6 - Female Circumcision and the Divisive Issue of Female Clitoral Sexual Pleasure Go Public, 1966–81

Summary

Catherine Kellison first heard about female circumcision from a friend, who told her she had undergone the procedure and now experienced “greater sexual sensations” and “higher levels of orgasm” than she had prior to the operation. Writing in Playgirl magazine in 1973, Kellison, who admitted being ignorant about her genitalia, raced to the library to look up information on her body after learning about the operation. She discovered that the clitoris “exists for the sole purpose of giving pleasure” and that women are “multiorgasmic.” After reading about the clitoris, Kellison noted she was “more than mildly distressed.” If, she wrote, women “are so potentially erotic, seething on the inside with great bursts of passion flames, what happened to it all?”

In search of an answer, and encouraged by the fact that a second friend had “treated herself to the circumcision,” Kellison made an appointment with Stanley Daniels, a gynecologist in southern California, who had removed the clitoral hood of her two friends. Daniels, Kellison wrote, “was great” and very “enthusiastic.” He informed Kellison that although the “clitoris responds well to both direct and indirect pressures,” an “awesome 75 percent of women are hindered from feeling the full extent of the sensations due to a condition most commonly known as a ‘hooded clitoris.’” The clitoral hood on these women was “too long or too thick (or sometimes both) and the clitoris lies buried, forgotten, but by no means gone.” Circumcision, done “strictly for pleasure,” was the surgical solution to this condition, he informed her. This was enough information for Kellison, who elected to undergo the operation to find out for herself.

When Kellison was writing for Playgirl in the 1970s, information about the proposed benefits of female circumcision was being touted directly to women through stories in popular magazines and books about cosmetic surgery. No longer was this information mostly limited to medical texts and articles, and Kellison was not the only woman to learn about, seek out, and undergo female circumcision as a sexual enhancement surgery from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Edward Wallerstein, in his history of male circumcision, noted that though there was no accurate data regarding how often women chose to undergo circumcision, he estimated that of the “approximately 5,000 operations performed annually on the external female genitalia” for the years 1968, 1973, and 1977, “possibly two to three thousand were circumcision.”