No sex before marriage? Migrant youth navigating restrictive norms regarding premarital relationships

ABSTRACT

While restrictive norms on premarital sexuality are not exclusive for Muslims, most of the research on premarital sexuality is on Muslim women, while young men are virtually absent. This Dutch study also includes young people of other religious backgrounds and young men. It discusses how the 55 young people who were interviewed experience and navigate the virginity imperative and norm of sex segregation. The deeply religious young people experience virginity as a deep moral value. Others do not subscribe to the virginity imperative, but neither do they openly rebel. Many young women have had secret sexual relationships. While young men are believed to enjoy more sexual liberties, our male participants also felt monitored in their love life. These young people refrain from openly rebelling, because they do not want to disgrace their parents. By taking responsibility for their parents’ well-being in their sexual choices, they demonstrate a relational sexual agency.

KEYWORDS:

• virginity
• sexuality
• sexual agency
• migrant youth
• gender
• religion

Introduction

In 2018 Boef (Eng. “crook”), a French-Dutch rapper of Algerian descent, caused a national riot in the Netherlands. He called three young women of Moroccan origin “kechs”, slang for whores, in a Snapchat video after they gave him a lift in the early morning of New Year's Day after a night of partying: “What are you doing in a club with alcohol, with short skirts, at eight in the morning, with young men? […] You're just a kech.” (Van Dijk 2018). Only when moral outrage arose and a DJ called for boycotting his music did he publicly apologize for his statements (Tates 2018).

The rapper’s statements could just be tough talk, common in the rap scene, as Boef claimed in his apology. The Netherlands, moreover, is a society in which gender relations and sexual norms attributed to migrant groups, and Muslims in particular, are used in an anti-immigration discourse (Prins and Saharso 2010; Duyvendak, Geschiere, and Tonkens 2016). The moral indignation following Boef’s statements was not free from these sentiments and Boef’s tough talk could just as well be a rebellious reaction to this pathologizing discourse. Yet, his statements might be more than just tough talk and instead be informed by the “virginity imperative” and associated ideal of sex segregation that are prevalent in some migrant communities in the Netherlands. According to this morality women in particular are expected to abstain from penetrative sex until they marry and after a certain age (usually after their first menstruation) any contact with a person of the opposite sex outside the direct family sphere is considered as potentially sexually charged (Buitelaar 2002; Bøe 2018; Cense 2014; Ali et al. 2020; Hawkey, Ussher, and Perz 2018; Griffiths 2015; Cinthio 2015). This makes it a gendered moral imperative. The appropriate behaviour expected of young unmarried women therefore is that they avoid contacts with men who do not belong to the family, and avoid any reference to sexuality in their dress and behaviour (Buitelaar 2002; Bøe 2018; Cense 2014; Ali et al. 2020; Hawkey, Ussher, and Perz 2018; Griffiths 2015; Cinthio 2015). This morality thus not only forbids sexual acts between people of the opposite sex, but also encompasses a broad range of restrictions on young women’s daily lives, which leaves them little room for the expression of romance and sexuality. There is strict control that young women follow these rules, also in a migration context. Gossip is described as the most commonly used disciplinary tool, while young men are expected to watch over their sisters’ honour and therewith protect family honour (Cense 2014; Cinthio 2015; Griffiths 2015; Hawkey, Uussher, and Perz 2018). According to this morality, socializing in a club with young men is indeed inappropriate behaviour for a young unmarried woman. If Boef’s statements were informed by these ideas on sexuality and gender relations, this raises the question if other young men of similar background share these ideas and how they deal with them in their love life, which we assume will often be with young women of the same background.

The behaviour of the three young women Boef called “whores” is just as interesting. It suggests that some young women from these communities claim and get more (sexual) freedom, a development, which has also been observed in diasporic communities in other countries (Bøe 2018; Ali et al. 2020; Hawkey, Ussher, and Perz 2018). Their behaviour also reminds us that people are not only subjected to social norms, but they also position themselves vis-à-vis these norms. They can choose to comply or to resist, or, like Boef, choose to be complicit in the strengthening of the norms or to support young women in their struggle to challenge them. In short, people have agency. Therefore, we were interested in – this is also our research question – how young men and women from migrant communities where premarital sex and contact with the other sex are traditionally not allowed, experience and navigate these norms in their daily lives and love relationships.¹

