Disclaimer: I apologize for the potential ‘vulgarity’ or touchiness that comes with talking about women and sexuality in advance, but I don’t believe in holding back on issues that need to be in the light. You can turn away now, but if you don’t, please go in with an open mind. Be critical, but be open.
My friend and I went to a film festival the other night to see a documentary. There were two playing but the one which stole my heart was the one on the topic of women (particularly in Egypt). Egypt borders Jordan at the very, very southern tip of the country, so it feels pretty close to home. The film depicted the current realities of the sociological roles of men and women and the stigma against the latter. We’ve all heard of the “subjugation of women in the Middle East” and I’ve never been convinced it was at it has been portrayed in the US, now I know why. I came to Jordan to answer many questions for myself because it is hard for me to “take your word for it”. Instead, what I’ve found are not answers but simply more questions, specifically regarding the topics touched upon in this movie. The narrator was too afraid to show her own face in the making of the movie for fear of negative familial backlash.
The film was a series of questions asked to ordinary Egyptians on the streets to find out what the realities for women regarding their sexuality are. She asked:
“If you found out your daughter had slept with a boy before marriage, how would you react?” It was the same answer over and over.
“Well of course, I’d kill her.” I wasn’t sure if I was more disturbed by the clapping and laughing in the local audience or the constant repetition of this statement in the film “How would you kill her?” ..Poison, strangulation, beating, stoning…
“If you loved your girlfriend very much and you found out she had slept with someone else before you, would there be hope for the relationship?”…
“If I loved her very much? Mmmm..sorry, no, there’s just no way.”
They showed how in Egypt the situation in the family regarding girls is that (obviously they would rather have boys) and that girls are often treated in an emotionally detached, cold and unloving way. As a result, the necessity for attention and love is filled when a boy tells her she is beautiful and loves her. She falls; she’ll do anything, even sleep with him. Then he will dump her for being a slut and her family will kill her for fulfilling her need for attention.
It all sounds barbaric, and before it gets any better, it gets much worse. Realities in Egypt are that anywhere from 78-97% of women are circumcised. Every statistic you look up will reaffirm this fact. There are three types of circumcision and the most brutal is the kind where you are entirely sewn up so that you cannot let out urine or blood. If this occurs, it will build up in the stomach and you will drown in your own fluids. This is not a rare occurrence. The documentary visited a hospital where the nurse being interviewed explained that a father in a city in rural Egypt saw that his daughter’s belly was growing and he was going to kill her. She had never even had her period. She swore and swore she had done nothing wrong, and wasn’t pregnant so he took her to the hospital just to see if her hymen was in place. They told him that due to the shape of hymen she had in fact had her period, multiple times, but that she had not been able to bleed through. They said all they would need to do is make a little incision to save her life and it would be all over. The father asked, would you be able to restore the hymen after? The doctors said they could not. He said, she will not have the surgery then. The doctors said she will die. The father said “She will die with pride and honor.” That is exactly what she did in the room of the ER not long after.
In case you never had Sex ED, the hymen is just a translucent film part of female genitalia that is easily broken through physical or other activity such bike riding, horseback riding, walking etc without even knowing. The unfortunate thing is this is the only part of the body which matters for a girl in Egypt. If you do not bleed on your wedding day, you are dead. Literally. You can bet that day is not the happiest of your life.
Men, of course, have no way of proving whether they are virgins or not, so they fully take advantage of the system and when the narrator asked “What defines a man’s honor?” The boys being interviewed laughed and said “What defines a man’s hon- HA!! Nothin’!” And the men in my audience cracked up, clapped… I was not amused. The hymen is God’s Seal on a woman. Burst that seal early and you’ve defiled God. This is the logic I do not understand. You have no place defiling God’s prize. If you are going to enforce it when you are fathers of daughters, you have to enforce it when you are the fathers of boyfriends, or else it just does not work.
Of course I did not live this experience, so I cannot confirm anything with my own two eyes. What I can confirm on the other hand is a conversation between my friend here, and a ‘peer language tutor’ we are all assigned (if we want). We are supposed to use these local students at our university to help us with our language skills, but it seems to (for some of us) turn into a cultural peer tutor instead. From the conversation, there were so many questions I had answered about the realities here, in Jordan, in her eyes.
I will not use her name, nor quote her word for word, but will give you the gist of the conversation. It was also held which much more finesse and delicacy, but to get the point across, I have simply outlined the questions asked.
“What is going on with the full veil? Why do some women cover themselves head to toe with or without an eye slit?”
