"The Question No One Would Answer" by Nawal El Saadawi

After reading this story I must say I was tremendously appalled, to hear of such intolerant and ghastly ways, alas I am but an observer and I cannot force my opinions unto others, even if I think it is wrong because what is wrong for me, might be right for someone else. Living in the 21^st century, after the women’s right movement, we still see the segregation that women must deal with everyday of their lives and this is in our society, but nothing compares to what goes on in the East. The simple thought of female genital mutilation makes my skin crawl, and awakens every nerve end in my body as I try to conceive, to find the reason behind these heinous acts. I suppose by now you can deduce where my loyalty lies in this case, yes I am against it, but not because it is a different culture than my own, but because willingly and hopefully unknowingly these people are creating margins in which they separate the women and the man as to entire different beings. It seems absolutely preposterous to my western civilization mind that these rituals in which they cut off the clitoris of a girl, not even a women, but a girl is not something that’s frowned upon in their cultures. It is only achieving the dominant thought that has plagued humanity for centuries that man is above woman, and that women’s only role in this world is to give pleasure, to bear children and to raise them. It is forcing the man’s masculinity unto the women by making them nothing more than tools of pleasure. As I finished reading this story I wondered to myself, why does humanity take one step forward and two steps back? It feels like every time we try to progress in some way we  retrogress in another, and until we learn to advance as a whole being, we will never achieve true equality.