duplo-dragon:

“Making an example of herself and all she had accomplished, Ms. Leng’ete convinced the younger men that cutting wasn’t good for the community, and she turned them into backchannel diplomats, who helped persuade the elders.

Finally, after nearly four years of dialogue, the elders in her village changed hundreds of years of culture and abandoned cutting. She had persuaded the men, and with them the village, that everyone would be healthier and wealthier if girls stayed in school, married later and gave birth without the complications cutting can create.

She and the elders planned a different kind of ceremony to celebrate girls, and the next year, the number of girls in school soared. The elders recognized Ms. Leng’ete’s work with a thing of great power — an esiere, a black walking stick that symbolizes leadership.“



While she’s hero and it’s wonderful that she saved 50,000 girls from fgm, it’s horrible that she has to put so much energy into it. And in the end girls won’t escape patriarchy when it comes to other things. Men still expect them to be good wifes and get children.

She put so much energy into making men stop wanting to cut the genitals of girls but you see how men don’t really want to stop? How it took so long? How in the time she bargained they still did it? How girls are still going to be wifes?

This is what socialization means. Sure women could teach men to stop oppressing them. But at what price? Especially in a large scale? It would take hundreds if not thousand of years because women would have to fight for very single tiny thing. During these hundreds or thousands of years men would continue to do what they usually do. And the outcome probably isn’t much.

Like is that what you want?

This story makes me really sad because while it’s great what this woman accomplished, all these girls still have a patriarchal mindset:

“Shiluni Shirim, 12, is an ambassador for the program. She remembered fighting with her family, even after last year’s program, to keep them from cutting her.“They were saying, ‘You’re not a real woman,’ and I was saying, ‘I will still be a real woman one day,’ ” finishing school, marrying and having children, in her own time, she said.“



Men will only give up something as long as they can make sure that women are still in their place. They sometimes give us some litle crumbs so that we have the feeling that we accomplished somethigne and that we’re silent and won’t bother them for some time. This is what trying to teach men does.