Ownership Over Women’s Bodies
When news of T.I.’s “virginity testing” broke late last year, many of us questioned if we’d stepped into a real-life version of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. His openness about the annual humiliating ordeal which he subjects his eighteen-year-old daughter to once again sparked an intense debate about the ownership of the female body (no points if you’ve heard this one before). Although the rapper’s actions may seem extreme, question how many times we’ve heard a man take ownership over his female relatives’ sexuality; the protective older brother who interviews his sister’s boyfriend or the t-shirts with slogans such as “don’t touch my daughter or my tools.”
When asking who made men the gatekeepers of female sexuality, look also to society’s customs where a fiancé asks the bride’s father for her hand in marriage before asking her, and then walks his daughter down the aisle to “give her away” to him. All of these micro-aggressions contribute to the objectification of women’s sexuality.
However, this is not to say that men cannot be protective or loving fathers; T.I. told Jada Pinkett Smith that he was worried about his daughter as a young black woman being “defiled and distracted” – and despite his choice of actions, Jada concluded they were done from a place of love. However; this is not love. It is control. It is also completely ineffective for the simple fact that as well as being a morally flawed, “virginity testing” is also completely medically unsound. Any conversation with a gynaecologist can tell you that vigorous exercise at a young age can cause the hymen to break or rupture, and often times sex causes it only to stretch. Virginity is a construct, and a harmful one at that. Unfortunately, it begins at home. It is so far ingrained into what we see in the media; what we read in religion and what is written into our laws to the point that it is difficult to untangle it from every image we have of sex.
Part Of A Larger Problem
“Hymengate” is symptomatic of a much larger problem. It is the idea that women belong to anyone other than themselves; that our sexual practice determines our moral worth and that our private sexual life is open to public scrutiny. Historically, rape was only illegal when done to a “chaste woman” and a prostitute could not be raped – I say historically, but look only to the recent investigation of the Grace Millane murder and you can see that a woman’s sexual history is still used as an excuse for violence against her.
In the case of T.I.’s virginity testing, medical professionals still felt comfortable testing a sixteen-year-old girls hymen at the request of her father. The problem is systemic- it is not just one rich man with archaic ideas. It’s all of us; who praises a woman for waiting till marriage; who expects marriage in the first place. The outcry this sparked was important, clearly minds are beginning to change. But how late? And what about Deyjah, T.I.’s daughter? T. I. hit the spotlight; but so did his daughter- a young woman who was not ready or willing for her private sexual life to be thrown across the headlines of the Daily Mail. A lot of us have been Deyjah in some way or another. So in 2020 be mindful, be honest, and be educated; for the sake of all of our daughters.