On September 30, 2016, Egyptian lawmaker, Elhamy Agina, took to the Egyptian Minister of Higher Education to say that “Any girl who enters university, we have to check her medical examination to prove that she is a Miss”, which is a common term for virgins in Egyptian culture (RT International 2016). He proposed that each women intending on entering a university must take a virginity test to prove their worthiness of being there. He went on to justify these tests with the idea that they will reduce the amount of “urfi marriages” which are on the rise in Egypt. An urfi marriage does not require the approval of the woman’s guardian, but rather two witnesses and a Muslim cleric. They are becoming quite popular amongst Egyptian youth because of the high cost of marriage ceremonies and the idea that the couple should abstain from sex until marriage. Agina’s proposal for young women to take virginity tests before being allowed into a university has received an enormous amount of backlash, including a request from the National Council of Women for his expulsion from parliament.
When Boyd talked about masculinities this week, he covered the piece Fear of a Female President by Peter Beinhart. Though we used this piece to talk about the policing of masculinities by more dominant masculinities, he brought up an interesting point that there is a fear of subordination to women and how men and women judge powerful women more harshly than they judge powerful men. If we use this lens to look at our text, it really makes sense how this proposal was an attempt to perpetuate patriarchy.
Looking at the statistics in Empowering Women, Developing Society: Female Education in the Middle East and North Africa by Farzaneh Roudi-Fahimi and Valentine M. Moghadam, they give us an inside glance at the progress of female education in Middle Eastern and North African cultures, including a look at Egypt. When we look at those statistics, we find that from the 1970’s to the 2000’s, the literacy rate of Egyptian females between the ages of 15-24 has risen from 28%-63%, still behind the literacy rate of Egyptian males in this age group by a staggering 13%. That is a growth rate of 35% and we can take into account that the amount of females in Egypt who attend college is higher than the amount of males in Egypt who attend college. Under the notion that education is knowledge and knowledge is power, this shows how females are gaining power in their societies which threatens the patriarchal hierarchy.
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One of the ways men have always kept women under control is shaming them in various different ways, one of which is objectification. By forcing young women to take virginity tests to prove their “Miss” status, you are perpetuating the idea that a women is nothing other than her sexual status, which in return allows men to hold all of the power. This law would be taking something that is giving women power, education, and turning into a show of whether or not the woman is pure as if that is some sort of indicating factor of her mental capacity.
The proposal for the law was retracted days later and was claimed to be a misunderstanding. Agina states that he never meant that it should bea law, but that it was simply an idea. It has yet to be seen if Agina will be taken out of parliament, but it is unlikely at this point. But it can be said that, for now, this is a win for the females of Egypt.
