Jezebel
Leftovers
Posts Tagged “
genital mutilation
”
Leftovers
clit bandits
Evil Gyno Graeme Reeves Brutalized 800 Women Before He Got Caught
You know what I'm sick of writing about? GENITAL MUTILATION. Seriously, another day in February = another story about women getting their clitorises brutally cut out of their vulvas. Why is the media so obsessed with covering the 'bad news' of women are getting their labias sewn shut when it never seems to chronicle the billions of women who go through life with perfectly intact vaginas? But hey, it's not my news judgment that feeds this blog, so I might as well let you in on the latest re this guy, Graeme "I'm going to take your clitoris, too" Reeves. To recap: Graeme Reeves is a former OB-GYN who liked to put women under anesthesia, then remove parts of their vaginas. Sometimes he'd get carried away, and remove other organs while he was at it. A woman died at his hands and another woman got cervical cancer, which he ignored, and today it turns out his various hospitals had actually fielded complaints from 800 women! What sort of primitive barbarian society would tolerate such atrocities? More »
cult of clit
Still Down From Last Night's Top Model? Adopt A Clitoris!
So... "female genital mutilation." Sorta hard to type the words without getting weak in the lungs! (Especially with the memory of the wine I consumed following Fatima's wrenching revelation she'd had her clit removed and her labia sewn together as a child last night on Top Model still so fresh in my gut; oh god, room spinning...) But, uh, hey! There is hope for Fatima (pictured after the jump so you can root for her in case you didn't catch the premiere) and others like her! A nonprofit called Clitoraid is collecting donations to build a charity hospital that will offer victims of genital mutilation free reconstructive surgery at a hospital in Burkina Faso. (Yes, you can fix the clit: as it turns out circumcision only removes the superficial 2 centimeters, but a full 8-10 centimeters of clit is located inside the body; who knew; okay maybe you knew but I did not.) So who is behind this grand humanitarian gesture? Just a crazy UFO church that believes humans are the descendants of aliens! More »
first, do him harm
Dr. Graeme Reeves, The Sickest Man Alive
I was all set to write a really uplifting post on why men use war as an opportunity to rape women when I came across a story of an Australian guy who did not have any sort of backdrop of dehumanization or trauma or anything like that to blame; he's just fully, comprehensively, independently jawdroppingly evil. His name is Graeme Reeves. He was an OB-GYN. One of his patients wanted to have a small pre-cancerous lesion on her labia removed. As she slipped into unconsciousness from the anesthesia, he leaned in and whispered:"I'm going to take your clitoris too."Huh? I know it's pointless to ask, but why???? Well, Graeme Reeves was not your garden variety Law & Order psychopath; he is a murderer who left dozens of women permanently injured. He removed their organs for no reason, he ignored the cancer growing inside a woman's cervix for no reason, and way back before any of this, in 1996 he withheld antibiotics from a dying mother against the pleas of nurses so that she eventually died for NO. REASON. How the fuck did this happen? Was none of this considered to be a crime? More »
You Wanna Be On Top
There's a whole new dimension added to this upcoming cycle of America's Next Top Model—genital mutilation. According to Us Weekly, one of the contestants, Fatima, has quite a horrific past. Growing up in Somalia, she underwent a female circumcision, and then two of her sisters were murdered before she fled the country at age 13. That's nuts, right? We're kinda inclined to say, "Tyra, she's been through enough! Don't you dare tell her to ever 'make it fashion,' and just let her win the damn fake modeling competition." [FourFour]
There's a whole new dimension added to this upcoming cycle of America's Next Top Model—genital mutilation. According to Us Weekly, one of the contestants, Fatima, has quite a horrific past. Growing up in Somalia, she underwent a female circumcision, and then two of her sisters were murdered before she fled the country at age 13. That's nuts, right? We're kinda inclined to say, "Tyra, she's been through enough! Don't you dare tell her to ever 'make it fashion,' and just let her win the damn fake modeling competition." [FourFour]
a cut below
Clitoral Circumcision Will Make This Baby "More Beautiful In The Eyes Of Her Husband"
"When a girl is taken — usually by her mother — to a free circumcision event held each spring in Bandung, Indonesia, she is handed over to a small group of women who, swiftly and yet with apparent affection, cut off a small piece of her genitals."
That sentence comprises the first 45 of over a thousand words devoted to female circumcision in Sunday's NY Times. (Sorry guys, this is the last of our Blue Monday-type stories for today.) According to Lukman Hakim, a (male) chairman of an Indonesian foundation that sponsors mass circumcisions, the benefits include the "stabilization" of a female's libido and balancing "her psychology".
More »
broadsides
Shrinking Violets Have Shrinking Life-Spans
- A new study indicates that women who keep quiet during marital disputes have an increased risk of dying from heart disease compared to women who speak their minds. Oh Katie, you're so doomed. [LA Times]
- Thinking about getting pregnant? Want a baby girl? Get stressed. Want a baby boy? Get fat. [DailyMail, ScienceDaily]
- Nearly 96% of all women and girls in Egypt are subjected to some form genital mutilation. Though the country's Health Ministry outlawed the practice over a decade ago, they created a massive loophole for "emergencies". [NY Times]
- Cervarix, HPV vaccine alternative to Gardasil, has been approved for sale across the European Union. Hopefully the US will be next, as Cervarix is available for women above the age of 27, unlike Gardasil. [Wall Street Journal]
Some hope, perhaps, for victims of female genital mutilation? A new procedure being pioneered in Burkina Faso is reported to be able to begin to reconstruct the clitoris using "hidden" tissue, thus restoring sexual sensation. We wish the women undergoing this new procedure lots of luck and and hope that they and their new clits have happy lives, sexual and otherwise. [Economist]
oldies but (not so) goodies
Clitoral Mutilation: Not Just For African Girls
Everyone loves a clitoris, right? Well, not really! Yesterday our favorite old-magazine-article blog Modern Mechanix posted a piece on 'the female penis' from a mid-1960s issue of the journal Sexology and sparked a mini-debate within the blog's community after one reader intimated that clitorises are immodest, indecent, and therefore un-Christian. (That reader won't be reading the blog anymore, she says!) Anyway, the article — from January 1964 — doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know (Clits get bigger when stimulated! They have cute hoods and like to draw back under them, "like a snail into its shell") except, um, maybe this:Girls born with an enlarged and unslightly clitoris usually prefer to have it removed, for the sake of feminine appearance.More »
broadsides
Benetton Knows How To Accessorize Your Black Eye
- We are sick and tired of reading about women beaten, shot, stabbed, raped and injured by men they know. But we don't know that pairing purplish scars with Italian knitwear is the best way to raise awareness about domestic violence. [Feministing]
- Activists in Africa are turning to the Koran in an effort to cease female genital mutilation. [Feministing]
- Researchers have made a "landmark breakthrough" in breast cancer research with the discovery of a genetic mutation that often causes the disease. [CNN]
- No matter how you play it, eating too much or too little is bad for the bones. [CNN]
- British nurses aren't getting any. [The Sun]
the end of womanhood
We're Beginning To Look A Lot Like Barbie
A leading British medical journal has released a report slamming the increasing demand for "designer vaginas" and warning that plastic surgery to the female genitals carries a risk of decreased sexual response. Fueling the demand for such procedures? Unrealistic images of female genitalia in pornography, women's magazines, and... the fashion industry. More »
men
