Chastity Makes the News

The New York Times is clearly one of those well-intentioned newsrooms where senior editors encourage their hordes of minion writers to get "the scoop" on minority communities.

I really wish they wouldn't. The result is pieces like "In Europe, Debate over Islam and Chastity."

It's true that nothing whets the American news appetite like a) Muslims and b) virgins, two demographic groups the average American finds incredibly weird. The Times batted a hit with the mainstream, since this piece of fluff is now the most email-ed article on NYTimes.com.

And with care and the proper attention, this story might have been great. Instead, it's a mess. First off, the author cites no stats on grounds that there are none. In journalism classes we're taught that it's really a sellout for a writer to resort to the vague "a small but growing number" when trying to justify a trend. This writer not only resorts to it, she offers a lame, one-line excuse as to why she did so. She says that hymen reconstruction surgery is so deeply personal there are no stats available. I find this hard to believe. We're talking about a cosmetic procedure, performed by licensed doctors, in hospitals. I'm sure she could have dug up some numbers.

Second, the article frames the question in light of Muslim "culture." I'm not sure that Elaine Sciolino is an expert on Muslim culture, assuming she even wants to be. Witness the fact that most of the people in her article, the ones having the "debate" over Islam and chastity, are not Muslim.

In fact, she waits until the end of the piece to cite the viewpoint of a lone Muslim dissident, who actually (haha!) turns out to be vice president of a large Muslim Cultural Center. So he's not just some man she grabbed on his way home from the mosque. He says "The man was the biggest donkey of all" but we have to wait until the end of page 2 before we hear someone in the Muslim community call this "small but growing trend" for the absurdity it is?

This story could have been one of several things. It could have been "Among Muslim immigrants to France/England/etc, surgery narrows gap between permissive Western values and religious tradition" or it could have been "In England, hot debate over woman whose marriage was annulled because she was not a virgin." But these better stories would have required more research and better knowledge of the communities into which Sciolino was delving. She could have discussed honestly the difficulties of many European governments in dealing with new immigrants, particularly Muslims. She could have talked about differences between Muslim immigrant communities. She could have researched attitudes towards virginity as expressed by prominent Muslim clerics and scholars in the West. (And to be honest, a real delve might have unearthed the fact that traditional Muslims are really very similar to all those chastity ball dads and "Silver Ring Thing"-ers we've seen before.)

Instead, Sciolino and her faithful "native" sidekick traverse Europe, find a few African women who have had the surgery (and never mind, here, the vast difference between religious and cultural practices of African, Arab, Turkish and American Muslims, never mind the variety to be found in the vast diaspora of the world's third-largest religion) and file this sucker before the Wednesday deadline.

It comes off as what it is: a cliche-ridden, cobbled-together, inadequately-sourced and (worst of all!) misleading piece of tripe.