Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem1
WARNING: THESE WORDS ARE painful to read. They describe facts of life as far away as our most fearful imagination and as close as any denial of women’s sexual freedom.
As you read this, an estimated seventy-five to one hundred million women in the world are suffering the results of genital mutilation,2 The main varieties of this extensive custom are:
The age at which these ritual sexual mutilations are performed varies with the type of procedure and local tradition. A female may undergo some such rite as early as the eighth day after birth, or at puberty, or after she herself has borne children. In most areas, however, the ritual is carried out when the child is between the ages of three and eight, and she may be considered unclean, improper, or unmarriageable if it is not done.
To readers for whom such customs come as horrifying news, it is vital that we immediately recognize the connection between these patriarchal practices and our own. They are different in scope and degree, but not in kind. Not only have American and European women experienced the psychic clitoridectomy that was legitimized by Freud,3 but Western nineteenth-century medical texts also proclaim genital mutilation as an accepted treatment for “nymphomania,” “hysteria,” masturbation, and other nonconforming behavior. Indeed, there are women living in the United States and Europe today who have suffered this form (as well as other, more familiar forms) of gynophobic, medically unnecessary, mutilating surgery.
As a general practice and precondition of marriage, however, some researchers cite recent evidence for genital mutilation in areas as diverse as Australia, Brazil, Malaya, Pakistan, and among the Skoptsi Christian sect in the Soviet Union. In El Salvador, it is still not uncommon for a mother to carve the sign of the cross with a razor blade on the clitoris of her little girl for reasons such as to “make her a better worker and keep her from getting ideas.” But international health authorities find the most extensive evidence of such customs on the African continent and the Arabian peninsula. The majority of mutilations take place without anesthetic at home (in the city or village), but many are now performed in hospitals as approved procedures. Nor are these rites limited to one religion; they are practiced by some Islamic peoples, some Coptic Christians, members of various indigenous tribal religions, some Catholics and Protestants, and some Fellasha, an ancient Jewish sect living in the Ethiopian highlands.
The form most common on the African continent is clitoridectomy, which is practiced in more than twenty-six countries from the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea across to the Atlantic coast, and from Egypt in the north to Mozambique in the south, also including Botswana and Lesotho. According to Awa Thiam, the Senegalese writer, clitoridectomy—in the form of either complete excision or the more “moderate” Sunna variant—also can be found in the two Yemens, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and southern Algeria. Infibulation appears to be fairly standard in the whole of the Horn—Somalia, most of Ethiopia, the Sudan (despite legislation prohibiting it in 1946), Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Upper Volta, and parts of Ivory Coast. Many ethnic groups have local versions: some cauterize the clitoris with fire or rub a special kind of nettle across the organs in order to destroy nerve endings; some stanch the flow of blood with compounds made of herbs, milk, honey, and sometimes ashes or animal droppings.
The health consequences of such practices include primary fatalities due to shock, hemorrhage, or septicemia, and such later complications as genital malformation, delayed menarche, dyspareunia (pain suffered during intercourse), chronic pelvic complications, incontinence, calcification deposits in the vaginal walls, recto-vaginal fistulas, vulval cysts and abscesses, recurrent urinary retention and infection, scarring and keloid formation, infertility, and an entire array of obstetric complications. There is also increased probability of injury to the fetus (by infection) during pregnancy and to the infant during birth. Psychological responses among women range from temporary trauma and permanent frigidity to psychoses. A high rate of mortality is suspected by health officials, although there are few fatality records available, because of the informality or secrecy surrounding the custom in many areas.
Although such practices are frequently described as “female circumcision,” the degree of damage is not comparable to the far more minor circumcision of males. Certainly, the two procedures are related: both are widely practiced without medical necessity and are extreme proofs of subservience to patriarchal authority—whether tribal, religious, or cultural—over all sexual and reproductive functions. But there the parallel stops. Clitoridectomy is more analogous to penisectomy than to circumcision: the clitoris has as many nerve endings as the penis. On the other hand, male circumcision involves cutting the tip of the protective “hood” of skin that covers the penis, an area whose number of nerve endings are analogous to those in the earlobe, but not damaging the penis. This procedure does not destroy its victim’s capacity for sexual pleasure; indeed, some justify the practice as increasing it by exposing more of the sensitive area. The misnomer “female circumcision” seems to stem from conscious or unconscious political motives: to make it appear that women are merely experiencing something men also undergo—no more, no less.