First, those are called niqabs. The niqab is worn by women for a couple of reasons. It can be because her father is a Sheik or someone higher up in the Islamic community and then it is just a given she will be covered when she reaches University age and from then on. Otherwise, there are two reasons which I find most intriguing. The peer tutor said, sometimes, if she is too beautiful, deemed so by the father, so she must cover. Otherwise, if she has scars on her face or is ugly, she will cover for herself.
“How do you recognize someone in a niqab?”
She wasn’t sure, she never had a friend with one, but she would imagine that it is from her accessories, bags, eyes (potentially), walk and “body shape”.
“Why do you cover?” (She wore a hijab, headscarf and relatively tight clothing)
She chose to veil on her own, her family is liberal and she is the only one who covers. She took a class on Islam in college and when she found Islam, she felt so much safer. She said she covers to protect herself from the harassment of men (I can empathize), but also as a sort of personal pact with God. She also has a boyfriend. She said her boyfriend is not in college so her father said they can never marry, even in her liberal family.
“Do you and your boyfriend kiss?”
Yes, they kiss, and sometimes they “touch”, but never sex. Sex is sort of taboo in Jordan. It’s sort of okay to do maybe if you aren’t married, but you’ll have to be liberal and have a liberal boyfriend who won’t dump you after. Hymen reconstructive surgery is VERY popular in Jordan; only for the purpose of bringing honor to her husband should the day arrive. She once dated an American who said for the relationship to continue, they would have to be more intimate and possibly have sex, she couldn’t believe it. We will come to this later.
“Regarding your style, we notice a lot of different one’s here. One such as the Jilbab, why do you not wear that and wear modern clothes etc?”
A couple reasons, the jilbab (the trench coat dress of sorts I referred to earlier) is hot. And it’s hot in Jordan. (Okay, so what about in the winter time?). Well the thing is, once you wear a Jilbab, you are making a pact with God. You can’t wear it once, twice or three times and then decide you aren’t going to wear it anymore. It’s a lifetime thing, and if you take it off, people will talk about you and be very put off. She might wear one when she’s older, but not yet.
The fathers control a lot of the affairs, so do the mothers, but especially the father. We asked about the reasons that we see some girls in tight, tight clothes and a hijab. She laughed and said that usually it is a symbol the father wants the daughter to wear, and so long as she is wearing the hijab to cover the hair (the symbol of beauty?) he doesn’t really care about anything else. This is usually a moderately liberal father. What interested me about this point was that obviously the father doesn’t really care what the daughter is wearing, because she is still revealing her body shape. It can then be concluded that he is only enforcing it because he is afraid of the judgment of others for letting his daughter run around without one. Preserving family honor here is crucial. Number 1. This is an amazing cycle. We will return to this in a bit.
We asked her if she had any questions regarding the U.S.
Her first question was “Well, I watch a lot of American movies and t.v. shows, listen to music etc, why is it not okay for a girl to be a virgin?”
If you were asked this question based on the semi-accurate portrayal of college life in movies such as American Pie, what would you say? “No it is… um… it’s just nobody happens to be a virgin before marriage?” The answer given by my friend was that America is obsessed with sex and sexuality. That’s our culture, it is embarrassing, but even kids on our program are complaining because “oh my god, I have to wait 4 months before I get laid!” Can you imagine…?
We live in two very different worlds. Our prizes in the U.S. need to be instantaneous. We need pleasure and gratification now. This is because it is not a country predominantly ruled by religious abstractions and thus we live for the now, not the tomorrow. My friends and I were discussing Max Weber’s the Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism. The idea in this work (inspired by Calvinist thoughts) claims that the Protestant ethic (which predominates in the US) views material and economic success as a sort of gift to God, a promise of salvation. We view the now as important because we are doing God a favor by being economically successful. Otherwise, we are atheists and view the now as important because there is no tomorrow.
Here, Islam is quite strongly concerned with the afterlife, and thus honor today will result in all the riches in the world tomorrow. We are being successful today in a different way, by preserving honor, not making money. We want to do right and be rewarded for it, and dishonoring the family is all it takes to throw off that balance. Women understand this, want to do right by God, and most are willing to give up the pleasures of sex with random men to preserve their and their family’s honor. And keep in mind that women are not killed the way they are in Egypt here, nor are they circumcised, but they still will not use tampons for fear of breaking their hymen (explains a lot about the lack of them in this country- a realization that recently blew my mind).
