Modern lifestyle may have made most of you women forget this rather unpleasant aspect of our upbringing, our virginity, but society hasn’t. Point in evidence, is the recruitment process for women into the Indonesian military and police forces.
Among the requirements: applicants must be 17.5 to 22 years old, high school graduates, unmarried, God-fearing, at least 65 inches tall – and they must be virgins.
That’s according to a Human Rights Watch report that reveals that the Indonesian government subjects female applicants for Indonesia’s National Police to “discriminatory and degrading” “virginity tests,” a requirement clearly spelled out on the national police jobs website.
“In addition to the medical and physical tests, women who want to be policewomen must also undergo virginity tests,” the website says. “So all women who want to become policewomen should keep their virginity intact.”
The issue of virginity always brings to mind this line from the movie, Jab We Met – “Akeli Ladki Khuli Tijori ki Tarah Hoti (A lone woman is like an open safe). The inference to a woman’s nether regions here is obvious to everybody, since all of us have been raised on the same moral diet regarding the ‘purity’ and ‘modesty’ of a woman.
All our lives, it is emphasised, over and over again, until we ourselves have it ingrained in us, that the thing between our legs is not just a reproductive passageway, it is also our moral compass and a reservoir for our value in the marriage market of course.
In the case of the Indonesian women recruits, this check on their morality is done in the most humiliating manner where the women recruits are made to strip and two fingers inserted into their vagina to check if their hymen is intact. What’s worse is that the check up is done by a male doctor, making this one of the most traumatising and humiliating experiences for these young women.
The test has been standard for decades and one retired air force officer, also cited anonymously, recalled having it done in 1984. She said four years later she got married but could not make love to her husband for months “because of the trauma that I had with that ‘virginity test’.”
It’s a mark of how deeply ingrained the concept of morality and virginity is that Indonesia’s top military commander defended their actions. “So what’s the problem? It’s a good thing, so why criticise it?” Gen. Moeldoko was quoted by The Jakarta Globe as telling reporters on Friday.
Military spokesman Fuad Basya told AFP that the tests stop immoral women from entering the armed forces. If a person has low morals, “then she cannot join the military. Because if she joins the military it will damage the military, which must handle a huge duty. They are responsible for the country’s sovereignty, the unity of the territory, the safety of the nation,” he said.
The infuriating thing here is there are clearly no such cruel and humiliating tests to check the moral compasses of the male recruits, obviously. One also wonders if the male recruits there are actually subjected to any kind of moral test. Clearly being a man and possessing testosterone is enough here to prove that your moral compass is always pointing north (pun intended).
And before we all bask in that feeling of complacency that this does not happen in India, here’s what you should know. Indian Armed Forces aren’t exactly known for treating their women officers as equals.
As Brinda Karat, CPI(M) member and ex-Rajya Sabha MP wrote six months ago on NDTV.com, “In India, women are prohibited from combat service. The reason put forth by the service chiefs before a Parliamentary Committee was that women being captured by the enemy would demoralise the troops. So it is not women’s safety which is the concern here but that male morale would be affected if “their” women were captured. Women as trophies for the enemy or women as symbols of the nation; nothing about the sovereign rights of women themselves.”
And then there are other examples. Of a Miss India runner-up in 2004, Lakshmi Pandit, who was made to give up her title because the organisers ‘discovered’ that she was sharing a flat with a man. Pandit even went on record the next week to say that she was not married to Siddhartha Misra and had signed an affidavit to that effect, but it was pointless, clearly.
So the moral of this story – you women can be capable, talented, organized, resourceful and pretty much every thing else a hundred times over anybody else. But sex and your vagina will become an issue over and over again.
Image Courtesy: Reuters
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