The Global Sociology Blog

Sophie des Deserts, journalist at the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, just won the Hachette Award for her report on a new trend in France among young Muslim women: hymen restoration surgery or hymenoplastie, titled Virgins at all Costs.

“She, the daughter of an Algerian worker, is amongst women in fur here fill up on Botox and silicone. What if her colleagues, police officers, saw her? What if her parents knew? She is here alone with pain firing up between her thighs. This morning, at dawn, Jalia had her hymen sewn up. In a few hours, she’ll put her pair of jeans back on go home in Vitry. Tomorrow, another girl, from Caen, will take her place in the operating room. And another one… They’ll each leave 2,800 Euros at the reception, but, as Jalia explains, “you can’t put a price on virginity.”"

This is France in 2007 and French Muslim women discuss the hymen all over the Internet. Those who have not preserved it intact display their anguish as to what will happen on their wedding nights. It is a new trend that many professionals, from OB-Gyns to workers at the Family Planning have noticed: a new obsession for an intact hymen.

With the rise in religious fundamentalism, OB-Gyns are now faced with demands for virginity certificates and for hymen restoration surgeries, something they had never faced before. Sophie des Deserts is more interested in the microsociology of these young women. Why do they do it? Most of them were born and raised in France, the ultimate secular nation; they are educated professionals running away from emancipation and running toward obscurantism, to the point of going for surgery.

For a woman like Jalia, it’s the same old story. Women have always faked an intact hymen, with chicken blood and poultry livers. Older women monitor the younger ones to make sure they reach marriage with their virginity and therefore the family’s honor, intact. Some families still practice the display of nuptial sheets, stained with blood as proof of the bride’s virginity (translate: that the product was indeed delivered brand new). Nothing has changed, the only difference is that, now, women have a surgical option.

OB-Gyns are reluctant to offer such surgeries, so, women have more luck with plastic surgeons. The surgery itself takes only 20 minutes, under local anesthesia, and is done on an out-patient basis. Marc Abecassis, the plastic surgeon who operated on the police officer, receives about 10 calls per week for this procedure and he operates two women a week. He says he has no problem doing this because it will allow women to have families.

A few OB-Gyns do agree to the surgery and pass it off as another procedure so the women get National Health reimbursement. They do so as a way of solving these women’s potential problems with their families. One of the surgeons makes the argument that there is some hypocrisy in the reluctance to operate. After all, a lot of surgeons agree with breast augmentation but balk at hymen restoration. Both reflect submission to sexist ideologies, one Western, the other one Muslim. He says both are contemptible.

Back to the women. They all tell the same story: the intensive socialization they receive very early on from other women who exercise surveillance, warn the girls against riding bikes. So, the girls adapt, accept to “take it from the back” so as not to be deflowered. They were all warned against the lifelong shame and repudiation they will experience if something happens to “their treasure” as a grandmother calls it.

All describe the experience of being French, Muslim and women as a form of schizophrenia. Several mention the incompatibility of being French and Muslim. The French society has pretty relaxed norms of relationships between young people, sexuality, contraception and marriage. At the same time, they are prisoners of families that tend to retreat back to outdated conceptions of such matters in order to protect themselves from what they perceive to be an assault on their religion.

In many French Muslim communities, there are only 2 kinds of women, the pure ones and the “zinas”, the whores. Men, of course, are allowed to “fuck the entire world”, as one woman puts it, but only the pure women are marriageable. A sexually experienced woman is damaged good. Even one of the women, who describes her fiance as a very gentle man, is quite sure that her lack of virginity would be thrown back in her face in any dispute between them, that if the marriage is not working out, it’s because she was not pure when they got married. So, the surgery will give her peace of mind. So, starting to wear the headscarf and getting surgery. A family planning worker describes this as “putting oneself under communautarian house arrest in one’s mind.”

One of them says she hopes to have a child, a boy, because “being a girl is way too complicated.“