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assigned sexual and familial roles as dictated by traditional family ideology”; see also Welchman and Hossain 5). It is due to these strictly defined sexual roles that a direct link between the purity of the female body and the value of honor can be observed in honor cultures. Consequently, a girl or woman who loses her virginity before marriage not only ruins her own but also her family’s reputation.

      It seems that a woman can only compensate for her existence, which is sinful by nature, by ostensibly protecting the purity of her body, especially in public. Writing about “Honor as Property,” Johanna Bond draws attention to this point: “in the honor context, the ‘previously unowned or undiscovered territory’ is the virginal, female body. The value of honor property is correlated with the notion of the undiscovered female body” (236). Cihangir explains that “sexual purity of female family members is an important indicator of the status of family honor” (3). If, for whatever reason, virginity is lost before marriage, this means that “the female body has been ‘discovered’ ” and thus “[…] the familial honor ←52 | 53→is so devalued that it triggers an attempt to reclaim that value through violence directed at the female family member” (Bond 236). The so-called method of “virginity testing” is sometimes used in honor cultures (e.g., if the bride does not bleed during her wedding night) to make sure that the female body in question is indeed pure and the value of the girl or woman who is to become her husband’s property not diminished through premarital intercourse. When a girl runs away from home with a man, for instance, gossip about her lost virginity starts to spread. In such cases, it can be deemed necessary to use virginity testing as a method to clarify the situation and find out whether the girl can still be married off.

      In one of the interviews carried out by Doğan, a male 20-year-old perpetrator narrates how the assumption of his sister’s lost virginity has stained his family’s reputation in general and his father’s patriarchal status in particular: “After my sister eloped, my father could not go out. He even could not go to his own brother’s house. If you are involved in something dishonorable, in my community people stare at you in anger” (“Dynamics” 12). Very rarely, virginity testing can turn into a way to prove the girl’s innocence and thus save her life, but mostly neighborhood gossip already serves as sufficient proof for her lost virginity. Ilkkaracan explains this issue of lost virginity as a potential source of honor loss in detail as follows: “Unmarried women are generally expected to remain virgins until their wedding night, and virginity is not only the symbol of a woman’s purity and chastity, but also an icon of her family’s honor. Sexual relations outside marriage on the part of a married woman, including rape, are generally understood primarily as assaults on men’s honor” (257). Sana Al-Khayyat also mentions that a “girl who loses her virginity is liable to be punished with physical or ‘moral’ death; the latter involves isolation and virtual house arrest. If, on the wedding day, she was found not to be a virgin she would be divorced. Such a divorce is, of course, accompanied by fadiha (scandal)” (34–35).

      Amani Awwad convincingly observes that “[t];he social constructs of honor and shame are at the core of virginity control and gender based violence in Turkey,” which seems to be a valid observation for honor cultures in general. Case studies illustrate that “a powerful system of social control was created to protect the sexual purity of women in the Middle East” (“Virginity” 105–06). Part of this system is the honor-shame-punishment mechanism that even makes women pretend that they are virgins in order to escape death. Since honor is a gender-specific concept, men, however, do not have to prove their purity to protect their reputation, as Awwad underlines by quoting Pitt-Rivers: “honor and shame, when they are not equivalent, are linked exclusively to one sex or the other and are opposed to one another” (Pitt-Rivers 43). As briefly mentioned in ←53 | 54→the general Introduction above, this notion of female chastity is also reflected in different languages, for instance in the Arabic expression “ ‘ird” that describes female chastity of unmarried women, or in the Turkish and Persian “namus” as well as the Afghan equivalent “namoos” which all refer to a woman’s sexual purity and corresponding honor, on which the reputation of the male family members strongly depends. It is therefore expected of women to protect their virginity by all means until they are married off safely.

      Already in 1982, Fatima Mernissi bluntly claimed that “[t];he concepts of honor and virginity locate the prestige of a man between the legs of a woman” (183). The patriarchal structure of honor cultures facilitates setting up double standards with regard to different social roles of men and women, as asymmetrical positional dyads. Since the honor-based codes established by men include strict punishment in cases of inappropriate behavior, “women take extreme measures to prove their virginity or conceal their false virginity in the face of mounting pressure by society. To these women, the wedding night could be their worst nightmare, especially if they fail the virginity test and no visible blood stains the sheets to display to the public as a proof of virginity” (Awwad, “Virginity” 107). Awwad furthermore points out that “ ‘[v]irginity control’ includes forced virginity exams and false virginity, which entails a medical procedure to restore the hymen” (107). Social pressure in the form of repeated threats or hints at the death of other women who had premarital intercourse serves to control the actions of female relatives, starting from a very young age. Glick et al., who analyze sex roles in Turkey for instance, summarize the situation of women who are thought to have lost their honor as follows: “they may be warned verbally, forced to take virginity examinations, punished physically or even killed” (545).⁷²

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      Jacobson explains that “[i];n an honor society, patriarchal and tribal traditions dictate that a woman’s body belongs to and serves the community” (4). For this purpose, its purity needs to be guaranteed. Among others, Pitt-Rivers as well as Sev’er and Yurdakul highlight the ideologically marked use of honor-related “female purity,” which is linked to a strict “control of women’s sexuality and cultural obsession with virginity” (Sev’er and Yurdakul 994). Particularly in economically poorer regions, “the only property that men seem to have is the lives and bodies of their women” (Sev’er and Yurdakul 986, similarly Tahira Khan 67). As a female body is regarded as a sort of commodity which needs to be married off as quickly as possible, it loses its entire exchange value if it turns out to be “impure.” The results described in a number of studies about virginity testing correspond to fictional depictions insofar as they all show how the fixation on female chastity from a very early age creates an enormous pressure on girls. Different methods of virginity testing⁷³ (and proving), though supposed to protect the honor of their families, at the same time do psychological harm to them.

      In a review on this highly controversial issue, Rose McKeon Olson and Claudia García-Moreno state that “[f];rom a human rights perspective, virginity testing is a form of gender discrimination, as well as a violation of fundamental rights,⁷⁴ and when carried out without consent, a form of sexual assault.” ←55 | 56→They furthermore draw attention to the fact that there are communities where “only the ‘pure’ females are to be married, have certain jobs, or be respected,” and describe the whole procedure as “physically, psychologically, and socially devastating to the examinee.” Quoting Zeyneloğlu, Kısa, and Yılmaz as well as Christianson & Eriksson, Juth, and Lynöe and Awwad et al., Robatjazi et al. underline a similar aspect in their article “Virginity Testing Beyond a Medical Examination,” highlighting that “[v]irginity testing for cultural reasons has been declared as sexual violence against women by the World Health Organization” and that it “has been criticized as a patriarchal belief, gender inequality, and violent behavior against women” (152–53).⁷⁵ It is not surprising that in social studies details of virginity examinations can rarely be found since women would often not be able to speak about such a traumatic experience, also because they are in danger of being killed. Literature in this case can provide us with realistic scenarios, as the following examples will show.

      Kader Abdolah briefly describes the tradition of virginity⁷⁶ testing in his novel My Father’s Notebook by providing us with information on a striking feature. In order to find out whether the first wife of protagonist Aga Akbar is “pure,” a female relative hides behind the curtains of the bridal chamber to keep an eye on the situation during the wedding night: “It was the custom back

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