Female Genital Mutilation: The Libertarian Imperialist Feminist Case Against (Day Thirty-Seven)

Today's featured article on Wikipedia draws attention to political, social, cultural, and moral issue on which I take a strong stance.  

Female genital mutilation (FGM), "also known as female genital cutting and female circumcision, is the ritual removal of some or all of the external female genitalia. Typically carried out by a traditional circumciser using a blade or razor (with or without anaesthesia), FGM is concentrated in 27 African countries, Yemen and Iraqi Kurdistan, and found elsewhere in Asia, the Middle East, and among diaspora communities around the world. The age at which it is conducted varies from days after birth to puberty; in half the countries for which national figures are available, most girls are cut before the age of five.

The practice is rooted in gender inequality, attempts to control women's sexuality, and ideas about purity, modesty and aesthetics. It is usually initiated and carried out by women, who see it as a source of honour, and who fear that failing to have their daughters and granddaughters cut will expose the girls to social exclusion. Over 130 million women and girls have experienced FGM in the 29 countries in which it is concentrated. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that 20 percent of affected women have been infibulated, a practice found largely in northeast Africa, particularly Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia and northern Sudan.

FGM has been outlawed or restricted in most of the countries in which it occurs, but the laws are poorly enforced. There have been international efforts since the 1970s to persuade practitioners to abandon it, and in 2012 the United Nations General Assembly, recognizing FGM as a human-rights violation, voted unanimously to intensify those efforts....

Yet, believe it or not, "[t]he opposition is not without its critics, particularly among anthropologists. Eric Silverman writes that FGM has become one of anthropology's central moral topics, raising difficult questions about cultural relativism, tolerance and the universality of human rights."

Ugandan law professor Sylvia Tamale argues that early Western opposition to FGM stemmed from a Judeo-Christian judgment that African sexual and family practices – including dry sex, polygyny, bride price and levirate marriage – were primitive and required correction. African feminists "do not condone the negative aspects of the practice," writes Tamale, but "take strong exception to the imperialist, racist and dehumanizing infantilization of African women."

The debate has highlighted a tension between anthropology and feminism, with the former's focus on tolerance and the latter's on equal rights for all women. Anthropologist Christine Walley writes that a common trope within the anti-FGM literature has been to present African women as victims of false consciousness participating in their own oppression, a position promoted by several feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, including Fran Hosken, Mary Daly and Hanny Lightfoot-Klein. It prompted the French Association of Anthropologists to issue a statement in 1981, at the height of the early debates, that "a certain feminism resuscitates (today) the moralistic arrogance of yesterday's colonialism."

As one who quickly disregards my multi-cultural principles when the individual is to be left tyrannized by the community, tribe, and/or family, I take a hard anti-anthropologist line on this matter. And if being against the anti-FGM campaign makes one an imperialist, do understand that I am "imperialist" because of my libertarianism. The state is not the only source of force in the world;–that is, culture can be as rippling to individual liberty as any government, be it democratic or despotic. 

Also, as one who finds nymphomania as an aspirational value for both the individual and society, at large, I cannot rectify how FGM is not sexual theft. What else can it be, when according to Understanding the Female Orgasm (July 2003), by Al Cooper, that

• Fifty to 75 percent of women who have orgasms need clitoral stimulation and are unable to have an orgasm through intercourse alone. 
• Even for women who do orgasm through vaginal intercourse alone, most still need the right position to provide clitoral stimulation.

Putting my libertinism aside, this again speaks to my liberal nature: individual sexual choices and experiences should never be sacrificed to any community's prejudices.

In short, on the issue of FGM, I am proudly a libertarian imperialist feminist!

P.S. Since many people I have spoken with over the years seem not to be aware of what exactly is be cut during FGM, here is illustration to explain: