Health authorities in Western nations should tackle "aesthetic" genital surgery in their own countries before criticizing the traditional female genital mutilation practices carried out in African nations, said Ronán Conroy, from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
Conroy's attack was aimed squarely at the increasing number of vaginoplasty procedures being carried out on Western women. He suggests that surgeons are promoting the fear in women that what is a natural biological variation is in fact a defect - a problem requiring a scalpel to fix.
His comments, appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), follow on from an earlier BMJ study about female genital mutilation practices in Africa and the Middle East. The earlier study found that there was little reliability in statistics reporting the extent and nature of traditional female genital mutilation.
Citing this study in his own commentary, Conroy suggests that "our own sexually repressive use of female genital mutilation may be at the root of our misunderstanding of its role in other cultures."
"[Existing] literature on female genital mutilation is long on polemic and short on data," he added. "European and American writers often assume that female genital mutilation is forced on unwilling young girls, but this is at odds with the high social value placed on it in societies that practice it."
Conroy slams the high moral tone that rich Western countries use to criticize traditional female genital mutilation, and suggests that such complaints would be more credible if we did not practice such procedures ourselves. "The practice of female genital mutilation is on the increase nowhere in the world except our so called developed societies," he says. "Designer laser vaginoplasty and laser vaginal rejuvenation are growth areas in plastic surgery, representing the latest chapter in the surgical victimization of women in our culture."
The growth of aesthetic genital surgery in the richer nations is being driven by a process of disease mongering, concludes Conroy, adding that this burgeoning industry is able to operate without the slightest attention being paid to it by medical researchers who seem totally fixated on practices in poorer nations.
Source: British Medical Journal
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