Why is it that so many "liberals" and culturally-sensitive types object to female circumcision? I mean, you can't have it both ways; you can't respect a culture and its differences, arguing for toleration, and then come down like an imperialist on female circumcision.

Let's not kid ourselves here. This isn't war. Yes, it's mutilation -- but how is that qualitatively different from tatooing, from body piercing, or from male circumscision? It's said that this deprives women of sexual pleasure, but this comment reveals more about the commentator than the practice criticized. It assumes that sexual pleasure is genital -- ironic given that so many of the same people criticizing female circumscision, these want-to-be-tolerant types, also agree with pop psychology that "the brain is the primary sexual organ." Does anyone understand that sexual gratification isn't necessarily in the nerves? That there's a joy in the conquest for the male, in the penetration itself, the knowing, the physical and emotional mastery it provides? Or that there's a joy in pleasing, in bringing a lover to orgasm? That many women enjoy knowing that they can lie back, do nothing, and that their body is still capable of bringing a man to orgasm? Admittedly, this mindset that many women have ignores the fact that this trait -- largely concerned with simply having a vagina, or at least one capable of getting moist and not loose or deteriorated due to use -- is hardly unique, but who are we to judge? If genital arousal were the only means of sexual gratification, why do women consent when most heterosexual sex the world over does not involve clitoral stimulation and the best studies indicate that a majority of women do not have orgasms? The jouisance of sex goes beyond clitoral or penile nerve endings. Is this not why many women enjoy oral sex, sexually enjoy pleasing the man they love?

The other great assumption of the belief that female circumcision deprives women of sexual gratification (besides the assumption that sexual gratification is genital) is far more essential, basic but going dead to the point. Put simply, why this concern for -- this exaltation of -- sexual gratification? In the West's post-sexual revolution environment, the assumption that sexual gratification is positive, even essential to a human being, is deeply ingrained -- but profoundly biased. Certainly, on a cultural level, men need to achieve sexual gratification -- if only to come and thus propagate the species, or at least the culture involved. But, as any basic psychology student knows, the female orgasm serves very little evolutionary purpose.

In fact, the West's concern -- or, rather, obsession -- with sexual gratification is exactly the point that cultures practicing female circumcision tell us that we're missing. And we'd do well to listen, lest we fall prey to the worst sort of marginalizing, degrading, imperialist thinking. Everywhere one looks in Western culture, sex looms as large as our roadside advertising boards, as large as our double-D breast implants, as large as the grosses for dumb movies filled with slim, big-titted bodies the likes of which 99% of women can never achieve. This culture of sexual promiscuity is so insidiously consuming that even self-professed waiting-for-marriage virgin Britney Spears has attained -- and maintained -- her excessive popularity through videos playing on underage sexuality, through MTV pseudo-strip shows, and (according to the press) a soon-to-appear role as a promiscuous youth on the cable show Sex in the City, (in)famous for its incredibly promiscuous women at whom viewers love to stare as they like to watch a car accident. This is a culture where pornography dominates the internet, where pornographic films make more money than Hollywood blockbusters, and where a woman can become a millionaire through her sheer willingness to expose herself, suck dick, lick ass, and generally get fucked. Our women wear clothes that all but show their sex. Commercials from beer to deodorant use sex wildly. And children are having sex younger and younger -- not so much because of this saturation of sexual imagery (an important point) as because of the comingled acceptability, even championing, of promiscuity.

And, of course, all of this is being exported the world over.

These are facts; there's no real way to dispute them.

Now, if a person -- or a culture -- happens to believe that promiscuity is wrong, we again reek of intolerance -- or imperialism -- not to accept the legitimacy of that belief. Indeed, there are good reasons for such views. If one values marriage -- or, I think more important (and more humanistic) -- the mutuality of two lives and two bodies shared with one another, the number of lovers prior to marriage has been definitively shown to have an inverse relationship with the length of that marriage -- or mutuality. Put more simply, the more lovers one has had, the more likely one is to divorce -- or have that oft-sought mutuality split asunder. And, of course, we have AIDS; even during the sexual revolution, naively described as if a promised land in much of Western discourse, we had gonorrhea, clamidia, herpes, syphilis, and a host of nasty infections. And, of course, pregnancy does exist, and no matter the proliferation of pills and latex and surgery (a massive industry coincidentally rising simultaneously with sexual promiscuity), there still exists a personal remainder: it only takes a moment of clarity to realize that, even if one believes that the most extreme and inhumane forms of abortion should be legal or even culturally accepted (or even praised), women contemplate their unborn (potential) children, pondering painfully if not regretting (even if they have children subsequently), and children painfully ponder their aborted or otherwise prevented (potential) siblings (or the siblings their mother may have aborted).

