Anti- genital mutilation ad campaign features blowup love dolls

"More than 140 million women in the world are condemned to feel nothing." Link to post at Ads of the World, more scans on kuteev's livejournal. Campaign by Contrapunto BBDO, Barcelona. The ads are for a group called AMAM, Association of Women against Genital Mutilation, who have run some very provocative PSAs before, too. Link to AMAM website (Spanish). (thanks Susannah Breslin)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: Sex

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

ankou

A week and a half ago, BME’s Modblog featured a woman’s “consensual female circumcision” [NSFW], which garnered a lot of disturbingly enthusiastic responses from gentleman commenters (and a few women as well). A different set of circumstances, certainly; but very interesting for any debate of personal liberties, who we see as victims and why, what some of us deem “visually pleasing” and how similar these aesthetics are to what we might call brutal from any other culture…
Antinous

there are innumerable situations that are not as black and white as we might assume, whether they take place within “non-western” cultures or not.

Does that include bride-burning? Killing women who dishonor their families by consorting with unrelated males? Forcing little girls to marry old men? Selling children into slavery as religious beggars? They’re all time-honored cultural traditions. I don’t find the gray area quite as gray as you seem to.
Chloramphenicol

@Landowner -

I completely agree with you on that one. Circumcision is barbaric, no matter which gender it’s being done to. The problem is, we’re so used to having males get cut that few people even think about it.
Grimmway

“They are almost always justified on dubious cultural or medical grounds”
I won’t defend female circumcision, but there is a fairly significant amount of data indicating that male circumcision is beneficial in reducing the spread of HIV/Aids. See WHO and and UNAIDs reports on the subjects. I would hardly call them dubious metical sources. (http://www.who.int/hiv/mediacentre/MCrecommendations_en.pdf)
Regardless of that I find it pretty ridiculous to put the two in the same category. Infibulation, the removal of the clitoris, is an accepted aspect of all FGC. In a game of clitoris, foreskin, scissors clitoris beats foreskin hands down. Equating female and male circumcision is hyperbole at best, and insulting at worst.
Marja

@Chloramphenical -

I have to take offense at your misuse of the language.

Barbarian simply means non-urbanized and civilized simply means urbanized. There have been many civilized/urbanized cultures which perform either circumcision or FGM, and there have been many barbarian/non-urbanized cultures which have not.

Genital mutilation and circumcision may be performed because of people’s gender roles, but it is performed on people’s sexual organs. It’s not being done to a gender, it’s being done to a sex.
Sister Y

I think this is a terribly complex issue that demands understanding of all of the perspectives involved.

Respectfully, I think the female genital mutilation issue is pretty much the reductio ad absurdum of cultural relativism.

You bring up the important point that very often women are involved in cutting the genitals of little girls. But, as Antinous says, just because women are often involved in perpetrating female genital cutting doesn’t mean it’s not primarily done in the ultimate interests of men, or, more importantly, that it’s right. As for the “smoothness” issue – I have zero problem with an adult women voluntarily consenting to have her vagina altered so that it’s smoother (or more aesthetically appealing in her view, as with #11 Ankou’s example). But there is a major consent problem in the usual FMG cases.
georgewbush

@ Grimmway

Male circumcision is a brutal practice, depriving men of the majority of sexual sensation by removing the most important component of the male sex organ. There is no hyperbole in comparing the two.
arkizzle

Ankou
“..(and a few women as well)”

I think that aside is a little disingenuous, there are plenty of women onboard, who have nothing but good to say about the procedure.

I was genuinelly shocked at how many responders thought it looked better than a natural vagina.

Also note, the woman featured has not removed her clitoris, just her inner labia and her citoral hood, so not quite the same as the FGC above.
Sister Y

There are various reasons why male circumcision has historically been performed – none of them medical (unless you count “preventing masturbation” as a medical reason). It’s a practice in search of a reason. The medical justification is new, and extremely weak. Cutting off an infant boy’s entire penis would reduce his chance of catching a sexually transmitted disease, but nobody would even think of arguing in favor of that.

Female genital cutting has only one reason: to control women’s sexuality in the most brutal way possible, specifically, to make it impossible for a woman to enjoy sex, so she won’t be sexually unfaithful. It “protects” the genetic interests of men, at extreme cost to women. In this way it is more horrible than male genital cutting. But both are awful.
arkizzle

Sister, both agreed, fully.
Takuan

the rage I feel.
festivemanb

While the ads are certainly provocative, and fun to look at, I doubt seriously whether they will do anything at all to actually convince the practitioners of Female Genital Cutting to abandon their centuries-old cultural practice. The sad truth of FGC is that people who do it do it because they want the best for their daughters, and believe that FGC is the way to become a proper woman. If they don’t do FGC, many believe, their daughters won’t find good husbands. Now, I don’t see how comparing people’s daughters to blow-up dolls is really going convince anyone to give FGC up. It will just make Western detractors feel good about themselves. And, when it comes time to think about FGC, maybe they will be that much less sensitive to the humanity of the people who do it–they people who, ostensibly, we want to ‘save’.

If you’re interested in an NGO that’s had fantastic success in encouraging the abandonment of FGC, I would point you to the Senegal-based Tostan (http://tostan.org). By taking a more pragmatic route than buying magazine ads, Tostan has given communities the tools to collectively abandon FGC. And it’s really working. They can describe themselves better than I can, so I will let their site do the talking.

As a wider idea, I think this shows the uselessness of ad agencies trying to take on ‘good works’. Advertising is not a proper medium for getting across any sort of subtle point that might make for a start of a good policy discussion. All it can do is to rile people, ‘raise awareness’ and comfort. But it can’t start a debate.
Xeni Jardin

+1, festivemanb. I’ve had some limited personal interaction with families in which this is practiced in West Africa, and the gap between these sorts of ads and the reality of the context in which the practice takes place is huge. The practitioners — at least the ones I’ve had any contact with — believe they are doing something good. They don’t read these magazines, and our distant, disconnected smugness doesn’t do much to help change things.
dillybravo

Sister, reducing the phenomena to “only one reason” is not very fair, is it? Men may indeed prefer the practice to continue for reasons of fidelity and aesthetics. However, your comment is also oppressive to these women, because you leave out all of the reasons they themselves value and perpetuate genital cutting. Also, little work has been done on post-FGC sexual response. That which has been is mixed. Some women in fact report equal or greater arousal, some of it attached to the values of purity, smoothness and closedness of the body this procedure in many contexts is all about (for the women), as well as physical pleasure in tightness and closure. Note that it is generally women, at least in many contexts, who undertake and demand the procedure.

I think this is a terribly complex issue that demands understanding of all of the perspectives involved. Especially because, as others have noted, we in “the West” have a long history of meddling with the affairs of others in order to style ourselves enlightened protectors of reason and civilization. See Janice Boddy’s recent book on early English colonial regulation of FGC for instance. The idea that this is about sexual control of women and barbaric, etc., fits very nicely with our imperialist geopolitical situation vis-a-vis the Middle East and Africa. Shouldn’t we be more concerned with all of the issues about gender and women’s embodiment in our own countries and cultures before we start pointing a myopic and self-serving finger of blame at others?
vermilliona

Re: web presence, they do, just in Spanish.
http://www.amam.es/index.html

I’m surprised that it was founded by a Gambian woman: when I saw those adverts they struck me as a perfect illustration of what was wrong with Western approaches to fgc (word to festivemanb).
cephalopod

@Georgewbush: Circumcision deprives men of “the majority of sexual sensation”? Please provide some documentation. Once again, hyperbole.
Landowner

They should have ads like this for male circumcision as well.
0xdeadbeef

The Mexican government did it first: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4789144.stm

Don’t you people know that women are property who exist for two mutually exclusive purposes? If she isn’t a whore for fun, she is livestock to produce heirs. It’s the same the world over, from Gambian villages to Republican mansions. You can’t fight human nature…

Unless you use human nature. We should emphasize the weakness and inferiority of men who are so incapable of satisfying their women that they must mutilate them to never know what they’re missing.
ankou

@Arkizzle
yes, a very good thing to point out: the woman in BME did leave most of her clitoris intact, and it is definitely “another set of circumstances”. It is also interesting to note that not all FGM procedures entail removal of the clitoris. And of course, similar to the BME woman, some of the women that AMAM & like organizations wish to help go through FGM having given their full consent. Obviously many women and children haven’t.

I really liked the contrast of the BME situation with those that AMAM’s ads deal with, because there are innumerable situations that are not as black and white as we might assume, whether they take place within “non-western” cultures or not. AMAM definitely wants to do good work for those who need it, but their stark, one-dimensional ads might alienate some and seem culturally insensitive, as Vermilliona (#4) touched on earlier. Either way, the debate is good: this is not an easy topic and people need to examine all sides carefully.
Antinous

Cutting off an infant boy’s entire penis would reduce his chance of catching a sexually transmitted disease, but nobody would even think of arguing in favor of that.

You beat me to it, Sis. Genital mutilation is either bad or not. Gender is irrelevant. The notion that women asking for it makes it okay is absurd. First of all, the woman is a thirteen year old girl. Second, if she doesn’t do it, she is an outcast who can be raped, beaten or thrown out of the village to die. Third, if she doesn’t consent, she’ll be held down and have it done anyway. I believe this fails the consent test.

Please provide some documentation.

Do your own research. There is ample evidence that the prepuce is the most sensitive part of the penis, and that drying and exposure of the glans secondary to circumcision decreases sensitivity.
Jonam

Fully agree with Landowner’s post. Both Female and Male versions of circumcision, whether done in the West (the US), the Middle East or Africa are barbaric (no anaesthetic) and unnecessary.

They are almost always justified on dubious cultural or medical grounds, are carried out without consent (usually on children or babies) and deprive the victim of the most sensitive parts of their anatomy for life.

The sooner both these evil practices are stopped the better.
Jason McIntosh

@2 – I think it’s meant to be an awareness campaign – it’s probably safe to say that the target audience isn’t direct FGM practitioners so much as everyone else in the world.

You put “raise awareness” in scare quotes, but this is how most people (especially in the western world) begin to learn about things like this. Public-service ads are as legitimate a medium for getting a message out to many people at once. Those who are moved by the striking but simple images will find no problems locating more information (especially now in the age of Google).

It’s then these made-aware people who can then clump together and start to effect change. The ads are only trying to catalyze them.
pinkpicnic

This campaign reduces the women to sex objects. If I had fgc, I’d be horrified at this image, even if I was consentual. Why not use the real human faces of women/girls who’ve had this done to them?
iraszl

Here is the full campaign: http://adsoftheworld.com/taxonomy/brand/amam