Breast Ironing : Gender and Africa

There is a practice in Africa (particularly in Cameroon), which is as shameful female circumcision and which aims to clean up femininity by making it less dangerous, less potent and less sexual. This practice is Breast Ironing, which involves ironing a girl's breasts to stop their development and to avoid that she matures (physically) too early and therefore becomes a prey for males too quickly. Parents who iron their daughter's breasts do it because they believe that when a young girl has breasts, she attracts male attention, has sex, and becomes promiscuous. I have written many times that African culture and traditions essentially view women as a prey and men as hunters. Women are sexual objects and a man is almost never wrong when he succumbs to the charms of a woman by having sex with it with or against her consent. Breast ironing is the result of these anti-female beliefs, which lead parents to destroy their daughter's breast in order to avoid shame and to avoid their daughters to become a sexual object, which a man will possess too early in life. The medical consequences of breast ironing are important for it can damage the breasts, but the emotional scars are overwhelming for after all, how does a girl gets over the fact that her parents, the people she trusted the most in the world, burned her breasts so that she wouldn't have sex?

Comments

[ebony]

i'm doing my proposal for united nations on this terible dilema that effected over 4 million girls as studies show. i think its a terrible thing to do to young girls who are just going through puberty. me being a young person myself i thimk its a problem that peope should be aware of and if they're not then they need to because its some trivial little thing that just stated to happen its been going on for years and theres no research on it or little anyway ithink that a non profit organization should start to help young girls out othe then the one thats already in cameroon. it should be prohibited all over the world ,but thats just my train of thought.

[kikie]

i only recently heard of this demeaning and barbaric practise just when i thought that all the harm that could be done to women has already been done-im convinced that this practise goes to prove how resilient the female spririt is and how nothing will crash it-what is being done to end this practise?

[Lara]

While your comments about the appalling reality of breast ironing are accurate, your description is not. The graphic of a hot iron is also highly misleading, although I'm sure it is unintentional. "Breast ironing" refers to the practice of pressing or pounding a young girl's developing breasts with heated coconut shells, bananas, flat stones, or other implements. It does not involve burning the breasts--it involves pressing and pounding. It's still barbaric, and your final statement is still spot-on: "The medical consequences of breast ironing are important for it can damage the breasts, but the emotional scars are overwhelming..." There is indeed medical damage, as anyone of sense can imagine, as well as emotional damage. Imagine torturing and mutilating your daughter to a) keep her from having sex and/or b) keep males from raping her.

[Kiki]

Dear Lara, you are wrong. In some cases, particularly in central africa, it involves burning the breasts with an iron. I wish it weren't the case, but it is. In this case, I know what I'm talking about.