Clitoraid – A Scam?
This morning I read a board post promoting Clitoraid, a charity aiming to help African women overcome female genital mutilation. The idea is you can “adopt a clitoris” and donate money to help establish a “pleasure hospital” where surgeons will operate on FGM women “uncovering the root of the original clitoris left after the excision. This root and tissues will become the new clitoris. The procedure takes 6 weeks for a woman to completely heal, with sexual pleasure and genetic normality being the end result.”
See that phrase “genetic normality”? Sounds a bit strange doesn’t it?
And that’s the thing. While Clitoraid sounds like a fabulous idea, it’s run by the Raelians, the weird group who believe their leader is from outer space and who have claimed to be the first people to successfully clone a human.
When I saw that, I wasn’t so keen on the whole idea.
Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, an expert on FGM told Salon:
“At best it’s misguided, at worst it’s a way to make money. This is not good. It’s not really that simple. There’s not necessarily a stump of a clitoris to be restored. Any surgery there will often lead to flashback anxiety, depression. The whole thing is so foolish, I can’t take it seriously. What does that leave? A moneymaking scam where you appeal to people’s guilt promising to make these women whole again, freed from this terrible thing. This is nonsense.”
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