The existing literature on the subject mainly focuses on youth of Islamic background (Bøe 2018; Griffiths 2015; Beekers and Schrijvers 2020; Marcotte 2015) and on women (Buitelaar 2002; Hawkey, Ussher, and Perz 2018; Cinthio 2015; Meldrum, Liamputtong, and Wollersheim 2014), while young men are virtually absent. The present study addresses this gap by including also young men. The focus in the literature on Muslim youth might suggest that restrictive norms regarding virginity and sex segregation are characteristic of Muslims only. However, similar ideas on prenuptial chastity exist not only among Muslims, but also among Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists (Cinthio 2015; Beekers and Schrijvers 2020; Ghanim 2015; Roberts 2006; Sharifi 2018; Steinmüller and Tan 2015; Raveenthiran 2009; Eijlander 2020; Yip and Page 2016; Ozyegin 2009). To not further add to the idea that strict norms about premarital sex and sex segregation are exclusive for Muslims, and because we suspected that their experiences might cut across ethnic and religious boundaries, we included participants from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, who all come from communities where premarital sex is prohibited and sex segregation is expected.² Also, the literature often discusses views and attitudes (Kogan and Weißmann 2020; Williams, Irby, and Warner 2018), while how young people experience and negotiate these restrictive norms regarding sexuality gets less attention. The present study aims to make up for this gap by focussing on how young men and women from these communities experience these norms and thus give them a voice. The paper is based on interviews with 32 young women and 23 young men. Their (grand)parents are born in Turkey, Morocco, Surinam, Afghanistan, Israel, Curacao, Tunisia, Serbia, Kosovo and Romania. They are mainly of the second generation. The majority is of Muslim background, others are (Orthodox) Christian, Hindu or Jewish and one young woman from a Muslim background considers herself an atheist. They all identify as heterosexual and cisgender. Theoretically, we aim to add to the understanding of the agency of young people regarding the sexual morality in their communities that prohibits premarital sex and demands sex segregation. We believe that a better understanding of the experiences of young people of different cultural and religious backgrounds with (the prohibition of) premarital sex, will also be useful for education on sexuality, which has been mandatory in Dutch schools since 2012.

Gender and sexuality in a Dutch(post)migration context

The Netherlands has a reputation as a country with a relatively liberal sexual morality. This liberalism is reflected in young people’s sexual attitudes and practices. According to a survey among Dutch youth a high percentage of native Dutch youth approve of premarital sex: 93 per cent of the young men and 92 per cent of the young women believe it is acceptable and at the age of 18, half of young people have had sexual intercourse (de Graaf et al. 2017). The Netherlands is also home to people with a migrant origin. The largest groups with a migrant origin in the Netherlands who traditionally reject premarital sex are people of Turkish and Moroccan descent, who are predominantly Muslim. The number of young people of Turkish or Moroccan origin who approve of premarital sex are much lower than that of native majority Dutch youth: 48 per cent of Moroccan young men and 59 per cent of those of Turkish origin approve of premarital sex, while the numbers for the women of the same origins are 17 per cent and 35 per cent respectively (de Graaf et al. 2017). This is reflected in their own sexual behaviour, as many state that they never had sex: 72 per cent of young men of Moroccan origin and 64 per cent of those of Turkish origin said so, while for young women of the same backgrounds the number was 83 per cent (de Graaf et al. 2017). Hence, the majority of young people of Turkish and Moroccan origin disapproves of and does not engage in premarital sex. They also masturbate less, use porn less frequently and have less online sexual experiences, like sexting (de Graaf et al. 2017). Yet, there is among them also a minority, and for men of Turkish and Moroccan background a substantial minority of roughly a third, who do engage in premarital sex, thus supporting the idea that the virginity imperative is a gendered moral rule.

Sexual agency

While sexual agency is often defined in terms of control of the individual over their body and being personally responsible for its well-being (Cense 2019), we follow a relational account of agency and understand it, inspired by Sherwin (1998), as the ability to make deliberate choices about one’s sexual life. Sherwin explains that people, women in particular, often experience constraints in the exercise of autonomy and are therefore not fully free to define their own (sexual) destiny, without this rendering them passive. These people, she claims, are still capable of making reasonable choices between the options that are available to them and thus exhibit agency. Central in theory on relational autonomy is the idea that persons are socially embedded and that people’s identities are formed within the context of personal relationships and deep attachments, which impact their agency (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000). This makes the concept of relational autonomy well-suited for understanding our participants’ choices, as it does not rest on a Western liberal view of persons as self-realizing individuals and thus responds well to anti-imperialist critiques on autonomy (Khader 2019). We assume the young people in this study may have their personal desires, but have to deal with other people’s expectations about their (sexual) behaviour. There is community pressure to comply with prevalent sexual norms, while their attachments may lead the participants to take into account the interests of others when making choices about their sexual life. Ours is hence an understanding of agency that includes not only responsibility towards the self, but also responsibility towards others (Evans 2013). Lastly, while agency is often associated with resistance to coercive circumstances, we think agency and coercion should not be thought of in binary terms. Narayan (2001) explains this by pointing out that even when there is pressure to comply, there can still be an element of choice in compliance with traditional roles, as these may also bring certain advantages, like women in India who said wearing the burqa gave them more freedom of movement. Mahmood (2005) observes that women in the Egyptian Islamic revivalist movement even embraced submission to traditional roles as they saw this as the path to self-actualization. Hence, there can be agency in compliance with traditional roles and even in the wilful submission to these roles. We expect the young people in this study to negotiate the sexual norms they face, but do not a priori consider those embracing conservative norms about sexuality as less agentic than those who rebel against them.

