Female Genital Mutilation

One thing I wanted to comment on that has been in the news recently is the Female Genital Mutilation case stemming out of Georgia. This horrible practice has occurred in the United States for hundreds of years and for thousands of years in Africa and Asia and other parts of the world. In her novel,Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker discusses how white men would prod and examine the bodies of the African women they had captured and brought to the United States as slaves and took note of FGM in this way and began, in some instances, to use it on their wives and daughters. There is one point in the book in which Tashi, the African immigrant woman who has undergone FGM, is introduced to a white woman from Louisiana by her psychiatrist, Raye, who has also undergone Female Genital Mutilation. The difference in their cases was that Tashi underwent the procedure voluntarily as an adult, in foolish support of a national cause, while the white woman had undergone FGM at the hands of her parents as a deterrent from masturbation. This horrible practice should stop and the horrendous practices of it here in the New World, as well as in the old, should be brought to light.