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| Reality of the Facade When virginity is just a layer of skin by Mridu Khullar The scenario isn't hard to imagine: A hip, urban, middle-class girl starts dating a guy. They have sex. The affair doesn't last, they both move on. She celebrates her 25th birthday, and the suitors come knocking. Arranged marriage, she thinks, isn't a bad idea if she has a choice in the matter and enough time to spend with the prospective groom. The problem: she's no longer a virgin. The solution, these days, is as easy as getting your hymen repaired. At a cost of less than a traditional wedding lehenga, hymenoplasty or virginity restoration is a 30-minute procedure through which the hymen is recreated in order to offer resistance and ensure bleeding during intercourse. At Rs 20,000 to Rs 35,000, it's not out of reach for the middle-class Indian girl. "The lower class can't afford it and the upper class isn't bothered," says Dr. PK Talwar, a practicing plastic surgeon from New Delhi. It is surely the demographic of the typical Indian woman who chooses to opt for these procedures that is the most surprising. in the middle-east and parts of Europe, women who opt for hymenoplasty are mostly young and Muslim. They have few resources, societal pressures, and that flap of skin could mean the difference between life and death for women who can and have been killed over past physical relationships. In India, on the other hand, while virginity is prized and expected, it has never traditionally been tested. The women undergoing virginity restoration procedures in India these days are neither uneducated nor poor. They are college-going students and financially independent working women. In India, the women who undergo this procedure come from all religions and backgrounds, and typically have a middle-class upbringing. The practice, while experiencing a shift in demographics, isn't new. Its' a commonly known "secret" that young girls sold into prostitution have for decades been offered to clients as "virgins" after their hymens are repeatedly stitched up. In some cultures, midwives would disguise broken hymens with a needle and thread, using parts of membranes from other animals. Dr. Talwar says that virginity today is much less an issue than it was even 10 years ago. "Earlier people were more conservative," he says. "These days most girls have boyfriends or men who marry them know they may have ruptured their hymens by some other factor like sports or cycling." In the 1980s, he says, a large number of women from neighboring countries, as well as from the middle-east, came to India to get these operations done. If it's hard to understand why women would opt for this degrading and patriarchal, not to mention deceptive, surgery, think about this. In a mass wedding ceremony in May this year, in the city of Shahdol, 600 kilometers from Bhopal, brides who signed up for this ceremony organized by the government were forced to queue up and undergo virginity tests. Several women complained, telling the BBC they had felt ashamed and humiliated. When it became an international story, senior administration officials denied all allegations and said no such tests had taken place. While outrageous, this is not surprising. Virginity is prized not just in India, but around the world, and in this country, a woman who isn't a virgin at the time of her wedding risks not only complete rejection by the groom, but also ostracism within her own family and community. The modern equation of sex has become confusing. As boyfriends, men want and expect their girlfriends to be forward thinking, go clubbing and have sex. As husbands, they expect virginity. In the real world, however, women increasingly are no longer virgins, and the focus on a bit of flesh only creates unhealthy, hypocritical, and dishonest relationships that both men and women hold responsibility for. The contrast is most striking. It takes immense independence and courage for a young woman to walk into a doctor's office and ask that he sew up her hymen, a one-hour operation with four to six weeks needed for recovery. It takes an equal amount of fear, repression and hypocrisy to then get into a deceptive arranged marriage. The obsession with virginity is not limited to eastern cultures. Princess Diana was infamously subjected to a test before her wedding, and a string of young women in America have recently auctioned off their virginity on sites like eBay to the highest bidder. Women are now getting surgeries to tighten their private parts in order to make sex more pleasurable, and many are getting hymenoplasty operations as "gifts" to their husbands, in a fast-growing practice that feminists term "genital mutilation." In July 2008, controversy broke out in France when a court annulled a Muslim marriage after the groom complained that the bride had lied about being a virgin. Feminists, lawmakers, and doctors, all got in on the act, with doctors performed surgeries being accused of reinforcing gender bias, profiting from vulnerable patients, and performing hymenoplasty operations on minors without the consent of their parents or guardians. "Morality is an individual thing," says Dr. Talwar. "It's a question of her life. Can I tell a girl that you had sex, now you're damned?" But doctors, too, have personal prejudices. "We don't do these kinds of operations," one replied condescendingly when approached for this article and refused to have her name associated with the practice. Another sighed and said, "Is it really any of my business how she lost her virginity or why she wants to get [the procedure] done?" Virginity, Dr. Talwar points out, is something that the woman is always held responsible for. Men are never quite held up to the same standards. Virginity is just a word. Like honesty, decency, and integrity, it can not be measured in physical terms or by the presence of a layer of skin. Hypocrisy doesn't excuse dishonesty, but it does cause it. How important is the truth when it's only the woman who is subject to scrutiny about her past? Does the blame for deception in a marriage fall solely on the woman when the truth is unwelcome, or worse, unacceptable? Tough questions. And India's women now have to answer. |
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