Methodology

This paper uses data from three studies performed in the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 and is based upon semi-structured in-depth interviews with 32 young women and 23 young men of different migrant origin in the Netherlands.³ All participants gave their informed consent. The research meets the standards of the Research Ethics Review Committee of the VU Faculty of Social Sciences. All researchers are required to complete an online ethics Self-Check form. We have chosen for interviews, because we considered interviews the best way to learn about the participants’ personal experiences with navigating the ban on premarital sex and the expectation of sex segregation. The participants were interviewed individually, except for two young men, who wanted to be interviewed together. At the time of interviewing, all participants were aged between 18 and 30 years old. In Table 1 we listed their characteristics.

Table 1. Participants’ demographics.

	Male	Female	Total
Respondents	23	32	55
Religion
Muslim	15	26	41
(Orthodox) Christian	6	0	6
Hindu	0	5	5
Jewish	2	0	2
Atheist	0	1	1
Country of origin
Turkey	11	11	22
Morocco	3	14	17
Surinam	1	6	7
Other	8	1	9
Educational level
Intermediate vocational education level 2	2	0	2
Intermediate vocational education level 3	2	0	2
Intermediate vocational education level 4	10	4	14
Higher professional education	4	14	18
University	5	14	19

Note: N = 55, Age: M = 23,6, max = 30, min = 18.

The three sub-studies had the same research objectives and used the same core topic list in the interviews. The core topics that were discussed included parental expectations regarding contact between the sexes before marriage; their own views regarding premarital sex and proper conduct for a young woman; their experiences with (restrictions on) going out, social media use, flirting, dating, premarital sex; their friendships (composition, their friends’ views on sexuality); their expectations of their future spouse.

The participants were selected via the last three authors’ own networks through purposive sampling and snowball sampling. Participants were friends of colleagues or friends of friends. Because of the sensitivity of the subject and because we wanted to maximize anonymity, we made sure that participants were not too close to the interviewers. Attempts to recruit participants via more formal ways like Turkish or Islamic student associations were not successful. The interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 1.5 hours and were conducted in Dutch by authors 2, 3 and 4. The interviews took place in a place chosen by the young people themselves, like a lunchroom. Twenty interviews were done online because of COVID-19 restrictions, which did not affect their quality (Jenner and Myers 2019). Regarding our positionality in the research process (Holmes 2020): author 2 and 3 are native Dutch and all interviewed some or all participants of the opposite gender. Two Muslim participants seemed to initially see author 2 and 3 as representatives of Dutch society, as they were keen on stressing that the rule of sex segregation is nowadays not very strict. They thus seemed to respond to a Dutch discourse that depicts Muslim parents as conservative and overly restrictive. Author 4 found her Serbian background to be helpful in the research, as the young men she interviewed expected her to understand them, having been raised within the same cultural norms. Author 2 on the other hand, was surprised by the willingness of many young women to be interviewed by a native Dutch male of similar age. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed with the help of the computer program Atlas-ti. After the three sub-studies were completed, the first and second authors re-analysed all interviews and presented their findings to the other two authors for verification. This second analysis resulted in three overarching themes: the young people’s views and practices regarding premarital sex; how community control restricts their romancing; how they navigate this control in their dating and love relationships. To give the respondents’ statements some context, we included the respondent's name (pseudonym), age and religious background with the quotes, and where relevant, we mentioned their ethno-national background. As this is a qualitative study and differences between participants could be the result of sampling bias, we did not intend to compare between groups.

Results

Sexual views and practices

In communities that prohibit premarital sex and socialization with members of the other sex, the prohibition is described as applying to both sexes, but is stricter for young women than for young men (Ali et al. 2020; Griffiths 2015; Yip and Page 2016). Our participants also said their parents expected them to stay a virgin until they are married and have raised them with an ideal of sex segregation, except for five young men of Jewish or Christian Orthodox origin. The majority of the participants grew up and live in superdiverse neighbourhoods with people from their own ethnic background and native Dutch, as well as people from other minority groups. They usually have a mixed circle of friends, but many of these friends also come from families, in which premarital sex is not allowed. Azra (Muslim, 20) explains for instance, that next to friends of Moroccan and native Dutch background, she has also friends of Turkish, Iraqis and Iranian background. So, instead of being “caught between two worlds” (Meldrum, Liamputtong, and Wollersheim 2014) in their immediate environment “no sex before marriage” is the norm(al).

The young people themselves vary greatly in their views on premarital sex and also in their sexual practices, as is shown from Table 2. We grouped them into three categories: (1) those who observe the virginity norm, (2) the in-betweens, who abstain from penetrative sex, but engage in other forms of sex and (3) those who do not follow the virginity norm by engaging in penetrative sex (cf. Bøe 2018). Muslim youth, who form the majority of the participants, are represented in all three categories.

Table 2. Sexual views and practices.