Killing women for this “crime” is entirely unjustifiable, of course, to us, and I will not be defending it. But the rationale is that it will do the woman better to be dead than to live eternally with the shame, and no one will marry her, her family will disown her and she will have no friends. This is not so much in Jordan, once again, but in Egypt, the Sudan and Saudi Arabia, this is actually quite commonplace. On the other hand, many Jordanian girls are more than willing to make this sacrifice. “Why is it so strange for women to be virgins in the US?”
Why? We are denying freedoms of sexuality? Women here are protecting their bodies, they say. One day they will be mothers because they believe that is important. It is looked down upon for a woman to smoke here because they want to be healthy; they want to be a safe space for their children to grow. That doesn’t mean women are relegated to the home. Many women are successful here. They just want to be healthy and STD-free when the day comes.
Keeping in mind that death for betraying the pride of the family is limited to only a very small percentage of Muslim countries (still with many women put to death falsely because no one understands anatomy and the obsession with seeing the blood at breakage point is crucial) we have to think in the shoes of a Muslim. It is not easy if you are not thinking this way, and you need to in order to not sit wherever you are with a stern face and shake your head.
In America, we use women as symbols of sex to sell things. We dress as women in a certain way for a certain purpose. Don’t think we put on makeup only because it makes us feel better. If we had no one to attract, if we weren’t constantly doing a mating ritual dance through the clubs and streets of New York, we would not wear thigh length dresses out. It is not okay to be a virgin in high school today, or expect to be one without being ridiculed. Women are prude if they don’t and sluts if they do. Music videos do not depict business women arguing in a board meeting with her Gap pants on. They show her shaking everything she is worth in a Miami club, showing her lips, her boobs, her butt and her sexy heels. She will give you pleasure now. Girls have eating disorders (at least five million of them, which is two million more than the country in second place) at a rate unheard of in other countries because they have to sell themselves to you. Are we much better? We destroy women emotionally, physically, and if you’ve ever worked in the adolescent unit of a psychiatric hospital, you know the pressure can break them down to the point where they down half a bottle of Clorox to call it a day.
We are not so superior and it is destructive to our community. You cannot compare, you cannot claim one is worse, one is better. Our societies differ in their need for integrity, versus the need to be financially successful. Our two cultures are collectivism and individualism personified. You see it walking down the street. It comes down to family or business. Family matters more than anything here. Keeping it strong, keeping it together, keeping it proud.
As a result, my friends and I have come up with a simple plan for the Middle East and especially North African countries whose women may suffer. Sex education. It seems ridiculously simple but honestly, my friends and I just spent the better part of an hour figuring out on Google what exactly the hymen was, where it was, what it did, if it could be repaired, and what can break it because we had no idea. We were all educated in western countries and go to top liberal arts and Ivy League schools in the US. But we didn’t freaking know about our own anatomy. It is embarrassing, you might be embarrassed that I’m even bringing it up, but that is half the problem. We are so worried about the thoughts of others and personal embarrassment of discussion that we fail to educate.
If we mandated a sexual education course, especially for the men, it would change everything. They would understand from an early age the consequences of destroying something scared in this society. Let it be sacred, let them be safe and abstinent, we aren’t trying to revolutionize the world. Lack of freedom for you is just common sense for them. If we told men that this part of the body can break at any point, and that the women might not bleed on their wedding night, a lot of lives would be spared. Women may think they’ve done something wrong because they don’t know either. Show them how different women are shaped differently and show them the effects of female circumcision so they won’t force it upon their daughters. It is banned in Egypt, actually. So people resort to friends without anesthetic and sanitary anythings to mutilate their daughters’ genitals. No one understands that if you have anal sex (because it’s not “real sex”) that it can spread disease ( isn’t it ironic that AIDS is such a big deal in Africa when circumcision is prominent in just about every single African country ((check a map if you don’t believe me)) Is that coincidence?).
Just a little piece of translucent film. Look at all the fuss it causes. A little education on the realities of anatomy would make a world of difference. I am so appreciative that our peer tutor was able to be so frank and open about the realities for girls here. I am embarrassed for my country on the other hand, when the cab driver tries to teach me the word black and says “like Nigger!” and when I say it’s not okay to say that, he says “but you say it in all the movies! Like Will Smith and Bad Boys!” or when people ask me if I party like in American Pie 2. These are representation of our country, and if you live there, you will know they aren’t false. We are hyper-sexualized and materialistic. Who is in the right? Who is in the wrong? Are you right because you believe in an ultimate freedom of everything controlled by nobody because here that is seen as primitive. That is seen as barbaric because you are degrading your own people, you are using your women as material things, they are slaves to you and your culture.
Things look a little different on the other side of the hill.
