Well, I can see where you're coming from. I'm all for freedom of choice as well but you gotta live with the consequences of your choice depending on the kind of culture you live in. They do take it to extreme limits sometimes which should change I know. but I don't see anything wrong with wanting to stick with traditions. Guess we're just of too different backgrounds coz the sentence 'You wouldn't buy a car without test driving it first' said in the case of male/female relationships is completely ridiculous to my logic and views of life! lol :P

Haha it's weird how differently people view things because of the culture they were brought up in.

They will probably have the piss taken out of them by their friends, but they won't be looked down upon.

I happen to think that taking the piss out of a woman for making that choice IS looking down on her. And it very much depends on the friends. I have friends who don't believe in sex before marriage, and I have FAR too much respect for them (and their choices) to ever mock them for it. That's not true friendship to me.

I meant in a jovial way. I can't imagine one of my friends making that decision without suffering some sort of grief from their friends, even in the nicest possible way. But that is probably because as a group, my friends and I are not religious, which is usually what fuels such a decision in our society more than culture rules.

Well, this is true that such decisions here are usually religious ones. But I still can't see why a real friend wouldn't respect their friend's choice, religious or not. I'm obviously not against sex before marriage, but if I can respect my friend's choice, rather than mocking her, I just can't see why others wouldn't be so respectful. And if one my friends mocked me for a decision which was important to me, then I really wouldn't consider them to be a real friend.

Well me and my friends are really rather immature ;D

HA! Back in college, all of my friends and I were super devout Catholics (obviously, we were the churchgoing types and not the practicing ones), and only one of them was a virgin. You can bet we gave her a hard time until she finally got rid of "it".! To this day, I still remember the date she finally slept with a guy at the age of 23.

I agree with you.

Yes, but until we start seeing/hearing news about men going to extreme lenghts in order to recover their virginity, you cannot possibly talk about equality between men and women under Islam. Besides, even if extramarital sex is frowned upon equally regardless of who's having it, it is the women whose lives are in the line if for some reason they've dishonored their family with their decision to have sex.

I am not claiming that men and women are equal in Western society, but at least women here can do what they want with their bodies without the fear of facing fatal repercussions from their own family.

Well now that you bring Islam into the subject, men and women concerning sex before marriage are most definitely equal in terms of the religion. A man doing it is exactly as bad as a woman doing it. It's condemned regardless of gender... Like it's mentioned in the article Christians and Muslims alike react in the same way here. It's the culture though that makes women suffer more in extreme cases like the ones mentioned in the article where there's actually a risk to the woman's life. You can argue that families make it not fair for women because it's easier for guys to have sex and have it go unnoticed. If caught though both the man and the woman suffer the same consequences.

"women around here think that the fact that you're allowed to do it is sickening."

But I think that's the point we are appalled by. You should be ALLOWED to do anything you want with your own body.

Well yeah you should be allowed to do whatever you want with your body but to a certain limit. In our culture our bodies are sacred, which is why we don't share them with anybody else until we get married and we're sure he's the one we're spending the rest of our lives with...

I think I just chose the wrong wording there. Women here are appalled by the fact that you so willingly expose your bodies or have sex with sometimes several partners before marriage. We consider it taking away from your self worth by our standards so that's where we differ. We don't think it's a bad thing that we're bound by our traditions to not break this certain rule since it's applied to everyone being male or female.

Oh & I think it's a great thing for someone to wait until marriage. In my religious views, I should have waited until I was married. I just think it's sad that women are feeling so pressured by this that they would do something so drastic to avoid being judged & persecuted for it. Here in America, of course there are still whores, but you aren't considered a whore just because you aren't a virgin when you get married. I think some of it has to do not only with cultural differences but also with a man feeling more power over a woman because she's only been with him. They feel like they are being judged & insecure if they are with an experienced woman.

Like I said before... The article is just mentioning the extreme cases of this where the woman is fearing for her life. When you live in a conservative culture like ours it's not really surprising that you get judged for breaking such a fundamental rule though, know what I mean? You need to have some consideration for the place you live in.

It really doesn't have anything to do with a man feeling more power over a woman... That sentence in the article makes absolutely no sense to me. It's just one random person's opinion about it. I'm sure most around here would disagree with it anyway. If the rule is applied to both men and women, as in neither are allowed to have sex before marriage, then using the same logic the same can be said about women. That a woman feels more power over the man because he has no one to compare her with. It's just that the west is somehow determined to keep their image about Arab women being oppressed and everything always meaning that men are above women. It's not the case at all though.