Religion	Observe virginity norm		In-between		Reject virginity norm
	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female
Islam	12	8		11	4	5
Hindu				3		4
Orthodox Christian	1				5
Jewish					2
Total	21			14	20

Twenty-one people, eight young women and thirteen young men, observe the virginity norm. Nineteen say they are still virgins. One Orthodox Christian young man agrees with the norm, but is now married; one Muslim young woman has “sinned” in the past. Most abstain from any romantic relationship, but if they have one, romance for them means holding hands and occasionally kissing. Some feel it as a religious obligation; having premarital sex is a sin. Some also see the beauty of keeping oneself pure for one’s marriage partner, like Hira (Muslim, 27), who says: “It is something sacred to me, it is something so intimate. I don't want to share it with just anyone”. For many there is no strict distinction between religion and culture; this is how they were raised. “I was brought up with those thoughts that I would not do it. So, I will just save that until marriage.” says Azra (Muslim, 20).

Given that the literature describes the virginity norm as a norm applying in particular to young women, it is remarkable that twelve unmarried men in our sample state they want to abstain from premarital sex. Some of them are devout believers. Another explanation may be their young age: nine of them are between eighteen and twenty-one. (Although, at the age of 18, half of Dutch young people have had sexual intercourse de Graaf et al. 2017). A reason, which many of them give themselves, is concern for their family’s reputation. While much of the literature suggests only young women experience community control, many young men in our study too experience this (cf. Griffiths 2015). They are watched closely by cousins or older siblings and they themselves take into account their good name. It is not good for a young man's reputation to be known as a player or “male whore”, as one of them put it. This could damage the family honour and reduce the chances of a good marriage:

Sure, because the other family has to give away their daughter, right. And if they know you've been going down on every girl in the neighbourhood, do you think they're going to give away their daughter? I don't think so. (Lev, Muslim, 19)

A second group, the “in-betweens”, are those who do not engage in penetrative sex, but their relationship with a boyfriend – they are all women – includes also sexual contact. They enjoy the physical contact with their boyfriend, but also do not want to disappoint their parents or give their family a bad name. Therefore, they are cautious not to go “too far”. As Alaia (Muslim, 20) explains “My parents trust me and I don't want to betray that trust, so that's why”. They keep it to cuddling, sometimes heavy petting and for some the sex also includes touching each other’s genitals. This is usually after they have a long relationship with their boyfriend. Another reason to not engage in penetrative sex is for some also that thus they remain technically virgins. This is important, as they expect that many men want their bride to be a virgin, which is, as we will explain, indeed what many of our male participants expect.

Lastly, there are those who have had penetrative sex before marriage. They consist of nine young women and eleven young men. Given that virginity is so important for women, it is in particular the nine women’s choice not to keep their virginity that is remarkable. Four of them are of Hindu background and five women are of Muslim background. While Griffith (2015) found that some British Pakistani young women were pressured by their boyfriends to have penetrative sex, none of the young women in our study has mentioned this. For some the reason to have sex is the same as for the in-betweens: they are having a long relationship with a young man and expect that they are going to marry him and then decide that it is acceptable to have sex with him. Still, there are also young women, for whom a love relationship is not a condition to have sex. An example is Meyra (Muslim, 28)

It is really hammered in: it is not possible (to have sex)! So, for me it was a step. But it felt good, I really thought that I had become a woman. So no, I did enjoy it. I think it is a pity the person that I have chosen (to have sex with) was a disappointment, but well! That is just the person, (I do not regret) that it happened to me.

Meyra explains that she always has been a rebel: “I always looked for the limits”. Her father was initially “very conservative”, but changed, she says, but her sexual life she keeps secret from him. In her struggle for more freedom, she got support from her mother, who comes from a liberal family in a big city in Turkey. For example, her mother supported her when she expressed her desire to live on her own, which she now does.

Virginity and sex segregation: gossip as a means of control

Many of our participants mention that young women are not supposed to visit clubs, and a young man and a young woman alone are looked at with suspicion.

I had a best friend, with whom I always was, it wasn't my boyfriend. But there was really one time when three of her (mother’s) friends came up to her and said, “I saw Dalya yesterday with a boy … ” (Dalya, Muslim, 26)

The message that Dalya, and her mother, well understood, was that Dalya was transgressing the rules of modesty and should stop seeing her friend. Otherwise, her reputation and therewith her mother’s reputation as the one responsible for raising her well, would be at stake. For young women like Dalya, it is not only their own reputation, which they fear, but also, or especially, that of their parents that makes many of them accept the restrictions on their behaviour. Samira (Muslim, 26) explains:

(If) they would say about my mother or my father: “How they raised their daughter, that's impossible”. That would really hurt me. I would also feel very guilty, because ultimately, they have to live with those people. I would hate it if they would feel ashamed because of me.

A double sexual standard

Implied in the virginity norm and the rule of sex segregation is a double sexual standard. The young women in our study are, in line with the findings of other research (Ali et al. 2020; Marcotte 2015), indignant about this:

A young man does everything in his younger years and then ends up asking “Are you still a virgin?” I've had that one quite often as well. Then I think: “You can do all sorts of things yourself but expect to end up with a girl who has had no past. I can't stand that”. (Samira, Hindu, 26)

The men are also aware of the double standard. Bogdan (Orthodox Christian, 23) explains:

My sisters really weren't allowed to just hang out with boys. If they were seen on the street by my father with a boy, even if it was friendly, the bomb would explode. (…) I do remember my father always calling me and saying “have you got a girlfriend yet”. But my sisters, no, my sisters were not even allowed to think about a boyfriend. They would get into trouble immediately if they even thought about it.’

