{"id":1115,"date":"2016-05-12T13:54:01","date_gmt":"2016-05-12T12:54:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1115"},"modified":"2021-12-01T15:05:54","modified_gmt":"2021-12-01T15:05:54","slug":"what-its-like-to-experience-female-genital-cutting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/what-its-like-to-experience-female-genital-cutting\/","title":{"rendered":"What It’s Like to Experience Female Genital Cutting"},"content":{"rendered":"

When she was 7\u00a0years old,\u00a0Mariya Karimjee<\/a>\u00a0sat on a tarp in a neighbor woman’s living room and had an operation that would affect her\u00a0life forever. As part of a family\u00a0tradition in her small Dawoodi Bohra\u00a0sect of Islam, Karimjee had part of her clitoris removed in a procedure that was meant to make it impossible for her to feel desire or “get turned on.”<\/p>\n

Karimjee shared her story of slowly\u00a0learning about what happened to her that day in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1995 on the radio program\u00a0This American Life<\/a><\/em> this week, and has written about her experience previously for\u00a0The Big Roundtable<\/a><\/em>. As she said in the recording, her mom referred to her budding sexuality and anatomy\u00a0as a “bug” that needed to be taken out.<\/p>\n

\u00a0“According to my mother, a bug was growing in an egg down there \u2014\u00a0her language not mine \u2014\u00a0and that it would hatch and eventually crawl to my brain, unless we removed it,” Karimjee said<\/a>. So her mother took her to the neighbor woman’s house, and she received a gold necklace with a teardrop\u00a0pearl pendant as a gift afterward.<\/div>\n

“For two days [after the operation], I wore what I\u00a0can only describe as a big-girl diaper wet with blood,” Karimjee said. “Peeing was so painful that I tried to last for hours\u00a0without going until my mother explained that I could give myself an infection. For the next year, I’d break out into a cold sweat whenever I saw the kind-faced woman who, on a tarp on her living room floor, had\u00a0spoken to\u00a0me softly as she took a knife and cut me.”<\/p>\n

Read M0re:\u00a0http:\/\/www.cosmopolitan.com\/sex-love\/news\/a58222\/what-its-like-to-experience-female-genital-mutiliation\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When she was 7\u00a0years old,\u00a0Mariya Karimjee\u00a0sat on a tarp in a neighbor woman’s living room and had an operation that would affect her\u00a0life forever. As part of a family\u00a0tradition in her small Dawoodi Bohra\u00a0sect of Islam, Karimjee had part of her clitoris removed in a procedure that was meant to make it impossible for her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[415,98,4,10],"class_list":["post-1115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-clitoris","tag-fgm","tag-halo-project","tag-honour-based-violence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1115"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1918,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions\/1918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.haloproject.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}