Page 7 [0] of the report seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery. I'm surprised by this. I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!).
> seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery.
> Longitudinal data indicate that approximately 22% of women
who undergo clitoral reconstruction experience a post-operative decline in orgasmic experience [25, 26]
From [25] abstract: Most patients reported an improvement, or at least no worsening, in pain (821 of 840 patients) and clitoral pleasure (815 of 834 patients)
So, I think the quote needs to be interpreted as surgery, even though beneficial on average, still having a pretty high percentage of negative outcomes (22%) and nerve mapping potentially helping reduce that.
> I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!)
And talk to any gyn doc in the west: it's happening among those communities in the west too (but on a lesser scale). In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family). You may not have gyn doctors friend but I do. And midwives. And they know.
"... surveys show that the practice of FGM is highly concentrated in a swath of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Horn of Africa, in areas of the Middle East such as Iraq and Yemen and in some countries in Asia like Indonesia, with wide variations in prevalence. The practice is almost universal in Somalia, Guinea and Djibouti, with levels of 90 per cent or higher, while it affects no more than 1 per cent of girls and women in Cameroon and Uganda"
"FGM is practised predominantly within certain Muslim societies,[13] but it also exists within some adjacent Christian and animist groups.[14] The practice is not required by Islam and fatwas have been issued forbidding FGM,[15] favouring it,[16] or leaving the decision to parents but advising against it."
Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
> In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family).
> Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
If the point here is that this is an Islamic/Muslim issue, then you'd find this in other Muslim populations. It's an Africa issue. Ethiopia is 60% Christian, yet had a 65 percent rate of FGM. Look at Pakistan, and the levant in general. Very Muslim populations yet very low levels of FGM.
No, it's important context, and attempting to suppress it does everyone a disservice. Without taking these kinds of points of comparison into consideration, one becomes susceptible to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy , and may become convinced about supposed bias where the evidence doesn't support the claim, contradicts it or even shows the opposite.
Another classic example is the discourse around "missing and murdered Indigenous women" in Canadian politics. It was popular enough around a decade ago to be more or less a set phrase. To listen to politicians and wonks discussing the matter, you would imagine that Indigenous men didn't ever get kidnapped or murdered. As a matter of fact, the statistics showed that it happened to them at over twice the rate of the women. (They also showed that it was not an alarmingly high rate compared to other Canadian populations, and that the perpetrators were usually themselves Indigenous — as you'd expect for generally fairly isolated communities.) But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.
> But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.
Canada has an incredibly censorious culture. I have been downvoted to -4 [0] [1] and flagged for merely suggesting that Canadians do not care about medical privacy (or privacy in general) in light of things like Bill C-22 and DNA collection at the US border [2].
Interestingly enough, questioning gender ideology and being trans critical (maybe even transphobic) is now acceptable on HN [3], but Canadians have something very dark to hide when it comes to respecting medical privacy given how hard posts of this nature are downvoted, flagged, and censored.
Surprised he didn't willingly relinquish a sample.
Privacy is not actually a core Canadian value.
Neither in spirit nor in letter do Canadians actually
demonstrate that they give a shit about privacy; see
for instance Bill C-22.
I invite commenters to demonstrate otherwise instead of
merely downvoting incontrovertible facts.
To someone who is shocked at the prevalence of female genital mutilation in other cultures, the widespread acceptance of other types of genital mutilation in (probably) their own culture is an important piece of context, I'd say.
Whether removing the tip of your finger or the whole arm, the imposition on bodily autonomy is equal. It is a violation of your personal sovereignty at the deepest level.
Absolutely. Let's switch away from fingernails to hair because that's something I can talk about with person experience. I have long hair, plenty of people have jokingly threatened to cut it in my sleep or such. To have my hair cut like that would impart no physical injury or ailment to me at all, but it would be such a severe violation of my bodily autonomy that I would have no reservation about considering it assault and bringing charges as such.
I think your point is that fingernails are just a bit of extraneous keratin that is universally removed as part of grooming and so the violation cannot be equal to having your entire arm removed, but perhaps you forget the many women and some men out there who like to decorate their fingernails and that this is an expression of self.
My point was merely that it's a matter of degree, and while having part of your fingernail removed against your consent is assault, it's not exactly the same thing as having your whole arm removed.
I hear what you are saying. But hear me out. I think their comment is ok.
No one is forced to follow that thread. And the comment does provide additional information.
In fact, I never considered circumcision a form a gender mutilation. Despite being circumcised. But that comment got me thinking about it in a new way. And thinking about GM in a larger context.
On some levels yes, but if the male experience isn't being talked about, then no.