For many young men the double standard is just how things are, but some, including Bogdan, find it unfair.

Transnational control

Many participants live transnational lives with much contact with family in the country of origin. Research on transnationalism and social remittances (Levitt 1998), that focuses on how ideas and cultural practices circulate between communities in sending and receiving countries suggests that the views of young people of migrant origin in the Netherlands may also be influenced by cultural change in the country of origin. Pre-marital sex was, for instance, already in the 1990s becoming more accepted among Turkish higher educated urban young women (Ozyegin 2009). Yet, the cross-national contacts of our participants appear to confirm the existing sexual norms instead of changing them:

We were on holiday in Morocco and we (aunts and nieces) were all together in the living room and my niece was (exchanging) WhatsApp messages the whole time, mainly with boys. At a certain point, her mother, meaning my aunt, took out her phone and started reading all the boys’ names. … . It was very shocking and a disgrace. (Maysa, Muslim, 26)

Maysa’s niece is also diaspora Moroccan. While particularly the older generation disapproved of her behaviour, Maysa herself, who condemns young women who have premarital sex, did not mind so much.

Samira (Hindu and Afghan-Dutch, 26) explains that she avoids contact with Afghan young men, because, she says, “Everyone knows each other, so if you have had contact with an Afghan boy then my family in Germany knows, and in the Netherlands … ” Meyra (Muslim and Turkish-Dutch, 28) on the other hand says:

The Turkish and Moroccan people who have moved to the Netherlands have stuck around a bit. Because the people in Turkey, they live together, sex before marriage, it is all very normal. The majority of Turkey is much further ahead.

Critical of the gossiping

Many participants dislike the gossiping. Ahmad (Muslim, Tunesian-Dutch,28), who has penetrative sex, says:

I hate it, I really do. I think it just brings a lot of misery. It makes my life harder. Everyone’s life, I’m sure it happens with the Moroccans too, that it happens with the Turks. It just ruins everything a bit.

Soumaya (Muslim, Moroccan-Dutch, 19), who does not have sex, confirms that gossiping is damaging and therefore, she does not want to take part in it:

That your parents will think badly of you (because of the gossiping). I think that's the worst thing that can happen to a Moroccan girl in the Moroccan culture. And I think it also happens to Turkish girls. And that's why I think it's terrible if you, as a girl, contribute to this in others. So, because I would hate it if someone said I was a whore, I don't want to say it about someone else either.

While the gossiping is generally disliked by the participants, they can hardly escape it. This is also illustrated by what they tell about the role of brothers as guardians of their sisters’ reputation.

Brothers as their sisters’ guardians

Some young men have clear ideas about how young women should behave. They differentiate between serious girls and “sluts”.⁴ Serious girls don’t dress too scantily. Neither should they be too active on social media. Sharing pictures of oneself on Instagram is a way to flirt with men. “Sluts”, according to these young men, are girls, who regularly visit clubs late into the night. Because they feel responsible for the family reputation, these young men act as their sisters’ guardians. Their sisters should not behave like “sluts”. This also applies to young men, who themselves do not keep to the virginity rule and also to non-Muslim young men:

Look, I grew up without my father and then you are going to take over the male things anyway, you know. You are going to take care of them. And when you take care of someone you also check them and see what they are doing with their life. So, yes, I did check on my sister. (Gino, Orthodox Christian, 22)

They see it as their right and their responsibility to intervene when a female relative does something that is not allowed: “You don't necessarily keep an eye on them, but if you hear someone say something like ‘ey your niece was with a boy the other day, I saw that’, then action is taken.” (Can, Muslim, 26). This “action” can vary. It can stay with a warning, but there can also be violence: “I swear, if I saw my sister kissing a boy in the street. I would beat the shit out of her and him, I mean it.” (Yassim, Muslim, 21).

Some young women recognize the group pressure on their brothers. Muna (Muslim, 25) relates about her younger brother:

I went to a party once, and his friends were there. And they then go and say to him; “I saw your sister there”. He didn't like that, so he had said to me, “Why are you going there? My friends have all seen you, and then they run around saying things”. He really doesn't like that.

And Soumaya (Muslim, 19) explains:

I also think that a lot of boys who don't have that as their nature, who don't want to interfere 1,2,3 with their sister, that such a boy does it anyway because it's a pressure from his friends. Like: “Whollah, how come you let your sister walk down the street like that, I saw your sister there so late”. That he gets a certain pressure because of that: “Oh I really have to do something about this, because my friends find that really weird”.

Three young men, however, renounced their role as guardians. Bogdan (Orthodox Christian, 23): “Yes, I did know that my sister had a boyfriend secretly at the time  …  and she didn't dare tell my parents. But I always kept my mouth shut about it. I couldn't betray her”.

