The Virginity Trap in the Middle East

D. Ghanim

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349704040, 9781137517470
• eBook ISBN: 9781137507082
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Politique sociale

This book is a social critique of the cultural taboo of the female virginity in the Middle East. It highlights the unobtainability of this cultural myth and its multilevel destructive influences on various aspects of social life.

CHAPTER 1

Incarcerating Honor

Chastity and Honor

There is a strong preoccupation with the sexual purity of girls in Middle Eastern societies to a level of obsession developing into a cultural and social cult of virginity. Abu-Odeh argues that the discourse on gender and the discourse on virginity in Arab culture crisscross so intricately that they are hardly distinguishable.¹ Bouhdiba states that virginity is the object of a veritable cult and an essential element of Arab Muslim erotic life.² The virginity cult is deeply ingrained in cultural practices in the region.

Compulsion with the female virginity is an old and well-established tradition in the Middle East. Lerner maintains that in ancient Mesopotamia, the 1780 BC Babylonian code of Hammurabi is the first legal legislation to institutionalize the sexual control of women and the patriarchal family. Under this code, fathers were empowered to treat the virginity of their daughters as a family property asset, and a man found seducing a virgin had to pay three times her value to her father.³ However, even before this famous code, the importance of virginity was already recorded in an earlier Mesopotamian code, the 2100 BC code of Ur-Nammu, which is the oldest known law code surviving today. This code stipulates that if a man violates the right of another man and deflowers the virgin wife of a young man, the abuser should be killed. On the other hand, if a man proceeded by force and deflowered the virgin female slave of another man, that man must pay five shekels of silver (one shekel equals eleven grams).⁴

The nineteenth-century Egyptian legal system defines sexual crime against women as defloration rather than rape and hence saw the woman’s virginity rather than the woman herself as the victim of the assault. Defloration is not considered an assault against a person, but rather against public morality.⁵ There is a repeated emphasis in the modern Turkish penal code on the virgin status of the woman, both in defining crimes against women and in meting out punishment. The woman’s status as virgin, nonvirgin, or married plays a significant role in how a crime against her is interpreted.⁶ These provisions exist in most of the legal codes in the Middle East.

The cultural taboo of virginity proves to be resilient in the social life in this region. A conservative religious cleric warns that letting women drive in Saudi Arabia would increase prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, and divorce and would connote the end of virginity in the country.⁷ The virginity taboo is reinforced by cultural and religious traditions. Ai’sha, who is considered a model for the Muslim woman, used to proudly claim that she was the only virgin wife of the Prophet Muhammad. Paradise is presented in religious discourse as a place full of everlasting virgins, huri, waiting to sexually serve the male believers, and every martyr is promised 72 eternal virgins.

The virginity and whore dichotomy, a product of the ideology of honor, is a clear-cut demarcation within the context of the virginity taboo, serving to rationalize the cult. This duality makes virginity an unconditional and inflexible state for girls in these societies. With the onset of puberty, the sexual behavior of girls in Middle Eastern cultures becomes very important for a society that puts a prime value on female virginity. Chastity becomes the concern of everyone from then on, and a whole social system starts to develop a stake in her virginity. Minces contends that, even today, a girl’s virginity is a family possession of considerable importance.⁸

A dominant, restrictive culture and a strict moral code leave women with little to be proud of besides their virginity. Female premarital chastity is so taken for granted that virginity becomes an absolute attribute and an uncompromising identity for women prior to marriage.

In her study on Morocco, Dwyer argues that a woman is a virgin deflowered, which is an interactive act that determines the sexual identity and social status of a female, rather than the concept of a womanhood defined by virtue of her physiological development and age.⁹ Abu-Lughod expounds that the more women are able to deny their sexuality, the more honorable they are.¹⁰ Dwyer adds that virginity marks a time of purity and goodness in women.¹¹

The raison d’être of an unmarried woman focuses on repressing her sexual instincts and interests. Premarital existence for a female becomes, therefore, a merely transitional period in her life waiting and preparing for the main, “real,” life of marriage and reproduction. Hence, a vital and formative stage in a girl’s life is not lived in the proper sense. Undoubtedly, girls who are socialized and indoctrinated in the ideology of honor and shame from early childhood do find pride and gratification in honoring the rules of the imposed code. Yet the sense of accomplishment that girls gain from paying difference to the social expectation of female chastity would greatly restrict the range of aspirations and ambitions of these girls in society. The obsession with virginity is a social arrangement where the right to a full and healthy development of one-half of society is constrained.

