Policing vaginas, virginity and the elusive hymen

Jamie McCartney is obsessed with vaginas. At least that is the impression given by his Great Wall of Vaginas (GWoV). Great Wall of whaaat!? Yep, you read right: vaginas.

Over a period of five years, McCartney, a British sculptor, created a nine meter polyptych: 10 panels made up of 40 plaster casts of women’s vaginas.

Just check out the videos: women dropping their pants, opening their legs wide to have this Brighton-based sculptor slather blue alginate gloop on their nether regions to be made into casts.

The women, aged between 18 and 76, were all volunteers: mothers, daughters, twins, post-natal women and a woman pre- and post-labiaplasty, as well as transgender men and women. So don’t be surprised to see the odd penis or two sticking out of the GWoV just to make the point (ahem)!

Talk about “in your face”. As the GWoV cite states, “This is about grabbing attention, using humor and spectacle, and educating people about what normal women really look like.”

OK, but what’s the real idea behind this somewhat freakish enterprise?

It seems that women have concerns about their vaginas just like men do about their penises.

If the fashion industry dictates an “ideal body” shape, pornography creates a notion of the vaginal aesthetic ideal.

This has made labiaplasty — a plastic surgery procedure for altering the inner and outer labia — a very popular procedure. While it’s true that some women do it because of congenital or medical conditions, many are increasingly doing it for cosmetic purposes.

McCartney asks, “Why are women cutting off part of their genitals?” For him, it’s a kind of female genital mutilation (FGM). That’s why he created the GWoV, to make women aware that “normal” falls within a very wide and diverse range. He hopes it will help women develop better body images and accept themselves as they are.

Recently, the Indonesian police were also involved in some attention-grabbing antics, which like McCartney’s project, involved vaginas. But if the women who volunteered for the GWoV project offered their genitals willingly, that was hardly the case with the women in the police project.

What’s the project? To raise the number of polwan (policewomen) in the Indonesian police to 5 percent of its 400,000-strong force by recruiting more women. All recruits — male and female — have to undergo a battery of tests but female recruits are made to undergo a virginity test.

Unlike the GWoV project, these tests are far from humorous or educative. If anything, the so called “two-finger test” to see if the hymen — that oh-so very unreliable “indicator” of virginity — is intact, is painful, embarrassing, humiliating and traumatic.

Imagine having it done in a room with 20 other recruits. Talk about adding insult to injury.

The National Commission on Violence against Women (Komnas Perempuan), Human Rights Watch and other women’s NGOs have all condemned these tests as discriminatory, cruel and degrading. They demand that they be stopped.

Nila Moeloek, the new health minister, has also expressed dismay at these tests. She has raised doubts over the police’s method of assessing the cadet’s virginity on the sole basis of rupture of the hymen, which can occur when engaging in sports, or through accidents and rape. And guess what? Some women are born without a hymen!

And what does virginity have to do with a policewoman’s ability to perform effectively anyway?

According to Insp. Gen. Moechgiyarto, head of the legal division of the National Police, nothing really. That’s right, it’s just an “internal regulation” they have.

It’s part of the general health exam, and if a recruit is found to not be a virgin (according to their criteria), it will be factored into the total score.

Moechgiyarto claims the aim is to safeguard the polwans’ “morality”. If a woman had been a sex worker, he said, how could she accepted into the police force? “It’s not to do with gender [discrimination]”, he claimed, “It’s to do with morality.”

The statement is very hard to accept given the police are one of the most corrupt institutions in the country. And it is exceedingly ironic since it is public knowledge that members of the police are involved at various levels in the prostitution industry. It’s also a distraction from the recent conflict between officers of the police Mobile Brigade (Brimob) in Batam, Riau, and members of an Army infantry battalion.

It’s an old story really, as the conflict between the two groups of combat troops stem from a kind of primordial “tribal” rivalry.

The military and police forces are supposed to be part of a modern state but their mentality is so hopelessly outdated. It’s not surprising that their stand on virginity is what it is.

OK, so what’s the real idea behind this archaic virginity test?

McCartney’s GWoV tries to raise women’s awareness about their body image. The police are also engaged in image improvement — in this case, their own: trying to assert a self-proclaimed morality to counteract their terrible reputation. And as women have always been seen by societies as the repository of morality, they are an easy target. In fact, it is often true that the more corrupt someone is, the more moralistic they are.

Even the language as well as body language of Moechgiyarto so perfectly epitomizes the hypocrisy and arrogance of the police and patriarchal men in general. Check out his interview.

November 25 is commemorated each year as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. It should remind us that police virginity tests do absolutely nothing useful — except abuse women and prove that we’ve got a very long way to go to change the abusively patriarchal mind-set that still permeates public life in Indonesia. – The Jakarta Post