The Beauty of Artificial Virginity

[Ellipse]

Slate.com
October 06, 2009 10:14
William Saletan
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If you're a woman in a conservative Muslim country, you had better bleed on your wedding night. If you don't, your husband or his family will know you aren't a virgin. For that, you could be beaten or killed.

If you're a man, on the other hand, all you have to do on your wedding night is ejaculate. Nobody expects you to bleed or produce any other proof of virginity.

Some day, this barbaric and hypocritical tradition will end. Until then, the best we can do is fool it. You want blood on your wedding night? We'll give you blood. Fake blood.

For many years, doctors have quietly offered hymenoplasty, a procedure that restores your hymen so you can fake virginity on your wedding night. And now you don't even need a doctor. Joseph Freeman of the Associated Press reports:

The Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, distributed by the Chinese company Gigimo, costs about $30. It is intended to help newly married women fool their husbands into believing they are virgins—culturally important in a conservative Middle East where sex before marriage is considered by many to be illicit. The product leaks a blood-like substance when inserted and broken. Gigimo advertises shipping to every Arab country.

On its Web site, Gigimo explains more about the product:

Artificial Virginity Hymen is created from Kyoto, Japan at 1993. it was first introduced to the locals, then it gets famous and spread to Thailand at 1995 and now available in South East Asia, South Asia and in the Middle East countries. It is mainly made of natural albumin, medical use inflation element and water-soluble base medicinal preparation which have no side effect. Insert this artificial hymen into your vagina carefully. It will expand a little and make you feel tight. When your lover penetrate, it will ooze out a liquid that look like blood not too much but just the right amount. Add in a few moans and groan, you will pass through undetectable.​

Outraged Egyptian lawmakers are demanding a ban on the kit. Freeman reports:

Sheik Sayed Askar, a member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood who is on the parliamentary committee on religious affairs, said the kit will make it easier for Egyptian women to give in to temptation. He demanded the government take responsibility for fighting the product. ... Prominent Egyptian religious scholar Abdel Moati Bayoumi said anyone who imports the artificial hymen should be punished. "This product encourages illicit sexual relations. Islamic culture forbids these relations except within the confines of marriage," Bayoumi said. ... "If this thing enters Egypt, the country is going to go to waste. God protect us," commented a reader on the Web site of Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm Al-Sabie.​

Pause for a moment to consider what these men are asking God to protect them from: a cheap, mass-produced insert that releases fake blood. It's the technical equivalent of a Halloween gag. But to them, this is no gag. It's an offense against God.

In this way, the artificial hymen serves as a useful test of religious idiocy. If a $30 item that leaks fake blood violates your faith so profoundly that you must ban it, then what you have isn't really a faith. It's a fetish. And your fetish won't survive globalization.

Sex within marriage is a perfectly good idea. It encourages commitment, structures relationships, builds a foundation for society, and secures a healthy environment for raising children. But rigid proscriptions against premarital sex are excessive, futile, and unnecessary. They breed hypocrisy and contempt for authority. In the age of the artificial hymen, you can still preach and practice fidelity. Just don't ask God to protect your sick craving for wedding-night blood. She can't and won't.

Virginity fetishism is doomed, boys. Give it up.

http://slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/archive/2009/10/06/the-beauty-of-artificial-virginity.aspx

 

[NormaRegula]

Hmmm..I didn't bleed during my first time. I suspect it doesn't occur in every virgin, either.

Virgin or not, it's appalling that any female must produce such proof...or risk rejection, violence, and in many cases death, should she not feel pain and bleed for the perverted wishes of the followers of the psychopathic Jewish/Christian/Islamic god. Or any religion's god for that matter.

Read somewhere that certain Eastern European Christian couples had a tradition of the best man giving them a vial of chicken blood to stain the wedding night sheets. These sheets were then presented to the bridegroom's parents in the morning after as proof of the bride's virginity. Makes one wonder if the bridegroom's parents resorted to the same tradition.

Sigh. Total insanity.

 

[ramaj]

Hmmm..I didn't bleed during my first time. I suspect it doesn't occur in every virgin, either.

Virgin or not, it's appalling that any female must produce such proof...or risk rejection, violence, and in many cases death, should she not feel pain and bleed for the perverted wishes of the followers of the psychopathic Jewish/Christian/Islamic god. Or any religion's god for that matter.

Read somewhere that certain Eastern European Christian couples had a tradition of the best man giving them a vial of chicken blood to stain the wedding night sheets. These sheets were then presented to the bridegroom's parents in the morning after as proof of the bride's virginity. Makes one wonder if the bridegroom's parents resorted to the same tradition.

Sigh. Total insanity.

total insanity is correct in my opinion, when one is so concerned about blood, what about love? Sounds like an obsession of some sorts.

 

[Hildegarda]

Ironic that they are freaking out about it now. Virginity simulation in those areas of the world has been going on for hundreds of years. "Thousand and one night" has episodes of brides using blood of pigeon chicks to fake the bleeding; or the women would insert in a piece of raw liver before intercourse, which would give the same results. I guess it's something about having a prepackaged product that brings the hypocrisy out in the open.

