Headscarves and Hymens (11 page)

“When you’re surrounded by four or five men from the riot police, and they’re beating you with sticks this long, there isn’t much ‘resisting’ you can do,” I explained to the nurse.

I’ve spoken often about my sexual assault, usually with mechanical detachment. At first, I spoke in order to expose and shame not just the men who’d assaulted me but also the regime that had trained them to do so, that had set them as attack dogs on me and at least twelve other women on Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Divide
and conquer takes on a new meaning when you tug on the jacket of the supervising officer who, as he witnesses his men groping every part of your body, assures you nonetheless that you are safe because he will protect you. Then, after he says he will protect you, in the very next breath he threatens you with gang rape by another group of his men, amassed close by and gesticulating at you.

Still, I needed a body, however imperfect and unreliable, between me and the men who were grabbing at me. I needed to believe that there was an authority figure who could protect me. I needed to pretend that the supervising officer meant what he said, even as his lie was demonstrated on my body. I have needed to say this over and over for my own reckoning with what I survived, and also because I came to learn that this pattern of assault—promises of protection as the assault is happening, alternating with threats of gang rape—was a modus operandi that had been used on other women during the battle with security forces on Mohamed Mahmoud Street.

Women have fought alongside men in political revolutions that have toppled dictators. But once these regimes fell, women have looked around to find the same oppression, sometimes inflicted by the men they stood shoulder to shoulder with, by men who claimed to be protecting them.

Listen to Donia and Mayada, two nineteen-year-old
women from a working-class Cairo neighborhood, whom I interviewed for my radio documentary.

“We had a revolution to improve our lives and things have gotten worse. It’s dangerous to walk the streets. We don’t feel safe at all, our lives haven’t improved, and none of the things we wanted from the revolution have been achieved,” Donia told me.

“Men around here look like at us like we’re products in a shop. We have no rights. If you complain, no one listens to you and you could suffer the consequences of complaining. I want women to have a respected position and not be considered a product you can buy in a shop.”

Said Mayada: “Our society by and large says your position as a woman in Eygpt is in your home, not outside. So women are not considered equal to men and a lot of men don’t give you the respect you deserve. A lot of men don’t make you feel like you belong outside with them, that your place is at home.”

Just before I met Donia and Mayada, producer Gemma Newby and I had gone to a five-star hotel for an event called Egmadi (“toughen up”), in which women were taught the basics of self-defense and given a mood boost with dancing and Zumba exercises. The hall where the event was held was filled with mostly young women in their late teens and early twenties. Some older women had brought their daughters with them.

All the women I spoke to for the radio documentary
complained of constant verbal and physical sexual abuse on the streets and of an overall feeling that they were not safe in Cairo. Though there are many class disparities in Egypt and the rich are cushioned by several privileges, street sexual harassment spares no one, rich or poor. Once your feet are on the street, it matters little whether your can afford to attend an event at a five-star hotel or you live in a working-class neighborhood that does not have a police precinct. Being a woman anywhere is dangerous.

The regimes that governed the Arab world before the recent revolutions were united in an utter disregard for women’s bodily integrity—a message that was not lost on the male public, who reflected back a similar disregard. Lack of accountability left both state and street misogyny to grow unchecked, producing the horrific incidents of sexual violence that recur day after day.

Unless we draw the connection between the misogyny of the state and of the street, and unless we emphasize the need for a social and sexual revolution, our political revolutions will fail. Just as important, women will never be free to live as autonomous citizens whose bodily integrity is safe inside and outside the home.

O
ur hymens are not ours; they belong to our families.

This truth was brought home to me one evening in Amsterdam, after I’d taken part in an event on the rights of Muslim women. In a conversation that evening, probably the first conversation about sex I had had with fellow Arab or Muslim women, a Dutch Moroccan woman told me and a group of her friends, “When I first had sex, it was as if my mother, my father, my grandparents, the entire neighborhood, God, and all the angels were there watching,” We all convulsed with laughter.
It was a relief to talk to women who still understood the burden of virginity and the guilt involved in shedding it, women who did not judge. It was a relief to talk to women who would never ask, “How could you not resist?” as the nurse in the ER asked me when I told her I’d been sexually assaulted.

I actually “resisted” for a long time—too long, I believe when I look back now. I guarded my hymen like a good virgin until I was twenty-nine. I accepted and obeyed what I was taught by my family, who in turn were taught by their parents: no sex until marriage. Now, when I think about how long I waited to have sex, I am sad for my younger self and sad that I waited so long to experience and enjoy something that gives me so much pleasure. Back then, though, during all those years that I waited and waited, it would terrify me even to consider sex before marriage. I was taught by my family, by school, by religion, by society, and I obeyed. I’d been trained well and I was a “good girl” to the end. My hymen was protected from my feminism. My feminism wrestled with my headscarf but not with my hymen. Why?

Why did I obey? And why did I wait so long to finally disobey?

Those questions kept coming up again and again in, of all places, Oklahoma. There, in a University of Oklahoma lecture room where I was teaching a course on gender and new media in the Middle East, in 2010, I began
publicly to share my reckoning with the god of virginity.

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.