CIRCUMCISION

CIRCUMCISION

Some time ago I discussed “circumcision” in my religious studies class. I downloaded the material to be discussed from http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/ . I intentionally selected the topic to introduce an idea about ‘female circumcision’ or people also call it as ‘female genital mutilation’. And, as I expected, all students did not know yet about the ‘existence’ of this disastrous ‘so-called’ tradition in some areas in the world. 

MALE CIRCUMCISION

To begin with, we talked about male circumcision. One male student of mine who just moved back from America to Indonesia around a year ago said that he and his older brother got circumcised after they arrived back in their home country. This particular student of mine is around 18 years old. When I asked him why he did that, he said his parents convinced him that it would be for his as well as his brother’s health advantage. He believed that circumcised penis is more hygienic. And after being circumcised he said that he felt his genital area was cleaner or it was easier for him to clean it.

Another student said that he did not get circumcised because his mother never talked about it. He believed if it were really good for his health, his mother would talk about it and offered him to have it or not. The statistic given in the material discussed – only around 30% of males in the world are circumcised – strengthened his opinion that circumcision is not important.

Two female students shared their stories when their brothers got circumcised. They said that their brothers got their penis circumcised after they had a discussion about it with their parents – especially their fathers : It is important that men get circumcised for medical advantage. Besides for medical reason, they believed that circumcision is compulsary because it is one religious obligation.

However, when finding out that in fact only the book of Genesis stating the importance of performing circumcision – and not in The New Testament nor in Alquran – my students started thinking that perhaps circumcision is carried out in some areas in the world due to cultural reasons and not religious instruction. 

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION

As I wrote above in fact my students have never heard of female circumcision yet. They were never aware of this bloody inhumane practice. Their parents never talked about it to my students and nobody else has ever got them to know this. Since the Genesis only mentioned about male circumcision – and no verse at all in the New Testament or Alquran mentioning about it – we came to the conclusion that female circumcision – or female genital mutilation – is all due to cultures. (At least it is not supposed to be a part of Abrahamic faiths’ rite.)

“Why does it state that female circumcision is very painful while male circumcision is not? Or at least not that painful?” one student asked when the handout we discussed wrote “painful procedure.”

It is a painful procedure perhaps because in fact in women’s genital area there is nothing to be cut for any reason – for example for hygienic reason. If there is no hygienic nor religious reason, why do many people still do that nowadays?

Genital cutting is widespread within some African cultures and ethnic groups. It is seen as the climax of initiation, something that both boys and girls have to take part in before they are accepted as adults in the community. According to those who support this practice, the process of female genital cutting has practical merits in a physically harsh society. It is proof that the woman is mentally strong and able to deal with the difficult responsibilities of adult life. Nevertheless, representatives from many countries in Africa meet each year to discuss ways to end the practice because “female genital mutilation and cutting is a violation of the basic rights of women and girls. It is a dangerous and irreversible procedure that negatively impacts the general health, child bearing capabilities and educational opportunities of girls and women,” said Carol Bellamy, executive director of the UNICEF on February 7 2005, the International Day of Zero Tolerance of FGM.”

Girls in African countries undergoing female genital mutilation are usually still very young – six years old – so that it means the decision to have it is in the hands of their parents. The parents possibly do that due to social pressure and the girls cannot say ‘NO’ towards their parents while in fact those girls are the ones who will suffer from some negative impacts caused by FGM.

FEMALE CIRCUMCISION IN INDONESIA

Although the practice of FGM in Indonesia is not as ‘well-known’ as in Africa, we can still find it especially in rural areas despite the fact that the Indonesian government officially banned FGM in 2006. If in Africa female circumcision is considered as the climax of initiation before girls enter adulthood, what about in Indonesia? The article in this link said that there are three reasons why some foundations holding free circumcision events include female circumcision :

• ·         It will stabilize her libido
• ·         It will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband
• ·         It will balance her psychology

The first reason strengthens what women activists have said that the practice is strongly misogynistic. Inferior and weak men need to do something to ‘calm’ (or conquer?) women’s sexual drive. In order to make themselves sexually powerful, they must weaken women first. Besides doing this ‘physical thing’ they also create false true woman precept: a true woman must be libido-less.

