I am so thrilled! I just read in Pambazuka of the first hospital in Burkina Faso, “The Pleasure Hospital” that is reconstructing clitorises for women who have been subjected to female genital mutilation. Since I started thinking seriously about women’s rights to pleasurable sex and sexuality I have always wondered about women who have been FGM’d. Do they have pleasurable sex?
I have read a few books by African women who have suffered from the practice. Those that readily come to mind include Aman’s autobiography, Aryan Hirsi’s Infidel and Waris Dirie’s Desert Flower. If I remember correctly Dirie is critical of the practice, Hirsi wrote eloquently about the torture she and her sister underwent in the …