The shifting significance of the clitoris

Female circumcision has not always aroused the intense emotions we see in the West today. The first pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) for ac-

A Reflection on the Cultural Meanings of Female Circumcision

tion came in 1958. A year later, the WHO stated in a resolution that female cir­cumcision 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 1970s did the WHO take action against excision (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,[68] 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, had by the late 19th century become the focus of women’s “illness” (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 (Johannisson 1994:200). Although never practised broadly it was used in England and United States as recently as in the 1940s (Toubia 1995). Moreover, Freud’s 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, and the ‘leading genital zone’ of a sexually mature woman should be her vagina (Freud 1975:101). Not until the late 1960s, 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 the clitoris again recognised as important to women’s pleas­ure in sexual intercourse.

The time of the presentation of this theory coincided with the Sexual Revolu­tion and the Women’s Liberation Movement, a fact that is more than simple co­incidence. Free sexual expression came to be regarded during the 1960s as anti­thetical to the exercise of power.[69] Consequently, Master and Johnson’s report was used in the 1970s feminist debate on women’s right to orgasm and sexual auton­omy. The invention 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 the 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 excising 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 also deprives her of her femininity, since the capacity to experience orgasm from a Western point of view makes a woman more of a ‘real’ woman. Furthermore, given the im­portance attached to sexuality as closely related to personal identity and self-ful­filment, the excision of the clitoris also has the implication of a ’mutilation’ of a woman’s potential for liberation in a more extended sense.

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