If we were to talk about domestic violence the automatic assumption is male against female. Ignoring the fact that a third of victims are men. That isn't exactly a small minority, before you take into account that it probably an undercount as no one talks about men getting abused.
The same goes for breast cancer. Men can get it, its almost never talked about.
This is a bad take. If society takes genital mutilation of children seriously, and it gets outlawed in more and more countries, it helps save ALL children from genital mutilation. Only a shortsighted person would see it as a zero sum.
There wasn't really an all lives matter on the same sense as the black lives matter movement.
Plus there's 'all lives matter' as in the proponent doesn't want to do anything, and 'all lives matter' as in police brutality is bad no matter who it's aimed at, and should be stopped completely.
The latter more closely mirrors the parents example.
Further I would say your example is flawed. BLM assumed a level of racism that I don't think there is. This isn't a case of KKK members wanting to get the s out of the country and back where 'they belong' it's more an issue of laziness and profiling. That isn't to say it isn't racism, but just talking about racism allows police that aren't KKK members to tell themselves they aren't the problem. Focussing on the issues of laziness etc means they do actually need to face up to the issues.
The same thing with genital mutilation, this isn't simply a case of something that happens to girls in a far away land, this is happening to kids right now in the west. Focusing on FGM kind of misses the point.
BLM also never claimed cops were KKK members. You're really fictionalizing the movement and its history; also, you have presented zero credibility as an expert in how much racism exists among US police forces.
The KKK reference was to make clear that there are some that might identify themselves as racist. Whereas there are those that may for whatever reason, legitimate or not treat different groups differently. It isn't considered ageist to treat 1 yr olds and 91 year olds differently for example.
You presumably don't class yourself as racist. If someone were to claim your group were racist, would you automatically accept you were? Simply stating the outcome and some extreme examples doesn't force the rest of the group to actually engage with the problem. Worse it could create division where there was none because the majority feel they have to treat a particular group better than the rest.
I'm a white man, I've had similar experiences to what ethnic minorities would describe as racism, except in the context of domestic abuse. Are the police man hating sexists, or is it more that it sounds about right that a man would abuse a woman rather than the other way round, and is more a case of laziness and not really caring, which yes is technically sexist/racist, but ignores the fact that the perpetrators don't think of themselves as racist and were 'just doing their job'.
I have my own experience. And my experience is that they don't give a toss about me as a white male. Should I infer that they are sexist also? Or is it a case of them treating me like shit is related to them treating ethnic minorities like shit? And if that's the case there's a unifying factor more nuanced than just 'racism'
Respectfully, if we didn’t shutter men all the time, maybe there would be paradoxically more time for women. Unless we make it a zero-sum game where we’re all extremists who would lose if it makes the opponent lose too.
Mixed school is a bane for men, for example. I’m full on with the Mollahs on this one.
(Nonconsensual) genital mutilation is bad no matter who you are or what parts you have.
Also: If pain becomes a contest, we're all losers.
Also: Thank you for complaining. There is much to complain about. There's so much to complain about that we can sit in a circle and take turns complaining and everybody will probably learn something.
Dumb question, why do “sensitive” spots on the body need more nerves? Couldn’t you just have the normal touch-sensing nerves and map signals from specific spots on the body to stronger/pleasurable qualia in the brain?
I remember that Matteo Realdo Colombo (1515-1559) [1] described the clitoris. There is a novel about the story [2] which was the finalist on one of the top Spanish literary prizes [3].
165 comments
[0]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1...
> seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery.
> Longitudinal data indicate that approximately 22% of women who undergo clitoral reconstruction experience a post-operative decline in orgasmic experience [25, 26]
From [25] abstract: Most patients reported an improvement, or at least no worsening, in pain (821 of 840 patients) and clitoral pleasure (815 of 834 patients)
So, I think the quote needs to be interpreted as surgery, even though beneficial on average, still having a pretty high percentage of negative outcomes (22%) and nerve mapping potentially helping reduce that.
> I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!)
And talk to any gyn doc in the west: it's happening among those communities in the west too (but on a lesser scale). In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family). You may not have gyn doctors friend but I do. And midwives. And they know.
"... surveys show that the practice of FGM is highly concentrated in a swath of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Horn of Africa, in areas of the Middle East such as Iraq and Yemen and in some countries in Asia like Indonesia, with wide variations in prevalence. The practice is almost universal in Somalia, Guinea and Djibouti, with levels of 90 per cent or higher, while it affects no more than 1 per cent of girls and women in Cameroon and Uganda"
Now from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_female_geni...
"FGM is practised predominantly within certain Muslim societies,[13] but it also exists within some adjacent Christian and animist groups.[14] The practice is not required by Islam and fatwas have been issued forbidding FGM,[15] favouring it,[16] or leaving the decision to parents but advising against it."
Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
Ponder this.
> In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family).
Can you source that claim?
> Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
If the point here is that this is an Islamic/Muslim issue, then you'd find this in other Muslim populations. It's an Africa issue. Ethiopia is 60% Christian, yet had a 65 percent rate of FGM. Look at Pakistan, and the levant in general. Very Muslim populations yet very low levels of FGM.
>230 million women
500,000 in the USA. 98%+ in some other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_female_genital_m...
Another classic example is the discourse around "missing and murdered Indigenous women" in Canadian politics. It was popular enough around a decade ago to be more or less a set phrase. To listen to politicians and wonks discussing the matter, you would imagine that Indigenous men didn't ever get kidnapped or murdered. As a matter of fact, the statistics showed that it happened to them at over twice the rate of the women. (They also showed that it was not an alarmingly high rate compared to other Canadian populations, and that the perpetrators were usually themselves Indigenous — as you'd expect for generally fairly isolated communities.) But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.
> But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.
Canada has an incredibly censorious culture. I have been downvoted to -4 [0] [1] and flagged for merely suggesting that Canadians do not care about medical privacy (or privacy in general) in light of things like Bill C-22 and DNA collection at the US border [2].
Interestingly enough, questioning gender ideology and being trans critical (maybe even transphobic) is now acceptable on HN [3], but Canadians have something very dark to hide when it comes to respecting medical privacy given how hard posts of this nature are downvoted, flagged, and censored.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571182[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571396
[2] https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/canadian-man-denied-en...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165
I think your point is that fingernails are just a bit of extraneous keratin that is universally removed as part of grooming and so the violation cannot be equal to having your entire arm removed, but perhaps you forget the many women and some men out there who like to decorate their fingernails and that this is an expression of self.
No one is forced to follow that thread. And the comment does provide additional information.
In fact, I never considered circumcision a form a gender mutilation. Despite being circumcised. But that comment got me thinking about it in a new way. And thinking about GM in a larger context.
If we were to talk about domestic violence the automatic assumption is male against female. Ignoring the fact that a third of victims are men. That isn't exactly a small minority, before you take into account that it probably an undercount as no one talks about men getting abused.
The same goes for breast cancer. Men can get it, its almost never talked about.
Plus there's 'all lives matter' as in the proponent doesn't want to do anything, and 'all lives matter' as in police brutality is bad no matter who it's aimed at, and should be stopped completely.
The latter more closely mirrors the parents example.
Further I would say your example is flawed. BLM assumed a level of racism that I don't think there is. This isn't a case of KKK members wanting to get thes out of the country and back where 'they belong' it's more an issue of laziness and profiling. That isn't to say it isn't racism, but just talking about racism allows police that aren't KKK members to tell themselves they aren't the problem. Focussing on the issues of laziness etc means they do actually need to face up to the issues.
The same thing with genital mutilation, this isn't simply a case of something that happens to girls in a far away land, this is happening to kids right now in the west. Focusing on FGM kind of misses the point.
The KKK reference was to make clear that there are some that might identify themselves as racist. Whereas there are those that may for whatever reason, legitimate or not treat different groups differently. It isn't considered ageist to treat 1 yr olds and 91 year olds differently for example.
You presumably don't class yourself as racist. If someone were to claim your group were racist, would you automatically accept you were? Simply stating the outcome and some extreme examples doesn't force the rest of the group to actually engage with the problem. Worse it could create division where there was none because the majority feel they have to treat a particular group better than the rest.
I'm a white man, I've had similar experiences to what ethnic minorities would describe as racism, except in the context of domestic abuse. Are the police man hating sexists, or is it more that it sounds about right that a man would abuse a woman rather than the other way round, and is more a case of laziness and not really caring, which yes is technically sexist/racist, but ignores the fact that the perpetrators don't think of themselves as racist and were 'just doing their job'.
> BLM assumed a level of racism that I don't think there is
Why is your lived experience greater than that of an entire group of people?
Mixed school is a bane for men, for example. I’m full on with the Mollahs on this one.
> Respectfully, if we didn’t shutter men all the time,
Respectfully, what are you talking about?
Also: If pain becomes a contest, we're all losers.
Also: Thank you for complaining. There is much to complain about. There's so much to complain about that we can sit in a circle and take turns complaining and everybody will probably learn something.
Not in Europe.
I still remember "Show HN: Clitly, my app for finding the Clitoris".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realdo_Colombo
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Anatomist-Federico-Andahazi/dp/038549...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premio_Planeta_de_Novela
> her colleagues used high-energy X-rays to create 3D scans of two female pelvises that had been donated through a body donor organ programme.
Would be really interesting to get a few dozen of these and map out the variability. Gotta start somewhere though