Cuts

It was a small cut, maybe a quarter inch. We were weilding a scissor-point against a seamed canal on the side of a new bra. Pinch, poke, pinch. We cut ourself when the scissors slipped, making a small slice alongside our middle finger. It turned red, but wasn't near deep enough to bleed.

The object was to pry out a tiny yet diabolical strip of clear plastic. It was the shape of a short, slightly wide popsicle stick. It's purpose on either side of a bra? Who knows. Someone's antiquated notion of how the glands should appear in a blouse, under a tee-shirt. As if we were Marilyn Monroe or some other performer. All I knew is that they hurt like heck, and even if they did gave us a silhouette that made people stop, stare and applaud I didn't want the ridiculous discomfort.

Imagine being pinched hard on either side of yourself. All frigging day.

Looking how we want to look and feeling how we want to feel is a basic human right.

I fingered the pieces of plastic and wondered what kind of sick, twisted bastard would inflict such a thing on half the country. Well, the answer was in the question.

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Cockatoo is perhaps the last progressive in the country to just become aware of NYT reporter's Nicholas Kristof's Half the Sky, a book about the obstacles placed in front of women throughout the developing world. The documentary was on television last week and it was beautiful, maddening, lovely and crazy-making.

While we were relieving our garments of pinching plastic strips, somewhere on earth - in Africa - little girls were in a hut, bound, their trauma and pain coalescing into a lifetime of physical difficulties. An unnecessary, malignant act performed in the crudest manner.

Kristof, along with a progressive African health worker, and his crew were in a hut in (we believe) Kenya. They listened to an ancient, ancient woman talk about her "job" of grabbing the girls for the "ceremony" and performing the mutilation. She said she performed ten mutillations a day.

(Cruelty engenders cruelty, and we had a sick fantasy of the reporter turning off the camera, just snapping the crone's neck on the spot, and back on camera, claiming it was self-defense. Fool-proof, really; who would expect such a thing from journalism's biggest bleeding heart? And actress Diane Lane who accompanied him looked sufficiently pissed off to corroborate any "she came at me with a knife" story Kristof concocted.)

Obviously the only answer for ending mutilation is education, education, and since we're at it, more education. Westerners needn't go into full-on screed mode; the best thing, I think, would be for other African women, like that wonderful health professional in the film, to just lay out the facts to their sisters:

Mutiliation leads to infections, dismenorrhea, and makes basic hygiene difficult. It increases the likelihood of maternal death.

A tiny cut endured for my rights and freedom. A mutilation because...we've always done it? Tradition? To reign in the mere threat of promiscuity?

There are cuts and there are cuts.