Of course, I'm not in favor of going back to the 1950s, nor could we if we tried; I'm no religious puritan or religious fundamentalist. But I am a student of cultural and intellectual history, and we would do well to realize that chastity was not cherished in so much of the past due to some arbitrary misogyny but for very real practicality. The cultural and personal disruption that lack of chastity provides is not confined to Shakespeare; if we indulge our sexual desires through movies, popular music, and Sex in the City, we indulge our puritanical desires -- or simply practical understanding that there are and always will be (short of a short-term memory-erasing device that would defeat the point anyway) consequences to sexual activity -- when we watch Cops or documentary detective shows. Spouses, both male and female, are killed for sexual indiscretions; similarly, couples grow apart or divorce. The question "how many men have had you -- and how?" or "did a woman really please him more than me?" are fundamental unstated questions in most relationships. Is it the end of the world? No. But even without pregnancy, disease, or outright (potentially violent) recriminations, there are always these anxieties in sexual relationships -- if one wants a sexual relationship with caring on any level.

This is (at least one reason) why sex disrupts things, as we so often observe.

It's not pleasant. It's not fun. Neither is getting old. But this isn't a kid's show. And this isn't an "adult" show that is anything but, designed to make you smile and buy instead of actually getting at truth. No, this is the shit they don't tell you, the shit that really counts, the shit that's there, all around, always just under the surface in your psychology. Blame me for pointing it out because you prefer the darkness, but don't pretend it's not true -- that it's not in your mind right now.

Sex is like murder: you never utterly forget it.

If this seems off-topic, it's only because the issue of female circumcision is so rarely discussed with anything resembling noteworthy consciousness because it involves, on such crucial levels, these fundamental issues. And they are issues we don't want to address. Which means we can't intellectually get at female circumcision.

We hate female circumcision because it is a very real strike against our pro-promiscuity society. It is a radical blow against our (usually unstated) belief that sexual gratification is an important part of life and that sexual gratification is genital. It is, to use a metaphor, a surgical strike against the very strange historical belief that people, particularly women (who, after all, not only are held to different standards but are different, inherently require a "double standard," do get pregnant, do acquire sexual diseases far easier than men, and are built to be penetrated), can (or should be able to) have sex without consequence.

And, of course, we do the same thing. Circumcision of boys began in the West in the twentieth century under suspicious circumstances, may in fact reduce penile cancer, which is extremely rare, but has been found by all responsible researchers to be far more like female circumcision in terms of its (genital) gratification-depriving effects than the West wishes to acknowledge. Health is an utter red herring: far more are injured in botched circumcisions than get penile cancer. I know a middle-aged man who confessed that he was circumcised for medical reasons late in life; here was a man, without a religious agenda, who had first-hand experienced sex with and without a foreskin. His description of his first time having sex after the operation? "This sucks. What the hell is this? I can't feel anything. I mean it, Julian, sex afterwards was nothing compared to sex before." The effect on him has been so great that he rarely has sex anymore, each time being an inevitable disappointment. As a circumcised man, there is rarely a day that goes by that I don't feel that I have been mutilated in the deepest way imaginable and that I am forever deeply incomplete and embarrassingly scared as a result. I wonder whether I have been, and deeply suspect that I have been, driven to more extreme sexual practices to compensate. But not all pain is bad in its effects, and, while I have probably had less sex as a result, my lowered genital sexual gratification has likely allowed me to focus my energies almost exclusively on my writing (and the world is, and will be, the better for it).

