Virgin: The Untouched History

by Hanne Blank

  Should the accusation be upheld, however, the nature of the crime is suddenly and horribly transformed into a capital offense not just against man but against God. Moreover, there is no question of who is to blame. The woman alone—and not her father, her mother, or the man who was involved in deflowering her (if indeed she had been deflowered at all)—bears all the responsibility.

  Never mind that a woman does not, even in the long-ago Judaean imagination, lose her virginity all by herself. And never mind that the standard of proof—most likely blood on a cloth—was sufficiently fallible that even the rabbis of the Talmud argue about whether it constituted valid evidence for a decision by a religious court. The woman who was judged to have lost her virginity prior to her wedding was presumed to have committed whoredom, a crime against her father's household, in other words, a crime against her father's patriarchal right to control the women under his roof.

  For this crime, which was not merely the destruction of a useful commodity but also the destruction of patriarchal control, the daughter was put to death. But she was not killed by her father, the man whom she had ostensibly wronged. She was put to death by all the men of her city, symbolically allowing every man to join in reaffirming the right of men as a class to determine the fate of women as a class, and to reinforce the principle that men were not only permitted but obligated to punish women who evaded their control. Such an evasion, after all, constituted "evil" and had to be repaid with a human life crushed under a bloody pile of stones . . . even though lying about whether a woman had managed such an evasion of male control earned no such epithet and could be repaid with a pile of shiny silver.

  By the time the Deuteronomist was writing, verifiable paternity had already become a subsidiary concern to the existence or nonexistence of virginity itself. Virginity had come to carry the symbolic weight not just of a husband's desire to control the ancestry of children born under his roof but of male desire to control the behavior of women and children. It had become a symbol of successful patriarchy as a whole.

  Long before the birth of Christianity, then, there was already a strict framework of social law in which virginity kept was good and valuable and virginity lost was bad and worthless. The stakes were high and the consequences were extreme. As a result virtually every member of the culture, male or female, old or young, could be counted upon to participate in one way or another in the practices of policing and commodifying virginity. To do otherwise was to invite disaster.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hymenology

  Given the pronounced variations in size and shape from woman to woman, perhaps it would be moire accurate to identify the hymen as a site than as an anatomical part. To make an analogy: we all have insteps, but to identify precisely where the "top" of the instep is would be very difficult.

  However, if identifying the exact location of the top of the instep were, in some Swiftian fashion, crucial to social identity, then insteps would become the

  subject of much controversy indeed.

  —Kathleen Coyne Kelly

  PUT IN THE SIMPLEST TERMS POSSIBLE, a hymen is what's left over when you dig a hole.

  Hidden from view in the warm, wet dark of her mother's womb, a female fetus develops genitalia and reproductive organs, including the uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, vagina, and the external folds, flaps, and openings we collectively call the vulva. She doesn't intend to, nor does she know she's doing it. It just happens, triggered and guided by the complicated coded instructions of her uniquely female DNA. At some point during the process, the exact instant of its formation unbeknownst to her or anyone, she also develops a hymen.

  The hymen forms not on its own, as a stand-alone structure, but rather as a by-product of the complex creation of the female genitalia. At the beginning of the fourth month of pregnancy, the female fetus does not even have a vagina, let alone a hymen. But by the time this fetus reaches the end of her sixth month of gestation, she will have both. The hymen forms because the vagina does. It is the lone physical reminder of the time when the interior portions of a female's genitalia were completely separated from the external ones.

  The female genitals develop in separate internal and external sections. Until their development is all but complete, they do not connect up to form a single contiguous system. In the early stages of the reproductive system development of a female fetus, a space or hollow called the urogenital sinus forms close to the surface of the body. This space will gradually become the vulva, developing the various folds and ridges of labia minora, clitoral hood, and so on.

  Inside the fetus's abdomen, meanwhile, within the space enclosed by the bones of the pelvis, a pair of structures called the mullerian tubercles (also known as paramesonephric ducts) enlarge and form what is called the vaginal cord. One end of this cord is anchored to the inside surface of the body wall. The other end is anchored to the uterus. The body wall end will ultimately become the opening of the vagina. The other end will become the cervix, the gate between the vagina and the uterus.

  As the vaginal cord matures, it hollows out. This process is called canalization, and it. is exactly what it sounds like: the process in which a solid cord turns into a canal or tube. The last step of canalization is when the canal forms an opening, right through the body wall, giving the vagina its outlet.

  This is what creates the hymen. At the threshold between the external urogenital space and the internal vagina, a small, flexible flange of what used to be body wall tissue remains around the rim of the newly formed opening. This remnant is the hymen. Although some people imagine that the hymen is like the head of a drum, a skin that is stretched across the opening of the vagina, normal hymens are anything but. The reason the hymen exists at all is that the vagina cannot function without an opening to the outside of the body. This tiny leftover of the process of genital development is the piece of flesh by which the reputations, futures, and in some cases, lives of millions of women have hung in the balance.