Navigating the rules of chastity: dating and love relationships

While the social control is for many participants very present in their lives, many also found ways to circumvent it. Some participants openly challenge the rules. One young man is living together with his girlfriend. Others challenge the rules in more private ways. Samira (Hindu, Afghan-Dutch, 26) dates, without her parents knowing (non-Afghan) young men, but how do you date when you are supposed not to have one-on-one contact with a member of the other sex? One participant only dates chaperoned by her brother. Some participants call this “halal dating”, thus broadening the idea of halal (permissible) that normally mainly refers to food, and that we interpret as an effort to “legitimize” dating, also observed by others (Bøe 2018; Ali et al. 2020). In Samira’s dating life social media play an important role, as they do for other young women. Some are active on dating apps such as Tinder and Muzmatch (described by Fatima, Muslim, 26, as “Halal-Tinder)”.⁵ These are applications where you can like or dislike someone based on a profile. When the like is mutual you can start a conversation with each other. The first meetings often take place digitally. When they meet live, most young people prefer to meet outside their own city or neighbourhood, for fear of being caught by their family or acquaintances. They also take other precautions. Fazil (Muslim, 24) explains that when dating a young woman:

You have to be aware that it (physical contact between unmarried people) is looked down upon … . that's just the way it is. Just be pragmatic about it, don't go in the middle of the square and kiss each other. Go to an alley, do it real quick. Do your thing, you know.

When the relationship develops, most young people want to become also physically more intimate with their partner. They then find ways to secretly meet, like Selin (Muslim, 23) who went on holiday with her boyfriend, telling her mother she was going with girlfriends. Parents and children seem to tacitly agree to a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy, because if they know, fathers have to act. Leading a double live however, comes at a cost. Several young women complain about the stress it creates to constantly lie.⁶ At some point, it is often the mother who is taken into confidence. When they inform their fathers, this is more like a formal step towards the wedding:

We just keep it a secret from my father, so to speak. Only when serious steps are taken, when he comes to ask for my hand, for example, only then does my mother tell my father, “Look, she knows someone and he wants to come over”. (Yasmine, Muslim, 25)

As relationships do not always work out, some of the young women had sex before meeting their future husband. To save face with their future partner, they lie about their previous sexual relations. Selin (Muslim, 23) had been sexually active in her previous relationship of seven years. She admits not talking about her past to her fiancé:

Definitely not, I lied too. (laughing) How terrible. I was a virgin when I went with my (former) boyfriend, but something (sexual activities) had happened with my ex, so to speak.

A phrase the young women regularly use to indicate that they have been engaged in sexual activities, is to say that they “have a past”. Young men are expected not to keep on asking about that past. Both parties are thus engaged in this strategy to reconcile the young women’s sexual past with the young men’s expectation of their future wife to be a virgin (cf. Griffiths 2015; Cinthio 2015).

That parents vary in how strict they are is illustrated by Dalya (Muslim, 26), who was criticized by her mother’s friends, because she was seen with a man. She had a boyfriend when she was twenty. Because she also slept over at her boyfriend’s house, her mother knew she was having sex. Her mother was angry about this, but in the end accepted it. Another example is Sarah (Muslim, 26), who stayed for a period in Antwerp for her work. Sex is not discussed at home, “But”, she tells: “my mother did say, when I was in Antwerp, ‘Enjoy it, wink, wink. If something comes along, enjoy it.’” Dalya and Sarah can also visit clubs and go on holiday with friends. Neither are very involved in the ethno-national community. They grew up in a village with a native Dutch majority population and have a mixed circle of friends. They and also their parents are highly educated. Sarah comes from an Alevite family. Like Meyra, Dalya explains that her family in Turkey is more liberal than the Turks in the Netherlands, and that her nieces in Turkey openly have boyfriends.

A virgin bride

What does the importance that young men place on their bride’s virginity say about their perception of female sexuality? This is made clear by a conversation between two friends, both of Muslim origin, Ozan (Steinmüller and Tan 2015) and Lev (Raveenthiran 2009) (they wanted to be interviewed together) about whether they could marry a young woman who had had sex with a boyfriend before:

Ozan:

You know it's really about the person to me. Just how you are as a person. Yes, whatever happened, happened, you have to let certain things go. I'm not going to ask who was better either. Okay, the thought does linger, but you are with me now.

Lev:

No but you know what it is, that woman is gold and someone has been in your gold, brada. That's how you have to think. No, won't be him.

Ozan:

I would just give it a chance.

Lev:

Someone has already seen her naked brother.

Ozan:

So?

Lev:

Someone else has seen her naked.

Ozan:

Some people don't go naked with sex.

Lev:

No, they go through those clothes, okay? You're walking there with your wife, bro, and from across the street you see this guy, who fucked her. And you know, she knows and he knows, he's been inside her. Bro, bro no bro. No bro.

Ozan:

I just look at how she is as a person. If she's busted often then, yeah, I don't like her.

Lev:

No bro. I don't appreciate your opinion at all.