Politics are also evident in the attribution of this custom. The Sudanese name for infibulation credits it to Egypt (“Pharaonic circumcision”), while the Egyptians call the same operation “Sudanese circumcision.” The more moderate “Sunna circumcision” was supposedly recommended by the Prophet Muhammed, who is said to have counseled, “Reduce, but don’t destroy,” thus reforming, and legitimizing, the ritual. That version was termed “Sunna,” or traditional, perhaps in an attempt to placate strict traditionalists, although such rituals are mentioned nowhere in the Koran, a fact Islamic women who oppose this mutilation cite in their arguments.
The overt justifications for genital mutilation are as contradictory as are theories about its origins. Explanations include custom, religion, family honor, cleanliness, protection against spells, initiation, insurance of virginity at marriage, and prevention of female promiscuity by physically reducing, or terrorizing women out of, sexual desire, this last especially in polygamous cultures. On the other hand, the fact that some women in the Middle East who are prostitutes also have been clitoridectomized is cited as proof that it doesn’t reduce pleasure, as if women become prostitutes out of desire.
A superstition is a practice or belief justified by simultaneous and utterly opposing sets of arguments. (For instance, male circumcision is not only said to increase desire but to decrease it through toughening of the exposed skin or removing the friction-causing “hood.”) Thus, a frequently given reason for sexual mutilation is that it makes a woman more fertile, yet in 1978, Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, then director of the United States Agency for International Development’s Population Bureau, failed to oppose it on the ground that it was a contraceptive method, claiming that “because it aimed at reducing female sex desire, [clitoridectomy/infibulation] undoubtedly has fertility control as part of its motivation.” In fact, some women’s behavior indicates the reverse. The pain of intercourse often leads mutilated women to seek pregnancy as a temporary relief from sexual demands.
In some cultures, the justification is even less obscure. Myths of the Mossi of Upper Volta, and the Dogon and Bambaras of Mali, clearly express the fear of an initially hermaphroditic human nature and of women’s sexuality: the clitoris is considered a dangerous organ, fatal to a man if brought into contact with his penis.
Similarly, in nineteenth-century London, Dr. Isaac Baker Brown justified scissoring off the clitoris of some of his own English patients as a cure for such various ills as insomnia, sterility, and “unhappy marriages.” In 1859, Dr. Charles Meigs recommended application of a nitrate of silver solution to the clitoris of female children who masturbated. Until 1925 in the United States, a medical association called the Orificial Surgery Society offered surgical training in clitoridectomy and infibulation “because of the vast amount of sickness and suffering which could be saved the gentler sex. …” Such operations (and justifications) occurred as recently as the 1940s and 1950s in the United States. For instance, in New York, the daughter of a well-to-do family was clitoridectomized as a “treatment” for masturbation recommended by a family physician. Some prostitutes were encouraged by well-meaning church social workers to have this procedure as a form of “rehabilitation.”
During the 1970s, clitoral “relocation”—termed “Love Surgery”—entered some medical practice. As late as 1979, the feminist news service Hersay carried the story of Dr. James Burt, an Ohio gynecologist who offered a fifteen-hundred-dollar “Mark Two” operation, which involved vaginal reconstruction in order to “make the clitoris more accessible to direct penile stimulation.”
Whatever the supposed justifications for these efforts to make women’s bodies conform to societal expectations, we can explore the real reasons for them only within the context of patriarchy. It must control women’s bodies as. the means of reproduction, and thus repress the independent power of women’s sexuality. Both motives are enforced by socioeconomic rewards and punishments.
If marriage is the primary means of economic survival for a woman, then whatever will make her more marriageable becomes desirable. If a bride who lacks virginity literally risks death or renunciation on her wedding night, then a chastity belt forged of her own flesh is a gesture of parental concern. If the tribal role of clitoridectomist or midwife who performs such mutilations is the sole position of honor, power, or even independent livelihood available to women, then the “token women” who perform such rites will fight to preserve them. If those who organize the ceremonies of excision (sometimes whole families by inherited prerogative) have the right, as they do in some cultures, to “adopt” the excised children to work in their fields for two or three years, then such families have a “ considerable economic motive for perpetuating the custom. If Western male gynecologists also believed women’s independent sexuality to be dangerous and unnatural, then surgery was justified to remove its cause. If a modern gynecologist still presumes that men may not be willing to learn how to find or stimulate the clitoris for female pleasure, then he will think it natural to move the clitoris closer to the customary site of penile pleasure.
