Peacockblue - where erotica on the web all started

by Fletchnia Archer

Reduce your thighs and butt? Not if you live in a place that appreciates womanly women. Ever been to Puerto Rico? The women there know what's feminine and it isn't tooth-pick thighs and flat butts. And they show it off in tight dresses, tight pants, tight bathing suits--tight anything across their butts. And that's one of the things that make the island beautiful.

Not everyone on the planet thinks that boobs are the be all and end all of feminine beauty. People in Mali, in West Africa, for instance, recognize that they're designed as a milk delivery system for babies. The amount and quality of milk doesn't depend on whether the boobs are perky or big or small or droopy or whatever. But that's what counts in Malian boobs, milk. They might excite a hungry kid, but they're not a sexual turn-on to anyone.

That's why they have a hard time figuring out why some women like Europeans and Americans take so much trouble to cover up their milk glands and go around with the really erotic parts hanging out for everyone to ogle. Right, thighs again.

This is a place where everything is complicated by nutritional disorders from goiter to vitamin deficiencies to malnourishment. Lots of kids' growth is stunted. So thin isn't beautiful. Thin is malnourished. Thin is unhealthy. Fat is healthy. Fat is sexy.

What a world! A place where fat is sexy, where thunder thighs are a turn on and nobody cares about droopy boobs.

Too good to be true? May be. There's a major downside. They cut off the clitorises of the girls. It's part of coming of age, part of being a woman, part of being acceptable. It's a cultural thing, not religions. Christians do it in Ethiopia and Kenya; Moslems do it in Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Oman; Ethiopian Jews did it before they immigrated to Israel; and people who are none of the above, animists in sub-Saharan Africa do it. It came before Islam, and a majority of Moslem people do not do it. But about 135 million women have had it done to them. About six thousand every day have it done now.

Clitoridectomy it's called. Cutting off the clit. According to Amnesty International, a woman from Kenya who defends the practice says it makes girls clean, promotes virginity, and guards young girls against sexual frustration by deadening their sexual appetites. Some people say that cutting off the clitoris and the labia is just removing the male parts to enhance a girl's femininity-to make her more docile and obedient.

It comes in three strengths-the lightest kind is removing the clitoral hood, the prepuce and the tip of the clitoris, or just the tip of the clitoris. The medium form-clitoridectomy--cuts away the prepuce, the clitoris itself and adjacent labia. The extreme form-infibulation--cuts away the clitoris, the labia majora and minora, and sews the sides of the vulva across the vagina to leave a small hole for the passage of urine and menstrual blood. People who do this cut open the women on her wedding night to let her have intercourse with her husband and then stitch her together again to insure fidelity. When babies come, she has to be cut open.

We're not talking about sterile clinics with antiseptics. We're talking about pocket knives and dull blades. We're talking about stitching women together with thorns and cat gut. And the attendant chronic infections, pelvic infections, cysts and other health problems.

Someone once suggested the only reason for an organ like a clitoris, an organ whose only purpose, whose only function is for pleasure, for orgasms, is to make women crazy enough to get pregnant in the first place. But women whose clitorises have been cut off manage it, though maybe without as much enjoyment. In Mali the women don't think of sex as anything fun. There's no pleasure to it. It's something you endure because you are a woman. But it doesn't last long and if it hurts, it's not a major pain compared to the other pains of a woman's life.

Even so, one survey reports that ninety percent of women with clitoridectomies have orgasms. This makes me think maybe someone mis-translated the question. It makes me wonder whether there are even words for orgasm that translators could use. But maybe you just can't keep good women down.

Our sisters in Africa aren't the only ones. In nineteenth century England, some doctors thought that masturbation was the cause of anything that could go wrong with a person-male or female-including insanity. Masturbate yourself crazy wasn't just a saying to these guys. Licking somebody's clit til she goes nuts would have seemed reasonable to them--but not in quite the same way it is to us. These guys thought that clitoridectomy would cure women of hysteria and what they called 'excessive' masturbation. I guess it might.

In the places where they do this as part of coming of age, there are festivities and presents that make girls feel accepted. Having her clit whacked makes a girl eligible for marriage. It's like any other initiation rite. If you don't do it, you don't belong. You're not one of 'us,' and everyone, all of 'us' will reject you as an outsider. That's a bad place to be, and most of us have withstood some kind of pain to avoid that haven't we? Maybe we can understand why these girls would accept having their clits cut off if it made them real women, if it put them on the inside, made them feel clean, if it cut off the masculine parts of them and made them more feminine, if it made them acceptable people. Think about the expense and pain that our American and European sisters endure to be feminine, to be acceptable, to be on the inside. We probably burn enough calories in a year fighting against our thighs and butts in any one city to support a whole village in Mali.

Amnesty International sees clitoridectomy as violence against women and opposes the practice. They see it as human rights issue, a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human rights that protects the right to security of person and the right not to be subjected to cruel inhuman or degrading treatment.

Cruel, inhuman and degrading. Ever seen an aerobics class? A gymnasium full of torture gear? A permanent being administered? If that doesn't do it, think of liposuction, breast implants, breast reduction surgery, tummy tucks, and other forms of cutting women. Think about pulling out your pubic hair with wax. Shaving armpits and legs. Painting faces.

Cruel, inhuman and degrading may depend on the time, the place, and the culture. There's another place in South India where people really like hairy women. The more hair, the more beautiful. No eyebrow plucking here because the mark of femininity is heavy eyebrows.

The question is whose culture? The men? Is it just the men if the women go along with it? It's these same guys in the clitoridectomy places who like the thunder thighs and fat women and don't mind droopy boobs. Often enough the women go along with the whole package. How else to explain our own beauty industry?

Others point out that even if it's not a human rights issue, it is a public health issue because women suffer health consequences from any form of female genital mutilation from light to extreme. The apologists answer that the task is to clean up the act, do it in clinics.

Maybe Puerto Rico and other Latin places have it all together-there people appreciate womanly women but don't whack off their clits. But there are other prices to pay there, I guess. You have to deal with that machismo stuff. On the other hand, the machismo is the flip side of that oh-so-feminine femininity that shows up in the women's walk, talk, and ways of being.

Then again, maybe the lesson is that nobody's perfect and we might as well learn to like or own imperfections and get along with everyone else's.