Lev associates virginity with purity.⁷ A woman who has had sex is impure. Young men and women also refer to women’s virginity with statements that suggest it is a precious possession. Often this means: men’s possession. In the conversation between the two young men, it is literally referred to as “your gold”. Even if a young man likes it that other men admire his girlfriend, it is because he is the proud “owner”:

Sexy is good. I love it when my girlfriend looks sexy and I walk next to her. Let everyone else be devastated that they weren't able to get her and I was. (Valentino, Jewish, 29)

Young women, even the ones who have had sex, see their virginity as a precious gift that you must keep for a very special person (cf. Cinthio 2015; Yip and Page 2016). Lina (Muslim, 29) says “Your first time, to whom you give it away, you just have to save”.

Discussion and conclusion

Boef’s statement that women who visit a club are whores is more than only a rapper’s tough talk. Many of the study’s male participants believe “serious girls” do not go clubbing and want to marry a woman who is still a virgin. The young people, who are of different ethnic and religious origin, do not differentiate much between cultural and religious imperatives (cf. Griffiths 2015; Meldrum, Liamputtong, and Wollersheim 2014). They share that they have to take into account rules about sex segregation in their daily lives and romancing. If they do not, they run the risk of being gossiped about, thereby jeopardizing their reputation and that of their families. This makes some young men act as guardians of their sisters. Our research shows that young men also feel constrained in their sexual agency because of social control, while so far this was mainly described for women only. Still, all participants recognize that the rules are stricter for women than for men, which underlines that the norms about premarital chastity are gendered norms. Many women and a single man are indignant about the double standards. Although participants are aware that in the wider Dutch society it is not common for young people to abstain from sex until they are married, they do not compare themselves with native Dutch people. Dutch society is rather absent from their stories. We suspect this is, because most of them live in superdiverse neighbourhoods, where to abstain from premarital sex is the norm(al). This may also explain why so few responded to the Dutch discourse that problematizes them, and the Muslims among them in particular, for the conservative views on gender relations and sexuality attributed to them (Schrijvers and Wiering 2018). Also, the method of recruiting through friends and colleagues, made the participants trust the researchers. Possibly because of this, they did not feel they had to defend themselves to the researchers.

The young people’s agency is displayed in different ways they navigate the rules of chastity. We differentiated between those who observe the virginity imperative, the in-betweens, all women, who engage in sexual acts, but abstain for penetrative sex and those, who no longer follow the imperative and engage in penetrative sex.

The deeply religious ones, whether Muslim or Christian, choose to abstain from premarital sex, because this is in accordance with their moral values. We suspect it is religiosity rather than religious belonging, which explains their attitude.⁸ Young women who said they wanted to keep themselves pure for their marriage partner or wanted to save their first time for a special person, are thus claiming body ownership and expressing agency by subjecting themselves wilfully to the virginity imperative, resembling the wilful submission to conservative gender roles, that was described by Mahmood (Mahmood 2005).

While two-thirds of our participants engage in sexual relationships (cf. Griffiths 2015; Yip and Page 2016), our findings suggest that also in their lives the virginity imperative is still important, as about a third of them does not engage in penetrative sex. The in-betweens’ sexual behaviour we understand as a strategy to navigate the boundaries of the permitted, by differentiating between penetrative sex as strictly forbidden “real” sex and tolerable other sexual activities.⁹ Also, the choice of roughly half of the young men to abstain from premarital sex because of their (family’s) reputation, we see as a trade-off between different competing interests. Their choices illustrate Narayan’s observation regarding decisions about compliance with tradition, that communities may pose constraints on choices, which may require resignation to certain trade-offs in order to secure the things one values (Narayan 2001).

As virginity is so important for women, we searched what could explain that well over a third of the young women has had sexual intercourse. Some are highly educated, which is in line with acculturation theory that expects the highly educated to be more acculturated and hence to have more liberal sexual views (Kogan and Weißmann 2020). The Muslim young women who have had penetrative sex are highly educated, but there are also highly educated Muslim women, the deeply religious ones, who (want to) abstain from premarital sex. What makes these nine women, five of Muslim background and four of Hindu background, different is that they are less involved in the ethnic community. One young woman of Hindu background grew up in a family that is deeply embedded in the Hindustani community, but she has a bad relationship with her parents. Others grew up in a neighbourhood and went to a school with few co-ethnics. They all have more native Dutch friends or a mixed circle of friends. Also, some of the women grew up with their mothers, who were divorced. The parents of the Muslim young women also differ from other parents, because they are not very religious or are Alevite, a liberal current in Islam, or belong to a minority group in Turkey, like Kurds or they too are higher educated. Some parents also come from more liberal families in the big cities. We have checked whether these parents raised their daughters with more liberal views on sexuality. This was not the case. We therefore suspect that the daughters felt freer to explore their sexuality, not as acculturation theory presumes by their own higher level of education or that of their parents, but that the effect is more indirect. Crul (2016) for instance found that highly educated individuals of migrant background can afford more expensive housing, which often means that they move to a neighbourhood with a native Dutch majority, resulting in less contact with co-ethnics.