But the West mutilates for sexual reasons in other ways as well. Cosmetic surgery, from nose jobs to breast implants, is a multi-billion-dollar industry -- and booming. Breast implants, in particular, are not only a significant health hazard -- unlike female circumcision -- but decrease sexual sensitivity in the breasts (much as female circumcision decreases sexual sensation, the only significant critique of its effects). It is only hatred, or at least suspicion, of men that causes the West to blame men for female circumcision, to imagine that this is done for male benefit; not only do men often like female arousal and orgasm, but most reports indicate that the mothers of girls who are circumcised, who themselves typically have been circumcised and well-know what life is like in such a state, defend circumcision far stronger than their husbands. Indeed, female circumcision is done for society as a whole and (even if one thinks it to be misguided, one must acknowledge that it is done out of) the perceived benefit of the females involved (who are spared the tyranny to which genital sexual arousal often leads). But whereas female circumcision is done in order to prevent the promiscuity that disrupts society and, indeed, to protect the psychological well-being of the women involved, breast implants are indeed done, at least directly, for male gratification -- for making one's self more attractive to men. A woman may derive greater self-esteem from being more attractive to men, but this effect is secondary and indirect. Whereas female circumcision is critiqued by a feminist West as patriarchal, it is in fact the West's own popular (and more expensive) practices that are directly designed for male sexual gratification.

And that's not mentioning tattoos and piercings, both presently popular in the West. Even if one ignores the fad for body piercing, the mutilation of female ears in the West is at least as widespread as female circumcision in other cultures. This is not to say that the two are the same in effect, merely to say that mutilation itself is not the issue. Moreover, neither is whether men are the beneficiaries, since ear piercing is primarily designed to increase female sexual desirability through the direct decoration of the body just as their dresses provide indirect decoration. The ultimate proof of this is provided at the Oscars and virtually every other celebrity gala, at which the media provide almost instant commentary on dazzling earrings, described as "sexy" and designed, as much as sparkling bangles on a skin-tight and otherwise see-through blouse, to make one's body noticeable.

Of course, tattoos, piercings, and cosmetic surgery are almost always voluntary. It should be pointed out, however, that girls get their ears pierced, and are increasingly getting their body pierced, at ages at which they cannot legally consent to sex. Moreover, cosmetic surgery is routinely performed on infants and young children with deformities or even mild physical abnormalities, the goal being to standardize; clearly, involuntary mutilation is acceptable to the West in the interest of standardizing appearance, of not letting a son or daughter stand out in a society that may be intolerant to difference. This same acceptability of mutilation does not extend to other cultures, however, in which both women and potential grooms might not accept an uncircumcised woman. And, lest we think the concern for one's daughter finding an acceptable mate is a key difference, cosmetic surgery is performed on children in the West greatly, if not primarily, out of fear that they would be rejected not just in a general social sense but by potential mates.

And, whether we like to admit it or not, every responsible report of cultures in which female circumcision is practiced show that all but am extremely small minority of females who receive the operation do indeed want it. They're too young, we say. They're only agreeing because of their culture, we say. But the same is true for us... .

So let's cut the shit. The issue isn't mutilation. It's not that female circumcision is involuntary. It's not that it's patriarchal. It's that we don't do it -- and, not doing it, we just can't imagine a scalpel being taken to a girl's clitoris.

Actual logic, it seems, need not apply.

There are those who object to the way female circumcision is performed, that it's sometimes done to poor girls in poor countries with unsanitary instruments, or by unqualified personnel. But this has nothing to do with female circumcision and everything to do with poverty. Rather than forcing a society to change and reject such a basic ritual of its culture, we might consider actually providing these cultures with medical training and equipment. Then, having provided the means to ensure the safety of female circumcision, a surgery that is not intrinsically dangerous and only becomes so in an environment in which surgery in general is so, we might gently nudge a culture and say that it might consider dropping the practice. Focusing on female circumcision instead of poverty and its effects on female circumcision only shows us to remain imperialistic in our thinking. Not only is it like trying to convince a culture that eating halibut is wrong when we eat bass, but it's like trying to do so on the grounds that the only fish-harvesting equipment that culture has contaminates that halibut. If we want a culture to reject a practice sincerely, we should want them to do so out of a genuine belief that it is wrong and not that it is impractical because all such practices are dangerous when they need not be. In the true imperialist tradition, we demand a society change something to which we object more than we want to help it acquire what we consider basic standards of living.
Again, the Western arguments against female circumcision are full of red herrings, rife with hypocrisy and insensitivity.
This is the real "double standard," not differing treatment of men and women -- which are, after all, fundamentally different, as attested by even our bathrooms, our corporations' preference for women in jobs requiring communication with the public which generally feels safer doing so with women, our courts of law which reward child custody to women far more than men and which every survey shows gives stricter penalties to men than women, our police officers who routinely arrest men on a single woman's testimony of domestic violence but who routinely disregard male reports of domestic violence on the part of women, our doctors who segregate men and women for gynecological and penile exams, our clothing, our polling data, and our marketing campaigns with their extensive testing acknowledge.

