For you to understand the basis of my madness, let me ask you a simple question which is actually the basis for this article; did Lama deserve to die?
Lama was only a five year old girl who still thought about nothing else but her Barbie dolls and the bouncing castle in her school playground. A saintly innocent soul who still cried for candies and played dress up with her other cute little friends.
Lama was killed … No, she was maimed; or how would you describe her death being that she was first beaten with canes before being burnt with electric cables after which her nails were torn off and her skull crushed.
Who does that to a five year old I ask? It is very painful that the grim reaper chose no other person as the lieutenant to take Lama’s life but her own biological father, Fahyan al-Ghamdi, a cleric in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
What could have been her offence, the basis for her gruesome murder? Well, Fahyan killed his daughter because he doubted her virginity; the virginity of a five year old!
Lama’s story only typifies the fate that has befallen many other young girls and women across the globe. I’ve read many stories of women in Yemen, Pakistan, Jordan, Afghanistan who have been killed by their own, fathers, brothers and or other male relatives because the ladies lost their prized virginity before marriage. In Yemen, a father was said to have taken a gun and shot his daughter in cold blood on the night of her wedding when her newly wedded groom called to inform the father that he didn’t meet his daughter a virgin.
I’m sure so many women would have suffered the same fate in Yoruba land in times past because in the old Yoruba wedding culture, it was customary for family members to gather at the home of the newly wedded couple at night and with ears wide glued to the door and windows of the couple’s room wait until the man comes out and brandishes a blood-stained white linen as proof of the woman’s virginity. Any woman who has no hymen for her new husband to tear or whose virgin blood refused to flow to stain the sparkling white linen was doomed for the rest of her life. She might be sent off to her father’s house that same night and would have to continue to face constant abuse and live in shame for a better part of the remaining years she has on earth. The same fate still continues to befall women in the Kanjarbhat tribal community in India where a piece of blood-stained cloth is the only measure of virginity. The fear that their girl children might lose their virginity has made so many fathers decide not to send them to school in Kanjarbhat.
For your information, the story is not any different in the so-called “Western world”. An episode of Kalla Facta reveals how parents connive with doctors to carry out virginity tests on their teenage girls against their will in Sweden. Moreover, the fact that some women in the United States of America undergo the hymenoplasty procedure, a surgical reconstruction of the hymen, shows that virginity is also tied to women’s honour in America.
My heart bled for women when I read recently that girls’ hymens come in different sizes; some cover the whole opening; some cover a large part of it; some cover a small part of it and some come totally uncovered. I read that some who even have it covered risk losing it through engaging in some physical tasks if involved in accidents or while playing sports. I learnt that not all ladies bleed during their first sexual encounters as against what I’ve heard. Heavens only know the number of young girls and new brides whose lives have been taken or marred because of our ignorance of the female body.
I wouldn’t have been this pained and angry if we place equal emphasis on virginity for boys like we do for girls; what some scholars call asymmetric virginity premiums. In order to tame girls and their “wild” orgies, we either cut off their clitoris or thread their private parts while we do not place checks on boys’ things to keep them in line.
I am yet to hear of a woman who divorced her husband on her wedding day because she realized he was not a virgin but real-life stories abound of women who were kicked out of their matrimonial homes on the first day they stepped in it because they lost their virginity before marriage or because nature did not endow them with our own ignorant indices of virginity (hymen and blood flow). We hold virginity celebration days to appreciate girls for staying virgins but how many of such programmes do we have for boys? Who cares really? After all, boys will be boys.
We tie the worth of women, their morality and honour to a chunk of meat between their two legs. This high water mark we place on virginity based on moral cum religious grounds and our ignorance of what virginity is, does our world more harm than good.
A good percentage of domestic violence can be traced either directly or indirectly to issues surrounding virginity. Many young and promising girls across the globe like Lama lose their lives in droves because they’re perceived not to be virgins. Girls who were tricked due to their lack of reproductive health education or raped and assaulted often end up being emotionally scarred for life. Such encounters leave them extremely vulnerable, worthless and unable to stand up for themselves or feel the need to be respected in their social and marital lives. Some even end up committing suicide because they’ve been taught that their virginity is their honour and once they lose it, they have lost the essence of life and living.
I do not condemn virginity; I only believe that we need to straighten the way we look at it. To place equal virginity premiums on boys and girls, and to teach both genders that their sexual status; that what goes on between their two legs is not the most important measure of their honour, worth, morality and self-esteem.