PARIS — The operation in the private clinic off the Champs-Élysées involved
one semicircular cut, 10 dissolving stitches and a discounted fee of $2,900.
But for the patient, a 23-year-old French student of Moroccan descent from
Montpellier, the 30-minute procedure represented the key to a new life: the
illusion of virginity.
Like an increasing number of Muslim women in Europe, she had a hymenoplasty,
a restoration of her hymen, the vaginal membrane that normally breaks in the
first act of intercourse.
Dr.
Marc Abecassis carries out hymen reconstruction surgery on a 23-year-old French
woman of north-African origin.
Ed
Alcock for The New York Times
“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.”
As Europe’s Muslim population grows, many young Muslim women are caught
between the freedoms that European society affords and the deep-rooted
traditions of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
Gynecologists say that in the past few years, more Muslim women are seeking
certificates of virginity to provide proof to others. That in turn has created
a demand among cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacements, which, if done
properly, they say, will not be detected and will produce tell-tale vaginal
bleeding on the wedding night. The service is widely advertised on the
Internet; medical tourism packages are available to countries like Tunisia
where it is less expensive.
“If you’re a Muslim woman growing up in more open societies in Europe, you
can easily end up having sex before marriage,” said Dr. Hicham Mouallem, who is
based in London and performs the operation. “So if you’re looking to marry a
Muslim and don’t want to have problems, you’ll try to recapture your
virginity.”
No reliable statistics are available, because the procedure is mostly done
in private clinics and in most cases not covered by tax-financed insurance
plans.
But hymen repair is talked about so much that it is the subject of a film
comedy that opens in Italy this week. “Women’s Hearts,” as the film’s title is
translated in English, tells the story of a Moroccan-born woman living in Italy
who goes to Casablanca for the operation.
One character jokes that she wants to bring her odometer count back down to
“zero.”
“We realized that what we thought was a sporadic practice was actually
pretty common,” said Davide Sordella, the film’s director. “These women can
live in Italy, adopt our mentality and wear jeans. But in the moments that
matter, they don’t always have the strength to go against their culture.”
The issue has been particularly charged in France,
where a renewed and fierce debate has occurred about a prejudice that was
supposed to have been buried with the country’s sexual revolution 40 years ago:
the importance of a woman’s virginity.
The furor followed the revelation two weeks ago that a court in Lille, in
northern France, had annulled the 2006 marriage of two French Muslims because
the groom found his bride was not the virgin she had claimed to be.
The domestic drama has gripped France. The groom, an unidentified engineer
in his 30s, left the nuptial bed and announced to the still partying wedding
guests that his bride had lied. She was delivered that night to her parents’
doorstep.
The next day, he approached a lawyer about annulling the marriage. The
bride, then a nursing student in her 20s, confessed and agreed to an annulment.
The court ruling did not mention religion. Rather, it cited breach of
contract, concluding that the engineer had married her after “she was presented
to him as single and chaste.” In secular, republican France, the case touches
on several delicate subjects: the intrusion of religion into daily life; the
grounds for dissolution of a marriage; and the equality of the sexes.
There were calls in Parliament this week for the resignation of Rachida
Dati, France’s justice minister, after she initially upheld the ruling. Ms.
Dati, who is a Muslim, backed down and ordered an appeal.
Some feminists, lawyers and doctors warned that the court’s acceptance of
the centrality of virginity in marriage would encourage more Frenchwomen from
Arab and African Muslim backgrounds to have their hymens restored. But there is
much debate about whether the procedure is an act of liberation or repression.
“The judgment was a betrayal of France’s Muslim women,” said Elisabeth
Badinter, the feminist writer. “It sends these women a message of despair by
saying that virginity is important in the eyes of the law. More women are going
to say to themselves, ‘My God, I’m not going to take that risk. I’ll recreate
my virginity.’ ”
The plight of the rejected bride persuaded the Montpellier student to have
the operation.
She insisted that she had never had intercourse and only discovered her
hymen was torn when she tried to obtain a certificate of virginity to present
to her boyfriend and his family. She says she bled after an accident on a horse
when she was 10.
The trauma from realizing that she could not prove her virginity was so
intense, she said, that she quietly borrowed money to pay for the procedure.
“All of a sudden, virginity is important in France,” she said. “I realized
that I could be seen like that woman everyone is talking about on television.”
Those who perform the procedure say they are empowering patients by giving
them a viable future and preventing them from being abused — or even killed —
by their fathers or brothers.
“Who am I to judge?” asked Dr. Marc Abecassis, who restored the Montpellier
student’s hymen. “I have colleagues in the United States whose patients do this
as a Valentine’s present to their husbands. What I do is different. This is not
for amusement. My patients don’t have a choice if they want to find serenity —
and husbands.”
A specialist in what he calls “intimate” surgery, including penile
enhancement, Dr. Abecassis says he performs two to four hymen restorations per
week.
The French College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians opposes the procedure
on moral, cultural and health grounds.
“We had a revolution in France to win equality; we had a sexual revolution
in 1968 when women fought for contraception and abortion,” said Dr. Jacques Lansac, the
group’s leader. “Attaching so much importance to the hymen is regression,
submission to the intolerance of the past.”
But the stories of the women who have had the surgery convey the complexity
and raw emotion behind their decisions.
One Muslim born in Macedonia said she opted for the operation to avoid being
punished by her father after an eight-year relationship with her boyfriend.
“I was afraid that my father would take me to a doctor and see whether I was
still a virgin,” said the woman, 32, who owns a small business and lives on her
own in Frankfurt. “He told me, ‘I will forgive everything but not if you have
thrown dirt on my honor.’ I wasn’t afraid he would kill me, but I was sure he
would have beaten me.”
In other cases, the woman and her partner decide for her to have the
operation. A 26-year-old French woman of Moroccan descent said she lost her
virginity four years ago when she fell in love with the man she now plans to
marry. But she and her fiancé decided to share the cost of her $3,400 operation
in Paris.
She said his conservative extended family in Morocco was requiring that a
gynecologist — and family friend — there examine her for proof of virginity
before the wedding.
“It doesn’t matter for my fiancé that I am not a virgin — but it would pose
a huge problem for his family,” she said. “They know that you can pour blood on
the sheets on the wedding night, so I have to have better proof.”
The lives of the French couple whose marriage was annulled are on hold. The
Justice Ministry has sought an appeal, arguing that the decision has “provoked
a heated social debate” that “touched all citizens of our country and
especially women.”
At the Islamic Center of Roubaix, the Lille suburb where the wedding took
place, there is sympathy for the woman.
“The man is the biggest of all the donkeys,” said Abdelkibir Errami, the
center’s vice president. “Even if the woman was no longer a virgin, he had no
right to expose her honor. This is not what Islam teaches. It teaches
forgiveness.”
