BBC Special: How the Hymen Myth destroys lives

[Chase]

How the Hymen Myth destroys lives
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220419-how-the-hymen-myth-destroys-lives

The hymen – or the vaginal corona, as some believe we should now call it – has been a centre of scrutiny and anxiety for centuries.

 

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"Am I virgin?" asked the stranger across the internet, matter of factly, in Sarras Sarras's inbox. Sarras wasn’t sure how to reply. It was the first time she had been sent what she describes as a "vagina selfie".

At the time, Sarras was an admin on the Love Matters Arabic Facebook page, which delivers relationships and sex education in Arabic on social media. "She said she had had a relationship and now she was getting engaged and wanted to make sure she was a virgin," Sarras explains. Then she pauses, and grimaces. "I hate this word: maftuuha – she asked if she was that, she asked if she was 'opened'."

What the stranger was really asking was if Sarras could see her hymen – and tell her if it was "intact" – because of the pressure in her community to be a virgin at marriage, and for her husband to see this, visibly, in the form of blood.

 

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This belief that the hymen provides physical "proof" of sexual history is the premise of virginity testing, a practise condemned by the World Health Organization in 2018 as a human rights violation. Such tests can take different forms; everything from physical examinations of measuring a hymen or vaginal laxity to wedding night rituals where a bloodied bedsheet is expected to appear, and even be shown to the bride and groom's families.

Despite this having no scientific basis – and despite virginity itself being a social construct with no biological reality – millions around the world continue to believe that a woman's sexual history is somehow writ into her anatomy, and that all cisgender women bleed the first time that they have sex.

 

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Many people erroneously believe that the hymen seals over the vagina, not realising that that would mean a woman wouldn't be able to menstruate (a minority of people do have this condition, and can get a hymenectomy to help open the channel). Instead, most hymens have an annular or crescent-moon shape, and may take many forms of varying thinness and thickness. Few of us would have been told that it can change with age, that some of us aren't born with one, or that it might totally disappear by the time we enter sexual maturity anyway. Or that a wide variety of activity can stretch or tear it, from exercise to masturbation to, yes, penetrative sex.

In humans, hymens can vary massively – and given their seeming purposelessness, we still don't know why they evolved


But this doesn't mean there's any validity to the idea that you can ascertain sexual activity with a hymen examination. One small study of 36 pregnant teenagers published in 2004, for example, found that medical staff were only able to make "definitive findings of penetration" in two cases. A binary idea that either we are sexually active and have no visible hymen, or that we aren't sexually active and do have one, is simply not accurate.

 

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Blood on the bedsheet, a type of virginity test used around the world, is also based on falsehoods. Some hymens may bleed when first stretched if the act is abrupt or if you aren't relaxed, but any blood is actually far more likely to come from lacerations to the vaginal wall due to forceful sex or a lack of lubrication. Bleeding from first-time sex may or may not happen, just like bleeding from anytime sex may or may not happen. Reasons for bleeding during sex include feeling anxious, not being fully aroused or experiencing some aggravation from things like infections. When one obstetrician surveyed 41 of her colleagues, asking them if they bled the first time they had sex or not, 63% of them said that they had not.

 

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This can have a profound impact on women's ability to access positive sexual health, preventing them from exploring their sexual identity and causing anxiety around sex. A social study in Giza, Egypt, found that most women interviewed experienced anxiety and fear before their wedding night, and pain and panic during and after, because of ideas around virginity and the hymen. In a Lebanese survey of university students from 2013, nearly 43% of women interviewed said they would not have premarital sex for fear of not bleeding on their wedding night. Another study from Lebanon, this one from 2017, found that of 416 women interviewed, about 40% of them reported having anal or oral sex to protect their hymen for marriage.

In my research, I found innumerable online posts of women terrified that masturbating had caused them to lose their hymens, or were clearly so scared of touching themselves that they simply never did.

As governments around the world seem to take an increasing interest in banning practises like virginity testing and hymen repair, they would be wise to consider that the reasons behind their bans make it into classrooms and lecture halls. That way, we might never let these dangerous myths appear ever again.

 

[eatshitndie]

besides intercourse cycling can break a virgin's hymen. this is why the bicycle can be a virgin's first love.

 

[mako65]

It's just a seal with an expiration date! What's so special..

 

[syed putra]

Tbat was in the old days. Nowadays arabs prefer prostitutes from china.

 

[laksaboy]

Hymen is very important to the pedophiles whom the BBC and other fake news merchants protect.

 

[tanwahtiu]

Everything on women blamed on men....

1. Hy men
2. Wo men
3. Men ustration
4. ....

 

[Cottonmouth]

maftuuha? you slut!

 

[laksaboy]

Forget the ramblings of feminazis at the BBC, CB doctors are making a fortune performing labiaplasty and other cosmetic surgeries for the CB.