There’s a cool meme going around about a Senegalese woman’s experience with female genital mutilation. Most people are attributing it to the wonderful Ema of Well-Timed Period but after following the links it looks like it was first brought to light by frequent commenter and general incredible font of information A of A Changing Life.

The original blog is written in French by Papillon of Excision: le chemin de ma reconstruction (Which Bablefish translates as “Excision: the way of my rebuilding.” “Excision” is a common euphemism for female genital mutilation a.k.a. “female circumcision” a.k.a. “carving out the clitoris and inner labia and sewing the outer labia almost completely shut, with no anesthesia, and often with no trace of antiseptic conditions.”)

It turns out as well that A did the translation into English that most people have quoted.

In a nutshell the author gradually concluded that her FGM had ruined her life. She assumed her father had been behind it. No one from her family would talk to her about it. Finally she remembered a cousin who had been living with them at the time and asked her.

So I wanted to know. To know as much as possible what had happened. I didn’t dare speak to either my mother or my father. My sister refused to speak about it and got stressed when I bought up the subject. One morning on the metro I had the idea of calling my cousin. She had been brought up by my mother and was living with us at that time, I was sure. I was apprehensive (“And what if she won’t speak to me?”) and I was very surprised at how easily she spoke to me. I had been circumcised at four years, at the same time as my sister, in my father’s village at the instigation of my mother and my paternal grandmother. My father wasn’t there that day. He had gone to find my cousin at her father’s house. It was done behind his back. When he returned, my cousin told me, he flew into a terrible rage. He said he wanted to divorce my mother. Had it not been for the pleas of my grandmother who claimed all responsibility of our circumcision, he perhaps might have.

My cousin did me a service by telling me all that. For years I had believed that my father, if he hadn’t been in cahoots with my mother, had at least shown some indifference to “women’s trouble”. I had also believed that it had happened in my mother’s village and it was my maternal grandmother who had arranged everything. That was completely wrong. I held it against my father, convinced that he didn’t love me, and I hated my grandmother all these years. All these years…

Read the rest of A’s translation here.

So, assuming your skin’s stopped crawling, there are a couple of points that jump out of this narrative.

The first being that Teh Patriarchy is as real, and as deadly serious, as broken-bottle scalpels. (And as serious as the death threats Papillon’s reconstructive surgeon receives.)

The next, however, being that not all patriarchs are men, nor are all men patriarchs.

Yes, yes, the mother and grandmother thought they were doing some abstract image of a future husband a favor… when they chose to act against both the interests and the intention of the concrete and real husband/father/son in front of them. And yes, yes, one can claim that while the actual men in their lives wanted nothing to do with mutilated partners (let alone mutilation of *their own small children!) the women were nevertheless in thrall to Teh All Seeing Patriarchal Eye that binds them all up on some mountain top back in Mordor. To do so, however, would be to deny their agency in the endeavor they undertook with deliberation, calculation, and knowledge of right and wrong.

Using my preferred terms of stereotypes, the mother and grandmother’s stereotypes of men and women were so powerful they chose to surgically alter reality to make it conform to those stereotypes. In other terms the nominally jailed subverted paternal authority and became the actual jailers. The tortured subverted the narrative of masculine authority to become torturers.

Twisty Faster of I blame the patriarchy has argued (sorry, I can’t find the link) that patriarchy would remain with us even if there were no men, and believes further that escape will come only with the extinction of our species. I’m more optimistic than she but stories like Papillon’s suggest her pessimism is not entirely unfounded.

And Sara of Sara Speaking has recently been debating with others the extent to which feminists should examine the extent to which men are also oppressed by gender. Even a quick glance at the current state of men’s studies one suggests her, and my, frustration with that but sooner or later we men will get there ourselves. If I were instead to offer advice for academic feminists I’d suggest examining women’s roles as not just passive or resistant subjects or objects of patriarchy but their active agency in shaping and perpetuating it.

‘Cause even if men dropped their hands from the wheel, without understanding that I’m pretty sure would keep right on rolling for generations.