A Reflection on the Cultural Meanings of Female Genital Cutting ...

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8 take more pleasure in sex, and are more ‘tasty’. The way they discussed the subject reveals a certain reification of sexual enjoyment. They did not speak of sexuality in relational terms, and did not consider their own behaviour in relation to women, but focused on the absence or presence of a clitoris. Many of these young men seem to be constructing a dream image of uncircumcised women, a phantasm of how sex with nonexcised women would be. From talking to women, I got the impression that their sexual response, or lack of it, had more to do with men’s sexual behaviour than with the clitoridectomy. In talking with men who had experienced sex with both excised and non-excised women, they usually could not tell if it made a difference. The Cultural Construction of Sexuality From a contemporary Western point of view, it is difficult to conceptualise female sexuality when parts or all of the outer genitalia is missing. Without trivialising the harmful effects of different forms of excision, it is important to emphasise that “Western theories do not prove that the biological base for sexual satisfaction is completely removed by female circumcision” (Skramstad 1990:14). In conversations with my close female friends in Casamance on sex and love relations, I understood that they do take pleasure in sex. They did not express any feelings of being denied sexual pleasure and the clitoridectomy is not mentioned as a problem. To understand circumcised women's statements about their sexual experiences, sexuality has to be related to the particular cultural and historical context. Besides being a very individual experience, difficult to measure and compare, sexuality and sexual pleasure are culturally and socially constructed (Caplan 1987). What is conceived of as sexual pleasure is to a high degree dependent on what is defined as such within one culture. ”What people want, and what they do, in any society, is to a large extent what they are made to want, and allowed to do" (ibid:25). In each society this changes with time, as "sexual behaviour and practice, morality, and ideology are constantly in a state of flux." (ibid:1). Rather than defending female genital cutting, I wish to emphasise that we cannot talk of pleasure and sexuality as something solely biological and dependent on anatomy. Questioning Western Stereotypes The discrepancy between the Western and the Joola understanding of female genital cutting is striking. In considering the custom from an emic, inner point of view, the common Western stereotyped representations of practising people are immediately challenged. We need to pose the question: if they are not reflected in ethnographic and empirical data, on what, then, are the common Western assumptions on female circumcision based? What emotions underlie the great concern and interest the practice of female genital cutting arouses in the Western world? Using a reflexive approach, I suggest that far from being based on investigations conducted in a ‘scientific’ or ‘neutral’ way, Western reactions to FGC are founded on a Western cultural and historical model of sexuality (Parker 1995).
9 The Shifting Significance of Clitoris Female genital cutting has not always aroused the intense emotions we see in the West today. The first pressure on WHO for action came in 1958. A year later, WHO stated in a resolution that genital cutting is of a socio-cultural character and therefore not their responsibility. In 1975, the alarm was sounded again, and the same answer was given (Thiam 1978, Vichniac 1977). Not until the end of the 1970’s did WHO take action against female genital cutting (Coqiery-Vidrovitch 1994). This may seem late, but in fact, coincided with the ‘re-discovery’ of the clitoris in the West. In the Western history of sexuality, 10 the clitoris has attracted special attention in varying ways. From having been considered in the 18th century medical literature with a matter-of-factness as “the main location for women’s pleasure in sexual intercourse”, the clitoris, together with the female inner sexual organs, in the late 19th century had become the focus of women’s sickliness (Johannisson 1994:200, my translation). Masturbation in both boys and girls was understood as causing physical and psychological disorders. In the case of women this even led certain physicians to prescribe clitoridectomy (ibid.). Although never practised broadly it was used in England and United States as recently as in the 1940s and 1950’s 11 (Toubia 1995). Moreover, Freud’s (1975) theory on sexuality can be said to have imposed a ‘psychological clitoridectomy’ (Toubia 1995:18) on Western women, as clitoral orgasm was labelled an ‘immature’ fixation. The ‘leading genital zone’ of a sexually mature woman should be her vagina (Freud 1975:101). Not until the late 1960’s when Master and Johnson "proved that all orgasms in women are caused by clitoral stimulation” (Hite 1976:95), was vaginal orgasm dismissed as a myth and clitoris again recognised as important for women’s pleasure in sexual intercourse. The time for presentation of this theory coincided with the Sexual Revolution and the Women’s Liberation Movement, which was more than pure co-incidence. Free sexual expression came during the 1960’s to be regarded as antithetical to the exercise of power. 12 Consequently, Master and Johnson’s report was used in the 1970’s feminist debate on women’s right to orgasm and sexual autonomy. The discovery of ‘the pill’ was an important factor as it gave women the possibility to control and separate sexual activity from reproduction (cf. Giddens 1995). Female orgasm by clitoral stimulation became a prerequisite of ‘good’ sexual intercourse and linked to women’s identity and liberation in a wider sense than purely sexual. Shere Hite notes the “social pressure that says a woman who has an orgasm is more of a woman, a ‘real’ woman” (1976:131). The loaded symbolic meaning the practice of cutting the clitoris has in the West is then obvious. To cut a woman’s clitoris not only means a mutilation of her body and a reduction of her capacity to feel sexual pleasure but, deprives her of her femininity, 10 Cf. Foucault, 1976. 11 In United States about 2000 infants per year are subjected to clitoridectomy because they are born with ‘ambiguous genitalia.’ Interestingly, people in the Western world have their cultural reasons for trimming girls’ clitorises and in Africa people have their cultural reasons. The difference is that in the West the excision has an aura of scientific credibility and is therefore not considered a mutilation. However, American women who have been operated on began in 1997 to lobby the Congress using the Federal ban on FGM to put an end to this surgery. They argue that the clitoral reduction serves no purpose beyond a cosmetic one and have left many of them with physical, sexual and psychological problems (New Internationalist, April 1998; New York Times, May 13, 1997). 12 Cf. Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse using Freud’s theory on sexual repression and neurosis for reanalysis.
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