CASTRATINGWOMEN

Castrating Women(1)

One of the most ridiculous, yet archetypal pictures to come to my mind recently, by the time the media had beaten it to death, was the image of a whole police department, the chief of police, probably the fire department and several other search and rescue teams as well; I can imagine their determination, hunting for that one little penis, with flashlights, searchlights and blood-hounds, that a no-doubt tortured, desperate, driven and divinely inspired woman had hacked off and thrown out of her car window. (I'll bet she wishes now she hadn't told them where.) There was such fuss being made over that. There still is. Men everywhere grab their pee-pees and cry, "Ow!"

Something is way out of balance here. What about the millions of castrated women in America? Nobody has any searchlights for them or their missing parts. They are not talked about. No one is crying out for them. There is hardly even a question about any of this, other than by another desperate woman who is faced with what her doctor chooses to tell and not to tell her.(2)

It just makes me wonder. When mostly male doctors want to enhance women's breasts for men's pleasure they can do it without a scar. Have you seen pictures of the breast removals either partial or complete, done by doctors for other reasons? Major scars. Most of them look like they have been gouged out by a maniac. I can't imagine that this is not some form of sadistic disregard.(3)

When I mentioned female castration at a feminist bookstore reading recently, I was corrected and told that it wasn't castration, they assumed I was talking clitoridectomy as it is still done elsewhere in some distant cultures. It didn't immediately enter their minds that I was talking United States(4) and that indeed I was talking castration, the removal of our female sexual organs. This is not a perspective that we are used to looking from: how barbaric the treatment of our own women is, I would even venture that the United States is probably the largest castrator of women in the world today. It is 1993 and women's wombs are being sacrificed like it was the Middle Ages.

We call it hysterectomy. It was originally initiated to subdue a woman, a preventative for hysteria. Hysteria is, according to Webster: lunacy, anxiety, wild uncontrolled feeling, attributed to disturbances of the uterus.

We have been reduced from being powerful and psychic during our periods, a time so awesome that, to paraphrase Judy Grahn,(5) we can only compare it to an atomic bomb blast and event that isn't as powerful an image. There was a time when the whole fabric of the community was based on our dreams and actions, on our perceptions through our connections to our menstrual cycles and our wombs. We have been reduced to the point of no attributes, no power at all. We slap on a tampon and take our place at our jobs, checking out groceries, preparing food, installing electronic components in computers to remain productive even though our cycle is telling us something else and we take drugs to deal with out denial and men's erasure of what we truly are. No wonder we have "female problems." These wouldn't be labeled as problems if the differences between men and women weren't labeled as negatives for women. No wonder we have cramps, excessive or scant bleeding, hot flashes, PMS, headaches, anxiety and anger. No wonder.

The courts and the medical community know sex offenders and serial killers are "subdued" when they are given chemicals to decrease their testosterone. But this is never used. We sure don't cut their balls off. Even women have been programmed to consider this a barbaric thought. What could be of greater importance to the world than the male testicles and penis? But who is interested if a woman has feelings, has sensuality, has arousal, has her sexual organs, other than the woman herself. Countless unnecessary medical "procedures" are performed on women all the time. Beyond medical mutilation, beyond physical castration exist other subtler forms of castration being done on women also.

I think we must liken ourselves to these not so distant women in Africa and India who voluntarily allow themselves to have clitoridectomies and who when interviewed say that they do it because it's a tradition, their mothers did it and so on. Alice Walker quotes Efua Dorkenoo speaking about a time when, and I hope all, genitally mutilated women will understand what has been stolen from them.

(1) Excerpt from Women's World, a novel in progress, copyright 1993 Kathryn O. Bennett.

(2) The Castrated Woman, copyright 1986 Naomi Miller Stokes, Franklin Watts, NY, NY.

(3) Male Practice, copyright 1982 Robert Mendelsohn MD, Contemporary Books, Inc., Chicago, IL and Women Under the Knife, copyright 1984, Herbert Keyser MD, George F. Seikley Co., Philadelphia, PA.

(4) "More Hysterectomies Performed than Necessary" NY Times, June 30, 93 pB6; "HMO Performed Hysterectomies Inappropriately" Wall St. Journal, May 12 1993.

(5) Blood, Bread and Roses, copyright 1993 Judy Grahn, Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Copyright Off Our Backs, Inc. Jan 1994
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