Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

far from asserting aggressive virility, concedes instead God’sassumption of human weakness; it is an affirmation not of superiorprowess but of condescension to kinship, a sign of theCreator’s self-abasement to his creature’s condition” ; Christ’scircumcised penis “is offered to immolation. ” 74In the contemporaryWestern world, male circumcision is routinely done forso-called hygienic reasons. The genital is wounded, mutilated,so that it will stay clean as it immerses itself obsessively in dirt.Female circumcision, which originated, as did male circumcision,in ancient Egypt, is now widely practiced in parts ofAfrica; but it has been used in modern Amerika, for instance,to “ treat” delinquent girls, the excision of the clitoris held totake away sexual drive and behavioral nonconformity. The circumcisionof females, unlike the circumcision of males, destroysa capacity for sexual response; and infibulation,whatever its origins, constitutes a sadistic practice of mutilationon a civilly inferior class. “ So extensive is the infibulationoperation— the clitoris is excised and the surrounding tissuescarified so that the fusion of the labia will occur during thehealing, ” writes Sarah Hrdy, “that approximately 9 percent ofgirls operated on under semimodern conditions (with someanesthesia) suffer hemorrhage or shock. Infibulated women arepartially cut open at marriage, and must be fully opened atchildbirth—after which they are sewn up again. ”75The literal wounding of the genitals, including the circumcisionof male infants, suggests human, not divine, fury: a hatredof the self in sex passed on as a patriarchal legacy; ahuman practice expressing for the male a self-hatred and towardthe female a genocidal loathing. The wounding is literal;yet it is also psychologically true— in sex, the act itself is oftenwounding— scarring, hurting, a jagged edge of pain and grief.