Read somewhere that certain Eastern European Christian couples had a tradition of the best man giving them a vial of chicken blood to stain the wedding night sheets. These sheets were then presented to the bridegroom's parents in the morning after as proof of the bride's virginity.

I wonder where that was observed and what it really means. Peasantry in Russia, from what I know, wasn't at all concerned about the girl's premarital chastity, which I understand to be more of a traditional way. The youth would all run around and foul around, and many brides would be pregnant before marriage, which was even sometimes seen as a good thing, as it proved the woman's fertility. Similar thing is still a norm in Amish societies. "Bedroom courtship", when a young couple can pretty much sleep together in the parent's house, is permitted; then there's also Rumspringa, a short period in young people's life when they can do whatever they want, party, go out into the world, before making a conscious decision to join the Amish church, get married and settle down.

These kinds of things are possible only in small communities, where 1) everyone knows one another, 2) young people spend time together and girls actually marry their peers, not rich old men, 3) everyone knows who is with whom, and there's no question about marrying your girlfriend if pregnancy is in the works, and 4) no threat of STDs.

The woman's virginity becomes important if the marriage is fundamentally viewed not as a union of a man and a woman, but a contract between two families: the groom as a male representative of the first family, and the family -- the father -- of the bride. In such arrangement woman (together with her dowry) is viewed as a commodity that's changing hands, not an equal partner, and a commodity should be untarnished. That's why this was seen among the nobility, and I think that was in pre-Christian times too, in Greece.

What I'm wondering about is that the roots of it may not be necessarily in Monotheism per se, but in a stratified society where men and women do not have equal rights. E.g., in Mesopotamia things were pretty much the same -- bad -- for women when it came to marriage, and that was a polytheistic society. Or consider Babyoln, where every woman was required to serve in a prostitute in a temple -- different bad (virginity clearly didn't matter to them), but still very little choice and a lot of pressure for women. Although my opinion is not solid, I still have to think it over.

 

[NormaRegula]

Read somewhere that certain Eastern European Christian couples had a tradition of the best man giving them a vial of chicken blood to stain the wedding night sheets. These sheets were then presented to the bridegroom's parents in the morning after as proof of the bride's virginity.

I wonder where that was observed and what it really means.

I read about it some years ago. I think the custom came from Armenia...that was once part of the USSR, located in the Caucasus. Did a quick search for the original article...no luck. However, I did find a few blog blurbs regarding an Armenian virginity custom. (No mention of the best man procuring some animal blood...although some brides would purposely cut another part of their body or have outside help to make a good show of it.)

According to reports, the wedding party and guests would parade through town with a person waving a red apple impaled on a sword. (I don't like thinking about what this means!) The blood-stained sheet from the wedding night is given to the bridegroom's parents...who are allowed to display it. There's also something about delivering a bowl of red apples to the bride's family to symbolize that the bride was indeed a virgin...so long as the sheet is stained.

One blog disputes that the red apple custom is widespread today.

Below are a couple of links:

_http://otarakan.blogspot.com/2009/03/armenian-in-laws-want-virgin-blood.html

_http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarypage.php?did=12581

 

[sid]

It's just sickening to know what women have to go through to satisfy male's ego. And I must thank my partner for clearing this for me too (scientifically) when we met few years ago that it is not necessary for a virgin to bleed. The hymen can break natuarally too especially if you are a physically active person such as involved in sports, even general house work and especially horse riding etc. But the uninformed fools simply cannot get over it partially because this is never taught in the schools or alternate means of sex education. And talk about religion, why would religion teach such things when the one of the main purpose of all religions is to confine women to households and obey men whichever means necessary.

-Sid

 

[Starlight]

Artificial virginity!?! :O
I would say that both party be it the female and the male are living in deception and are allowing this deception to continue!!

 

[Adaryn]

According to reports, the wedding party and guests would parade through town with a person waving a red apple impaled on a sword.

Absolutely charming

Again, there's that focus on the body. They're so concerned with physical virginity, whereas (and sorry if this sounds cheesy), the focus should rather be on virginity / purity of the heart...

 

[Bluestar]

Back in the mid-eighties I was working with an Asian woman (can not remember her native country). She was wearing white everyday for a year and a day. I asked her about it and she said she was purifying herself to marry her fiance. He was a merchant marine and would be back the following year and she was wearing white and doing other purification things in preparation. She also told me that she was well beyond a virgin and this was a custom from her country to bring that "purity" back. I wondered if her fiance was doing something similar out there in the world? I must admit I had my doubts, but who am I to judge.

I am so curious as to why this need of purification before marriage? And isn't it interesting that the color white is symbolic of purity?

According to reports, the wedding party and guests would parade through town with a person waving a red apple impaled on a sword.

Absolutely charming

Again, there's that focus on the body. They're so concerned with physical virginity, whereas (and sorry if this sounds cheesy), the focus should rather be on virginity / purity of the heart...

I am in agreement with a purity of the heart when it comes to love and relationships, or anything that we do for that matter.

Just some input here, it reminded me of her and thought I would share. Thanks.