Chapter 1

When my brother, Frank, was in high school he started dating Amy– a young woman whose father is a Deacon in a very strict “original doctrine” fundamentalist church. Frank started going to functions and services with her, and he got in very close with her family. In fact right after they both graduated from high school he married her. As they were dating, we got invited to many of the functions at the church. John, my father, started having discussions with Pastor Steve, who led the congregation. Mimi, my mom, also had several talks with the pastor’s wife and some of the other women there.

Eventually what happened was that mom, dad, and my brother joined the church, and Frank and Amy married while I was a Junior in high school. I was old enough that having my parents join did not include my joining. Instead, I was given the option of taking a confirmation class and being confirmed as an adult in the church if I so desired. My mother and my father were members, but I did not have to be. It wasn’t like they would have to shun me or anything ridiculous like that. I just wouldn’t be invited to the members-only functions at the church.

Now the congregation had some very strict rules, and they had a lot of non-mainstream beliefs. They practiced some unique rituals, and had specific beliefs which were all compulsory for members. The one that I found to be both extraordinarily exciting and extraordinarily scary at the same time If was that the church practiced an extreme form of radical female circumcision on all of the women in the church. There was not one woman in the congregation that had a vestige of a clitoris or one female member who had an intact and functional Bartholin’s gland.

They didn’t perform the minor version, clipping-off the visible part. They performed the deep down cutting and gouging out of everything. All of the erectile tissue, all of the nerve endings, destroying the lubrication and tingly fullness producing glands. The whole point of the operation, the desired result was to have all of the women, all of the female congregants completely and totally incapable of achieving an orgasm under any circumstances. That my own mother, a well educated woman who had a brain, and a career would see an appeal and so readily agree to such an extreme step amazed me. We talked about it a lot.

I was a little bit older than Amy had been when she took the step, and I wasn’t required to undergo the procedure. I only had to undergo it if I wanted to be a member of the church along with my brother and his wife. Another part of this custom that both excited me and scared me at the same time was that they performed this ritual on the altar of the church, in front of anyone who wished to view it, during a regular Sunday Service. The young woman would walk down the aisle escorted by her parents as if it was her wedding ceremony. Barefoot, she would wear only a little spaghetti strap, above the knees, silky, white slip, which would be removed by her sponsor at the altar.

She would be held down on the altar by her brothers, sisters, and friends. Upon the altar the operation would be deliberately carried out by a church Decon who had some medical training. Different forms of pre-circumcision chastisement were practiced by different families. Amy’s clitoris was pierced and distended with weights, and her urethra was dilated so that it could be penetrated by a thick tube that was held in place by a cross piercing that destroyed her Skene’s glands. Her mother had been repeatedly cunt-whipped with a leather strap.

Within the families that belonged to the church the dime-store razor blades that all of these surgeries were carried out with were accorded a ceremonial status. They were retained, becoming duller, and more painful, with each subsequent use. Initiates often asked for the dullest blade as experiencing more pain was seen as offering more devotion. Blades were passed along generation to generation, preserved and presented in little wooden boxes. The severed parts, however, were immediately committed to flame as a burnt offering on the little torch that heated the cauterizing tool.

As a special dispensation, even though I had not been circumcised myself– a membership prerequisite for women– Pastor Steve had allowed me to be at the ceremony where my mother was to offer up her future orgasms as a holy sacrifice and have her clitoris completely cut away on the altar. A couple of the women explained to her that she wasn’t the oldest person to make this sacrifice. That sometimes people were married into or came into the church later in life. Amy’s family even offered to allow Pastor Steve to use one of their razor blades to remove my mother’s clitoris and labia, as well as mine if I chose to join the church.

Using the same blade that had cut the clitorises from my father-in-law’s mother, wife, and daughter would forever link our families in his view. My mom told me that contrary to “outsider” belief women were the rock of the congregation and underwent the willing sacrifice of their clitoris and sexual pleasure to bond the community. That we were the strong ones– the ones who served our lords on earth as we served our Lord in heaven. That women were symbolically the incestually produced line from Adam to Noah, Abraham, Solomon, and Jesse to Mary and Jesus. And our husbands symbolically were the Holy Spirit whom we should always be eager to receive the essence of in our bodies.