I'm exactly in the middle here. xD Obviously I live in Western society, but I am Catholic and had a fairly standard Catholic upbringing which has included no sex before marriage. It hasn't been forced upon me, it is my choice to wait, just like it's my friends' choices to not wait. I don't care what they do, I celebrate their freedom, but at the same time I can understand WHY those of a separate culture would be appalled by it (because my own culture/upbringing isn't too far off!).

I don't really care whether everyone has sex before marriage either, if they're happy and that's how they decide to live then so be it. I choose to wait as do most women here. I mean because of our upbringing we don't think about it as something forced upon us we think of it as the right thing to do.

I'd just like to add my own two cents. This is all is down to perception as mentioned before. It is perceived by Westerners that Arab women are forced into roles that give them no rights what so ever; that women are forced to take the hajab, be 'pure' and that men are allowed to do what they want, sleeping with multiple women etc. And while I won't argue that there are extremists out there that push for such 'barriers' the majority of women within an Arab family are treated as 'jewels'. They are the soul of the home and family, treated with respect and they are not married off to just anyone. As Giggle mentioned, any potential husbands are thoroughly researched before given approval. The family does want what is best for the woman. The family and the husband do want the woman to get an education, they want the woman to be 'strong' so this ignorance that it is all down so that the woman can't 'rate' her husband is completely wrong.

In regards to the article, while I would agree that it is sad that women feel like they have to to go to these extremes, at the same time, we can not judge. We are not in this position, and maybe never will, and if the women feel that this is necessary, then they feel it is necessary. I feel as though the author of this story twisted it, proof by that line. While it is completely unfair that there is no physical way to prove if a man is no longer a 'virgin' (for lack of a better word), and it is true that sometimes women don't bleed after their first time (I didn't), this one-sided view makes it harder to breach a gap between the two different realms of ideas. It's unfortunate that when an article is published on the Arab world, it is either over the more 'stricter' side, twists on 'ideal's' and so forth, rather than actually taking a honest view of it.

That article was actually taken from the BBC which is pretty impartial. There have also been some excellent articles over at The Guardian on Islamic societies, where they take two female Muslim journalists and one will argue one side and one will argue the other. We do have biased press here but those two sources are probably the least unbiased you are going to get.

I agree that the BBC is generally very unbiased, but I will point out that the line over not wanting women to be able to 'rate' their previous sexual partners to their husband, is where they go too far.

I know a woman whom I met in my previous degree. She was (and still is!) intelligent and just a great person all around. She is Muslim and so is her husband, and (from what she told me) he takes wonderful care of her and works to PAY for all her education. She even said, 'I'm able to do pretty much as much uni as I want' (the corollary being, 'without being expected to go to work anytime soon'). I think that is so awesome. xD And illustrates that the minority really do wreck the image for everyone else.

i didn't bleed, so i guess i'd be screwed. hurt like a bitch though.

i know it's probably stupid of me to ask, but why do they risk losing their virginity in the first place if they know there's huge consequences for doing so?

a girl i know has to go through all this too, but it's totally not how our culture works here so it's extra weird because no one else but her family expects this of her. she did go along with it and was even going to marry an arab guy until she walked in on him cheating on her 8| now she's dating a greek boy [huge no no, if her family found out they'd disown her]. they don't have sex though, so she's like secretly rebelling against this whole idea, but not. i dunno it's very odd. all my parents ever really expected from me out of sex was that i wouldn't be a slut, and that i'd protect myself from std's and pregnancy.

It's not stupid of you to ask, it's exactly the right thing to ask! =P It's just a really small percentage that actually lose their virginity and have to go through such a procedure or through any hard times. The rest of us are just leading normal lives, meeting guys, even dating just without having sex or anything physical for that matter.

not everyone bleeds though, isn't there other ways of knowing? i mean surely the bloke can feel when he's up against the hymen and breaks it? my first boyfriend did.

Yeah of course... The article gives a somewhat wrong image. It's not like the guy starts looking for blood on the wedding night. A girl could not bleed at all and it would be fine. Like you said, the guy can feel if she's a virgin or not. Even if he didn't sometimes, if he knows her and trusts her well enough, the thought that she had sex with another guy before doesn't even cross his mind. He trusts that the hymen must've been broken by other causes. The article is just mentioning the extreme cases.

yeah see i'm glad it's just the extremes of this. i'm sure not all new husbands are nut jobs looking for blood afterwards lol.