Hillary Clinton gave some remarks yesterday regarding the total ban on female circumcision in the United States (oddly enough, banned only as late as 1997).
There's a gritty description of female circumcision in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, and an odd remark, spoken by her grandmother, that referred to a belief that all women of the Sudanese tribe in the book must be cut, lest their clitori grow to the size of a man's penis and they die in childbirth.
That seemed an odd worry.
Several months later, over a drink with co-workers, a biology major entered in a discussion about the oddities of animal genitalia, focusing on the hyena. The clitori of female hyenas grows as large as the hyena male penis, and causes incredible pain in childbirth, often killing the mother. And hyenas, of course, are all over the Sudan. The logic wasn't hard to follow.
Still an odd worry to have, but less so. At least if you're in a nomadic society.
The picture is of Hillary, aghast –
Or consternated – in remembrance, here,
Within the State Department, of the sheer
And quite excruciating pain that is amassed
From cutting off the labia. Alas,
Religions are a mystery to me,
Though I confess, and quite emphatically,
I’d rather have the boy cut than the lass
(Assuming that I have to make the choice),
For reasons dealing with the agony
Of the procedure. No religious freedom
Here removes the specter of a voice
In agony, and crying out to what
Unyielding god had ordered she’d be cut.
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