Virginity and patriarchy.

Abstract It is no secret that when some marriages are consummated, the virginity of the bride is artificial. Enough young women to delight the gynaecologists with the relevant skills, resort to a minor operation on the eve of their wedding, in order to erase the traces of pre-marital experience. Before embarking on the traditional ceremonies of virginal modesty and patriarchal innocence, the young woman has to get a sympathetic doctor to wreak a magical transformation, turning her within a few minutes into one of Mediterranean man's most treasured commodities: the virgin, with hymen intact sealing a vagina which no man has touched. Curiously, then, virginity is a matter between men, in which women merely play the role of silent intermediaries. Like honour, virginity is the manifestation of a purely male preoccupation in societies where inequality, scarcity, and the degrading subjection of some people to others deprive the community as a whole of the only true human strength: self- confidence. The concepts of honour and virginity locate the prestige of a man between the legs of a woman. It is not by subjugating nature or by conquering mountains and rivers that a man secures his status, but by controlling the movements of women related to him by blood or by marriage, and by forbidding them any contact with male strangers.