I came in this morning and had gotten a copy of the article referenced here about Muslim women having their hymens reconstructed. I shared it with my friend Hareg who informed me that infibulated women go to the doctor to have their infibulation "tightened up" for the husbands as a holiday gift. (If you don't know what infibulation is, it's when a woman has her clitoris, labia majora and minora cut out and then sewn together to ensure she remains a virgin until she marries. See my post on International Women's Day.)

Y'all, what the fuck? At least Judith Warner knows what time it is.

From today's New York Times.

June 12, 2008, 11:37 pm

Pure Tyranny

Tags: chastity, patriarchy

Righteous indignation is so easy, so pleasant, when you can sit back and fling it overseas.

I had that edifying experience on the D.C. Metro Wednesday morning, reading in the Times about the Muslim women in France who are going to cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacement surgery so that they can bleed as seeming virgins on their wedding nights.

It’s a practice that has, apparently, become relatively common in the immigrant communities of Europe. But, of course, it seems like hair-raising news in a country like ours, where a young woman’s right to do with her body as she sees fit has, for decades, been enshrined as perhaps the most essential part of her God-given human dignity.

As my 11-year-old says, Yeah, right.

Right after I finished reading the Times piece, I called the French Embassy to find out under what conditions French social security would pay for the hymen-restoration procedure. (It’s “mostly done in private clinics and in most cases not covered by tax-financed insurance plans,” said the Times article; “Oh la la!” said the receptionist to whom I relayed my query.)

I then started rifling through my desk. And there, beneath a report showing paid family leave to be on the decline, beneath a Newsweek article on a new children’s book, “My Beautiful Mommy,” that tells the story of a mom who becomes even prettier after a nose job and a tummy tuck, I found the story that the hymen news had immediately brought to mind.

It was also from The Times, from May 19, and featured 70-odd girls, of “early grade school to college” age, with their fathers, stepfathers and fathers-in-law-to-be, at the ninth annual, largely evangelical “Father-Daughter Purity Ball.”

“The evening, which alternated between homemade Christian rituals and giddy dancing” – and which culminated, for at least one father and his daughters, with a dreamy walk in the night around a lake, “was a joyous public affirmation of the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed,” said the Times article.

“From this, it’s only a matter of degree to the man in Austria,” I’d scribbled across the first page.

The “man in Austria,” of course, was 73-year-old Josef Fritzl, who was around that time also making headlines after it was discovered that he had kept his daughter, Elisabeth, 42, locked up in a cellar for 24 years, during which time he’d raped her regularly, and had her bear him seven children.

(“It was a lovely idea for me, to have a proper family … down in the cellar, with a good wife and a couple of children,” he said in his confession.)

Fritzl, a self-described “man of decency and good values,” had imprisoned his daughter after she began staying out all night and drinking. “I had to create a place where I could keep Elisabeth by force if necessary, away from the outside world,” he confessed.

“Fathers, our daughters are waiting for us,” Randy Wilson, one of the ball’s organizers, said at the Colorado Springs “Purity” event. “They are desperately waiting for us in a culture that lures them into the murky waters of exploitation. They need to be rescued by you, their dad.”

I don’t want to take this analogy too far. I don’t mean to imply that there’s any equivalency between Josef Fritzl’s acts and the Purity Ball. Fritzl’s actions were uniquely horrific, and I am not accusing the men who danced in Colorado Springs of any crimes. But there is nonetheless a kind of horror to their obsession with their daughters’ sexuality. There is a dangerous boundary violation contained in their vow “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.” And there is even greater danger to the fact that this particular aspect of the nationwide “abstinence movement” has not been broadly denounced as the form of emotional violence against girls that it indisputably is.

Judith Lewis Herman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, whose work with and writings on incest victims in the 1980s revolutionized the understanding of the crime and its perpetrators, believes that incest, like rape generally, has to be viewed within a wider context of power relations. Incest, she says, is “an abuse of patriarchal power,” a criminal perversion of fatherly control and influence. It is perpetrated, in many cases, by men who present themselves as the guardians of the moral order. And it isn’t always physical; in her 1981 book (with Lisa Hirschman), “Father-Daughter Incest,” she writes that the violation can be emotional, too, as when a “seductive father” oversteps his boundaries and goes places he never should in his daughter’s head.

“Something I need from dad is affirmation, being told I’m beautiful,” said 19-year-old Jordyn Wilson at the ball. “If we don’t get it from home, we will go out to the culture and get it.”

Sexual abuse – judging by statistics mostly based upon reports of incest – has greatly decreased in our country in recent years. From 1992 to 2003, substantiated cases went down 40 percent, according to the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. Lisa Jones, a research professor at the center, says she thinks the impressive decrease isn’t just due to changed reporting patterns or data collection methods. “We feel like it’s very suggestive of a likelihood that there’s a real decline,” she said.

There are many possible reasons for this improvement. But one, I think, that has to be considered is that girls’ and women’s status has risen. Acceptance of sexual assault and insult has declined. In a world where girls and women are stronger, “abuses of patriarchal power” are less tolerable, acceptable, and possible.

Or should be.

In highly secular France, the reaction to the drama over young women’s virginity playing out in Muslim communities has been public and profound. Justice Minister Rachida Dati recently had to fight off calls for her resignation after she upheld a ruling by a regional court that had annulled the marriage of two French Muslims because the bride turned out not to be a virgin.

Our condemnation of cultural practices and beliefs in our own country that violate girls’ and young women’s dignity and most intimate personal boundaries should be no less total. For, when it comes to female chastity, much of what passes for “protection” is nothing less than sick.