Both assumptions are also well grounded in the Western tradition. From Plato to Kant to Kohlberg, a long line of philosophers and social thinkers has urged that women are naturally lighthearted, prone to temptation, and therefore less able to practice self-restraint and think in moral terms. More likely than men to be corrupted, they need special guidance, restraint, and protection. Freud added that women who require clitoral stimulus are victims of arrested development. Repression takes its toll on the individual psyche, but a necessary toll.
Repression is civilization.
The major problem with clitoridectomy, then, is socio-political. Clitoridectomy is yet another way of oppressing women and locking them at home, of seeing them as the producers of children and as a source of pleasure to others. But if we will object to clitoridectomy on these grounds, the argument will seem very familiar, and will have clear implications for our own society. Michael Walzer has argued that every morality has both a thin universal dimension and a thick contextualized content. The same is true of wickedness.