I know that they wanted something, but everybody in the church was so nice, friendly, and honest. Which was in direct opposition to the situation that I was facing at school and in the real world. Everyone seemed to be saying one thing but doing another. So even before witnessing my mother’s circumcision I too agreed to make the willing sacrifice of my clitoris and all of my future orgasms. Mom was so proud of me when I said that. She immediately went to her bedroom and returned with an old metal lozenge box. She told me to shuck my jeans, that from now on I would wear only modest dresses.

She had me hop up onto the kitchen table, where she adjusted my position. From the metal box she took a very heavy duty safety pin. Opening it she showed it to me and said that I had worn it in my diapers when I was a baby. She put one arm on me to steady herself and proceeded to shove that pin through the head of my clitoris and into the wooden table. She told me that my father-in-law had suggested the diaper pin. That Amy had been pierced and weights attached to keep her from pleasuring herself. That since I had decided to make this sacrifice I shouldn’t be pleasuring myself either. But we did not have as much time as my in-laws had with Amy.

Then she took off her dress to show me how minutes after she agreed to be circumcised, Pastor Kevin and my father had pushed four gigantic, rather dull, steel, safety pins through her doomed clitoris. She told me how happy that made her, understanding that they had just eliminated her orgasms forever, and how proud she was right now that I had made the same informed choice. She asked if I could take four in my clitoris like she had.

I said that I was sure that I could and she said that she was going to do the same “kindness” for me right now. She had me pull back against the safety pin. Which I did, even though it hurt a lot, and she shoved another pin Into me. She asked me if I thought I could take two more so I’d be just like her. I said yes, that I wanted her to do that to me. She found two more pins, and into my clitoris they went. She pulled the pin out of the table and closed it before helping me down. I was pretty woozy, she had me sit while she made dinner. Neither of us put our clothes back on.

When my father arrived home she had me show him what she had done to my clitoris. He stroked it, played with it gently and then pulled on it hard and asked me what I felt.

“Just pain daddy,” I said.

“Very good,” he said, “that is all a girl should ever feel down there.” Before he pushed two hooked fingers roughly into my cunt.

I moved a little on his fingers. It hurt, but it also felt good.

“Don’t worry, baby,” he said, “Amy’s father gave me a cure for that feeling.

He took out two little plastic bags. Each had a single, long, thick, hollow, tapered plastic tube and two long needles. The tube– he explained– was to go into my pee-hole just as deep as it could be pushed. Then the needle would be thrust through it to hold it in place and destroy my Skene’s glands in the process. My mother asked my father if she could insert my tube. He agreed and I hopped up onto the table again. Dad was quite impressed at how mom backed the tube out and pushed it in several times to get the tube about half-way inside me.

Then he took a pair of pliers from the kitchen and heated one of the long needles in the flame from the stove top.

Oh, GOD! That hurt. I screamed loudly, as the needle entered my flesh, searing it...

Daddy used a lot of force and pushed the needle through my urethra and the plastic tube inside of it. The needle cauterized the hole through my Skene’s glands, melted the plastic tube a little and pierced through the other side. Daddy then heated the second needle and poked into the ridge surrounding my urethra several times.

“We have to make sure we kill the whole gland, sweetheart,” he said as I screamed again, “you won’t be needing any lubricant my girl.”

After he heated the second needle and poked around a few more times, mom got up on the table next to me, put her arm around me, and told me how brave I was. Dad rubbed a dab of something on mom’s tube and shoved it in. He used a lot of force– probably more than mom had with me– and soon the tube was almost all of the way inside of her. I stared at her crotch and smiled. She looked at mine and smiled back. Daddy looked at both of us, smiled and then took the piers and heated the needle he had used to destroy my glands.