The second reason is illogical since the criteria of being beautiful is different from one person to another. While the third reason is very wrong since FGM even can cause some negative impacts. FGM also can result in a lifetime trauma, moreover when done by not an expert and using non hygienic media.

The same article reported that female circumcision in Indonesia is less extreme than the kind practiced in other parts of the globe – Africa particularly. Despite some studies done on it informing that female circumcision in Indonesia is done by merely rubbing turmeric on the genitals or pricking the clitoris once with a needle to draw a symbolic drop of blood, the Population Council’s 2003 study said that 82  percent of Indonesian mothers who witnessed their daughters’ circumcision said that it involved ‘cutting’. Another article at this link  stated that “while the procedure in Indonesia is not as severe as in parts in Africa and involves cutting less flesh, it still poses a serious health concern.” 

“The fact is there is absolutely no medical value in circumcising girls. It is 100 percent the wrong thing to be doing,” said Laura Guarenti, an obstetrician and WHO’s medical officer for child and maternal health in Jakarta.

There is no medical value nor cultural tradition nor religious merit in female circumcision. The Indonesian government banned the practice in 2006. So, what caused the even more widely-found practice in society? Social unawareness! Ignorance! Misogyny! In order to make it safer, the effort proposed by Linda Gumilar, the Minister of Women’s Empowerment, to make the female circumcision practice medicalized and carried out by trained health personnel will make it sound misleadingly lawful.

Maria Ulfah Anshor – one women’s rights fighter – said, “I would advise not to circumcise your daughters at all. It women are circumcised, people believe they become more beautiful and not as wild and will make men more excited in bed. For women themselves, they don’t get any excitement at all.”

CONCLUSION

When male circumcision possibly has medical benefits and it is somewhat strongly encouraged from religious views – it is written in the book of Genesis – female circumcision has no medical benefits at all for women and it is not written either in any so-called holy book. The root of it is just misogyny that dates back from immemorial time. 

GL7 12.06 110612

MISOGYNY

 

THE BEGINNING

Rosemary Radford Ruether in her book entitled “New Woman New Earth” wrote that the root of the misogynist was firstly molded in the early first millennium B.C. in Hebrew and Greek cultures. It was the starting point of men wanting to free themselves from dependency on nature, and to master nature, they tried subordinating it and linking their essential selves with a transcendent principle beyond nature which is pictured as intellectual and male. This image of transcendent, male, spiritual deity is a projection of the ego or consciousness of ruling-class males, who envision a reality, beyond the physical processes that gave them birth, as the true source of their being. Men locate their true origins and natures in this transcendent sphere, which thereby also gives them power over the lower sphere of “female” nature. (1995:13-14).

In genesis stories created out of this view, the world is no longer seen as evolving out of a primal matrix which contains within it both heaven and earth the organic and the spiritual. Creation is seen as initiated by a flat from above, from an immaterial principle beyond visible reality. Nature, which once encompassed all reality, is now subjugated and made the lower side of a new dualism. Anthropology and cosmology are split into a dualism between a transcendent spiritual principle and a lower material reality. A struggle ensues against the old nature and mother religions by prophets and philosophers who portray it as immoral or irrational. Consciousness is abstracted into a sphere beyond visible reality, including the visible heavens.

This higher realm is the world of divinity. The primal matrix of life no longer encompasses spiritual power, gods, and souls, but is debased as mere “matter” (a word which mans “mother”). Matter is created by an ego-flat from a transcendent spiritual power. Visible nature is posterior and created by transcendent “Mind”. Sky and earth, once complementary, become hierarchical. Maleness is identified with intellectuality and spirituality, femaleness is identified with the lower material nature. This also defines the female as ontologically dependent and morally inferior to maleness.

