Islam’s Hatred of the Clitoris FrontPageMagazine.com | October 18, 2001 By: Jamie Glazov

Editor’s Note: The following article contains graphic descriptions of female genital mutilation, which some sensitive readers may wish to avoid.

IF YOU HATE WOMEN, and you hate their sexuality, and you are terrified that you cannot control it, the most effective thing you can do is to mutilate female sexual pleasure. This can be done by a sexual lobotomy, which will destroy an essential and sacred part of a woman’s natural makeup. In achieving this feat on all women, you will become able to ruthlessly dominate them.

That’s what female circumcision is all about.

It’s about obliterating the clitoris, or the entire outer vagina. It is the barbarity that exists where misogyny festers most: in the Muslim and African world.

The Muslims are the principal religious group that practice female circumcision. In Egypt, for instance, 97 percent of women are circumcised. Their clitorises are amputated. In countries like Sudan, meanwhile, the women-haters are not so kind: all the women’s external genital organs are completely removed. In a savagery called infibulation, the clitoris, the two major outer lips (labia majora) and the two minor inner lips (labia minora) are amputated.

Nawal El Saadawi has documented these horrifying realities in The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. She demonstrates how the violence of female circumcision is performed on girls anywhere from the ages of one month to puberty. Usually, it is done around the age of seven or eight. Anesthetics are never used. The child is pinned down by several women, while one of them attacks.

After infibulation, the small outer opening of the vagina is the only portion left intact. A tiny piece of wood or reed is inserted to allow urine and menstrual blood to seep out. Extra narrowing of the opening is carried out with stitches, which remain until marriage. The victim’s legs are often bound together from hip to ankle and she is immobile for about a month or two.

This violence has to occur because, in much of the Islamic world, the female’s genital area is considered dirty and unacceptable. For example, in Egypt the uncircumcised girl is called nigsa (unclean). Thus, it has to be made "clean."

Many of the victims lose their lives during this torture – which is often inflicted with broken glass. Many other victims are afflicted with acute and chronic infections for the rest of their lives.

With serious and disabling lifelong consequences, the mutilation robs women of their equilibrium. It deprives them from enjoying the fullness of their sexuality and the completeness of their lives. In terms of sexual pleasure, for instance, we know that approximately 75 percent of women cannot achieve orgasm without clitoral stimulation. In other words, the possibility of orgasm has been obliterated for tens of millions of women in the Muslim world. So what does it mean if the psychic, mental and physical health of women cannot be complete if they do not experience sexual pleasure?

The terror of the circumcision itself tracks its traumatized victims down like a nightmare. Most, if not all, of these poor women end up suffering from serious sexual and/or mental distortions. The mutilation of their sexual being becomes the epicenter where sex and violence meet constantly in their lives – with them as victims.

Wedding night is often quite eventful. In some parts of the Arab and African world, the husband assaults the wife after the wedding. In Somalia, for instance, the groom beats the bride with a leather whip. After this romantic apex, he cuts the sealed vagina with a sharp scalpel or razor in order to have intercourse. He then has prolonged repeated intercourse with her for a week – to prevent the scarring from closing the vaginal opening again. During this time the wife must lie still and not move. Meanwhile, the husband takes the bloody sharp object, which represents the virginity of his wife, and makes rounds around the community – showing it off for approval. Scholars such as Raphael Patai and Vincent Crapanzano have documented these phenomena.

After this honeymoon period, the woman is now, for the first time in her life, actually recognized as a person – because she has become the extension of her husband. Her status might even improve if she has a child (a boy). She will be humiliated and shamed, however, if she has a non-child (a girl).

And if a little innocent girl enters this world, it will only be a short time before her genitals share the same fate as that of her mother’s. When the torturers and soul-destroyers begin to slice, who will hear her cries?

Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He is the author of 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist.. His father, Yuri Glazov, was a Soviet dissident during the Brezhnev era, who signed the Letter of Twelve, denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. His mother, Marina Glazov, also participated in the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, actively typing and circulating Samizdat - the underground political literature. To avoid imprisonment, Yuri Glazov took his family out of the USSR in 1972 and settled in Canada in 1975, when Jamie was 9. Today Jamie battles socialism from his high-tech warroom in Toronto. He writes the Dr. Progressive advice column for angst-ridden leftists at EnterStageRight.com. E-mail him at jglazov@home.com.

-- Anonymous, October 19, 2001

Answers

I didn't realize it was so violent, or so widespread.