  Generally speaking, where you find a vagina you also find a hymen. Contrary to currently popular belief, virtually every woman is in fact born with one, with the estimated frequency of women being born without discernible hymens given at less than 0.03 percent. Yet for most of us, and that includes the lion's share of the medical profession, the vaginal hymen is a mystery. Very few of us have ever knowingly seen one, or would be able to identify one if we saw it in a photograph. Most women report no awareness of their hymens as a separate structure or part of their bodies, which makes perfect sense since it isn't one. The hymen is part and parcel of the vagina, no more separate from its surroundings than the nostrils are separate from the nose. Like the top of the instep of the foot, as Kathleen Coyne Kelly's remark quoted in the chapter epigraph suggests, it is more a landmark than it is an entirely separate entity. The only time that most women become aware of what they perceive to be the hymen—although the hymen, as we'll discover later, may not in fact turn out to be what they're perceiving at all—is during their initial experiences with vaginal penetration.

  We know very little about the hymen. Medical science has paid it only scant attention. The hymen is not medically compelling. It is physically tiny, and it serves no known function. Aside from the one or two potentially problem-causing hymenal deformities that sometimes occur, it's one of the more law-abiding bits of the human anatomy. No one has ever suffered from cancer of the hymen, sclerosis of the hymen, or hymen dystrophy, died of a sudden hymen attack, or been plagued by paralysis of the hymen. In human beings it simply doesn't do much, for good or ill. Aside from its social role as a supposed determiner of a woman's virginity, the human hymen is really awfully dull.

  The only thing truly noteworthy about human hymens is the significance we've attached to them. In humans and most other animals that have them, they do not appear to have any significance to mating, pregnancy, or successful reproduction. If hymens don't appear to have a role to play in the lives of the animals that have them, though, we might well ask why they eve
r developed in the first place. British historian of the vagina Catherine Blackledge suggests, based oh what we know about animals like guinea pigs, that perhaps the human hymen once also had a directly reproductive function. Or perhaps, as evolutionary theorist Elaine Morgan suggests in her book The Aquatic Ape, in which she advances a marine-mammal background for the human species, it once had a protective barrier role to play in keeping water and foreign objects out of the vagina while our proto-human ancestors paddled their way through prehistoric seas. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to test these hypotheses. Whether the hymen is a leftover from some distant evolutionary past where it had a concrete function or, as it now appears to medical science, it is merely a vestige of a particular prenatal developmental process remains an open question. We don't know, and, given the fact that soft tissues like the hymen generally don't leave a fossil record behind them, it is entirely possible that we never will.

  What information we do have about the human hymen is likewise dramatically incomplete. Unlike so much of the rest of our bodies, hymens do not have a long and extensive history of being examined, dissected, surveyed, and documented by medical science. There is more extant medical writing on the subject of athlete's foot than there is regarding the hymen. The hymen simply hasn't been the subject of much scientific study. To be fair, it has also not been an easily available subject for researchers, since moral objections having to do with virginity and modesty have often precluded the study of women's hymens. Much of what we know about the hymen's specifics is of very recent vintage. All of the fairly small quantity of serious research that has been done concerning the human hymen has been done since the turn of the twentieth century, and most of it has been done since the 1970s.

  What we have learned about the hymen, scanty and recent as it is, is nonetheless useful. We can compare what science has to tell us about the hymen to the old wives' tales and folk wisdom that have accumulated on the topic, and see where what we've assumed to be true about the hymen turned out actually to be true, and where what we've assumed to be true turned out to be very false indeed.

  Hymen 101

  The location of the hymen is obvious once one knows how it forms. But for those who don't, figuring out just where the hymen is supposed to be can prove a source of consternation. It is not too unusual, for example, to find virginity loss scenes in modern novels that include descriptions of a man's penis penetrating a woman's vagina by several inches before he abruptly hits the ironlike barricade of her hymen, implying that it is some sort of buried treasure wedged halfway up the vagina. The hymen is in fact found at the very entrance of the vagina. It is part of what is known as the vaginal vestibule: one cannot enter the vagina at all without passing through the portion where the hymen is found. The floor and walls of the vaginal vestibule are the base of the hymen, which extends upward and inward toward the center of the vaginal opening from there. The hymen is nothing more than a ridge or flange of the very same tissue.

  This tissue is the same stuff that forms the inner layer of the rest of the vagina. It is a thin, flexible, smooth, hairless mucous membrane. Just like the inside of the mouth or nose or the side of the eyelid that touches the eyeball, it is moist and very soft. Unlike the rest of the vagina, however, the hymen has no muscular tissue underneath that thin, smooth upper layer, because that thin upper layer is all it is. Also unlike the rest of the vagina, the hymen typically possesses either few nerves or none at all. Whatever nerves the hymen does have, if it has any, are likely to be nearer the base of the hymen than the rim. The same pattern is true of blood supply. This is one of the numerous reasons that while some women bleed when their vaginas are sexually penetrated for the first time (or the first several times, in some cases) others don't bleed a bit: there may not be blood vessels in places where they are traumatized by such things.