This view of women as inherently inferior, servile, and “carnal” beings creates a symbol system that is also applied to the relations of masters and slaves, ruling and subjugated classes and races. Aristotle systematically develops this view of women as the type of the naturally servile person vis-à-vis free Greek males. In his biological and political sciences, free Greek males represent the ruling “reason”, which must subjugate the “body people” represented by women, slaves, and barbarians. (Ruether, 1995:14)

A misogynism developed, both in Greek literature and in the later strata of Old Testament and talmudic Judaism. These texts expound the evilness of women and trace the origins of evil in the world to female figures, such as Eve and Pandora (who are probably debased mother-goddess figures).

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, women are believed to have inherited from their mother, the Biblical Eve, the temptress, both her guilt and her guile. Consequently, they were all untrustworthy, morally inferior, and wicked. Menstruation, pregnancy, and childbearing were considered the just punishment for the eternal guilt of the cursed female sex. The Old Testament stated:

"I find more bitter than death the woman who is a snare, whose heart is a trap and whose hands are chains. The man who pleases God will escape her, but the sinner she will ensnare ... while I was still searching but not finding, I found one upright man among a thousand but not one upright woman among them all" (Ecclesiastes 7:26-28).

The Hebrew literature which is found in the Catholic Bible stated:

"No wickedness comes anywhere near the wickedness of a woman.....Sin began with a woman and thanks to her we all must die" (Ecclesiasticus 25:19,24).

St. Paul in the New Testament mentioned:

"A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I don't permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner" (I Timothy 2:11-14).

Below is what significant people in history stated:

St. Tertullian was even more blunt than St. Paul, while he was talking to his 'best beloved sisters' in the faith, he said: 6

"Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the Devil's gateway: You are the unsealer of the forbidden tree: You are the first deserter of the divine law: You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert even the Son of God had to die."

St. Augustine was faithful to the legacy of his predecessors, he wrote to a friend:

"What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman ... I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children."

Centuries later, St. Thomas Aquinas still considered women as defective:

"As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence."

In the anthropology of Philo and the Church Fathers, maleness and femaleness are treated as expressions of this body-soul split. Women are defined as analogous to body in relation to the ruling mind: either obediently subjugated body (the wife), or sensual bodiliness in revolt against the governance of reason (the harlot). Women are assimilated into the definition of sin. The bodily principle is seen as so intrinsically demonic that the high road to salvation demands the spurning of bodily life altogether for the ascetical virgin state. Sexuality and procreation correspond to the lower realm of corruption, of coming-to-be-and-passing-away. Redemption demands the flight from corruptibility, symbolized by virginity. In unitary spiritual selfhood, beyond sexuality or duality (“neither male nor female”), men and women might be spiritually equal. Christianity grants women as well as men the capacity to seek the higher life of virginity. For women, virginity frees them from the curse of Eve, which is to bear children in sorrow, and to be under the dominion of the husband (Genesis. 3:16).

Christianity typically produces a schizophrenic view of women. Women are split into sublimated spiritual femininity (the Virgin Mary) and actual fleshly women (fallen Eve). The ideals of virginity are exalted into an ethereal realm of “spiritual motherhood”, untainted by any contact with the flesh, while actual women are imaged along the lines of feared and repressed “carnality”. The cult of the virgin mother arises, not as a solution to, but as a corollary of, the denigration of fleshly maternity and sexuality. Actual sexuality is analyzed as “dirt”, while the repressed libidinal feelings are sublimated in mystical eroticism, expressed by the spiritual sacred marriage of the virgin soul with Christ. The love of the Virgin Mary does not correct but presupposes the hatred of real women.

ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN PERIOD

Hostility to women reached a peak during sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the outbreak of the witch hunts. The antagonisms nurtured by medieval Christianity seemed to culminate in the era from the Black Death through the religious wars. (Ruether, 1995: 18)

The romantic period following the French Revolution secularized and generalized the concept of spiritual femininity of the Virgin Mary. The nineteenth century image of women as naturally more delicate, moral, spiritual, less sexual than men was compounded of the fusion of Mariology and courtly love with the bourgeois Protestant idealization marriage and the home.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution when the very fabric of Western civilization seemed to be undermined, European thinkers went scrambling to recover bits and pieces of a threatened social order. The popularization of the mariological tradition of spiritual femininity was an integral part of this reaction. Romanticism sought, simultaneously, to renew human sensibilities through contact with the mystical depths of nature, from which rationalistic man had become alienated, and to compensate for the depersonalized world of industrialism and democracy that threatened the house of patriarchal society. The Victorian cult of True Womanhood was a compensatory ideology fashioned to serve these needs and negations.

