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And why oh why might that be?

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Girl auctions off virginity for tons of cash, proclaims she is not being taken advantage of, and concludes with amazement that people would bid so high to help her lose it:

She added: “It’s shocking that men will pay so much for someone’s virginity, which isn’t even prized so highly anymore.”

Classy.

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Rebecca wonders: Is it bad that I’m only semi-outraged at this? So many teenagers have so much sex for so many foolish, empty, short-sighted or just daffy reasons – doing it to raise money isn’t any more morally bankrupt or disturbing, in my opinion, than high school orgies, sex with a stranger while massively drunk, or any number of other things (which is to say, very disturbing).

Not that I’m endorsing this at all. It just seems only a little bit surprising and transgressive, given what’s become the norm these days.

When OBGYNs think they’re helping women but are actually hurting them

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And I’m not talking about abortion. William Saletan defends western doctors who do “hymen reconstructions” to “revirginize” women (overwhelmingly, and in the context of this article, Muslim women) so they don’t face the (sometimes fatal) consequences of not being virgins on their wedding nights. I have very mixed feelings about this.

Certainly, in any individual case, the compassionate and appropriate response may well be to do the operation. Even in situations where women who aren’t virgins (or, in fact, may well be virgins but not have sufficient evidence of this) aren’t in fear for their physical safety, humiliation and ostracism aren’t fun. And if we allow consenting adult women to pay to have saline implanted in their chests or synthetic substances injected into their lips, it’s hard to make a case that hymen reconstruction shouldn’t be done. But every doctor who plays along with this sick worldview helps this sort of treatment of women to limp along for another day.

The “importance” of virginity – an update

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Following this story from France. Please take the time to read this. And explain to me why, as far as I can tell, North American feminists have nothing to say about this issue.

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Andrea adds: 

In my culture, not to be a virgin is to be dirt,” said the student, perched on a hospital bed as she awaited surgery on Thursday. “Right now, virginity is more important to me than life.

Um, how to say this. Clearly it is not, because you had sex. And now want to pretend that you did not. 

As for why North American feminists have nothing to say, that much is clear. It is not Christianity they would be criticizing, so why bother. 

It’s nice to know we care

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I’ve been away on vacation for a while (yes, very nice thank you), and did not get a chance to keep an eye on this story, which I had briefly noted as I was fleeing town for the beach.

The annulment of a young Muslim couple’s marriage because the bride was not a virgin has caused anger in France, prompting President Sarkozy’s party to call for a change in the law.

The decision by a court in Lille was condemned by the Government, media, feminists and civil rights organisations after it was reported in a legal journal on Thursday. Patrick Devedjian, leader of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement, said it was unacceptable that the law could be used for religious reasons to repudiate a bride. It must be modified “to put an end to this extremely disturbing situation”, he said.

The case, which had previously gone unreported, involved an engineer in his 30s, named as Mr X, who married Ms Y, a student nurse in her 20s, in 2006. The wedding night party was still under way at the family’s home in Roubaix when the groom came down from the bedroom complaining that his bride was not a virgin. He could not display the blood-stained sheet that is traditionally exhibited as proof of the bride’s “purity”.

Mr X went to court the following morning and was granted a annulment on the grounds that his bride had deceived him on “one of the essential elements” of the marriage. In disgrace with both families, she acknowledged that she had led her groom to believe that she was a virgin when she had already had sexual intercourse. She did not oppose the annulment.

It appears, as you’ll see if you read the rest of the story as well as this one, that in France at least feminists and others are properly outraged and prepared to fight this “dangerous aberration”. I’m no expert on French marriage laws, but I never thought being in a position to “prove” one’s virginity by bleeding on the bedsheet was an “essential element” of marriage – or that it ought to be.

So my question to Canadian women’s rights groups and assorted feminists is: If you’re able and willing, more or less at the drop of a hat, to dig up decades-old cases of women being prosecuted in the United States for ending the lives of their unborn children as one of the main arguments against Bill C-484, can you say a little something against a small but tenacious portion of a religious culture that promotes and enforces such barbaric and retrograde views of women that failure to bleed on the wedding night is some kind of dishonour?

Anybody?

Students of virginity

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Promiscuity sans consequence is, at its core, a masculine concept. Women require certain measures, such as a regular dose of hormones (AKA: the pill, the patch, the shot, etc…) and when those fail, they claim abortion is a woman’s ultimate right. In other words, modern feminism is all about being more like men. There’s a certain disdain for the reproductive system of a woman, until she’s good and ready to “activate” it. Being a woman is all too inconvenient unless we have access to products and services that keep our ovaries and uterus in check.

Enter Janie Fredell, advocate of premarital abstinence and president of Harvard’s “True Love Revolution.”

If men are commonly more promiscuous than women, it is only because the culture allows it, she said. Fredell was here to turn society around. “It’s extremely countercultural,” she said, for a woman to assert control over her own body. It is, in fact, a feminist notion. Conventional feminism, she explained, teaches that control of your body means the freedom to have sex without consequences — sex like a man. “I am an unconventional feminist,” Fredell said, in the sense that she asserts control by choosing not to have sex — by telling men, no, absolutely not.

Hmm… Is it possible, if women are less willing to “give the milk away for free”, that men will be more likely to practice abstinence, too? If for no other reason, the math makes me think so.

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