How do you discuss virginity with a class of American university students without the conversation sounding irrelevant to their lives or, worse, like an exercise in exoticizing another culture? Women, sex, and culture form a Bermuda Triangle in which open discussion tends to run off course, through either defensiveness (when students feel compelled to defend a cultural practice) or superiority (when they feel compelled to parade their culture as being above whatever cultural challenges are being discussed).
The personal is not only political; it demolishes this Bermuda Triangle. I received a powerful reminder about how much easier the personal makes it to discuss problems “over there” after I showed my class the Lebanese film Caramel, in which director Nadine Labaki plays the owner of a Beirut hair salon whose friends and coworkers portray a cross section of the Lebanese female experience.
One of the friends undergoes hymen reconstruction just before her wedding to a man she fears will reject her if he finds out she isn’t a virgin. At first some students expressed shock that the woman could not share her sexual history with her future husband, while others wondered why it was such a big deal that she was no longer a virgin. I reminded the class that until the 1960s, virginity was a “big deal” in the United States, too.
“Have you heard of purity balls?” asked one young woman in the class, referring to formal dances in the United States between fathers and daughters at which teenage girls pledge to remain virgins until marriage. Such balls underpin purity culture in the United States.
Yes! I thought. Now virginity was “over here.” I had indeed heard of purity balls, through news articles, but they seemed as foreign to me and to the class as hymen reconstruction.
Until the personal shook us out of our complacency.
“I just want everyone to know that I signed a purity pledge with my father,” one of the students said.
I could not have engineered it better myself. Her courage in sharing reminded us all that virginity wasn’t just far away in Lebanon or in newspaper feature stories. It was right in class with us. Oklahoma kept doing that to me. I joke that going there was like going to the Middle East: a similar mix of religion and conservative politics prevailed. Watching the way the U.S. religious right wing has managed to erode women’s reproductive rights, especially in the South, I was struck by how important and courageous feminists and reproductive rights activists in those southern states are.
Some of the other students tiptoed around asking questions of the student who had shared her purity pledge experience.
“I respect that you think you’ve made a free choice,” one student told her. “But [the American playwright] Eve Ensler said that when you sign a pledge to your father, your sexuality is being taken away from you until you sign it to your husband when you get married.”
Teaching is like alchemy. You take a few students, mix in some difficult subjects, and you are bound to be stunned by the results.
I make my classes as personal as possible. I offer my experiences to keep a face on the issue we’re talking about, so the least I could do to show my appreciation for the generous sharing we had all witnessed—and to express solidarity with a conservative position I once shared—was to tell the class how long I had waited to have sex. There were no purity pledges in my past, but there was a time when I, too, believed I should wait till I got married before I had sex—but then it took forever to get married and I got fed up waiting.
When I was younger, I had no one to share this with. My guilt was exacerbated by secrecy, and for a long time I could talk about sex only with non-Muslim female friends.
Now I’ve become bolder, yet it’s not always reciprocated or appreciated. At one Muslim women’s conference, after I shared how difficult it had been to overcome the guilt of premarital sex, another Muslim woman bluntly told me that the Qur’an clearly stated that “fornicators were for fornicators,” so there was a “fornicator” out there for me somewhere.
Charming.
Undeterred, and sometimes driven by an insatiable need to share—share and shed the guilt—I’ve found that my skin has thickened. I was made more resilient in Oklahoma. Some evenings, alone in my hotel room, weeping was the only way to let go of memories, some as old as twenty years.
Male-dominated religions and cultures, which cater to male sexuality with barely a nod to women’s desires, are difficult enough to endure without the judgments of fellow women. I know where these judgments come from; I recognize the need to conform. That need internalizes misogyny and subjugation, so much so that mothers will deny daughters the same pleasure and desire they were denied, and will call them “whores” for seeking it. In order to survive, women police their daughters’ bodies and their own, subsuming desire for the “honor” and the family’s good name.
The god of virginity is popular in the Arab world. It doesn’t matter if you’re a person of faith or an atheist, Muslim or Christian—everybody worships the god of virginity. Everything possible is done to keep the hymen—that most fragile foundation upon which the god of virginity sits—intact. At the altar of the god of virginity, we sacrifice not only our girls’ bodily integrity and right to pleasure but also their right to justice in the face of sexual violation. Sometimes we even sacrifice their lives: in the name of “honor,” some families murder their daughters to keep the god of virginity appeased. When that happens, it leaves one vulnerable to the wonderful temptation of imagining a world where girls and women are more than hymens.
If they could, I’m sure many in our societies—families and clerics—would tie girls’ legs together until their marriage nights. In some countries, communities do the next best thing and cut off perfectly healthy parts of girls’ genitalia (the parts intended for pleasure), to curb sexuality until the girl and her intact hymen are handed over to a husband.