The cult of True Womanhood appearing in the middle of the nineteenth century comprises: four cardinal virtues, namely, piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Religion or piety is believed to be the core of a woman’s virtue, the source of her strength. Religion belongs to woman by divine right, a gift of God and nature. The vestal flame of piety is lightened up by Heaven in the breast of woman. Therefore, “the Universe must be enlightened, improved, and harmonized by woman… bringing the world back from its revolt and sin” (http://www. pinzler.com/ushistory/cultwo.html).

Purity, the second characteristic of the Cult of True Womanhood, is as essential as piety to a young woman, its absence in a woman is unnatural and unfeminine. Inside patriarchy, where a woman has traditionally belonged to a man, passed ceremoniously on to her husband almost as a piece of property on her marriage, taking on her husband’s name, as she leaves her father’s behind, her purity is the prize (Ussher, 1993:27)

Women are supposed to be pure of heart, mind, and body, not engaging in sexual intercourse until marriage, and even then not enjoying it. Without purity, she is no woman at all, but a member of some lower order. A fallen woman is a fallen angel, unworthy of the celestial company of her sex. To contemplate such loss of purity would bring tears; to be guilty of such a crime would lead a woman to madness or death.

Submission is presumed to be the most feminine virtue expected of women. Men are supposed to be religious, although they rarely have time for it, and supposed to be pure, although it comes awfully hard to them, but men are the movers, the doers, the actors. Women are the passive, submissive responders. The order of dialogue is of course fixed in Heaven. Man is woman’s superior by God’s appointment. Therefore, she should submit to him for the sake of good order at least. A young wife should not feel and act for herself because when, next to God, her husband is not the tribunal to which her heart and intellect appeals—the golden bowl of affection is broken. Women are warned that if they tamper with this quality, they tamper with the order of the Universe.

WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

Industrial Revolution indeed sharpened the dichotomy of public and domestic sphere. With more and more industries developing, more and more people (especially men) decided that women were domestic creatures, forgetting that some time in the past, men and women worked hand in hand to survive, both in and outside home. This view was wrapped by religious teachings knowing that religions have always taken a great part of people’s lives.

The hostility toward women, strengthened by the dichotomy of public and domestic sphere during Victorian Period urged women’s movement to deconstruct their predecessors’ misogyny. The first women convention held in Seneca Falls on July 19, 1848 could be called as the first awakening women’s awareness to better their lives in the still male-dominated world.

Almost two centuries has passed since that convention. What have women reached with their struggle?
 More women go to college to get education.
 More women work in public spheres.
 More women hold governmental positions, such as ministry, president, etc.
 More women hold professional jobs, such as doctors, scientists, astronauts, etc.

Can we say that women have successfully terminated misogyny? Absolutely the answer is NOT YET. There are still many women that cannot enjoy their rights, such as joining public activities, getting education as high as they want, joining politics world, choosing any profession they want, and more important, to make a choice for their own life without interference from their parents or other family members.

In Indonesia itself, women’s struggle face hostility and threats both from men (who naively or foolishly think that women just try to forget their nature when wanting to be equal with men) and women who have been blindly indoctrinated that their imprisoning at home is for their own good. With more and more regions in Indonesia applying the so-called Islamic syariat as law, women are threatened to be back to their “old sphere”, at home. History has proven that religions (such as Jewish, Christian / Catholic, and Islam) have always been abused to legitimate men’s dominant power on women.

Misogyny has existed for many millions centuries, and women’s movement has been done only for two centuries. Women must not stop struggling. There are many things to do for betterment. Hopefully we do not need millions centuries to realize the equalitarian world for men and women.

PT56 13.35 140507