SUSAN OKIN’S essay reminds us of the importance of a historical sensibility in our reflections on religious ritual and cultural tradition. Her language and images take us back 150 years to a time when the focus would not have been on female circumcision / ritual mutilation but on infant male ritual circumcision / ritual mutilation. (Yes, that term was used!) Those terrible Jews: their repulsive practice of marking the bodies of their male children was, as Enlightenment “thinkers” such as Voltaire stated, clear proof of their inherent inhumanity. A European liberal—the Italian physician Paolo Mantegazza, the widely read sexologist of the late nineteenth century and the physician who introduced cocaine into Europe—could write: “Circumcision is a shame and an infamy; and I, who am not in the least anti-Semitic, who indeed have much esteem for the Israelites, I who demand of no living soul a profession of religious faith, insisting only upon the brotherhood of soap and water and of honesty, I shout and shall continue to shout at the Hebrews, until my last breath: Cease mutilating yourselves: cease imprinting upon your flesh an odious brand to distinguish you from other men; until you do this, you cannot pretend to be our equal. As it is, you, of your own accord, with the branding iron, from the first days of your lives, proceed to proclaim yourselves a race apart, one that cannot, and does not care to, mix with ours.”1 Is this not, with small linguistic shifts concerning gender, the tone and stance of Susan Okin?
For Okin the culprit is the “patriarchy,” but a patriarchy that still evokes the image of Jewish difference. No less a feminist critic than Susannah Heschel has shown in her insightful work on the image of the Jews in contemporary feminist thought2 how the “patriarchy” comes to be defined as the special domain of the Jews. Okin’s covert history of the “patriarchy” begins with the binding of Isaac as the key to all further images of the exclusion of women. (It is this text, one might add, that has been used over and over again since the Enlightenment as proof of the Jewish proclivity to murder their own as well as others’ children. If you are willing to kill your own child, a bit of sexual mutilation is nothing in comparison! The story of Isaac remains the basis for accusations of ritual murder even today in contemporary Russia.) In the Enlightenment, Jews could become good citizens, but they could do so only if they were no longer different—only if they abandoned their ritual practices, such as the brith melah, the circumcision of the male child. Such practices are passé, they constitute an invasion of the autonomy of the individual, they cause infection, even death, and, at the bottom, they are signs of barbarism that must be overcome if one wants to be “modern.” Today, women are “free” only when they relinquish all ritual practices that “set them apart,” and, says Susan Okin, I will tell you what they are!
Such a desire underlies Okin’s argument—all people can become happy and well adjusted once they abandon those pesky rituals of difference that I don’t like. And she makes her distinction between the normal and the repressive based on her notion of what is acceptable practice—i.e., the absence of certain types of ritual—which (surprise, surprise) turns out to mirror her own beliefs and background. She labels certain practices as “barbaric” because these rituals create (in the mind of the external observer) physical images of difference. In doing so, she speaks for those engaged in ritual practices, for they are clearly victims of false consciousness and are unable to speak for themselves. No one could really want to undertake such rituals or have them done to their offspring, and therefore it is clear that women who might advocate them are “brainwashed.” And in this state they require someone else to speak for them. Thus in the Enlightenment the friends of the Jews, such as Christian Wilhelm Dohm and the Abbé Grégoire, spoke for as well as supporting the civic emancipation of the Jews—certainly advocating their civil rights but also underlining their need to become “healthy” members of a civil society if they were to become “real” citizens!
Okin claims that “women” are the prime victims of religious practices. But can one really speak of “women” as a unitary category? Her representation of “woman” as a singular, monolithic category is difficult to understand at the close of the millennium. The claims of the Enlightenment construction of “man” as a universal category have been (at least since Theodor Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment) shown to be specious; Okin’s “woman” suffering under the patriarchal rule of “religion” is a similar composite creature. And “she” must be rescued from the ignorance of superstition by “Western” women! But women are unquestionably a diverse group, as feminists have argued for over a decade. The very claim that Western (or Westernized), bourgeois (and, yes, white) women can speak for all women was exploded in discussions within and beyond the United Nations meeting on the status of women held at Nairobi more than a decade ago.