Indeed, the false double standard of male-female difference provides the only legitimate line of critique against female circumcision. The fact is that we tolerate mutilation of boys and do not tolerate mutilation of girls. We tell boys to "take it," to "act like a man." We often mock men's stories of abuse at the hands of their girlfriends while our hearts bleed for women's tales of the same on television show after television show. (Jerry Springer is useful in this regard as an expression of the real American population, or at least of its underclass, its bottom 50% or so, to which the program gives a voice.) In short, the West has less tolerance for female pain than male, and this has much to do with why we aren't generally repulsed by a scalpel being taken, without his consent, to the head of a boy's penis, full of nerve endings the joy of which he will never know -- but we are repulsed by imagining a scalpel being taken to a girl's clitoris.

And so we are forced into one of the following positions. We can admit our privileging of girls, of females over males, and honestly say that we don't care if men suffer and boys get scalpels taken to their penises -- at least compared to our concern for women, their ease of life, their wages, their protection (long the galvanizing force behind "patriarchy"), and their sexual pleasure (a concern long-standing, going back before the sexual revolution and modern feminism). Then again, we can admit our hypocrisy. Or we can live the unexamined, thoughtless lives that most of us live and that our promiscuity-promoting culture, full of contradictory messages, urges us to live.

Or, if we really wanted to get radical, if we really wanted to be culturally sensitive, if we wanted to be fair to both genders, we could admit that our own culture has a long, long way to go -- and that the world has a long way to go as well -- before we can criticize female circumcision with any merit.

We might even admit that the coming-of-age rituals of which female circumcision are a part are, in and of themselves, beautiful. That female circumcision does have positive social outcomes, is done out of a sense of responsibility and love not only for society but for the female individual, who, (far) more than likely, feels likewise. We might even admit that circumcised female organ looks beautiful in its own right, much as the circumcised male organ does, that circumcision creates a new sort of genitalia for women as well as men, genitalia that help to keep their owners from promiscuity, from regret, from venereal disease, from becoming mothers and fathers too early, and from obsession with their own baser desires.

We might even argue that female circumcision, like male circumcision, shows concern for the individual, for their own individualistic dreams to which they would devote more time and concern, that much freer from the slavery of sexual desire.

We could even promote female circumcision in our own culture, a solution I recommend for consideration by those concerned with sexual promiscuity.

But that's probably far too radical -- not intellectually, but for the minds of those who can't, or won't, get out of the mental boxes their cultures have provided or forced upon them.

I won't tell you which choice to make. But I will demand logical consistency -- or at least, in the event that you choose to accept hypocrisy, not pretending to have an opinion worth considering.

But don't pretend to be a good "liberal," to be socially conscious, and defend imposing our culture's dislike for female circumcision upon another culture.

These are dangerous words, I know. But you'll get no apologies, no soothing strokes from me. My job is to instruct, to enlighten, and to challenge. Intellect, in its beauty, does not respect your safety zones. It does not respect your national and cultural boundaries, nor your comfortable walls between topics that deny their inter-penetration, their shared values, thus allowing contradiction and hypocrisy, allowing real double standards, and allowing you to avoid doing the hard, selfishly brutal, ranging contemplation and intellectualism for which they pay me deference -- not to mention the big bucks.

This is, pay notwithstanding, my job. I don't always like where the search for truth takes me; if often involves cutting away basic notions somehow hard to live without. And, should you choose to accept it, this is your job too as a person of (potential) intellectual, and indeed spiritual, respectability or even might.

Think about it. Or go back in your shell and learn instead your place.

NOTES

This essay was first published as Apollonian Bacchanalia #3 on persiancaesar.com on 28 March 2002, where it was described as being "well worth reading if you're willing to be enlightened -- or wanting to be pissed off."