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| Like a virgin for the very second time | |
By MARGARET WENTE Saturday, April 24, 2004 - Page A23 |
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My name is [deleted]. I am 22 years of age. I am writing to you because I need your help. I had something taken away from me that I never thought I would get back until the person who did this to me told me about it.
I was dating this person for a few months and made it very clear that I would like to stay a virgin until I get married. (I have dated guys before and it never bothered them, especially since we were both the same nationality, they understood why.)
He knew and he didn't care. My parents knew that we were seeing each other and it was okay.
I never thought I would be using these words, but I was raped. I come from a very strict Catholic family. I was raised here since I was 11 months old and my parents are originally from Iraq. Can you please help me?
Dr. Robert Stubbs, a well-known plastic surgeon in Toronto, regularly gets e-mails like this. They come from unmarried women who've been date-raped, or had love affairs, or whose hymens have been ruptured in other ways. For them, restoring this membrane to its virginal state is not a lifestyle choice. It is a matter of family honour, of avoiding certain humiliation and disgrace, and sometimes even of life and death.
The women who come to see Dr. Stubbs are navigating the treacherous waters between two cultures -- one that accepts them as sexually autonomous, and one that regards an unmarried woman's virginity as the family's most precious asset.
The women who seek hymen restoration may be Latina, Chinese or Korean. But in Canada, most of them are from the Middle East.
Some, like the e-mailer, have grown up in the West. Others came here to study. Most of them are highly educated. They are equal to men in all ways but one, and in that they still share the status of the most backward peasant.
"The honour of the family and of the men are in between the legs of the woman," says Iman Bibars, an Egyptian woman who has fought to raise the status of women in that country.
Not long ago, a Muslim physician came to see Dr. Stubbs with her future husband. The two had met and fallen in love in Canada, where both had come to obtain advanced degrees. Their families were both highly educated and highly traditional, and they approved of the match. But even though the couple had been living together and having sex for years, they kept separate apartments so that their families wouldn't know.
Now the wedding date was set. The wedding was to take place in their native country. And it is the custom for the groom's mother to inspect the wedding sheets in order to secure the family honour.
Dr. Stubbs offered them a shortcut. "I said, 'Listen, you're a physician. Why don't I save you money and anxiety? I'll draw some of your blood, and you can spray it on the walls if you want. You can make it look as if a lamb was slaughtered.' "
She said no thanks. She wanted to shed her blood the old-fashioned way, out of respect for tradition.
Dr. Stubbs is a trim, neatly bearded man who is notoriously candid -- some might say merely notorious -- for his uncensored views and his enthusiasm for controversial procedures. He made his name (an apt one, as it happens) on penile enhancements. Now he wants to bring hymen repair out of the shadows. "I want to tell my peers I'm not crazy," he says. "I'm not just doing prostitutes and cheerleaders." (He's also campaigning to get his profession's private insurer to change its mind. Because of concerns about soaring liability settlements in the United States, the insurer no longer offers malpractice insurance for this procedure when performed on non-residents of Canada.)
In the plastic-surgery world, there's something of a debate over the ethics of a procedure that offers no physical benefits to the patient, and whose purpose is deceit. But the profession is increasingly inclined to agree with Dr. Stubbs, who argues that hymen repair is not only humane, but moral. Besides, it's relatively simple and complication-free. The trick is done by stitching together the frayed ends of the ruptured membrane or by adding a patch of tissue from the vaginal walls. It takes half an hour. The going rate is $2,500.
In fact, hymen repair is widely performed in secret in the Middle East. Even some religious leaders have given it the okay -- so long as the rupture was truly the result of rape, and not moral turpitude. There, the double standard is universally accepted by both sexes. The bride must be a virgin, but the groom is under no such obligation.
Recently Dr. Stubbs saw a Muslim university student who was born in Canada. "She's the new generation," he says. "Her parents told her she could choose her husband." But she was athletic, and used tampons, and wanted reassurance that she'd bleed on her wedding night. Dr. Stubbs examined her and told her she probably wouldn't. She was mortified, and paid for the operation with the savings from her summer job.
Last June, television's 20/20 broadcast a segment on the boom in hymen repairs. It included an interview with one of Dr. Stubbs's patients, a young woman who used the name Fatima. She, too, plans some day to marry a Muslim man. "I'm not going to feel comfortable to lie to him. But I guess I have to lie to protect the relationship," she said.
Fatima's family came to Canada when she was in her teens. She lost her virginity when she fell in love with a Muslim boy. They had an affair, but weren't ready to get married. He didn't want to ruin her life, and so he paid for the surgery. To make sure the deception would be foolproof, Fatima even visited a local gynecologist during a trip back home. The doctor assured her there was absolutely no doubt about it. She was still a virgin