Recently claims of speaking for the Other have surfaced in the debates about ritual circumcision. The discussion by American “women of color,” such as Alice Walker, about the bodies of women in Africa in the context of rituals of infibulation has been dismissed by many women within these cultures as misrepresenting their own autonomy. Critics such as my colleague Martha Nussbaum, Yael Tamir, and Frances Kamm expressed their opposition to this practice because of its impact on female sexual pleasure. Pleasure was and is the “rub.” The antisemite Ezra Pound once remarked to his friend Charles Olson: “There was a Jew, in London, Obermeyer, a doctor . . . of the endocrines, and I used to ask him what is the effect of circumcision. That’s the question that gets them sore . . . that sends them right up the pole. Try it, don’t take my word, try it. . . . It must do something, after all these years and years, where the most sensitive nerves in the body are, rubbing them off, over and over again.”3 Sexual pleasure is defined as the sexual pleasure of the speaker; sexual pleasure is defined as that which reflects the “sensitivity” of the self as opposed to the Other. Sensitivity (of body and of spirit) is measured by the absolute notion of a physical body reacting uniformly to “simple” stimuli. Is it not clear that even sexual pleasure is as much a reflex of the mind as of the body! The centuries-long debates about the physical and the spiritual nature of the sexual experience are now resolved in such a context—only the body speaks, and that independent of the psyche! It is not possible to have sexual pleasure with a “mutilated” body, says the Western view of all ritual alterations of the genitalia.
Tropes about the psychopathology of those who circumcise and are circumcised appear from St. Paul to the present. In the seventeenth century, when decircumcision came into vogue, Gabriel Groddeck commented that the Jews “imagined their fleshly desires could be fulfilled by greater stimulation if they were provided with that little bit of skin, and they believed also that they would give pleasure to their harlots and sweethearts, who broadcast in a depraved manner their very great pleasure if they have slept with a man who either never had the foreskin removed or had it restored.”4 In our own time, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, my colleague Edward O. Laumann released a study of circumcision based on a sample of 1,410 men eighteen to fifty-nine years old, interviewed in 1992 as part of his National Health and Social Life survey.5 He argued (based on that most modern of devices, the self-reporting questionnaire) that circumcised men, because of the loss of sexual pleasure, are forced to resort to weirder and weirder sexual practices (such as fellatio—yuk!) in order to get pleasure. (But pleasure they do receive, according to even this account.) Here he seems to be following the claims of John R. Taylor at the University of Manitoba, whom he does not cite. Taylor claims that the small sheath of foreskin tissue removed during circumcision is filled with extremely sensitive nerve endings and mucus membrane cells and its removal permanently blunts erotic stimulation.6 Laumann’s reading of sexual experimentation on the part of circumcised men—given his claim of an increase in sexually transmitted diseases of all kinds among such men—is a pathological one. And this is the model followed in the debates about female genital mutilation. Only intact genitalia can give pleasure. But is it possible that the projection of Western, bourgeois notions of pleasure onto other people’s bodies is not the best basis for anybody’s judgment?
Observers of the new Africa know that discussion of the “ritual mutilation” of the African body has been a hallmark of the modernizing forces, whether the body was that of a man or of a woman. Indeed, the wide practice of adult male circumcision has been actively opposed by the African National Congress in the new South Africa as a sign of the barbarism of ancient tribal rituals—much to the dismay of the ritually circumcised Xhosa president of the new South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Mandela understands and advocates the ritual of circumcision because it formed his (and his contemporaries’) experience of themselves as Xhosa men. What many in South Africa understand is that abolition of ritual will not further the stated goal of the creation of a complex, composite South Africa identity. The problem with ritual circumcision is the risk of infection, not the creation of “difference”; the answer should be found in the introduction of antisepsis, as was the case with infant male circumcision in the nineteenth century. Jews, for the most part, did not abandon infant male circumcision, but they certainly altered the form of its practice. Not abolition but medicalization would seem to be the reasonable remedy for the morbidity and mortality resulting from all such practices. The question of pleasure should be left to the culture that defines it.
It would seem that the acculturation of infant male circumcision through its medicalization in the late nineteenth century could be paralleled by the claim (heard recently in Egypt) for the medicalization of female circumcision and its limitation to a symbolic cutting of the labia minora. Indeed, as noted in Egyptian sources, one of the problems with the label of “female genital mutilation” is that it refers to a very wide range of practices. But such a movement for reform rather than abolition would take seriously the claims of ritual in the culture in which it was practiced. Such rituals are not “merely” superstition, even if they are debated hotly as such within the religious cultures themselves. For one person’s defining ritual is another person’s meaningless superstition. Remember that Helene Deutsch, one of the mothers of psychoanalysis, foresaw a future when the pains of childbirth would be so lessened that women would seek new rituals of investiture and coming-of-age and would turn to infibulation as their new ritual practice.7
Here is the problem with Okin’s worldview. In advocating the abolition of other people’s rituals, she fails to see ceremonial acts in her own culture as limiting and abhorrent. Only the world of ritual as she defines it holds this power. The “bizarre” rituals of Anglo-American culture are for her the norm. The power invested in Anglo-American class structures is less evident to her than the power invested in the patriarchy in those ritualized belief systems that she rejects.