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Jewish World Review July 11, 2008 / 8 Tamuz 5768 Islamic Virginity Restoration: ‘You Take Conjugation. We'll Take Subjugation’ By Julia Gorin
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
A front page New York Times article recently reported on an increasingly popular medical procedure among Muslim women in the West: hymen restoration, or "hymenoplasty", which apparently offers a whole new world of secondary virginity.
One patient at a clinic near Paris, a 23 year-old student of Moroccan descent, said, "In my culture, not to be a virgin is to be dirt. Right now, virginity is more important to me than life."
Those priorities will serve her well when she finds the Muslim husband she's looking for and as she re-embraces "the deep-rooted traditions of [her] parents' and grandparents' generations," as the article reads, which don't place much value on life, especially female life.
So if Islamic piety is the vogue, then while they're replacing their hymens, these girls should have the doctor throw in a clitorectomy. Because while it's important to the Muslim man that you be a virgin, it's also important that you get nothing out of the sex so he doesn't have to worry about his sexual prowess or lack of it. Or is this another case of eclectic Islamic assertion in the West? Indeed, the hymen replacement craze is a tacit acknowledgement that Islam is in fact taking over.
"If you're a Muslim woman growing up in more open societies in Europe, you can easily end up having sex before marriage," said Hicham Mouallem, a doctor in London who performs the surgery. "So if you're looking to marry a Muslim and don't want to have problems, you'll try to recapture your virginity."
Of course, if you're growing up in an open society, isn't it just as easy to marry a non-Muslim man? Or are Muslim women just using our men for sex?! I see how it is: sleep with the infidel but marry the believer, is that it?
But they can go ahead and have their hymens replaced over their birth canals; it'll prepare them for when their husbands put a much larger hymen over their entire bodies and call it a burqa.
The article reports that the issue is particularly charged in France, where news recently came out that a court "had annulled the 2006 marriage of two French Muslims after the groom discovered his bride was not the virgin she had claimed to be…[He] left the nuptial bed and announced to the still-partying wedding guests that his bride had lied about her past. She was delivered that night to her parents' doorstep."
A similar thing happened in my marriage when my husband found out that I had lied about my past. Instead of having sex with 22 guys before him as I'd claimed, he found out there actually had been only 18.
Anyway, according to the article, "the plight of the rejected bride" is what led the 23 year-old student to get the surgery. "She insisted that she had never had intercourse and said that she had discovered her hymen was torn only when she tried to obtain a certificate of virginity to present to her boyfriend and his family," which "more Muslim women are asking for" in Europe. The student "said she had bled after an accident on a horse when she was 10."
Kinky! An Islamic Catherine the Great! Though if she means a horse-riding accident, I don't know if I buy it. I always wonder about the ubiquitous "horse" excuse — and how a horse can break a hymen, which after all isn't that close to the surface. What kind of "accident" with a horse can cause a hymen to break? I can see how it would be possible with a unicorn, but not a horse or zebra.
But back to the article: "His extended family in Morocco is very conservative, she said, and required that a gynecologist — and family friend — in Morocco examine her for proof of virginity before their wedding."
Which begs the question: Wouldn't all the gynos know that this re-hymenizing is going on? (Especially in the 45-year-olds who are reportedly also getting the procedure.) What good would it do to check for a hymen when it could be a re-sewn one? From the scarring alone, doctors will soon learn to tell the real ones from the fake ones. In fact, now when a doctor is out with his buddies and points to a woman, asking , "What do you guys think — real or fake?" there are two things he could be talking about.
Once doctors are able to detect reconstructed hymens, the poor girls will be in double trouble, especially if the family friend inspecting the goods is also Muslim. Whereas the gypped groom's non-virginal bride had been simply delivered back to her family's doorstep, now — because of the added insult of deception — the groom's family will probably be entitled to kill her.
To be sure, "most young women had the operation to respect their culture or family tradition, not for religious reasons," according to the UK-based newspaper The Muslim Weekly, which mentions two women who've had their hymens re-sewn but neither of whom is a practicing Muslim. Instead they are "part of a growing group of women who foolishly try to juggle Islamic and modern French values."
