Today’s journal tunnels into unusually (non-financial) sordid depths, discussing hymenoplasty among French Muslims looking to marry. Any of several procedures that recreate or simulate an in-tact hymen, it’s usually intended to convince your next penetrator he’s the first. This canard may mean the difference between social inclusion and ostracism from societies that prize (female) chastity.
Debate over these procedures, gender-biased expectations of virtue, and secular French society’s treatment of religion-inspired judgements were touched off anew by this:
A court in the northern city of Lille in April annulled a marriage between a French engineer who had converted to Islam and a French woman of North African origins, after the husband discovered on their wedding night that his bride wasn’t a virgin.
Dismissing the roles of sexism, secular sexual norms or any other extraneous cultural forces played, the court and the groom’s lawyer, Pascal Labbée, considered mainly the deception (which the wife admitted):
…the court reached its decision on the grounds that the union had been formed under false pretenses. “This is about lying. Not about virginity,” Mr. Labbée said.
I think the anti-court protests are misplaced. It’s hard to argue marriages shouldn’t be annulled over outright deception about something one spouse considered a deal-breaker and specifically discussed prior.
What is to be done though, with this system seeming to force deception as the most viable answer to a double-standard; an outcome where many women have to gamble their livelihood on a medical gimmick in subjugation to a man who mayn’t have been so virtuous himself?