But there is a difference. The aesthetics of African women belongs to a tradition handed from mother to daughter for generations and tends to exclude male interests (lurid stories notwithstanding). The aesthetics of North American women has emerged only within the last several years with the advent of hi-def porn. Now, the camera can provide close crisp shots so that women (and their partners) can make comparisons in much the same way that Western women have been driven to self-destructive behaviours by comparing themselves to the ectomorphic body type of runway models. Maybe it’s time we re-examined the definition and etiology of abuse in the FGM issue. Maybe it’s time we tilted the balance of our attention from East to West.
But most telling in Gbemisola Olujobi’s article are the reader comments. She is making an important statement about the nature of colonialism: although we liberals like to think we live in a post-colonial world, little has changed; the agent of colonialism has morphed from states and missionaries to TNC’s and NGO’s. Yet the whole thrust of her argument is lost on many of the commenters. See, for example:
The writer claims she is sexually fulfilled. How do she know that? She was handicapped from the very beginning. Maybe she was partially spared or by luck or by her special nerve endings constitution.
The writer denies the possibility that Gbemisola Olujobi can legitimately speak to her own experience.
This is colonialism at work through social media. It is the denial of story. And it is the imposition of someone else’s story. Gbemisola Olujobi cannot know whether she is sexually fulfilled because she has never had the authentic (white) experience of sexual fulfillment. Where once upon a time we came to Africa with the Bible, now we come with Alfred Kinsey and Shere Hite.
I haven’t posted a comment to her article. I’m not sure she’s interested in what a white North American male thinks about the issue. I’m guessing what she’d like most from me is an attentive ear. She has a story to tell. It’s her story. Let’s shut up and listen for a change.