Female genital mutilation (FGM)—sometimes referred to as genital cutting and erroneously as “circumcision”—”comprises all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The main motivation behind FGM is to control female sexuality. It is believed to reduce a girl’s sex drive, thereby helping to maintain her virginity and, later, her marital fidelity.
The procedure has no health benefits for girls and women. On the contrary, it can cause severe bleeding and problems urinating and, later, can produce cysts, infections, infertility, and complications in childbirth. FGM does not reduce sexual desire, but it does make victims less likely to experience arousal, lubrication, orgasm, and satisfaction during sex, according to a 2008 study conducted at the King Abdulaziz University Hospital in Jeddah.
According to UNICEF, more than 125 million girls and women alive today in the twenty-nine countries in Africa and the Middle East where FGM is concentrated have had their genitals cut. It is estimated that 30 million girls are at risk of undergoing FGM in the next decade. FGM is carried out mostly on young girls, sometime between infancy and age fifteen. After decades of misguided handwringing over “offending” a cultural practice—handwringing that paid little heed to a girl’s bodily integrity—FGM is now designated a violation of the human rights of girls and women by a concert of international treaties, regional treaties, and political consensus charters.
In 1997 the United Nations and the WHO issued a joint statement declaring support for the abandonment of FGM. The next decade saw efforts to eradicate FGM in both law and practice by local agencies and international human rights organizations. Based on the lessons learned through these efforts, in December 2012 the UN General Assembly issued a stronger condemnation of FGM and urged its member nations to formally outlaw the practice. About half the nations that comprise the African Group followed this recommendation, though enforcement remains inconsistent throughout the cultures that practice FGM.
The WHO classifies FGM into four major types:
1. Clitoridectomy: partial or total remova
l of the clitoris (a small, sensitive and erectile part of the female genitals) and, in very rare cases, only the prepuce (the fold of skin surrounding the clitoris).
2. Excision: partial or total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora (the labia are “the lips” that surround the vagina).
3. Infibulation: narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal. The seal is formed by cutting and repositioning the inner, or outer, labia, with or without removal of the clitoris.
4. Other: all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, e.g. pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterizing the genital area.
I must have been about eighteen or nineteen when I first heard about FGM, through a news magazine article that my friends and I found at the university library in Jeddah. We read the item on FGM in silence and terror. It was not something we (or at least I) associated with “us” at all. Soon after, though, I learned that many women in my extended family had been cut when they were girls, and I became obsessed with the thought that so many women I loved had been subjected to that cruel procedure. I needed to learn all that I could about this torture performed in the name of love and acceptance, and in denial of its searing physical, psychological, and emotional pain.
The cultural origins of FGM are obscure. In Sudan, infibulation (the most extreme form of FGM) is described as the “Pharaonic” method, and in Egypt the same procedure is known as the “Sudanese” method. This history matters little to the girls brutalized and butchered as their own mothers watch, and sometimes even help to hold them down. Can there be a greater betrayal? And in the name of love! Yes, love. These mothers do not hate their daughters. They have not forgotten the brutalization they themselves endured as their own mothers held them down. How could they? Surely they have not forgotten the pain. Yet they understand—as they hear their daughters’ screams, echoes of their own screams of decades earlier—that without such butchery, their girls will be considered sexually out of control and unmarriageable. So they cut away to make them complete—the irony of cutting, of mutilating, to make whole!
The Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi recalls her cutting at the age of six: “I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and I did not try to find out. I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes, it was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them, as though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few moments ago.”
How does a girl survive this barbarism with her trust of other people intact, especially after her own mother was there and failed to protect her?
For the lucky few who escape, the god of virginity can creep up on you just when you thought you’d been safely delivered to a husband. In 1994, I covered the UN International Conference on Population and Development. One of the feminist groups participating gave me a report on reproductive rights in Egypt that it had prepared for the conference. Under the FGM section was a story that has never left me. A seventeen-year-old was returned to her mother’s home on her wedding night with a note from the young woman’s husband to his mother-in-law: “If you want your daughter to be married, you know what you need to do.” On the spot, the mother called a traditional midwife to cut off the necessary flesh—a pound of flesh to mark the transaction, the handing over from home to husband, the transition from daughter to wife. Now do you understand why mothers will hold down their daughters and block out their screams? They know what must be done, what must be suffered, what must be silenced, and what must be said for their daughters to earn a husband.
The hymen contains no Off or On switch. A sex drive is not determined by the presence or absence of a hymen; nor is it determined by the clitoris or what remains of it after cutting. Where does desire really begin and end? That does not seem to be a concern to those who insist on FGM. The greater concern is that the family deliver a physical virgin to a husband who can then claim her hymen for himself. But virginity does not rest solely on that fragile membrane otherwise known as the hymen.
The Arab world raises its girls to remain forever mental and emotional virgins. How, after years of having it drilled into you that sex is dirty, that sex is a sin—when your genitals are cut and you are left to contend with the resulting physical and emotional trauma—are you suddenly to enjoy sex, let alone to express what you want?
