By It was my mom’s week to carpool.
In the back seat, my friend told me that her sister was visiting from college and gave her tampons to use. Naturally inquisitive, I asked a few questions about the difference between tampons and pads before confidently announcing to my mother that, I too, would start using tampons.
Besides her audible gasp, “never,” was her only response.
At 14, my period remained as much a mystery to me as it had when it came three years earlier. Drying myself after the shower, I realized a brownish/reddish stain on the bed.
Disgusted, I ran to my mother to announce that someone had spilled something on my bed, half expecting to be berated for the crime myself.
I hadn’t the slightest clue about what it was. After a quick talk, the removal of stained sheets, and the gift of some pads, it was a non-issue.
This time around, I demanded more information. “Why mama? Why never?”
“Because you will not be a virgin anymore,” she snorted back, with a unique blend of anger and enough hesitation that empowered me to simply reply, “No, it won’t.”
The abstinence-only based curriculum of my private Christian school, mixed with the cultural Muslim conservatism of my parents experimenting with their first child had created the perfect mocktail of asexual ambiguity.
Embarrassed, I didn’t even make eye contact with my friend as I uncomfortably waited to be dropped off at school.
If at 11, I had no idea what a period was – trust me, at 14 I had little to no understanding of what made you lose your virginity.
The abstinence-only based curriculum of my private Christian school, mixed with the cultural Muslim conservatism of my parents experimenting with their first child had created the perfect mocktail of asexual ambiguity.
Tampons versus pads were really the least of my problems.
My mom might have been right for all I knew, but didn’t Courtney’s mom and sister care just as much about the youthful innocence of her own child?
Maybe her family was more culturally liberal than my own, but I knew that she also wasn’t encouraging her 14-year-old daughter to lose her virginity – to a tampon, at that.
In a myth unintentionally perpetuated by hordes of well-intentioned families, how many Muslim women live in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance from their own bodies?
The conservative dominance of female bodies is propagated by male privilege and power, which exerts itself in all aspects of current culture and socialization.
In imposing a distance between a young girl’s natural transitions and her own agency, particularly in a hypersexualized culture truncated by body shaming at best and rape culture at worst, the question strays from maintaining young girls sexual purity and evolves into preparing young girls to thrive in all aspects of life.
The fissure from Islamic Shari’ah, is not rooted in orthopraxy, but rather conservative cultural interpretations aimed at controlling the bodies and lives of women.
Most recently, we’ve seen this on center stage during the French burkini ban. While many jurists have spoken on the permissibility of tampon usage by women even prior to sexual-intercourse, many families still hesitate.
The conservative dominance of female bodies is propagated by male privilege and power, which exerts itself in all aspects of current culture and socialization. It is extended by women against women, in the form of cultural policing and shaming.
These nuances that show up as violence against women and girls are not unique to Muslim communities, but manifest as a result of the hypermasculine culture that dominates law, governance, and industry throughout the world.
The dissonance from my own body began shortly after this initial confrontation with my mother.
In high-school, a petite frame, paired with a D-cup, came with daily unsolicited harassment. From extra-long and unnecessary hugs that sparked me create a mental list of schoolmates to avoid like the plague, to explicit verbal commentary, to the fieldtrip that transformed the two undone buttons on my school mandated polo shirt into a field goal post paper football, I didn’t have the mental strength to explore my own sexuality — as it had already been determined for me by my peers.
In honoring the obligation and expectation in Islam for both partners to maintain their sexual purity until marriage, I simultaneously confront the way it is discussed and disseminated within our Diasporas.
At home, the insecurity about my body and peer-enforced sexuality manifested in me begging my parents to get me a breast reduction surgery, or regular tears from the back pain that my disproportionate breasts caused me.
They generously took me to see a chiropractor, but never explored the true root of my discomfort.
In college, this conflict with my own body quickly rendered me into a statistic. Within the first month of freshman year, a new friend I had gone to a party with a few nights earlier — welcomed himself into my dorm room. My two roommates were sleeping as he climbed into my lofted bed, and promptly started undressing me.
I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. My habitual inability to confront harassment in high school had followed me to this moment of disbelief.
The only fortitude I could muster came out in enough words and physical strength to tell this guy that he had to get out of my bed, immediately.
It took a few minutes, a few consistent words and supportive pushes, but he got off my bed and immediately fell asleep on the floor of my dorm room. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to sleep as well as he did — for most of my young adulthood.
The residual fear of men coming into my room to rape me manifested into regular night terrors that followed me around the globe for years.
What were we talking about again? Oh right – tampons.
For the hyphen-fearing, by the time I consensually lost my virginity to a Muslim man, in a Muslim nation, I had actually been using tampons for years. There was enough blood on the sheets for my first partner to joke that I owed him new sheets. Nice, right?
We didn’t last very long.
While I was eventually able to heal, grow, and take control of my own physical and mental health through a reestablished partnership with my own body, and some fabulous culturally competent therapy, I wonder how things might have been different if the virgin based ideology wasn’t perpetuated in our culture in the way it has been.
In honoring the obligation and expectation in Islam for both partners to maintain their sexual purity until marriage, I simultaneously confront the way it is discussed and disseminated within our Diasporas.
Blind submission to conservative cultural narratives aimed at policing our bodies, and shaming others comes at the expense of severely stunting our youth.
It perpetuates the fragility of male-dominant ideology which is easily threatened by the voice of Muslim Girl.
As I write this, my partner and I are expecting our first child, a daughter, in a little over a month. In our six years of partnership, we have regularly discussed the kind of family and household we would want to create for our future children; a home free of gendered expectations, double standards, and unanswered questions.
We’re unsure how this whole parenting thing will unfold, but we’re steadfast in our commitment to give our firstborn the tools she will need to navigate her future world with strength, grace, and confidence insha’Allah.
This kind of hymen obsession becomes idolatry. Idoltry is haram,