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"Operation Lets Muslim Women Reclaim Virginity"/"Surgery Offers Muslim Women Illusion of Virginity."

The NYT rewrote that headline. I'm still trying to figure out why they wrote it the way they originally did, with the word "reclaim," indicating that hymen repair surgery would actually make the woman a virgin again (as opposed to assist her in perpetuating a fraud). All I can say is that the first headline fits the way the article ? written by Elaine Sciolino and Souad Mekhennet ? mainly takes the point of view of the women who are intent on deceit as they enter marriage.

The notion seems to be that it's bad for a man or his family to want the bride to be a virgin and that therefore she is entitled to use trickery. I can think of some situations in which such trickery is justified, but these are European women who chose to use their freedom to have sex before marriage and who are now free to find a husband who does not demand virginity.

The article also talks about the recent French case were a court annulled a marriage after it was discovered tha the wife had falsely claimed to be a virgin. I like Eugene Volokh's discussion of the case:

[P]eople are entitled to choose their spouses based on any reason at all, and to my knowledge French law allows them to agree to divorce based on any reason at all (again, at least if both agree). Saying that they may also annul the marriage based on any misrepresentation that they saw as material strikes me as no different: It's an accommodation of people's choices about whom to have a tremendously important relationship with, and we should generally accommodate those choices even when we think they are partly unwise ? I say partly because while the insistence on virginity strikes me as unsound, the concern about the lie strikes me as much more proper ? or reinforce unsound community attitudes.

Full post as published by Althouse on June 11, 2008 (boomark / email).