Here's what that looks like:
Tight bodysuits with headdress. It's like a Kazakhstan fashion show:
One can certainly understand how this might lead to Muslim hymen breakage.
Just wait 'til a shaheed gets to heaven and finds out the virgins he died to get had a sew-over. ("Fight in our jihad; get 72 secondary virgins.") Some terror recruiters are going to be in big trouble, not to mention the virgin 'hos.
Of course, for Muslim men who want to be certain, there is always this option: "You can have a marriage contract even with a one-year-old girl, not to mention a girl of nine, seven, or eight," Saudi marriage officiant Dr. Ahmad Al-Mub'i recently told Lebanese TV. "But is the girl ready for sex or not?...The Prophet Muhammad is the model we follow. He took Aisha to be his wife when she was six, but he had sex with her only when she was nine."
Meanwhile, the surgeons in France who were interviewed for the Times article said they were "empowering their patients by giving them a viable future and preventing them from being abused — or even killed — by their fathers or brothers."
Who knew: France — from RU-486 to hymen reconstruction! Apparently, the procedure is done in the U.S. as well. Let me guess the female-empowerment argument that brought it to our shores: "The French have been doing it for years!"
While the procedure may be a lifesaver for the moment, it's yet another case of Western society finding common ground with Islamic society by moving closer to it, rather than it closer to us. French doctors are catering to, validating and thereby perpetuating Islamic values and practices, some of which — like the murder and abuse mentioned by the doctors above — are supposed to be illegal in Western countries.
At least someone is keepin' it French: "The French College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians opposes the hymen procedure on moral, cultural and health grounds. 'We had a revolution in France to win equality; we had a sexual revolution in 1968 when women fought for contraception and abortion,' said Jacques Lansac, the association's president. 'Attaching so much importance to the hymen is regression, submission to the intolerance of the past.'
It's also a regression socio-economically, as this development is the opposite of egalitarian. Because those women with more money will be able to afford more $3,400 hymens and therefore more pre-marital sex. In which case the spelling of 'hymen' will have to change to "hi, men!"
The article mentions that in most cases the operation is "not covered by tax-financed insurance plans." But give it time. Before long, the nationalized French healthcare system, which currently covers birth control and abortion, will soon also cover virginity.
The hymen reclamation piece originally ran in the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, with the deferential headline "For Muslim women in Europe, a medical road back to virginity," and it was written in the typically reverential tone reserved exclusively for Islamic piety — in contrast to the sneering laugh riots that characterize mainstream attitudes toward Christian abstinence teens, whose values are often called "puritanical".
Similarly, articles about AIDS in Africa have taken to praisingly singling out Islamic communities there as being less prone to contracting sexual diseases, thanks to their frowning on promiscuity. (Punitive gang rape doesn't count.) The same horde of "thinkers" and reporters bringing us the good news about Muhammad ridicule things like abstinence training, saying that conservatives are "trying to scare the kids into thinking that if they have sex, they're going to die." This sort is generally freaked out by Westerners (that is, majority Christians) who aren't promiscuous. How dare our people not be trying to get a disease! They also sneer at those who object to encouraging promiscuity through practices like birth-control distribution at schools. Indeed, why are media and the Left in general so invested in our kids being whores? In short, why is it hip for Muslims to be chaste, but unhip for Christians?
Imagine how everyone would be yukking it up if we heard that born-again-virgin Christian teens were getting hymen replacement surgeries. This would be fodder for "Jesus Camp 2". Imagine the field day Letterman, Leno and Ferguson would have with this. Speaking of which, where is SNL with this Islamic virginity restoration? O'Brien? Stewart? Maher? Anyone?
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JWR contributor Julia Gorin is a widely published op-ed writer and comedian who blogs at www.JuliaGorin.com She's the author of the just-published "Clintonisms: The Amusing, Confusing, and Even Suspect Musing, of Billary". Comment by clicking here.
© 2008, Julia Gorin. |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
