In the twentieth century, things are said to be more progressive, and it is assumed that men and women are on equal footing in most cases. Days, when women didn’t work and stay back at home, are things of the past. Today’s women are extremely bold, ambitious and capable. And with the MeToo movement taking hold in several parts of the world, one would assume that the fighting has finally culminated. But unfortunately, it is only the end of the beginning and not the other way round.
Is virginity still an issue?
We live in a country where women still need to affirm whether they are virgins before marriage. What if you happened to find out that something very similar is happening to the women in Indonesia as well, but in a more public and humiliating way? Indonesian policewomen have to pass the virginity test during recruitment to make sure that their virginity is intact.
Two finger test to check virginity
This is done by doing the two-finger test. The officials check by inserting two fingers into the vaginal canal to make sure that the hymen is intact. Young women enter the examination room, where they have to strip down to their underwear. Then they move to an even smaller room. Over here they need to take that off as well. After this, they lie down with their legs held apart. A female examiner examines them by inserting two fingers to ensure their virginity status.
An essential paradigm for recruitment
Apparently, this is a practice in the country for ages, with the only difference that the explanation says that virginity test occurs to ensure that they have no reproduction-related diseases. The plight of these women comes to the forefront when one of the applicants decides to file a complaint, saying that she didn’t pass the test and hence didn’t recruit into the police force. She was a martial arts enthusiast and had suffered immense pain in her vaginal region after doing a split. Even after examining this to her examiners, they had refused to let her into round two.
While virginity test is not officially mandatory, they occur anyway. And it is quite blasphemous that women tolerate this kind of torture. They go through virginity test at an age when we claim to have progressed so much. How absurd is this virginity test? How does one ascertain whether the intactness of her hymen qualifies a woman? The revolution, it seems, is bleak.