East African women talk about FGM to Musa Okwonga (via B&W):
One of them spoke of the agony that the procedure still caused her three decades later. Frequently, when bent over with pain, she would receive little understanding from those in her community who did not know what she had experienced. “Sometimes they just call you lazy”, she explained....
This, she said, is how it typically happens. When you’re six years old, girls in the year above at the local school, or madrassa, go and have the procedure done; after that, they return to school and they tell you that you’re dirty for not having gone through it. “We look up to them like they’re big girls”, she said. At that point, the young girls will go to their mothers and ask when they can have it done too. Then they go and have and it done; and, she says with a wry laugh, “then you get disabled”.
Having gone through this, their male agemates will look at them with renewed respect, telling each of them that “you’re a good girl, you’re clean now eh?” By the age of 14, most if not all of the girls will each have been paired off with a man, “and you’re expected to have your first baby at 16”. One of the women got married at 16 to a 36-year old man, and one of the others recalled that, when she got married, “I was 18, he was 43”.
“Back home, men can have wives in another country”, one of them noted, revealing that “when my father died, we [found that] we had Indian sisters, [and] sisters in Norway”. Having said that, due to the extreme discomfort that is the legacy of FGM, they took a very pragmatic approach to these affairs. They would rather that they fulfilled their needs elsewhere. “Why don’t you just have another wife? “Go and get yourself a minyire[a second wife, pronounced min-year-ray]”, one of them told her husband. “Sex for me is like a chore…We were not meant to enjoy sex. We were supposed to be machines to have babies.”
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