La Rentrée - Day 17: The Tale of the Virgin Bride

In those remote times when I was still busy in doing research and writing learned essays, I wrote, among other topics, on women in the Orient, on how their oriental adventure was a way of adopting a male gender identity: that of a desert sheikh, not that of an Arab woman. This recollection leads me to the question what did I actually learn, adopt or engage during those last fifteen years of my desert marriage. It is something that comes to the fore as I am here in Paris and try to negotiate the reality to which I am exposed.
What strikes me is that somehow, anachronistically and through a peculiar gender inversion, I have adopted the characteristic prejudices of a desert sheikh. And now I talk to those men here, and I experience a surprizing, inverted cultural shock, as if I were attacking this City of Men from the East rather than from the West. What is more, as if I were myself an Oriental man rather than woman. We talk and they tell me things about them, their life, and the latter invariably includes stories of "having had" various -rather numerous- sexual partners. Narrated in plusquamperfectum, such stories should do nothing to a western woman. We are not supposed to be jealous of the past; almost to the contrary, the vastness of experience should be appreciated. Yet those confessions end up giving me that typically oriental feeling of vague repugnance. Those men are sullied, impure, in quite a substantial way, independently of any moral appreciation of what they did and what they did not, of what could be forgiven or justified, or simply considered as a normal life of an adult male. I just have that oriental feeling in the guts. 
Apparently there exists a flourishing market of hymen reconstruction, producing false virgin brides for the benefit of Oriental men. I wonder if there exists a technique of restoring male virtue for the benefit of the uncompromising Oriental women like me.