I have shared this parallel verbally in the past. Here it is in writing:
A new business isn't just turned on like a light switch. Any experience entrepreneur knows this. You have to come up with a vision, put together a business plan, gather funding (if you're not already wealthy), design your product/service, manufacture your product, stock your product, market your product and distribute your product. In some cases, like mobile phones, society adopts the product as a standard requirement for the masses (ref: "Obamaphone"). Of course there can be some overlap in these stages and some circular aspects as you improve your product/service.
With the genital autonomy movement it would be really nice to jump to the last stage where society adopts the standard and government incorporates the standard into law. Unfortunately, we don't have the massive acceptance level yet. I believe we are at the "market your product" stage still. We have large stockpiles of product. Our marketing options are limited as many of the marketing avenues are not open to us, so we have to work with what we have.
We have to be careful about the perceptions of our product. Like the 5G worries with mobile phones, we have to win people's hearts instead of attempting to force the product on them.
For those of us that are victims of genital mutilation, this fact is very disheartening. We want everyone to see the obvious benefits of genital autonomy and to buy our product right away. Unfortunately, society has never changed that fast and easily.
I have worked with multiple large (Fortune 500 level) organizations and was frequently involved with major changes due to new technologies. As obvious as it was to me the benefits of making the change was, I still had to win the hearts of the people to help the organization work through the change. Sometimes the leadership would say things that helped that process along, but even those leaders recognized that things couldn't be forced. I would often have to take a step back and analyze the status of the situation. Once I did so, I would often see a pathway forward. And, I use "pathway" very intentionally. Just like you can't ask a person to just take a leap of 100 yards in a single bound, we can't ask people to just see that genital autonomy is a good thing. We have to lay out stepping stones for them.