-- Anonymous, October 19, 2001

I am NOT going to ask if there are pictures.

-- Anonymous, October 19, 2001

One of the evening news tabloid shows filmed circumcisms. The genital areas and faces were fuzzed out, but the screaming was left on the sound track intact.

-- Anonymous, October 19, 2001

Why on earth do these women not do the "BOBBIT" thing in the middle of the night? Why don't they pick up one of their (men's) guns and take the problem into their own hands?

Heaven only help the men of this country if they try to start this crap here. Somehow, I don't think they will.

-- Anonymous, October 19, 2001

People who are raped and mutilated by their own family members are not in a position to become freedom fighters. This is done to every female member of their societies and is rewarded by social acceptance. You would need to rescue a whole generation of little girls before you could begin to wipe the practice out.

One possible origin for the practice is thought to have been birth control among slaves. Then it became incorporated into a religious practice.

-- Anonymous, October 19, 2001

A Picture Worth a Thousand Words By Jeff Johnson CNSNews.com Congressional Bureau Chief October 19, 2001

Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - One member of Congress decided to "remove the veil" on the harsh treatment Afghani women receive at the hands of the country's fundamentalist Islamic government when she took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday night donning a "burqa," the head-to-toe covering those women are required to wear.

"You know the old saying, 'a picture is worth a thousand words,'" Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said. "I felt the best way to describe it would be to wear it."

Maloney says it's almost impossible to relate the feeling of wearing the burqa.

"It's very demeaning. It's as if you have no identity," she said. "No one knows who you are."

The congresswoman says she could think of no better way to graphically illustrate how members of the Taliban have demeaned and hurt women than to let her colleagues and all of America see the garment she describes as "a single-celled prison," worn on the floor of the House, a place that has always stood for freedom.

"It's hard to breathe. It's particularly hard to see," she said. "There's mesh in front of the eyes. It's like having 15 screen doors in front of you. After a while, you start seeing double."

Maloney says that, although she finds the garment uncomfortable, there's nothing wrong with a woman wearing it if she chooses to do so. But she believes forcing any woman to wear the burqa against her will is cruel.

Maloney says many members of Congress have reacted positively to the display. She also says she's been surprised by the volume of reaction, since the speech was given relatively late Wednesday night.

"Many, many colleagues came up and said they found the experience of just seeing the burqa on the floor searing," she related.

Under the rule of the Taliban regime, Afghani women are not allowed to appear in public without a male escort. They are also forbidden to work or attend school.

Maloney shared one report of a young Afghani woman caught teaching younger girls who was stoned to death, in view of her family and students. An elderly woman was beaten until her leg was broken because her ankle became visible below the hem of her burqa when she accidentally tripped.

Women in the Middle Eastern country are denied treatment by male physicians under the Taliban's rules. Since women are not allowed to study or work, there are no female doctors. As a result, she says, many women there die from easily treatable ailments.

"It's just a very, very cruel regime," the congresswoman said.

Maloney points out that, according to her research, the oppression of women practiced by the religious government of Afghanistan is not taught in the Islamic Quran, as members of the Taliban claim.

"When you look at other Muslim nations, women are not persecuted as they are by the Taliban," she said. "Before the Taliban they could educate, go to the university, they could work, they could dress the way they wanted to. It was just the Taliban that came and imposed this."

A forum Maloney had scheduled for Friday of this week with a group of women who have escaped from Afghanistan had to be postponed while health officials search House office buildings for the presence of anthrax spores.

She says she hopes exposing the Taliban's treatment of women will lead to some type of change in the country's leadership that will allow women to live in dignity and peace.

"Hopefully there will be a group of leaders in Afghanistan who will not kill women because they go to school," she said, "and will not kill women because they want to work."

-- Anonymous, October 19, 2001

Most Horrific costume this year, the Burqa.

This is MY feminism, This is my war.

This is my war..............

-- Anonymous, October 20, 2001

I saw something on MSNBC last night--I think that was the station, I was surfing the news channels. It showed the view through a burqa and a Western woman explained how uncomfortable it was, how she developed motion sickness when wearing it on a bus, and how difficult it was to breathe. On another program, I heard how women were not infrequently killed because they stepped into the path of a vehicle they couldn't see.

As long as Islamic countries force women, by law or custom, to wear such all-enveloping crap (and that includes Saudi Arabia and several others), we're not going to make much headway in this battle.

-- Anonymous, October 20, 2001