When the victims are men, and the torturer is a woman, who cares?
Item 1: I wrote a column on the Bobbitt case, in which I took issue with the contention of some feminists that there would have been far less of an uproar if a woman had been genitally mutilated. I mentioned that I hadn't read any recent reports of women who had had their clitorises severed or their breasts sliced off, and that, for most of us, such assaults would be every bit as abhorrent.
So what sort of readership reaction did I get? A flurry of letters from women pointed out the horrors of female circumcision -- a cultural rite in parts of Africa and Asia that is often painful and dangerous. The point is, of course, that I was referring in my column to cases of marital assault in North America, such as the one perpetrated by Lorena Bobbitt on her husband, not the rituals practised in Third World societies. And the letter writers must have known that.
But let's examine the issue raised by these women. Female circumcision involves removal of the clitoris, and sometimes also part of the labia, in young girls, and is done on the theory that a circumcised women is less likely to be unfaithful to her husband. As the letter-writers pointed out, it is often done without anesthetics or antiseptics. They argue that it is a barbaric practice and should be outlawed in North America, where some female immigrants are subject to the disfigurement.
Yes, yes, yes! Let's address this issue, at least here in North America. And where it is done for cultural reasons overseas, let's by all means push for it to be done under sanitary conditions and with a minimum of pain. But why, at the same time, do we blind ourselves to the suffering of millions of baby boys right here at home?
The truth is that there is a considerable body of medical opinion that condemns male circumcision as an excruciatingly painful procedure and a traumatic experience. Yet where are the angry editorials? Where are the politicians speaking up to condemn the practise? And there is worse. Male circumcision, as practised in North America, is at least normally done in sanitary conditions and involves only the severing of the foreskin. But much more painful and dangerous ritual circumcisions are still practised in many parts of the Third World and in some indigenous societies, often involving the boring of a hole through the head of the penis with a sharp instrument, with or without anesthetics. Where are the voices raised in outrage over these practises?
And I have just read a rare foray by a Vancouver newspaper into another aspect of male sexual suffering -- the bizarre and gruesome world of hundreds of thousands of male eunuchs in India. According to the article, these eunuchs are involved in sexual activity related to Hindu religious rites and many suffer from sexually transmitted diseases. Most of them are kidnapped, then castrated with a razor without anesthetic. If they survive this barbarity, they are then condemned to a life of poverty and humiliation as social outcasts.
Deafening cries of outrage? Don't hold your breath.
Item 2: A woman in the eastern Canadian province of New Brunswick, Sarah MacMillan, was recently jailed for two years for the sexual torture of four men. According to the article I read, she "admitted to holding four men against their will...with the help of two others, and beating and sexually assaulting them with a curling iron and a bottle." The court came to the conclusion that Ms. MacMillan, not her two male companions in the crime, was the initiator. One of the victims was stabbed, others had the curling iron or a bottle rammed up their anuses, among other outrages. It was, in short, an extraordinary case of depravity and sadism -- not to mention the suffering and humiliation of the male victims.
Front-page stuff, you may say, worth a splash on the nation TV news? Well, not exactly. There was a measly six-paragraph story buried at the bottom of an inside page in The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper. And the Vancouver Sun, one of the largest dailies in the country, also deemed it worth six paragraphs on an inside page. Nothing at all on the national TV news. I wondered, as I read these snippets, how the media would have rated the story if Ms. MacMillan had been a man torturing women. The front-page headlines would have been large and lurid, the TV coverage full of outrage and visual horror. Legislators would have condemned the incident, and a government task force or two would likely have been formed to find out how many other women suffered from such abuses.
But nothing of the sort happened in this case. After all, the perpetrator was a woman, the victims men. Who cares?
Peter Raeside is based in Vancouver, B.C. Reprinted with permission of the Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper.