Virginity Tests in Egypt as a Form of Torture

A colleague and a reader of this blog just left a link to the following horrible piece of news from Egypt:

Amnesty International has today called on the Egyptian authorities to investigate serious allegations of torture, including forced ‘virginity tests’, inflicted by the army on women protesters arrested in Tahrir Square earlier this month.  After army officers violently cleared the square of protesters on 9 March, at least 18 women were held in military detention. Amnesty International has been told by women protesters that they were beaten, given electric shocks, subjected to strip searches while being photographed by male soldiers, then forced to submit to ‘virginity checks’ and threatened with prostitution charges. ‘Virginity tests’ are a form of torture when they are forced or coerced. "Forcing women to have ‘virginity tests’ is utterly unacceptable. Its purpose is to degrade women because they are women," said Amnesty International. "All members of the medical profession must refuse to take part in such so-called 'tests'."

Obligatory gynecological exams aimed at shaming women for being sexually active and forcing them to hate the fact of having been born female are something that, unfortunately, I know very well firsthand. In the Soviet Union, we were subjected to forced gynecological exams since the age of 11 or twelve. Often, people conducting such tests on pre-teen girls were young male students of med schools. You can imagine how traumatic it is to be pawed and ogled by twenty-year-old men when you are at that age.

Later on, if one was getting a college education while being female, one was forced to undergo gynecological exams in order to be allowed to continue as a student. Such exams were extremely invasive and often resulted in women being shamed for being sexually active. Sometimes, spurious medical diagnoses were invented and women were obligated to go through painful and completely unnecessary medical procedures to get "cured" from illnesses they never had.

Forced gynecological procedures are one of the most popular methods used by repressive regimes to coerce and terrorize women. It horrifies me that this is now happening to the women of Egypt.

Women Rights in Post-Mubarak Egypt

It turns out that I was right when I wrote that there was a deep vein of misogyny underlying the recent protests in Egypt. The reality of women in post-Mubarak Egypt looks grim: 

Only days into the post-Mubarak era, many women's rights activists have begun to feel suspicious that the national umbrella they rallied under, whose slogan was democracy, equality and freedom for all Egyptians, may be leaving them out. Their disillusionment began when no women were selected by the military council to be among the 10-member constitutional committee responsible for making constitutional revisions. Another disheartening setback that raises questions about the future of women's rights in Egypt is the return of sexual harassment to the streets.

Any country that does not have a "wall of separation" between the state and a religion that was created by men for men in order to subject women (any of the three major monotheistic religions fits this description) will always end up turning into an anti-women cesspool. A country that has "a state religion" is hopeless. No amount of street protests, revolutions, tweets, and quasi-liberal gushing will help it become any less anti-women. 

The first step on the way towards progress always consists of putting religion in its place and getting it out of state affairs. The place of a religion is in the mosque, the synagogue, the church, etc. A country that is not prepared to acknowledge this is doomed to barbarity.

Understanding Other Cultures

Yesterday, I happened to attend a presentation on Egypt conducted by a brilliant Egyptian colleague. After her talk, an equally brilliant American colleague asked:

"Could you talk a little about diversity in Egypt?"

"About what??" she asked, looking bemused. This colleague's English is perfect, so it wasn't a linguistic problem. It was a cultural one.

"About diversity," the American professor answered. "Everybody keeps talking about Egypt as if its people were one. They forget about the diversity of the population."

"But we are one," the Egyptian colleague responded. "We are all the people of Egypt, one nation, one people."

This is precisely why it is wrong to try to impose one's own catchwords, cultural constructs and concepts on other cultures. Talking about democracy, diversity and multiculturalism when referring to Russia, Egypt, Latin America, etc. is a waste of time. It is an equal waste of time to try to impose the concepts that have wide currency in Russia, Egypt, or Latin America onto other cultures. Cultural differences exists. They don't make anybody better or worse than anybody else. They just are. We will never understand what is going on in other countries until we get rid of the desire to fit different realities into a set of familiar concepts.

What Really Happened in Egypt?

So this is what I just read on Echidne's Blog:

On Friday February 11, the day Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a "60 Minutes" story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy. In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.

This tells me that once again we have been sold a bill of goods by the media on what happened in Egypt. All these articles, newscasts, tweets and blog posts on how the people of Egypt bravely struggled for democracy and against a nasty tyrant make very little sense if this is what really was happening at the time. I wonder how all of those people who sent out celebratory tweets on February 11 about how they were peeing themselves with delight now feel. My Twitter feed was literally inundated by tweets filled with "power to the people" and other cheap slogans like that. I now feel embarrassed that I read those tweets. I don't want to imagine what it must feel to have written them.

Media cannot be trusted, people. They operate on the basis of sound bytes and cliches that have nothing to do with the complexities of reality.

Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Žižek on Egypt: A Video

Our Canadian friend Canukistani just shared this link to a video of a discussion on Egypt between Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Žižek. The great Slovenian philosopher is brilliant as usual. If you've never heard Žižek before, prepare yourselves for a very thick Slavic accent and a very eccentric way of being. "Forget about that stupid UNESCO"  and "that trash you see on television about the clash of civilizations" are priceless. Thank you, Canukistani!!!

Egypt

My knowledge of what is going on in Egypt at the moment is pretty much non-existent, so I'm not expressing any opinions right now. The hitcounter shows me that my regular readers from Egypt haven't been around recently. I know the Internet has been cut off in Egypt, which is really horrible. It is also dangerous, as people now have no way of letting the world know what's going on. 

If there are people reading this who can share their insights into the situation in Egypt, please do so in the comments. Also, if / when the Egyptian readers manage to get their Internet connection back, do let me know you are OK, because I'm worried here. Stay strong, people!