Illogical responses can be carried to new depths by bureaucrats. The White House and its concern for “human rights,” the various desks of the United States State Department, and such agencies as the United Nations International Children’s Fund and the World Health Organization all have expressed reluctance to interfere with “social and cultural attitudes” regarding female genital mutilation. This sensitivity has been markedly absent on other issues, for example, campaigns to disseminate vaccines or vitamins despite resistance from local traditionalists.
Clearly, “culture” is that which affects women while “politics” affects men. Even human-rights and other admirable political statements do not include those of special importance to the female majority of humanity. (This is true not only for genital mutilation and other areas of reproductive freedom. Most women of the Middle East cannot leave their countries without a male family member’s written permission, yet this was not classed with, for instance, Jews who were forbidden to leave the Soviet Union, or other travel restrictions that affect men as well.) Some international agencies take a reformist position—that clitoridectomy and/or infibulation should be done in hospitals under hygienic conditions and proper medical supervision. Feminist groups and such respected organizations as Terre des Hommes, the (ironically named) Swiss-based international agency dedicated to the protection of children, repeatedly urged a strengthening of this position to one condemning the practice outright.
The situation is further complicated by the understandable suspicion on the part of many African and Arab governments and individuals that Western interest in the matter is motivated not by humanitarian concerns, but by a racist or neocolonialist desire to eradicate indigenous cultures. In fact, as Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, noted in his book, Facing Mount Kenya, the key mobilization of many forces for Kenyan independence from the British was in direct response to attempts by Church of Scotland missionaries in 1929 to suppress clitoridectomy. Patriarchal authorities, whether tribal or imperial, have always considered as central to their freedom and power the right to define what is done with “their” women. But past campaigns against female mutilation, conducted for whatever ambiguous or even deplorable reasons, need not preclude new approaches that might be more effective because they would be sensitive to the cultures involved and, most important, supportive of the women affected, and in response to their leadership.
Precisely such an initiative began in February 1979, at a historic meeting in Khartoum, Sudan, attended by delegates (including physicians, midwives, and health officials) from ten African and Arab nations and supported by many who could not attend. Initiated by the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean with the assistance of the Sudanese government, this meeting was cautiously called a seminar on “Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children”—such practices as child marriage, and nutritional taboos during pregnancy and lactation, but also including genital mutilation. Four recommendations resulted:
Later in 1979, a United Nations conference held in Lusaka, Zambia—one of the series of regional preparatory meetings for the United Nations’ 1980 World Conference for the Decade for Women—also dealt with the subject. Adopting a resolution sponsored by Edna Adan Ismail of Somalia, the meeting condemned female mutilations and called on all women’s organizations in the countries concerned “to mobilize information and health-education campaigns on the harmful medical and social consequences of the practices.”
It is also true, however, that genital mutilation is not always cited as a priority by women in developing countries: the elimination of famine, general health, agricultural and industrial development may take precedence. Yet the Khartoum and Lusaka meetings showed clearly that many women, and men of conscience, throughout the African and Arab countries have for a long time been actively opposing clitoridectomy and infibulation. Such groups as the Voltaic Women’s Federation and the Somali Women’s Democratic Organization, and such individuals as Dr. Fatima Abdul Mahmoud, minister of social affairs of the Sudan, Mehani Saleh of the Aden Ministry of Health, Awa Thiam of Senegal, and Esther Ogunmodede, the crusading journalist of Nigeria, have been campaigning in different ways against genital mutilation, with little international support. In fact, according to Fran P. Hosken, a feminist who for years has been trying to mobilize American and international consciousness on this issue, “International and UN agencies, as well as charitable and church groups and family-planning organizations working in Africa, have engaged in a ‘conspiracy of silence.’… As a result, those Africans who are working for a change in their own countries have been completely isolated or ignored.”
Now, survivors and witnesses are beginning to be heard as they speak personally about the suffering inflicted, whether in a village hut, a modern apartment, or a sterile operating room, by genital mutilation—suffering that may continue for a lifetime. Their voices are unforgettable. It’s long past time that we heard them and understood what is being done—to them, and to all of us. It’s time that we began to act—with them, the most immediate victims, and in the shared interest of women as a people.
—1979 and 1992
1. Though this article is co-authored, we have chosen to publish it as part of our respective collections because of the subject’s importance.
2. 1992 estimates by the World Health Organization and the U.S. Agency for International Development respectively.
3. “The elimination of clitoral sexuality is a necessary precondition for the development of femininity.” Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Macmillan, 1963).