Consider two women. The first is cherished in a hospital in Kathmandu: she has just given birth through in vitro fertilization (IVF), a medically advanced procedure that involved her ovum, a biological material science regards as precious and irreplaceable. Doctors, families, and society gather to hail her as the miracle of life personified. The second woman lives in a village in the Far Western hills. She is menstruating, and so she is sent to a cold, dark shed outside her home, considered impure, untouchable, a source of misfortune. Both women are Nepali. Both are human. And in a deeply troubling sense, both are defined entirely by their bodies — one exalted for what her body can produce, the other punished for what her body naturally does. This is the paradox at the heart of gender ethics in Nepal today: a society that simultaneously worships and degrades the female body, celebrating its biological function while denying its owner the most basic dignity.
Virginity, at its core, is a biological state — yet society has transformed it into a moral and social weapon wielded almost exclusively against women. In countless Nepali families, discussions around a woman’s marriageability still revolve around her purity, while men face no comparable scrutiny. A research study on purity and gender in Nepal found that community members themselves acknowledged this imbalance openly: as one interviewee stated, “Virginity doesn’t exist for boys.” For men, sexual history is invisible or even a source of social status. For women, it becomes a lifelong burden that shapes not just marriage prospects, but access to education, economic opportunity, and even legal protection. These double standards are not merely cultural inconveniences — they reflect the deep rooted patriarchal architecture that still governs social behavior, healthcare, and institutional decision making across Nepal.
The clearest illustration of this contradiction comes from Nepal’s own unfolding story around IVF and ovum donation. When a woman undergoes IVF and successfully gives birth, she is praised as extraordinary — her body honored as the vessel of life itself. The ovum she carries is considered so biologically valuable that over 200 women are on waiting lists for egg donors at major hospitals in Kathmandu. Gynecologists confirm that demand for donated eggs is significant and medically critical for infertile couples. And yet, the same woman whose ovum is considered precious enough to create new life is, the moment she steps outside the clinic, reduced once again to a question of purity. Has she had relationships before marriage? Is she “untainted”? Is she fit to be a bride? Society praises her biology in the laboratory and condemns her autonomy in the community. This is not a coincidence — it is a profound moral failure, a double standard built into the very foundations of how Nepali society has been trained to see women: as vessels, not as people.
#Sexploration episode 9- Virginity
Nepal’s own experience with the IVF industry has made this hypocrisy impossible to ignore. The Hope Fertility case of 2025 revealed a devastating truth: the fertility industry, which depended entirely on women’s bodies, offered those women almost no legal protection whatsoever. Young women were lured with promises of easy money by agents, taken to clinics, subjected to hormonal stimulation injections, and had their eggs retrieved — sometimes without fully understanding what was happening to their bodies. One young woman described receiving her first injection and thinking she was doing something wrong. A minor was among those exploited. Legal proceedings were initiated against seven individuals. Nepal’s Supreme Court, on August 19, 2025, banned egg extraction altogether, citing the complete absence of a legal framework that could protect donors. It was only after this crisis and the public outrage that followed that the government introduced the Infertility Management Service Operation Standards 2082 (2025) — which for the first time mandated informed consent, set the donor age between 20 and 35, capped donations at six times in a lifetime, and explicitly prohibited coercion or financial luring. The state had to be forced, by scandal and by a Supreme Court order, to acknowledge that women’s bodies deserve legal protection. We must ask ourselves: if society can mobilize to protect a woman’s eggs for the benefit of someone else’s family, why can it not mobilize to protect her dignity and autonomy for her own sake?
The control of women’s bodies through purity norms is not unique to Nepal — it is a global pattern with global condemnation. In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO), together with the UN Human Rights Office and UN Women, issued a landmark joint statement calling for the worldwide elimination of virginity testing, describing it as medically unnecessary, scientifically invalid, and a serious violation of human rights. The agencies stated that such examinations cause women to suffer adverse short and long term physical, psychological, and social consequences including anxiety, depression, and post traumatic stress, and that in extreme cases they may lead to suicide attempts. WHO was unequivocal: this test must never be carried out under any circumstances. The statement also noted that virginity testing violates multiple core human rights, including the rights to equality, freedom from torture, privacy, and health. These are not Western or foreign values being imposed on Nepal. They are universal human rights that Nepal, as a signatory to international covenants, has already committed to uphold. Bodily autonomy — the principle that a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body without coercion or social punishment — is not a luxury. It is the foundation of human dignity. When a society strips that autonomy from women by treating their sexual history as public property and their purity as a family asset, it is not practicing culture. It is practicing control.
The body as burden ideology does not stop at virginity. It permeates every stage of a Nepali woman’s life. Nowhere is this clearer than in the practice of Chhaupadi — the tradition of exiling menstruating women and girls to isolated sheds, barring them from kitchens, temples, water sources, and family gatherings during their monthly cycle. Nepal’s Supreme Court banned Chhaupadi as a human rights violation in 2005. Parliament criminalized it in 2017, carrying a jail sentence for those who enforce it. And yet, nearly twenty years later, the practice continues to kill. On September 5, 2025, a falling stone crushed a menstrual hut in Achham, killing a thirty five year old woman and a seven year old child who were sheltering there. A 2024 review published in the International Journal of Public Health concluded that despite legal bans, Chhaupadi persists due to entrenched societal norms, limited education, and resistance to change in rural communities. Women forced into these huts face snakebites, hypothermia, sexual assault, smoke inhalation, and death. All of this because their body, in a natural biological process it cannot control, is deemed impure. The same body that is celebrated for giving birth. The same body that is medically prized for its ovum. It is impure when it menstruates, yet miraculous when it conceives. This is not spirituality. This is the systematic use of the female body as a site of social control.
