The Unveiled Truth: The virginity myth

Oct 142010
 

By Shirin Sadeghi

for Ceasefire Magazine

Making my way through 26th street, just past 6th avenue in New York City this year, I ran into a used bookstore called Revolution. It recalled a similar, revolutionary-themed bookstore I’d been to a few times around Tottenham Court Road in London.

I inspected the shop, helmed at the time by an older man whose front teeth were generously arranged with an empty gum space for each tooth still standing. He wanted to chat, in a friendly way, about politics, but I’ve never been one to seek conversions in public places, so I politely changed the mood by heading toward the back of the store.

I do admire the collections in these politically-inclined stores – they cover Black History, people’s representations of their own experienced history (rather than someone else’s view on that history), minority issues, women’s issues and international politics from alternative angles (meaning not necessarily radical but simply not available in mainstream information portals).

What I found unique in this store — and maybe it’s because I haven’t been to one of these bookstores in awhile or maybe it’s a new vein of research on the fundamental shortcomings of upholding inherent rights worldwide — was the section on virginity. A table was laden with a number of books on the subject from varying perspectives but veering toward the same conclusion: that a woman’s virginity is realistically a non-issue (and actually impossible to prove) but politically a powerful tool of containing women’s independence and dominating a woman’s ability to explore herself and her world.

More interestingly, while it is a well-known fact that more traditional cultures place greater value on female virginity, those cultures that are less so do not differ quite as much as one would think. In Egypt versus England, a woman’s virginity is still a matter of consequence, just in a different way: in Egypt a known non-virgin will have more trouble being accepted by a potential groom’s family. In England, a woman’s “number” and the chastity or wholesomeness of her appearance is too often of some importance to a possible marriage. And in both “Eastern” and “Western” cultures, there are long histories of veiling and cloistering women, always under the guise of religion.

The subject of virginity struck a chord with me because over the last few years I have attended several weddings in which the virginity of the bride – never the groom – was of varying importance to the success of the proceedings. In the most extreme example I saw, for a wedding in South Asia, the groom and bride’s family had completely arranged the marriage and had mutually agreed on just a few chaperoned cafe meetings prior to the wedding. The groom was known to have lived abroad. The bride had never left her family home.

In a Middle Eastern wedding, also arranged, the bride lived abroad and the groom lived with his parents. This time, the families were more liberal and allowed the two to spend time alone for a few weeks ahead of the agreement to marry. Not willing to take the risk of losing this mate, the bride had convinced the groom, who she started sleeping with a few days after meeting him for the first time, that he was the unique and everlasting taker of her virginity. We’ll never know if he would have married her if he had known the truth.

Read more at:  Ceasefire

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