Virginity is a farce, say Ellen Støkken Dahl and Nina Dølvik Brochmann, and armed with one of those hula hoops lined with a delicate transparent plastic film, they set out to explain it to their audience.
Brochmann holds it and Dahl breaks it with a powerful slap.
The scene, performed during a TED conference in Oslo by these two Norwegian doctors and writers, powerfully illustrates an idea that most of us have grown up with: that the first time a woman has vaginal intercourse, the hymen breaks. and, as a consequence, bleeds. And at that moment she loses her virginity.
Although the talk by the authors of “The book of the vagina: everything you need to know and that you have never dared to ask” took place in 2017, and the fact that the hymen does not undergo a change after intercourse It is a fact recognized by medical sciences for more than 100 years, the idea that this part of the female body can reveal her sexual history is still prevalent in our society.
“In current popular culture there are many examples of the myth of the hymen: on television, in books. It is still believed that most women bleed the first time they have sexual intercourse and that it is possible to notice a difference between women who are virgins and those who are not,” Dahl tells BBC Mundo.
“It is very practical to believe that nature has given us a kind of proof of virginity in the female body, if what you want is to control the sexuality of women,” he adds.
And although the WHO and the UN consider virginity tests (which involve a vaginal examination to check if the hymen is “intact”) as a violation of human rights and advocate its prohibition, these are still practiced in twenty countries (including the United Kingdom and the United States), as well as hymenoplasty, a surgical procedure that offers to “repair the hymen” despite the fact that it is not broken.
Open, elastic and with a hole
So what is the hymen really like and what exactly happens to it after the first intercourse?
Far from being a delicate membrane that covers the entrance to the vagina, “the hymen is more like a hair tie (like the ones seen in the photo below) or a elastic band“, indicates Brochmann in the TED video that has millions of views.
Its shape, in general, is like that of a donut or crescentwith a big hole in the middle. It is also a structure hyperelastic able to accommodate the penis without being damaged.
“Most hymens are pieces of meat —hymeneal caruncles—very different in each woman. It can be two, three larger pieces, or four or five smaller pieces, like small tabs or petalsthe same color as the mucosa of the vagina, ”Marta Torrón, pelvic floor physiotherapist and expert in physiosexology, who dedicates much of her time to disclosure, explains to BBC Mundo.
“For this reason, because they are the same color (and because we are not used to looking at our vulva and vagina), women do not know that those little pieces are their hymen, and that they will have it all their lives,” she adds.
That is, “the hymen not a closed membrane that it breaks and disappears (after penetration). In the majority—in 99% of the cases—the hymen is open and that is normal“.
In case it was not, we would be facing an “imperforate hymen, something that is considered a malformation, and that needs an intervention, since that way the flow or menstruation will not be able to come out and of course, you will not be able to have intercourse” Torron points out.
Its appearance can be as varied as that of the clitoris, vulva, or any other part of a woman’s body.
Fundamentally, there is nothing in his appearance reveal a before and an afterintercourse, as we have come to believe from so much repetition. Therefore, there is no medical procedure to determine if a woman has had vaginal sex or not.
“In all these years I have seen thousands of women, thousands of vaginas. In most cases, you cannot know if they have had intercourse or not”, emphasizes Torrón.
A study dating back to 1906, for example, revealed that a sex worker’s hymen was unchanged, maintaining an appearance similar to that of a young woman who had not had sexual intercourse.
Another more recent one, carried out in 2004, observed that of 36 pregnant young women, 34 kept their hymen intact.
In short, the hymen can remain as it is not only after penetration, but even throughout the pregnancy.
Hymen as a seal of virginity
Without a scientific basis, virginity is shown as a social constructiona concept deeply rooted for centuries in many cultures to control the pleasure and sexuality of women, the experts consulted by BBC Mundo agree.
However, it was not until the nineteenth century XVI when a connection between the idea of virginity and a specific part of the female body was first established.
The link of the hymen “with the vitrude flourishes in the fantasies of men throughout history until the sixteenth century, when the famous Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius discovered some remains of meat around the vaginal opening during the dissection of the corpses of two virgin women”, explains Eugenia Tognotti, professor of History of Medicine at the University of Sassari, in Italy.
“Vesalius wrote in his human anatomy book (which contains one of the earliest descriptions of the almost correct anatomy of the hymen), that not all virgin women had a hymen“, Tognotti tells BBC Mundo.
However, later, she added that the “so-called ‘intact’ hymen may be a ‘virginity test‘” continues the historian.
With this last assertion, “Vesalius unknowingly gave the hymen the symbolic meaning that would become dominant for the next five centuries, despite advances in understanding of female anatomy that demonstrate that the hymen, like many other body parts, It varies enormously in shape and size.
blood on the sheets
Another of the ideas that prevails in the popular imagination is that of bleeding.
The sheet with drops of blood —or the handkerchief dyed red in other cultures, such as the gypsy— on the wedding night constitutes a proof of the woman’s preserved honor.
To begin with, “the vast majority of women not bleeds in this situation and many feel guilty or strange. ‘Why haven’t I bled?’ they wonder. ‘Well, because your body is normal, you know it and you’ve understood when to have intercourse,’ I would tell him,” says Torrón.
“Without knowing how your body works, intercourse can damage the mucosa (the inner skin of the vagina) and that is why you bleed, but not because the hymen breaks,” the expert clarifies and adds that, with arousal, the ” vagina becomes long and wide.
And in the event that the hymen – a tissue with little vascularization – suffers a small laceration, “it tends to recover quickly, like any other mucosa in the body,” explains Dahl.
And what is true about the idea that the hymen can be broken by riding a bicycle, playing rough sports or inserting a tampon?
“For riding a bike, definitely not, because (the hymen) is a structure that is inside the vagina. Unless you ride the bike with the seat up your vagina, that would be very difficult,” Dahl jokes.
“The idea that riding a bicycle, dancing or riding a horse can change your internal anatomy, I find it absurd“, he adds.
The same thing affirms the Spanish physiosexologist. “There is no truth to this. Any. Since we have no idea of the reality of the body, we try to explain why there is no bleeding.
“The real explanation is that your hymen and vagina are elastic”
end the myth
For Torrón, it is important to disclose this information about the hymen, which weighs “not only on religious people”, to erase it from collective thought.
But aside from the impact it may have on women’s sexual health and well-being, eradicating these false notions is crucial because of the influence they have on the field of forensic medicine, she says.
“When a woman arrives who says that she has been abused and that there has been penetration, they value her vagina and if the hymen is intact, if they do not see injuries, they doubt her,” she explains.
Dahl believes that separate information is important stop worrying if a woman is a virgin or not.
“Because the problem is the idea that a woman has to be a virgin and they are using a biological misunderstanding to build their arguments.”
“That’s why the most important project ahead of us is to stop thinking that women should be virgins.”
Now you can receive notifications from BBC News World. Download the new version of our app and activate it so you don’t miss out on our best content.
Leave a Reply