There is a scene in the Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Zaat in which the protagonist, the eponymous Zaat, a middle-class Egyptian woman, considers subjecting her daughters to genital cutting at her mother’s insistence. Zaat discusses her misgivings with her best female friends, who dissuade her, reminding her of how their own cutting ruined their sex lives.
Why aren’t more mothers coming to this conclusion? Why does it take a male writer to remind women that our society is denying us the right of pleasure? We must create our own ways of writing and speaking honestly about FGM, between women.
Early on during my research on FGM, what I can only describe as destiny led me to Dr. Nahid Toubia. I was then an eager young feminist but I was unable to find the words to describe how heartsick I was that so many of the women I loved had been violated as girls through genital cutting. Dr. Nahid Toubia helped me find the words.
Toubia was the first woman to qualify as a surgeon in her native Sudan, and she has written extensively about FGM. She would tell me about her delicate discussions with her own mother about her mother’s FGM, and when I asked her how I could be as delicate in my own conversations, she told me never to make the women we love feel like freaks for having been subjected to cutting.
A year or two after I met Toubia, Egypt was forced to confront FGM—not because the country finally understood that we were needlessly and heartlessly slicing our girls’ genitals, but because CNN aired a video of a girl’s cutting and her screams. That poor girl was violated twice—once by the hacking away at her flesh, and again by its airing on satellite television around the world. The video was broadcast right after an interview in which then-president Hosni Mubarak claimed that Egypt no longer practiced FGM. So it wasn’t the horror of FGM that caused outrage, but rather that the president was made to look either mendacious or out of touch.
The local CNN producer—not the U.S. citizens who produced or reported on the piece—was arrested and charged, basically, with making Egypt look bad. And lo and behold, public service announcements followed in the ensuing years, billboards went up, and for about five minutes we paid attention to the pain of our girls—before sinking back into denial, leaving the heavy lifting to nongovernmental organizations whose tireless work over the years can only be described as Sisyphean.
That video exposed a horror that by 1994 had claimed at least 90 percent of ever-married Egyptian women between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine. When people in Egypt read those figures—issued by a multitude of organizations, ranging from UNICEF to the WHO, and most recently compiled in a 2013 UN study—they spend more time denying the veracity of the numbers than asking why we still subject our girls to FGM. In 2008 an Egyptian national health survey reported a drop in the prevalence of FGM, claiming that about 74 percent of girls ages fifteen to seventeen had undergone the procedure—giving hope that, despite all odds, those tireless NGOs were making some progress. But the genital mutilation of three-quarters of our girls is still horrific.
FGM is practiced by both Muslims and Christians in Egypt, where many believe it is a religious duty, despite the fact that it is not mentioned in either the Qur’an or the Bible. In 2008, doctors and nurses in Egypt were banned from performing genital cutting after a twelve-year-old girl died from an anesthetic overdose while undergoing the procedure at a private clinic in Minya, in southern Egypt. The ban imposes penalties ranging from three months to two years in prison and fines of up to 5,000 Egyptian pounds ($7
15).
But the ban on FGM has done little to curb the practice, which is still being carried out by traditional cutters and sometimes medical practitioners. While most deaths probably go unreported, every now and then a case makes it into the news, as when thirteen-year-old Soheir el-Batea died in June 2013 after a doctor at a private clinic in Daqahleya, northeast of Cairo, performed FGM on her at her family’s request.
The medical report of her death described it as an allergic reaction to penicillin. The doctor who performed the cutting and Soheir’s father stood trial in 2014, in the first case of its kind in Egypt. Finally, a chance for justice. The court acquitted both the doctor and the father. At the time of this writing, Human Rights Watch said it was unable to obtain the full final verdict explaining the acquittal. To coincide with the trial, the BBC produced a television segment in which the correspondent Orla Guerin found a traditional midwife who told her that despite the ban, she had a waiting list of mothers who wanted her to cut their daughters.
The Guardian newspaper found that many in Soheir’s village of Diyarb Bektaris supported FGM and believed it was prescribed by Islam. Raslan Fadl, the physician who performed Soheir’s cutting, was also a sheikh—an elder—at the local mosque, according to the paper.
“We circumcise all our children—they say it’s good for our girls,” Naga Shawky, a forty-year-old housewife, told The Guardian. “The law won’t stop anything—the villagers will carry on. Our grandfathers did it and so shall we.”
A sixty-five-year-old farmer told The Guardian he did not realize that genital mutilation had been banned. “All the girls get circumcised. Is that not what’s supposed to happen? … Our two daughters are circumcised. They’re married and when they have daughters we will have them circumcised as well.”
Calls to reverse the ban on FGM continue to issue from Islamists and some doctors who claim that girls are more likely to die if their families take them to traditional cutters. Those same doctors conveniently ignore the deaths that have already occurred in private clinics.
Headscarves and Hymens Page 9