Books
Biography
Blog
Where to
Find Me
Media kit
Clippings
Read online
FAQ
E-mail list
Contact
Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Excerpt from Chapter Six: The Blank Page
Even in cases where sexual penetration is known to have taken place, hymenal evidence is not uniform. Nor are the reasons that it occurs—or fails to occur—limited to the nature of the hymenal tissues or the object(s) with which the vagina is penetrated. Emotional circumstance and consensuality also play demonstrable roles in whether or not penetration causes hymenal injury. Drs. Karin Edgardh and Kari Ormstad, in examining a pool of Swedish women who had been referred for medical examination following reports of sexual abuse, discovered that while the women reporting abusive penetration as their first penetrative sexual experience (26% of the sample) did have evidence of significant hymenal tearing including complete posterior transections, such tears were found in none of the women who had a history of voluntary, non-abusive sexual penetration prior to the date of their abuse. The likely reason for this, physiologically speaking, is muscular tension, a common result of fear and anxiety. If the muscles of the vagina are tight and tense, penetration is likely to require more effort, and with greater effort comes both greater friction and a greater likelihood of collateral tissue damage. What this argues for is nothing more than a confirmation of what many women have experienced: if a woman is ready and willing to engage in voluntary and consensual vaginal penetration, it is entirely possible that she won't find it injurious.
There is a similar absence of strong evidence that tampons create hymen damage. Since the introduction of commercially-produced tampons in the 1930s, there has been near-continual controversy (and for some, considerable anguish) over whether or not tampon use “devirginizes” a woman. This fear is a logical one, given the common assumption that any penetration of the vagina will tear or destroy the hymen, but it is not well founded. In a 1994 study of 300 young women (median age 18) with no history of sexual abuse, a research team headed by Dr. S. J. Emans discovered that what the study characterized as “deep hymenal clefts” were observed in only eleven out of the one hundred tampon users surveyed who had no experience of sexual penetration.
Comparatively speaking, this is slightly more than twice as many “deep clefts” (a less precise term than “complete transection”) as were found in self-identified virgins who used only sanitary pads (5/100), but it is a far cry from the figures for women who had had intercourse, approximately 80% of whom Emans' team found to have the aforementioned “deep hymenal clefts.” This does not mean that there is no possibility at all of tampon use causing damage to the hymen, but rather that the likelihood of this happening is very small, bordering on statistical insignificance. Indeed, even in this sample, a fifth of the women who had engaged in intercourse, let alone used tampons, showed no hymenal evidence of having done so. Emans' research, like others', supports nothing so much as the impossibility of giving a definitive answer about virginity based on medical assessment of the hymen.
This impossibility, however, should honestly not, come as news in this day and age. As far back as 1885, physician J.B. Hicks argued in The Lancet against doctor-issued virginity certificates on the grounds that there were women in whom coitus produced no sign. And Hicks was hardly the first. As early as the third century CE, Saints Ambrose and Augustine rejected out of hand the use of medical examinations to diagnose virginity, and Saint Cyprian (d. 258 CE) pointed out sensibly enough that “even though [a woman] may have been found an incorrupt virgin in that part in which a woman can be, she may yet have sinned.”
Cyprian was correct. His statement was true in the third century, and it remains true today. And so does its opposite, that a woman may be found to bear the evidence of vaginal penetration, and yet not have engaged in sex. This is relevant not only with regard to hymenal transection, but also in regard to myrtiform caruncles. These small remnants of hymenal tissue are the remains of a hymen that has been truly destroyed, stretched to such a point that there are multiple complete transections of the hymenal tissue and the tissue itself is ragged and shriveled up into little bits. Extreme stretch trauma to the vaginal opening during childbirth is the usual cause. In some cases, however, they may also result from sexually abusive vaginal penetration, particularly in young girls with unestrogenized (and thus less elastic) hymens. Or they may be created if a vagina is sexually penetrated (whether consensually or forcibly) with very large objects.Even myrtiform caruncles, though, can only constitute circumstantial evidence. They do not tell us whether the object that traumatized the hymen penetrated it from the outside or whether it came from within, as with the delivery of an infant.
It is worth noting that pregnancy without penile penetration of the vagina or indeed any bodily contact at all has been recorded as far back as the twelfth-century physician Averroes, who reported a case of a woman who became pregnant after bathing in a public baths in whose waters a man had ejaculated. With the advent of the technologies of in vitro fertilization, as evinced by a February 24, 1992 “Dear Abby” column, a woman might well end up having borne a child and still be unsure whether or not she can still be considered a virgin. “I am a 26-year-old woman who is about to be married," the woman wrote. "I have never had sex, but when I was 24 years old, I agreed to be artificially inseminated and gave birth to a child for a couple who wanted one, but the woman was not able to have a child. Now here is my question: Am I still a virgin?”
Given that this woman had delivered a child, and given the probable effects of vaginal childbirth on the hymen, it seems highly unlikely that she would’ve gotten the same verdict from a forensic gynecological hymen inspection that she did from Dear Abby. A forensic gynecologist looking at the condition of this woman's hymen might easily presume that she had indeed had penetrative sex, perhaps on numerous occasions. But Dear Abby's take was quite different: she decreed that since this woman had not ever "had sex" (had a penis in her vagina), she was fully entitled to call herself a virgin.
Neither hymens nor hymenal remnants can speak to anything beyond their existence in the moment. They cannot tell us whether they look the way they do because of consensual sex, accident, childbirth, sexual abuse, or whether the hymen simply looks the way it does because it always has. Nor can evidence of hymen injury tell us how a hymen was injured. Even the raggedest of myrtiform caruncles can tell us only that the hymen was traumatized. They cannot tell us how.
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
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