Wednesday, June 11, 2008

“The man is the biggest of all the donkeys.”

That great insult comes from Abdelkibir Errami, vice-president of the Islamic Center of Roubaix. He was commenting on a French Muslim who recently had his marriage annuled when it turned out that his bride was not a virgin after all. The article also details hymenoplasty, a procedure that could also be called "unscrewing". (A like-new vagina for just pennies! Act now and we'll throw in the new vagina smell free of charge!) It's a somewhat popular procedure. Apparently, there are insecure men who believe strongly that a hymen is a terrible thing to waste.

The donkey in question is one such charmer. Apparently, he thinks that a vagina is a bit akin to a can of beer and that once it’s opened it starts to go flat. He was also anticipating the sensual pleasures of making love to a virgin, the erotic thrill of having sex with a woman who is lying stiff as a board with a deer-in-the-headlights look. Mmrrrrrow!

Fathers in patriarchal religions also often have a weird obsession with their daughter’s hymen. The article talks about one nut-job taking his adult daughter to a doctor in Cairo to make sure she’s still a virgin, and her expectations that he will beat her if she isn’t. Of course, there are those corners of Islam where fathers kill their daughters for having sullied the family honor: as if Psycho Dad strangling his little girl somehow reflects well on them. And then you have those creepy fathers from the backwoods of American Christianity taking their little girls to freakish chastity balls: The Enchantment of Your Daughter’s Un-popped Cherry Cotillion 2008.

It's all bizarre and depressing. Some French people are none too happy that the court allowed the fellow to get an anulment over his wife's virginity; they have condemned the ruling in the name of secularism. But, secularism isn’t the belief that the state should invalidate one religious group’s beliefs to make everyone else more comfortable: that’s actually the sort of thing that secularism is there to avoid. And the alternative- saying that nobody can get married or divorced for reasons that accord with their religious beliefs- is ridiculous. Ultimately, I don’t want the state being in the business of telling people that they have to remain married (especially to such a chauvinist) because we’ve decided that their reasoning is silly.

I am however alright with people calling these men the biggest donkeys of all.

[Note: For the record, I'm going to guess that the man actually called the other fellow the "biggest idiot of all", and the Post translated baudet a bit too literally as "donkey".]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A little more detail on the sordid lies and deceit in the French Virgin Ruling. ;-)

http://beema.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/french-courts-rule-on-virginity/

Rufus said...

Thanks! My sound doesn't work right now, but that looks like a heck of a project you've got going there.