Political Control and Women’s Bodies: The Egyptian “Virginity Tests”

Since a senior Egyptian general confirmed early last week that a group of women protesters were detained on March 9^th, 2011 and subjected to “virginity tests”, I’ve been thinking a lot about when sexual assault is utilized as a torturous political tool for subjugation and a way to dehumanize individuals. I find this heinous act particularly insidious in the way it materializes sexuality, the body and femininity as an object that can be morphed, dominated and suppressed. A disturbing kind of “loot” for those who want to viciously prove their so-deemed supremacy.

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This event, one that severely undermines the exultation of the Egyptian revolution and demonstrates the underlying changes in culture that need to be implemented, rings so clearly of what sexual assault is really, brutally about. Rape is not about sex or pleasure. This was one part of a lesson that my Women and Gender Studies 101 professor imparted to her students during my first semester at college. While I had already known this truth about sexual violence at the age of 18, I had never actually defined what it was actually about until after that moment in class. My professor delivered the second part of her short lesson, words I would never forget. Rape is about power.

With the latest information coming from the front lines of the revolution in Egypt, I’ve been thinking about this kind of power. How it breaks down into the fact that those who commit sexual violence feel empowered by the debasing nature of their crime. Amidst the widespread chaos and unraveling of political structures in Egypt, it was decided by an authority that some sort of infinitesimal power could be gleaned from supposedly determining the sexual status of a group of women activists.

The senior general who could confirm and justify these attacks, but did not actually own or claim the responsibility for his actions due to his cowardly anonymity, maintained the fact that the “tests” were conducted to verify the nature of the protesters—essentially whether they were “good” girls or “bad” girls, a kind of distinction that is made everywhere to differentiate between the offensive and worthless notions of who is allowed to be a victim, among other things. The general reported that

The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine. These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found … molotov cocktails and [drugs].

And then even more absurdly, the general notes:

We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” the general said. “None of them were [virgins].

Amnesty International, which has been pressing Egyptian authorities for action since the women first spoke out, aptly addressed the general’s comment by stating the following:

This general’s implication that only virgins can be victims of rape is a long-discredited sexist attitude and legal absurdity.  When determining a case of rape, it is irrelevant whether or not the victim is a virgin.

It is beyond obvious to me that the status of a woman’s sexuality does not make her less likely to experience sexual violence as such. But I’d like to further deconstruct the general’s statement. Let’s be clear, the general claims that a group (known as “we”) didn’t want the group of women to say that they had been sexually assaulted, so the group (“we”) sexually assaulted them. This logic seems outstandingly backwards to me, but it also reveals that the question of whether or not the women were virgins isn’t the actual issue. Again, sexual violence is a measure of power.

The anonymous, offending group wanted to subjugate the women via their bodies and sexuality. By performing these disgusting “tests”, security forces were able to gain what they determined to be control over these political dissidents, to silence the women, to stop them from protesting. As Mona Eltahawy writes:

And with the virginity tests, here is SCAF retracing that thin line between sex and politics again, in the hope of shaming women away from demonstrating.

It goes without saying that this group of women deserves a hearty helping of justice, but it also brings to mind the terrible ways certain forces seek to achieve some semblance of power over those who are “threatening” to them, for whatever reason. How utterly horrendous it is that women’s bodies (and men’s as well, in some circumstances) are objectified to serve a political message, to forcefully extract arbitrary yet ruthless control, to assert dominance over others, to lay claim to patriarchical superiority. This event reminds me of the various ways in which women’s bodies are consistently used as tools or pawns in the quest for political power, even when the two can and should be starkly mutually exclusive.

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