The findings show that the young people’s sexual agency is the result of their intersectional social positioning that allows how much they can digress from the sexual norms in their community. While this leaves unanswered the question why young people respond differently to norms of premarital chastity, with some embracing them and others rejecting them, it requires a larger sample size to research the intersections with characteristics like gender, cultural and religious background, community involvement, education, religiosity, marital status and internal minority status and establish causal patterns. Also, a limitation of our study is that the study’s female participants had higher levels of education than most people in their communities and also higher than the male participants, which may have influenced our findings.

We believe a relational notion of agency that stresses the importance of personal attachments and that includes also responsibility towards others helps us understand why young people, who do not subscribe to the virginity imperative, do not (openly) transgress the rules or rebel against them. We found that for half of the young men to abstain from premarital sex, and for the in-betweens to not engage in penetrative sex the reason is that they love their parents and do not want them to feel disgraced because of them, and not so much that they fear parental sanctions. Therefore, also, many do not openly challenge the virginity norm, but keep it to private acts of resistance, like refusing to take part in the gossiping. Privately also, they navigate the rules to find more freedom. Social media are an important medium for dating without risking their reputation. Parents appear to have made a pact with their children to follow a strategy of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, that works as long as gossip is avoided. It underlines the observation by Bakuri, Spronk and van Dijk (2020) that this secrecy requires the active engagement of both children and parents. The mutual care that is thus expressed also underlines how agency is embedded in affectionate family relationships. Our participants speak with love and warmth about their parents. They are aware that communal ties are important for them and do not want to disgrace them. It is thus responsibility for their parents’ well-being, that informs their choices about their sexual lives (cf. Cinthio 2015) and Cense (2019).

The findings also have broader implications for theory on relational autonomy. This theory focuses on women as persons whose autonomy is curtailed by cultural and family contexts. Yet, we found that these contexts also impact the agency of young men. The ethno-religious community is for all young people in this study the inescapable framework within which they express their sexual agency. They may observe, negotiate or reject communal sexual norms, still many participants value good relations within the community, if not for themselves then for their parents. Secondly, although theory of relational autonomy perceives of persons as socially embedded, it sees family and communal attachments primarily as constraining autonomous (sexual) agency. We would suggest, in accounting for (sexual) autonomy in restrictive contexts to include both young women and young men, and to recognize the negative impact of communal attachments but also the value they can have for people.

Lastly, we turn to our findings’ implications for sex education. Reflecting the liberal values of the dominant culture, Dutch sex education is based on ideals of sexual autonomy and freedom. This translates into an approach with a strong focus on individual decision-making (Cense 2019), while the pedagogical model is to encourage students to make personal confessions about their sex life in the classroom (Bartelink and Wiering 2020). The content of the lessons excludes young people, like the deeply religious among our participants, that value premarital virginity. The form of the lessons, to elicit public confessions, does not speak to the experiences of the majority of the participants, whose sex lives mostly take place in secret. They are critical of the virginity imperative and the ideal of sex segregation, and some also of the gender inequality inherent in them. Yet, they also feel bonded to a community that expects compliance with these norms, mainly because of their parents, and they thus try to navigate these norms. The challenge for sex education to be inclusive is, as also Cense (Cense 2019) noted, to respectfully approach more conservative sexual moralities than the dominant liberal Dutch one, but also to recognize community connectedness and simultaneously stimulate young people, of all ethnic and religious backgrounds, to reflect critically on the gender and sexual norms they are raised with.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Sarah Scuzzarello and Saartje Tack for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A note on terminology: as most of our participants are born and raised in the Netherlands, we will refer to them as Turkish-Dutch etc. and refer to ethnic majority youth as native-Dutch. Although the young people of migrant background are also born in the Netherlands and thus native, we opted for native-Dutch instead of majority-Dutch, because most of our participants live in the big cities, where native-Dutch are no longer in the majority.

2 Also, among native Dutch belonging to orthodox Christian denominations premarital sex is not permitted. We did not include them, because from earlier studies we knew that unlike young people of migrant origin and probably because they are native Dutch, they are differently positioned and position themselves differently from youth of migrant origin in relation to Dutch dominant sexual morality (Eijlander 2020; Beekers and Schrijvers 2020). Including them would have required a comparative design, which was not our intention, and which is already done by others (Beekers and Schrijvers 2020).

3 The last three authors performed these studies for their master thesis, under the guidance of the first author.

4 Griffiths (2015) found a similar distinction that British Pakistani young men used. They referred to “serious girls” as “wifey girls”.

5 Muzmatch now named Muzz, is an international Muslim dating app. The young people in the study by Ali et al. (2020) also say to use it.

6 This secret behavior is also described by others. Griffiths (2015) warns for the health risks this secrecy may bring, as the young women involved in instances of non-consensual sex are not likely to report this.

7 Hawkey, Ussher, and Perz (2018) found that also women discuss virginity in terms of purity.

8 Cf. Kogan and Weißmann’s (2020) finding that highly religious individuals whether of Islamic or Christian background reject premarital cohabitation (and premarital sex) irrespective of other background characteristics like education.

9 Yip and Page (2016) also found this strategy, but in their study, it was employed by young men.