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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Three: Hymenology
No one really knows what causes imperforate hymens, what factors lead to the vagina developing such that it does not develop the normal opening in the hymen that allows the vagina to function in all the usual ways. Doctors have documented some cases in which it seems to run in the family, although it is not broadly recognized as being an inherited condition. Most often it happens idiopathically, the medical term for “occurring for no known reason.”
Like the nose or eyes, the vagina is a self-cleaning organ, getting rid of dead cells and microorganisms thanks to the constant small trickle of mucous fluid produced by its tissues. This mucous fluid has to be able to exit the body somehow. The vagina is also, of course, the conduit for menstrual fluid. Therefore a hymen that completely closes off the vagina rapidly becomes an active medical problem. Mucous can build up behind it, producing a condition called mucocolpos, and if the condition goes unnoticed for long enough for the woman to begin to menstruate, a painful and potentially dangerous buildup of menstrual fluid called hematocolpos often ensues. Symptoms of hematocolpos are often the thing that gets many of these women into a gynecologist’s office for the first time, where their condition is diagnosed.
Fortunately, imperforation is easily cured. A simple incision or two made with a scalpel, and performed in a few quick minutes by any skilled practitioner, opens the hymen sufficiently to allow the vagina to do all the things it's supposed to do biologically and reproductively. Occasionally this procedure, known as a hymenotomy, is done on other women as well, for instance on women who suffer from what is called microperforate hymen.
This is closely related to imperforate hymen, but in the case of a microperforate hymen, the openings are present but too small to allow the easy passage of menstrual fluid and so on. Both microperforate and imperforate hymens also have a tendency to be thick and sturdy. A minority of otherwise normal hymens share this characteristic. When the hymeneal tissue is particularly thick, resilient, and unyielding, attempts at sexual penetration of the vagina can be both impossible and, due to the battering-ram-like nature of the attempt, quite painful and frustrating for both partners as well. In these cases as with women who have imperforate or microperforate hymens, surgical hymenotomy, on the whole, is generally viewed as a preferable alternative to hours of painful bashing away.
Most women, however, never require a hymenotomy for the simple reason that Nature has provided a simple expedient: normally-formed hymens have holes in them from the very beginning. This may seem counterintuitive, given the emphasis that our culture places on an “unbroken” and “intact” hymen, but after all, the hymen exists precisely because of the development of a tube which needs an outlet in order to be functional.
Fascinatingly, however, there is also some evidence that imperforate and microperforate hymens can, at least in some cases, also be acquired. Pediatric gynecology researchers have discovered that in rare cases, early childhood sexual abuse can generate sufficient scar tissue that it may completely obstruct the opening of the vagina, essentially forming what is for all intents and purposes an imperforate hymen. Curiously—and tantalizingly, from the point of view of the medical historian—the Talmud also suggests that such a “regrown” hymen after sexual penetration might be a possibility in the case of very small children.
In Tractate Ketubot, the book of the Talmud dealing with marriage law, there are extensive discussions of virginity and the terms and definitions of virginity. One of the tractate’s concerns is with women who have been enslaved, on the presumption that former slaves would probably have been sexually violated by those who enslaved them. The Talmud states that if a girl was enslaved, but then ransomed or freed prior to reaching the age of three years and a day, she is considered to be a virgin regardless of what might’ve happened to her when she was younger than that, because prior to that time, the hymen can grow back. This is an astonishing claim to see arising from a group of first-century rabbis, in a social climate where neither they nor the physicians they could have consulted been would have personally examined the bodies of females on a regular basis. But at the same time, how intriguing to find that a two-thousand-year-old Talmudic footnote has been confirmed to be possible, at least in some cases and at least after a fashion, by contemporary medical research.
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I welcome anyone interested in translating any or all of these excerpts to do so, as long as you put them up on the Web and notify me of where they can be found. I plan to link all translated versions from this page.
Photos by Hanne. Site by Jhames