The consequences of this ideology are not merely moral — they are measurable. According to the World Bank’s 2024 data, nearly one third of girls aged 15 to 19 in Nepal have experienced intimate partner violence, with the highest rates among women aged 20 to 24. Female literacy in Nepal stands at 70.1%, compared to 85.8% for males — a gap that reflects not only unequal access to schools, but the deeply rooted social belief that girls are less valuable to educate. Rural women face particular disadvantage: research shows they have difficulty finding regular employment even when their educational attainment equals that of their male counterparts, and face significant wage discrimination despite equal qualifications. Women make up only 6% of Nepal’s formal sector workforce. These statistics are not separate from purity culture — they are its direct product. When a girl grows up believing that her primary social value lies in maintaining her virginity, and that her failures will shame her entire family, she is less likely to demand education, less likely to resist early marriage, and less likely to pursue economic independence. Purity norms do not merely reflect inequality. They reproduce it, generation after generation, by conditioning women from childhood to measure their own worth by their bodies rather than by their minds, their choices, or their contributions to society.
The psychological damage is equally severe and less often discussed. Adolescent girls who grew up in households where menstruation was shameful, where pre marital relationships were treated as catastrophic, and where their eventual worth was weighed against virginity, carry wounds that no economic policy can easily heal. Studies consistently show that purity based shame is associated with anxiety, depression, and disordered relationships with one’s own body. Girls interviewed about Chhaupadi described wishing they had been born boys. Some reported fear of rape and violence in the menstrual sheds, knowing that isolation made them targets. Even in urban Nepal, where the most extreme practices may be absent, women describe the subtle daily weight of being watched, judged, and found wanting — in marriage markets, at workplaces, in social conversations where a woman’s relationship history is treated as relevant information for everyone except herself. Media in Nepal frequently reinforces these norms: films and popular culture often glorify the pure, sacrificing woman while portraying female independence as suspicious or immoral. The message absorbed by young girls growing up in this environment is consistent and damaging: your body is not your own. Your choices are everyone’s business. Your purity is your most important qualification. These are not merely cultural messages. They are psychological constraints that limit what women believe they are allowed to want, achieve, or become.
What, then, must change? The answer begins in the places where these beliefs are formed and reinforced: in homes, in schools, in healthcare settings, in religious communities, and in policy chambers. Parents must teach both sons and daughters that dignity is earned through integrity and empathy - not through the preservation of a biological state that science itself considers neither reliable nor morally meaningful. The hymen, as medical experts have established, is not an indicator of sexual history; its appearance varies widely among women regardless of their experiences. There is no scientific basis for virginity testing, and Nepal’s own Supreme Court has already recognized this in legal proceedings. Religious and community leaders carry particular responsibility: they must be willing to shift the narrative from purity to humanity, reminding communities that compassion, not control, defines a moral life. Healthcare professionals - nurses, doctors, midwives, counsellors - are uniquely placed to be agents of change. They see, every day, the gap between what a woman’s body can do and how society treats her for it. They can speak truthfully about biology, about rights, about what informed consent actually means. They can refuse to participate in practices that harm women, and they can educate the patients and families in their care. Men, too, must see this as their responsibility. The culture of purity policing does not survive without the passive cooperation of men who overlook it, excuse it, or actively demand it. When men stand beside women - not as protectors or gatekeepers, but as equals who affirm that women’s choices belong to themselves - the architecture of control begins to crack.
Nepal stands at a genuine crossroads. The country has made real progress- women hold seats in parliament, laws have been passed against child marriage and menstrual exile, the Supreme Court has ruled against virginity testing, and the government has been pushed to regulate the fertility industry. These are not small achievements. But laws alone do not change the interior landscape of a society. They do not undo the years a girl spent being told her purity was her most important quality. They do not restore the dignity of the women who died in Chhaupadi sheds after those sheds were already illegal. They do not protect the young woman who, at seventeen, was approached by a clinic agent and told her eggs were worth money- without anyone explaining what the procedure would actually do to her body, or what rights she had, or that anyone in the world saw her as more than a biological resource. True progress requires moral evolution alongside legal reform. It requires the willingness to look honestly at a culture that has long confused control with care, and purity with worth, and to build something better in its place. Nepal’s development - economically, socially, and morally - depends not on how strictly it can govern women’s bodies, but on how fully it can recognise women as complete human beings: intelligent, autonomous, and dignified in their own right, regardless of what their bodies have or have not done. Beyond virginity lies something far greater. It is time we looked for it.
(The author is a registered nurse and co-founder and mental health counsellor at Manodaya Psychological Care. She writes on gender ethics, healthcare, and social awareness.)
