IN 1993 something was cooking in Turkey and it wasnt exactly Turkish Delight. A report was being prepared by a human rights group on a terrible, widespread practice: "virginity exams". These were forcibly performed by the police on women in their custody, by state officials on women applying for government jobs and by families on prospective brides. The future of these women depended upon whether their hymen was intact or not and the state participation in this humiliation of women only further legitimised the social and legal norms of the country that had always maintained a strict control over the behaviour of its women. This absolute invasion of womens privacy, this atrocity was prevalent for years before it was outlawed by the Turkish government only as recently as January this year. But whether this law will be enforced or not is anybodys guess!
The entire world is feverishly preparing for the biggest party ever, the most glitter and confetti-laced global event supposed to throw us into the arms of the brave new world of the new millennium and we still havent grown up about sex. In such diverse nations as China, Italy and India, female virginity is considered a matter of family honour, an invaluable Ming vase to be jubilantly broken to pieces only by the husband! The natural sexual urge in a woman is of little importance and if anything to be suppressed and, curbed, like a bad habit.
About 50 years ago, the interaction between men and women was limited mostly to a few relationships: husband-wife, father-daughter, mother-son, bhabhi-devar on the one hand and lover-nautch girl on the other. Today the social bridge has broadened to include many more kinds of relationships in the workplace and the social circuit. And even though the social bridge of pre-marital sex remains quite strong and cannot be bypassed easily, we have begun to at least speak about it instead of childishly pretending that it just doesnt exist.
Despite this, by and large the fear and ignorance surrounding sex in our country, especially among the middle class, is so vast that the general belief is that a man gathers vitality by sowing his wild oats while a woman only loses her crystal-pure innocence by "opening her legs" before marriage and becomes an awful symbol of an emotionally scarred and sagging youth! While virginity has been almost a non-issue for the larger population of the lower and upper class Indian women, its the middle-class woman who has always placed a premium on it.
Recently, however, many middle-class women have somewhat started relaxing about it, at least secretly. I find that in the last 7-10 years most of the young, urban women Ive met have been single but not virgins. Mostly working women, some hide the fact while many dont even bother to do that. They dont feel that something precious has been robbed from them nor do they feel guilty about "defiling" some "sacred" part of them. Many want to marry the men they have sex with but if for some reason they dont end up doing that, they are sane enough to know that their sexual expression was a natural urge in their bodies, a healthy sign of vitality, and certainly not an aberration.
I think many of them would even feel it might be sinful not to take a relationship that makes them feel the exhilaration of love to its extreme expression of intimacy. And just for a few minutes if we all stop to think about it, and ask ourselves a simple question-can the life-giving act of sex, the human behaviour because of which the likes of you and I and Gandhiji, and Jhansi ki Rani, and Sai baba and Abraham Lincoln and Rabindranath Tagore were born, be considered bad just because it happens to be outside of some social rituals? Can we in all fairness answer "Yes?"
Furthermore, they feel theres too much happening in an ever-shrinking but magically-moving world and there are many things worthier of being obsessed with than the preservation of a piece of tissue called the Hymen which they had the misfortune of being born with. This so-called seal husbands are called upon on wedding nights to ensure, exists.
Is she a woman or a Coke bottle, whose seal must be intact at the time of purchase for the maximum freshness? She is intelligent enough to examine the fact that some of the worst social consequences of a culture that denies sexual freedom are war, drug abuse, suicide, loneliness, rape. And that there are far worse things she could do than losing her virginity! Like ignoring the real problems gnawing at the nation.
In a country of one billion people where most people live below the poverty line, and politicians from the "discriminated" class shamelessly spend crores on their childrens weddings, where truckfuls of provisions for the cyclone-hit lie idle for days while the victims suffer because theres no government machinery to manage the crisis, where fundamentalist killers are on the loose after murdering Christians and Muslims in the most brutal manner possible, where a case takes an average of 18 years to come to trial in a court of law, where the atrocities of history have only grown, how, I ask, how can we seriously give so much importance to an issue like virginity? When we can tolerate so much horror all around us, how come we cant bear to become more generous and human on the subject of sex? How come, when in the final consequences in Tagores words, a "name-absorbing, shame-absorbing, fame-absorbing pile of dust" is what each of us is certainly going to turn into one day?
( The writer is a young filmmaker known for her women-oriented films .)
