But these are only biological facts. These are only biological realities.

 But these are only biological facts. These are only biological realities.

As we know, facts and realities can be, and are, systematically ignored in the service of established ideologies. Throughout the world today virtually all religious, cultural, economic and political institutions stand, where they were built centuries ago, on the solid foundation of an erroneous concept. A concept that assumes the psychic passivity, the creative inferiority, and the sexual secondariness of women. This enshrined concept states that men exist to create the human world, while women exist to reproduce humans. Period. If we argue that data exists – not solely biological, but archaeological, mythological, anthropological, and historical data – which refutes the universality of this erroneous concept, we are told to shut up; because something called “God” supports the erroneous concept, and that’s all that matters. That’s the final word.

Throughout the world, throughout what we know of history, something called “God” has been used to support the denial, the condemnation, and the mutilation of female sexuality. Of the female sex, ourselves. 

Today, in parts of Africa – predominantly among African Muslims, but also among African Christians and Jews 4, and some tribal beliefs – young girls are still subjected to clitoridectomy. This surgery, often performed by older women with broken glass or knives, excises the clitoris, severing the nerves of orgasm; the operation is intended to force the girl to concentrate on her vagina as a reproductive vessel. Infibulation, a more thorough operation, removes the labia minora and much of the labia majora; the girl is then closed up with thorns or required to lie with her legs tied together until her entire vaginal orifice is fused shut, with a straw inserted to allow passage of urine and menstrual blood. On the wedding night the young woman is slit open by a midwife or her husband; further cutting and reclosing is performed before and after childbirth. Complications from these surgeries are numerous, including death from infection, hemorrhage, inability to urinate, scar tissue preventing dilation during labor, painful coitus, and infertility due to chronic pelvic infection. In 1976 an estimated 10 million women were involved with this operation.5 And something called “God” justified it; a “God” who supposedly created young girls as filthy sex maniacs who must then be mutilated to turn them into docile breeders.

The word “infibulation” comes from the Latin fibula, meaning a “clasp.” Those civilized Romans, great highway builders, also invented the technology of fastening metal clasps through the prepuces of young girls to enforce chastity. This practice was copied by Christian crusaders during the early Middle Ages in Europe; they locked up their wives and daughters in metal “chastity belts” and then took the keys with them while they were gone – often for many years – fighting for “God” in the Near East.

And, lest through hypocrisy and racism we dismiss these practices as merely “barbaric” or “ancient,” we must recall that clitoridectomies were performed in the last century on young girls and women in both Europe and America. This surgery, very popular with nineteenth-century Victorians, was inflicted on any female considered to be “oversexed,” or as a punishment for masturbation, or as a cure for “madness.” These determinations were all made by male relatives, male physicians, and male clerics, and the women involved had no legal say in the matter.

These are extreme examples of the repression and mutilation of female sexuality, always sanctioned, however remotely and dishonestly, by something called “God.” All the other repressions and mutilations – of the body, of the mind, of the soul, of our experienced female selves – are so well known and documented that they need no numeration at this point; we can all make our own lists. The point is this: Wherever repression of female sexuality, and of the female sex, exists – and, at the present writing, this is everywhere on earth – we find the same underlying assumptions. These are ontological assumptions – assumptions made at the very root of things, about the nature of life itself. They are (1) that the world was created by a male deity figure, or God; (2) that existing world orders, or cultures, were made by and for men, with God’s sanction; (3) that females are an auxiliary sex, who exist to serve and populate these male world orders; (4) that autonomous female sexuality poses a wild and lethal threat to these world orders, and therefore must be controlled and repressed; and finally (5) that God’s existence as a male sanctions this repression. 

The perfect circularity, or tautology, of these assumptions only helps to bind them more securely around the human psyche. That they are as erroneous as they are universal seems to pose no problem to their upholders. After all, wherever we go on earth, every intact institution – religious, legal, governmental, economic, military, communications, and customs – is built on the solid slab of these assumptions. And that’s a pretty entrenched error.

THE FIRST SEX: IN THE BEGINNING, WE WERE ALL CREATED FEMALE 

Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor 

Female Erasure edited by Ruth Barrett