Accordingly, society develops a unique concept that is explicitly and exclusively linked to the sexual comportment of women, ’ird in Arabic (the correct spelling and pronunciation is ’irdh), or ’irz in Turkish, or namus in Persian and Kurdish. This kind of honor denotes the sexual decency of women. According to Patai, “The Arab sensitivity to the ’ird is so great that an entire way of life has been built around it, aiming at the prevention of the occurrence of a situation which might lead to a woman’s loss of her sexual virtue, or a situation which might enable a man to cause such a loss.”¹² There is an Arabic proverb stating that ’ard and ’ird (land and honor) are the main causes of tension.¹³

Within the conceptualization of virginity in Middle Eastern cultural context, this exclusive notion is distinct from the general notion of honor, sharaf, which is applicable to everyone. Zeid illustrates, “’ird differs from sharaf in that sharaf can be acquired and augmented through right behaviour and great achievements, whereas ’ird can only be lost by the misconduct of the woman. And once lost, it cannot be regained.”¹⁴ Patai adds that in contrast to sharaf, which is flexible, ’ird is a rigid concept, and every woman has her ascribed ’ird; she is born with it and grows up with it; she cannot augment it because it is something absolute, but it is her duty to preserve it. A sexual offense on her part, however slight, causes her ’ird to be lost, and once lost, it cannot be regained.¹⁵ Stewart argues that ’ird is a reflexive honor where a perceived disgraceful act does not in itself destroy one’s honor irretrievably; it is only by not responding properly to the misbehavior that the honor is lost; punishing the offender will restore the damaged honor.¹⁶

Zuhur explains that this variant of honor pertains to women, and more specifically to women’s sexuality and to the sexual use of their bodies: “The honor of the clan was besmirched if unmarried women lost their virginity or married women were unfaithful, thus while this form of sharaf was strictly attached to women, it actually reflected upon the clan as a whole.”¹⁷ Dodd expands on it by saying that ’ird is the honor of the family, characterized as preoccupation with sexual purity and chastity; much of the organization of the Arab family can be understood in terms of ’ird as a controlling value.¹⁸

Schneider asserts that families associate their honor with the virginity of unmarried daughters and with the chastity of these women after marriage.¹⁹ She adds that honor as ideology helps shore up the identity of a group (a family or a lineage) and commit to it the loyalties of otherwise doubtful members.²⁰ Keddie points out that family honor depends primarily on the perceived good behavior of females: “This involves modest deportment, no mixing with unrelated males, deference and obedience to males, modest dress, and eschewing all behavior that could cast doubt on the virginity of girls or the fidelity of married women. Not only chastity and fidelity are crucial but also the avoidance of looks, gestures, or words that could lead others to doubt the chastity of a girl or woman.”²¹

In her study on honor and Palestinian women, Ruggi remarks that a woman’s virginity is the property of the men around her, first her father, later a gift for her husband. Family status is largely dependent on its honor, much of which is determined by the respectability of its daughters, who can damage it irreparably by the perceived misuse of their sexuality.²²

Cloudsley observes that virginity is much valued in Sudanese society, and all kinds of precautions are taken to preserve it, for ’ird is understood as decency in sexual matters and is mostly oriented to protect girls from extramarital sexuality.²³ Hayes reflects that virgins in the Sudan are made, not born, and that virginity can be thought of as a social category, in the sense that the physiological manifestation can be socially controlled. Loss of ’ird has grave consequences, for a family is not only no longer respected, but it may even move a great distance from its natal village to escape such a disgrace.²⁴ In so protecting the honor of the women, Hayes continues, the honor of the social group is safeguarded.²⁵

In his study on sexual politics in Iran, Vieille argues that the idea of the honor of families and lineages is central in the question of virginity, where honor consists of giving and accepting only goods that are ritually pure. Consequently, virginity becomes the chief concern of parents in the course of bringing up their girls; parents live in permanent fear and are obsessed by rape and by the premarital sexual relations of their daughters.²⁶ In his study on women and gender politics in Iran, Shahidian debates that women are supposed to have two contradictory and mutually exclusive sexual selves—a highly sexual side opposed by a practically nonexistent sexual instinct side. He adds, “The duality of sexual selves creates a hierarchy that also works as a control mechanism. ‘Good’ women can coordinate both their sexual and asexual dimensions. They become ‘honorable,’ respected by the community, and a desirable prospective bride for other honorable families. ‘Bad’ women bring disgrace to their families by failing to bring to the fore their asexual self in relation to forbidden men.”²⁷

Thus, the virginity cult makes a forceful and distressing association between the sexual conduct of women and the honor of the family. Patai argues that the most powerful deterrent devised by Arab culture against illicit sex is the equation of family honor with the sexual conduct of its daughters, single or married.²⁸ In so doing, this craze with female purity is directly scarifying one-half of the society and indirectly affecting the other half. Consequently, sexuality is collectively owned and morally judged accordingly rather than individualized. Abu-Odeh indicates that in the model of passion, female sexuality is not “fetishized” as the locus of reputation, but is seen more as a libidinal goal and the locus of complicated human emotions. Thus, the passion relationship is reduced to two people who are sexually involved with each other (man and w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   Incarcerating Honor
• 2   Virginity Cult
• 3   Internalizing Shame
• 4   Hymen Mystique
• 5   Virginity Hypocrisy
• 6   Virginity and Body Discourse
• 7   Virginity and Body Mutilation
• 8   Virginity and Asexuality
• 9   Virginity and Premarital Intimacy
• 10   Ritual of Defloration
• 11   Rewarding Virginity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index