Go check out the article and the haunting photo essay at The New York Times Magazine. Oh, and this is done to 9-month-olds and 14-year-olds alike.
The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl’s genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She is then helped back into her underwear and returned to a waiting area, where she’s given a small, celebratory gift — some fruit or a donated piece of clothing — and offered a cup of milk for refreshment. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where, according to a 2003 study by the Population Council, an international research group, 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14….
According to Lukman Hakim, [Assalaam Foundation's] chairman of social services, there are three “benefits” to circumcising girls.
“One, it will stabilize her libido,” he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.”
He’s forty, she’s eleven. And they are a couple – the Afghan man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. “We needed the money”, Ghulam’s parents said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school. But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan’s Ghor province know better: “Our men don’t want educated women.” They predict that Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children for Faiz.
Click here read the rest of the accompanying blurb and to see the Photo of the Year runners up.
Purity Balls are formal events in which a Christian teenaged girl pledges her sexual purity to her father until she takes a husband. The first time I saw a Purity Ball was during the excellent abstinence-only themed documentary, The Education of Shelby Knox. My reaction was visceral. When the tux-wearing father gave the gown wearing-daughter a purity ring, it became clear the ceremony is designed to mimic a wedding; the inference of a father marrying his teenaged daughter kicked me in the gut and repulsed me on many levels.
Eve Ensler describes Purity Balls succinctly: “When you sign a pledge to your father to preserve your virginity, your sexuality is basically being taken away from you until you sign yet another contract, a marital one…It makes you feel like you’re the least important person in the whole equation. It makes you feel invisible.”
Considering this new tradition traces its roots back to bronze-age times when women were property on the level of cows and land, I find it ironic that the only decent YouTube video on the subject comes from the al-Jazeera show Everywoman. Watch for yourself (the Purity Ball segment ends at around 6:30 into the clip):
