Societies Struggling with Sex

Yesterday, I listened to Nawal El Saadawi  on “Woman’s Hour” and felt a great sense of warmth and appreciation for the woman and the fact that there are still some people out there in the big, bad world who have a true understanding of the need to sort this societal sex block out once and for all.

Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian writer who has dedicated her life, through her writing, to fight against the suppression of women and their sexuality, particularly with regard to the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM).

What a woman!

“If you are creative, you must be dissident” she says (I like to think that this is precisely what Zenpuss is doing through her writing too) and how true this has been for el Saadawi throughout her years of campaigning and becoming herself through her writing. She has spent time in prison for her views and her actions, has resolutely adhered to her principles and done the most immense favours for woman around the world as well as in Egypt, where the practice of FGM was finally made illegal in 2008.

Not, unfortunately, that the illegality of the practice has outlawed it completely. Nowadays, according to el Saadawi, young women throughout the country are still being circumcised in what she describes as a “deep seated habit”.
But she continues to fight and continues to protest against the patriarchal society that she was born within.

During the interview, she talked about the inequity of a system which enables and allows and legitimises polygamy. According to her, in Egypt, it is perfectly acceptable for a man to have multiple partners but if a woman is found to be polyamorous, within or out of a marriage, then she is in serious danger; outcast by society and even imprisoned for her lewdness. The only way to ensure that women stay monogamous is to circumcise them so that they do not get the sort of sexual pleasure that might make them stray from the man that they have agreed to honour monogamously for the rest of their lives.

(Just a small aside, and I clearly do not know enough about FGM but does the cutting of the clitoris prevent vaginal orgasms too? Or are the Egyptians and other practitioners of FGM unaware of the possibility that woman have two sources of orgasm, and that is before you get onto the brain!)

So, Egypt – what abhorrence! A man can fuck his way through a range of women but if a woman is found to have had either extra or pre-marital sex, she is well and truly scuppered.

It all sounds fairly familiar to me. Surely this is precisely the sort of thing that happened in Victorian times. Admittedly, they didn’t go as far as cutting off the clit but that was only because they hadn’t discovered how to! Female sexuality was suppressed in whatever way it could be, right up to the point when the sexuality of women was found to be a positive thing for men,  and even that sort of understanding was and is still only the domain of the truly sexually enlightened.

“They can take our lives but they can never take our freedom!” shouted the blue-faced Mel Gibson in the film “Braveheart!”

“They can take our clits but they can never take our sexuality!” I would like to shout only it might not be that simple.

For sex is not just about this wonderful piece of bodily equipment that us women carry about ourselves, but the loss of the clitoris is pretty damn big and it is not only the physical loss of course. The thing about FGM which is particularly distasteful is this whole notion of a man being responsible for a woman’s ability to be in control of her sexuality and her enjoyment of one of the fundamentals of life. It is the suppression of the sexual mind through the physical act of severance that is too unbearable to think about. It is the notion that in cutting the clitoris, there is a sign to all woman that they have no right to their sexuality and no right to enjoy sex and no right to choose whether they spend their time with more than one sexual partner in their lives, not that the mere circumcision should prevent a woman from having multiple partners, but if the physical pleasures of sex have been either eliminated or suppressed, then it takes the urgency of multiple sexual partners out of the equation somewhat.

Nawal El Saadawi continues with the most brilliant of statements. She says that it is not just about the physical act of cutting the clitoris that bothers her. What is more horrendous is the “circumcision of the brain” to comply with monogamy.

Circumcision of the mind? What a phrase! For in that country as well as others, it is absolutely the circumcision of the mind which is so appalling. By practicing FGM, essentially those who perform such defiling acts are saying that sexuality is not part of the woman’s psyche let alone their body.

And according to Nawal El Saadawi, this is all done in the name of monogamy.

Monogamy, monogamy, monogamy. I’m beginning to tire of the word beyond belief. Monogamy, coupledom, partnership, fidelity. I am so tired of all of these words. I am so tired of the bastardisation of such vocabulary. I am so fed up of the misinterpretation and the values that are placed on such words without any feasible variance from the constraints of these misused words!

But what does the practice of FGM have to do with monogamy and what does it have to do with us generally, with me, with you?

Subliminally, is there a possibility that those that carry out FGM are actually aware of the potential of the female mind? After all, this is the land of Cleopatra.
Are those that practice FGM actually way ahead of some in Western society by realising that women do have a strong sense of sexuality and strong, capable bodily parts to accompany it that mean that as long as that clitoris is in place, then there is always the likelihood of woman wanting to explore the outer extent of their sexuality?

And guess what that means? It means that if they are prepared to explore their sexuality they might have to do it with more than one person. Heaven forbid, they might even want to explore it with other women, working together on mutual stimulation of their sexuality; tit and clit rubbing sessions of bewildering delight.

But the sort of monogamy that is being insisted on through the practice of FGM is even worse than the monogamy that we find somewhat difficult in this country. This monogamy is about having ONE sexuality partner within a lifetime. Yes, ONE!

Personally when I think back to the person that I lost my virginity to and the prospect of fucking that and that alone for the rest of my life, then I think I would be more insane than I clearly am. The thought of years and years and years with crap sex from a crap man would send me to the pill box fairly rapidly.
Fortunately, other people will have happier memories of their virginity loss. One of my closest friends still says she would return tomorrow to the first cock that entered her cunt, even though she admits that it wasn’t necessarily the best sex that she has ever had.