  Hymens offer a wide and colorful variety of configuration and shape. There seems to be a sense among many people that, insofar as they have any idea what a hymen looks like to begin with, all hymens must look alike. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  The hymen type that seems most common in the popular imagination is actually one of the least common types of hymens in terms of what actually occurs in women's bodies. Many people imagine that the hymen actually covers the entirety of the vaginal opening with an unbroken expanse of skin, like the paper-covered hoop through which the circus lion tamer makes his charges leap. Hymens like this do exist. The condition is called imperforate hymen, and it is considered to be a minor birth defect. It is caused when the canalization of the vagina does not quite finish going all the way through the body wall, and instead of having a vaginal opening, a layer of skin remains over the place where the opening should be. Imperforation of the hymen is the most common malformation of the female reproductive tract, but estimates of frequency range widely, from one in twelve hundred to one in ten thousand. Because it makes menstruation impossible, imperforate hymen is corrected surgically. A hymen with no opening is a bug, not a feature.

  The diameter of the opening of the hymen, like most other parts of the human body, starts out small and grows as the child does. It typically starts out at two to three millimeters in diameter and increases at a rate of one to two millimeters a year until the child reaches puberty, so older children are more likely to have larger hymenal openings than younger ones. Lest it be thought that all virginal hymenal openings are minuscule, a study published in 2000 showed that 93 percent of the virginal girls examined by Dr. Astrid Heger and her team had hymenal openings large enough to permit the doctors to view part of the interior of the vagina without using a speculum or any other tool.

  The size of the hymen's aperture is only the beginning of a veritable cornucopia of variety. Hymenal tissue itself appears in a number of forms. It might be fragile and barely there, or resilient and rubbery. It might be so scanty as to be overlooked, or appear in plentiful, tender, flowerlike folds that double over on themselves. The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, in line with many medical textbooks, identifies five primary hymen shapes: annular, crescentic, redundant, fimbriated, and septate.

  The most common hymen shape is annular—a word derived from the Latin annulum, meaning "circle" or "ring." A ring of tissue is precisely what the annular hymen is, outlining the vaginal opening all the way around. Similarly named for its shape, and almost as common, is the crescentic hymen. This crescentlike hymen is roughly U-shaped. According to a comparison of hymen research studies done by Astrid Heger and Lynne Ticson, annular and crescentic hymens together account for over half of all hymens, and may account for as many as four-fifths. It is difficult, however, to get an accurate statistic in terms of precisely how common each one is, because some annular hymens appear to have some propensity to change shape as girls grow older, turning into crescentic hymens.

  The least common hymen shape, by contrast, is septate. A septate hymen can be thought of in two different ways, either as a hymen whose opening is divided by a bridge, or septum, of tissue, or as a hymen with more than one opening, each opening divided from the next by a thin strip of tissue. Rarely, septate hymens that have more than two openings are seen. They can in fact have multiple openings, each separated from the other by a thin strip of membrane, creating a hymen that bears a certain visual resemblance to a kitchen colander. Because of this, they are also sometimes called cribiform or cribriform—from the Latin cribrum, meaning sieve—hymens.

  Less common than annular or crescentic hymens but more common than septate hymens are the redundant hymen and its relative, the fimbriated hymen. The redundant hymen is a particularly extravagant variety, formed of sufficient flesh that it folds back on itself not unlike the folded-over cuff of a sock or shirtsleeve. Fimbriated hymens are less fleshy but may have multiple projections or indentations along the rim that give the hymen a ruffled appearance. Redundant hymens tend to become less so with time, however: University of Texas researcher Dr. Abby Berenson has discovered that redundant h
ymenal tissue often recedes during the first three years of life, so much so that a hymen that was redundant at birth might change to become fimbriated or even annular by the time the child turned three.

  It seems strange, since we think of them as being static unless they are "torn" or "broken," but hymens change shape all by themselves. Between birth and age three, and in some cases again between ages three and five, hymens can go through quite a bit of alteration in shape and size. These changes take place painlessly, silently, and virtually unnoticeably, without the girl in question (or anyone else, in all likelihood) being any the wiser or noticing any change. We don't know why the hymen changes shape, and we don't know how it happens, but the phenomenon has been observed many times. The best way to think of it is that like other body parts, the hymen continues to develop after birth, and this means that sexual penetration is absolutely not required for a hymen to be different or look different from one day, one week, or one month to the next. This calls into question the very notion of the "intact" hymen: if the hymen can change all by itself, can we ever accurately call it "intact" or "unaltered"?