Although 19th-century anthropologists knew of the galaxy of practices loosely called “female circumcision” and discussed them in elaborate detail, the matter was not raised in an international forum until 1975, when the Australian delegation at the first U.N. conference on women in Mexico City proposed a motion condemning it, which I helped draft. To our surprise the African delegates did not fall on our necks and thank us for taking upon ourselves the defense of their genitals. We thought of FGC as an outrage enacted on babies and girls, an expression of sheer misogyny. We labeled it female genital mutilation, though we had very little idea who cut what. The change in labeling from FGM to FGC might indicate that the international community is retreating from its blanket condemnation of any modification of female genitals, but all U.N. agencies still resolutely denounce it as an infringement of women’s rights and the rights of the child. Signatories to the U.N. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women are required to show that they are taking steps to eradicate FGC. After a quarter century of indifference, the popular media in the United States have begun crusading on the issue.

We have no idea how many babies, girls and young women die as a consequence of FGC. Though we are told that fatalities ensue because the operations are carried out by untrained old women with defective eyesight using clumsy and dirty instruments, most countries bar accredited medical establishments and personnel from carrying out the procedures. Indeed, the sole effect of passing laws against FGC in Sudan and Kenya has been that health professionals may not be involved. In Britain an obstetrician delivering an infibulated women is forbidden by the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act of 1985 to close her up again after the birth; if she values her “closed” status, as many such women do, she has no option but to find a member of her own community to resuture her. After more than a hundred years of pressure by missionaries and colonial authorities to outlaw FGC, procedures are likely to be more dangerous now than they were when traditional mores were relatively undisturbed. FGC is now being carried out as an initiation rite for adult women entering ethnic liberation groups, a role which it did not play before the colonial powers began their drive to extirpate it. Male leaders are interesting themselves in this women’s business and redefining it according to their own priorities. African women seeking asylum will be granted refugee status on the grounds that their countrymen are threatening them with FGC.

We may suspect, from the multiplicity of forms of FGC–ranging from nicking the hood of the clitoris to cutting out of the entire clitoris together with the labia minora and ablation of the labia majora to create raw edges that are then sewn together (infibulation, the severest or “pharaonic” form)–that FGC serves different purposes in different communities and cultures. In Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia virtually all women, in Muslim, Christian and even Jewish communities, have endured some form of FGC. A London surgeon found to his surprise that in 43 out of 45 infibulated Somali patients the clitoris had not been removed. Conversely many infibulated women who have suffered clitoridectomy will vividly describe their own intense sexual pleasure. Yet the commonest explanation of FGC is that, though carried out by women, it was devised by men to control women’s rampant sexual desire. Suffice it to say that sexual pleasure is notoriously protean (remember the G spot?), and the nerve clusters that end in the clitoris (as yet very poorly understood) have ramifications deep in the abdomen and elsewhere.

The women who inflict FGC on their daughters have only relatively recently been asked by female anthropologists to describe what they are doing. Such explanations are usually dismissed by nonanthropologists as primitive superstition and misinformation, though in their own terms they make sense. FGC can function as any combination of witnessed ordeal, rite of passage, cosmetic operation, feminine hygiene or sacred ritual. When FGC has outlived its cultural value it will disappear. As long as the world elite remains fascinated by FGC, and reinforces their feelings of superiority by demonizing it, this dangerous, painful and destructive practice will continue and could even spread. As Carol Corso of PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) pointed out in 1998, “FGM must be identified by the community, and by the women, in particular, as an issue on which they are interested in working. The issue and need cannot be identified by outsiders.”