Virginity today is a bloody business
How did virginity, the physical presence of a membrane, an evolutionary vestige - much like loathsome body hair - become such a matter of trauma and shame for women? Named after the Roman god of marriage, it is a thin vaginal membrane not known to have any biological function. The hymen is anatomically iffy, too - only a quarter of "virgins" bleed at their first sexual encounter. Alas, if other mysteries such as tantric sex or the God Particle kept the masses as preoccupied, we might all be happier and more intelligent. No such luck.
The Indian bridal market is a rude place where anything may be demanded or discussed. Sensible people can see that the demand for virginity as part of a dowry contract is crazy. One can see it stems from a collective psychosis: a lack of affirmation for petty in-laws who want to claim brides as expensive chattel and the only way they may prove possession is through this virginity thing.
As a young girl, a description of virgin bloodletting in Sylvia Plath's 1963 semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, made me quite squeamish but I dismissed it as the author's well-known pathological cynicism. Another account I remember was the sale of a child's virginity to a rapacious mongol in Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden which, though misleadingly had "memoirs" in its title, was fiction. I have never met anyone who said she had bled. Nor have any of my male friends - even the ones who boast a lot - ever reported such an event. So, what is this dubious thing, a hymen?
Only some doctors seem to know for sure. A young suicide at AIIMS was one unlucky example. Her final note said that if she were physically examined, she would prove to be a virgin, which she held was evidence of her husband's homosexuality, the cause of her fatal despair. Though this event was deeply regrettable, it is unusual that virginity be used by a woman to gain advantage over her husband, breaking the rather more common mould of it as a means to deprive women of their sexual autonomy. By outing her husband, she got him in trouble with the law as it stands in India today - against gay rights; she unmanned him in a society that is predominantly chauvinistic, robbed him of privacy over his sex life and therefore his autonomy.
One has read of a thin membrane that connects vaginal walls which breaks due to reasons other than sex also. But neither doctors nor husbands can ever say conclusively whether a girl is a virgin or not. However, deceitful medicos are cashing in by playing with young women's fears and handing out virginity certificates for suspicious, prospective in-laws. This ought to be seen as extortion and these operators taken to task by the authorities.
Surgeons have gone further and are cashing in with hymenoplasty to assist in the deception by placing a membrane constructed from the tissue of the patient's vaginal walls. At examination, the hymen may be discovered as a fake, but the illusion of virginity also gratifies, apparently. Healing can take up to three months, but tell-tale bleeding will occur at the bride's "first" sexual encounter.
Doctors are answering increasing queries about hymen repair surgeries from anxious, religiously conservative families, where girls may be vulnerable not only to unfair treatment and abuse, but even honour killings in the worst cases. Meanwhile, the law is turning a blind eye to hymenoplasties by leaving it to the patient, her family and the physician, thinking nothing of letting scalpels near young girls when they are in one piece. Some even argue that hymenoplasties are in favour of women as hymenlessness might get in the way of a normal married life, which they have a right to. Until recently, before an international furore arose against it, such lame arguments were being employed for perpetuating female genital mutilation (FGM), practiced in some African communities, too. Though, FGM is worse: a long-term physically and psychologically disabling condition built around the same, sick obsession with bridal virginity.
Plastic surgeons usually offer an array of unnecessary, or cosmetic, surgeries and have hymenoplasty camouflaged amidst procedures such as breast augmentation. An article in the New Indian Express did something similar by talking about the increasing rates of plastic surgeries whilst in the same breath mentioning hymenoplasty and labiaplasty - the latter to change the external appearance of the vagina, another mostly useless exercise.
Often, women will volunteer - in secret, of course - to undergo hymenoplasties to save their skins. These operations are quick, and may be performed under general or local anaesthesia depending on how squeamish the poor girls are, or how long they can go away missing from their viciously oppressive families. Patients may bleed while they heal, are told to abstain from sexual activity for three months, but theatricals on the Big Day are guaranteed and that's that. So, if women must allow this violence to be done to them, should it be made mandatory for doctors to record it? But whom might they report it to? In the absence of political will crisis centres, supposedly one-stop shops for vulnerable women have so far failed to come up.
This brutish procedure is illegal in most countries but, the law allows the cultural idiosyncrasies of families who will punitively inflict trauma on young girls, rather than face the fact that it is not a given that a girl may be a virgin; marriage is not a developmental milestone and sex is a choice. Men and women may now become acquainted without the intervention of grown-ups, however calamitous this might be for reputations and family honour.
Women's wombs do not arrive piecemeal with seals intact and how healthy or destructive their relationships or children are, is dependent on their overall maturity and mental health. But girls have never, in history, been given their freedoms on a platter: they have had to wrest it out bit by bit, rebellion after rebellion. They will do it for themselves, but it is the duty of policymakers to offer them the necessary protections so they may go about making their lives more meaningful.