(And at this point, it might be worth mentioning something about my own insecurities.  When you have had crap sex for the majority of your life, then yes, you do want to hang on to the sexuality that you currently enjoy, not necessarily monogamously but certainly for a prolonged period of time; not that it is just about the physical act, you understand.)

One is not enough for one lifetime.
One kiss with one man in one life? NO I couldn’t do that and neither should any sane woman wherever they live in the world, with or without their clitoris intact.

There is a huge difference between monogamy and that awful phrase “serial monogamy”. In reality, there are many people who actually rather like monogamy. It suits them. It’s not necessarily for me, as I have discovered through looking back at my own sexual story but it does suit some people. It is a matter of choice. There are others that are suited to a series of monogamous relationships, only our society as well as the Egyptians frown upon this is as unnatural state, in spite of the fact that there is an admittance and appreciation of the fact that we are all sexual beings and like the sexuality of others even when we are in a committed relationship. And guess what, sometimes people just get bored with what they have, and sometimes people just grow apart. Fact.

There are others who know that essentially they are polyamorous people; that they have fully embraced the importance of sexuality within their lives and know that they are unable to commit their entire sexual being to one person for life. There are others who are polyamorous and yet can happily have periods of their life in monogamousesque relationships, whilst still maintaining the essential philosophy of polyamory. There are others who also believe in polyamory but rather like the warmth and closeness and intimacy of having a significant other in their lives that is free to be as sexual as they like with other people.  There are others who embrace polyamory whereby partners actually live together. There are indeed many different types of ways to conduct relationships.

What the practice of FGM does, or what it possibly intends to do is restrict the above choices to just one, which is madness, pure madness because we are all different and no one way of conducting a relationship is right for all people. It is oppressive, restrictive, intimidating and for the dissidents amongst us, a little tiresome.

Returning to Nawal El Saadawi, she comes up with another glorious phrase “Monogamy diminishes creativity and intelligence” and she is not talking about just intellect. Monogamy, i.e. the sort of monogamy that is aspirational through FGM – one person for life, is oppressive and can stall all sorts of creativity and not simply sexual creativity. It can stymie the mind, it can stifle the development of all manner of intelligences from the social to the personal to the metaphysical. And it is this that she objects to most vociferously.

So thank goodness we do not live in a society that practices this abhorrent act. I’ve grown quite close to my clitoris in recent years. It is now my bedtime companion and I am not sure I could fall into slumber at all these days without healthy dose of clitoral stimulation.

But consider this, another quote from this great woman.

"Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture. "

I don’t know what country she was talking about within this quote but I would hazard a guess that it is either the USA or our very own glorious Britain. It is certainly something that could be said about many countries steeped in one form of relationship as the be all and end all of existence.

Mainstream culture has circumcised the mind. We may have our clitoris (what is the plural for clitoris – clitori?) in clear, working order but the lack of education about female sexuality is as damaging as the physical ‘excision of the clitoris’. Not appreciating the wonders of the clitoris, not valuing other parts of the female anatomy, not understanding once and for all about female orgasms and ejaculations all suppress the mind, circumcising the sexuality within.

Mainstream culture has circumcised the mind regarding the different forms of relationships that us humans are capable of having. There is no one way. Even within monogamy and polyamory, there is no one way. I know sometimes it looks as though monogamy is a clear and defined word, but the addition of the ‘serial’ shows that there are additional interpretations of this word. And that is before you go into the difference between physical and thought monogamy, and all the debates about whether looking at a hot babe on youporn is tantamount to infidelity.

Whatever the situation, there is no getting away from the fact that our minds, both men and women have been circumcised by the inability to come to terms with sex and relationships, which carefully brings me to a final point.

Isn’t this ‘circumcision of the mind’ exactly what the likes of Rupert Murdoch has latched onto?

We are so incapable of coming to terms with sex as a society that we hide away from it to the point of suppression of ourselves. And yet, there is the prurient desire because that is indeed our instinct. If we cannot successfully fulfil our sexual interest through the monogamous relationships then we might need to find it elsewhere to decontaminate our circumcised minds.
That is what Murdoch latched onto. He knew that there was a fascination in sex, and he knew that there was a fascination in the lives of celebrities, especially if they managed to combine the two. That is why his organisation (I’m being careful here!) started phone tapping; to find out about the sex lives of the rich and famous, and once he, I mean his organisation had worked out just how much information that they could get from this practice, they turned to others and tapped into their lives on different issues, crawling uninvited into other peoples’ grief for the rest of the world to see.

I’m not letting Murdoch off the hook but it is, as Geoffrey Robertson stated yesterday, our fault. We have allowed our minds to be circumcised to the point that we are prepared to allegedly adhere to the indoctrinations of sexual suppression and then dash out on a Sunday to get the News of the Screws to give us a cheap thrill; no longer thankfully. But where there was the News of the World, something will come along instead and it will happen much sooner than our final ability to stand up and say that we no longer wish for our minds to be circumcised.

Before we raise our eyes and start banging our fists on the table about the abhorrent practices of the Egyptians with their disgusting FGM, perhaps we ought to look at our own views on sexuality, relationships, monogamy, suppression of female sexuality and everything else in between and stop behaving like the ostriches that we have become to finally realise how much of our society is shaped by the reluctance to accept ourselves as the instinctual sexual human beings that we are.