http://english.alarabiya.net/views/2012/03/19/201748.html
On March 8, I saw the then-proud 25-year-old girl, who took the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to court over virginity tests conducted on several female protestors arrested during a sit-in one year ago, at a International Women’s Day march. On March 11, I saw that same now-broken girl trying to come to terms with a court ruling that acquitted her assailants. In those couple of days, I saw Egyptian women take a nose dive from the peak of hope to the bottom of despair. Obviously, I am no exception.
It was not just the shocking fact that a man who forced a woman to take off her clothes and took the liberty to embark on such a flagrant violation of her body was suddenly absolved of all blame. Nor is it about the mindboggling fact that the senior military officers who had earlier admitted that virginity tests are a common procedure with female detainees are now treating the matter as a figment of the victim’s imagination. Not even the sickening fact that she lost the case because she could not remember the name of the prison warden and was not able to determine the rank of the doctor-conscript who examined her. And, believe it or not, it is not the simple fact that she is a woman.
A compulsory virginity test is a form of physical abuse and this, for me, is like rape in the sense that both are not really sexual acts, for even in the most conservative of societies there are so many ways of having sex that do not involve the humiliation of the second party. Therefore, the culprit in the two is not really different from a wife beater, for the three crimes come in handy owing to one single assumption: the weakness of the object of the act whether physically and socially. The three of them are also an easy outlet for a terribly insecure person who is desperate to feel powerful and has no other means to do it except by physically prevailing over another person who is not likely to resist and with whom emerging victorious is a finished business. By virtue of their alleged vulnerability, women feature as the perfect candidates of such violations, but that is not the case all the time.
Men, too, are often subjected to abuse that can be seen as sexual when they are placed in a situation where they are the helpless party, sodomization in police detention being the most typical example. Whether male or female, the victim is meant to be humiliated in the worst possible way and there is nothing more effective than sexual-oriented repression. I am not quite sure why anything related to private parts is more traumatic than electrocution or beating, but I guess it is more cultural than physical because such acts violate the sanctity of the body as perceived by females who are always expected to preserve their chastity and by males who associate any assault of a sexual nature to loss of manhood. Of course, this is much more accentuated in conservative countries that tend to stick to these fixed conceptions of what makes a woman precious and a man worthy of respect.
As much as virginity tests are all about women, they are not really so and as much as the verdict that implicitly endorses them dealt a fatal blow to women’s rights, it did not really do so. Virginity tests are about humanity and the verdict is simply the latest addition to an already deplorable human rights record. It took me such a strenuous effort to see the girl breaking into tears upon realizing that her degradation was adorned with the official stamp as a human being rather than a woman and even though this might sound so un-feminist, I see it as the most advanced form of feminism. I believe that if I focus on the fact that the victim was a woman and turn this fact into the crux of the matter, I will be indirectly supporting that fixation on women’s sexuality as untouchable and I will be, like most people around me, not as shocked when a woman is beaten up or verbally abused as when she is sexually assaulted. I, therefore, made the conscious decision of seeing the girl who was tested for virginity as one more Egyptian deprived of the most basic of rights to which citizens of any decent democracy are entitled. This, however, made me come to a quite depressing conclusion, for looking at this case as part of a much bigger picture made it just another testimony to a floundering revolution that has so far been unable to achieve any of the goals for which it erupted, on top of which was human dignity.
Yet, on a second thought I realized it didn’t look that bad after all and I even reached the point of believing that there is no reason why the girl should be no longer proud or why those supporting her should feel broken. In fact, if this lawsuit and any similar ones have any positive side to them, it is definitely the documentation of a series of violations to which Egyptians are subjected and if this verdict and any equally unjust ones serve the revolution in any way, it is definitely through shedding light on desperate attempts at squashing the revolutionaries. The more lawsuits and verdicts of that type are made known to the public, the uglier the face of the current ruling authorities appears.
This girl was not really defeated as she appeared to be not only because her courage is even more highlighted than it has ever been, but because she just hammered one more little nail in the coffin of the military council which was not even smart enough to indict one person in return for making an entire institution, whose reputation has already been compromised for quite a while now, look a tad better. Hence, she defeated them twice: first, when she, through filing the lawsuit, proved that she was not intimidated and that what they did to crush her actually made her stronger and second, when she, through losing the case, became a live demonstration of a tyrannical rule and a politicized judiciary.
At the end of the day, it is not she that was abused, for whatever they did to her they did to the entire country in her person … and more. While she was forced to strip naked and had her genitals groped and her body prodded by men who claim they would rather die before seeing “their” women touched, Egypt was being deflowered by those who claim to be its guardians. Deflowering, like the virginity test, does not make a woman the victim of a sexual act but makes a human being the sufferer of a brutal physical and psychological infringement and makes a nation the subject of a sweeping invasion that is not necessarily led by outside enemies. Deflowering, unlike what is commonly believed in our part of the world, is an act that disgraces no one but the sadist perpetrator and is redressed by neither a hymenoplasty nor the demonization of the victim. It is only when the culprit gets what he deserves and preferably keeps out of the victim’s sight so that she can be given the chance to get some healing from a past everyone around her calls shameful and build some defenses for a future everyone around her believes is bleak.
Otherwise, the deflowering act will never be the last stop for it is bound to be followed by others of a similar, yet more traumatic, nature.
And let us always remember that if deflowering by definition happens only once, rape can recur as long as the rapist is alive and the raped is helpless.
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