Virgin: The Untouched History (4 page)

This raises the question of what women stand to gain from limiting their options so severely. Human women, like other female animals of other species, are not necessarily given to such a system by nature. Primates do not often behave monogamously. This common tendency toward nonmonogamous sexual behavior is partially explained by the desire to have the most genetically superlative offspring possible. It is to the biological advantage of a species when females are at liberty to choose to mate with genetically superior males wherever those females might find them. The myth of the naturally monogamous female and the corresponding myth of the naturally promiscuous male have been trotted out for centuries to help reinforce the double standard that has been so pervasive in Western culture. But as numerous scientists have now proven (Bettyann Kevles's
Females of the Species
provides a reader-friendly, soundly researched introduction), it simply isn't so. Women are no more inherently monogamous than men. If a woman is to behave consistently in a way that runs counter to the biological imperative of maximizing genetic potential—that is, if she is to voluntarily participate in a scheme where she will remain a virgin until she mates with one man, and never mate with any other man thereafter—the incentive has to be a strong one indeed.

The incentive is indeed strong: K-strategist females need a lot of help if their babies are going to survive. In a burgeoning patriarchy, where property and the distribution of goods are controlled primarily or exclusively by men, this means inducing men to feel that they have an investment in helping to provide food, shelter, clothing, social affiliations and protections, and physical care for women and babies. One of the best ways a woman historically has had of doing this is to convince a man to publicly acknowledge his paternity of her child.

The stakes in the bid for paternal recognition are high. Not for nothing is it considered a curse to call someone a bastard. In a patriarchy, it is hard to survive without the sponsorship of a patriarch. To this day, being disowned by one's parents is considered serious business. In the distant past, being disowned or not acknowledged by a parent generally meant death, particularly if the child was an infant. Many legal systems still use the terms "legitimate" and "illegitimate" to indicate whether a child was born within the confines of a heterosexual marriage. It is a telling sign of the deep and lasting power of patriarchy that in so many places it remains the prerogative of men to determine whether children are,
in
the eyes
of
their society and its institutions, legitimate, and therefore fully real.

For the K-strategist female in a patriarchy, securing a future for her children means trading on monogamy generally and on virginity specifically. The trade is not necessarily either equal or fair, and the male side of the bargain is easily withdrawn. Nor does a woman who grants exclusive sexual access to her body to just one man always receive, in return, a guaranteed supply of resources to meet her needs and those of her child or children. But for a K-strategist living in a patriarchy, it has historically been her best bet.

Pure Goods

The process by which this quid pro quo transaction evolved into an institution invested with enormous religious and moral significance is lost to us. As it did, however, men and women alike became profoundly invested in perpetuating the ideology that holds that female virginity is singular and valuable.

This ethos has formed a huge part of the bedrock on which our sexual, social, and familial relationships rest, but its prominence does not mean that valuing virginity is something that is inborn or inherent to human beings. Anthropologists have found examples of too many other cultures that do not value virginity or which value it very differently than we do, including cultures in which both private property and virginity are essentially nonexistent concepts, for us to claim that the way our culture does it is either the way that humans are "supposed to" do things, or the only way they can be done. The way we do it may be a popular, even dominant paradigm among human cultures worldwide, but it is hardly the only basis on which human beings might organize their sexual lives.

The same thing holds true of our tendency to regard virginity as a commodity. Again, we must return to our Neolithic grandparents to imagine the roots of this practice, but the reigning theory runs that as it became increasingly popular for men to bring only virginal women into their households for purposes of having greater control over the paternity of the children they supported they and their women alike began to pay more attention to controlling the sexuality of their daughters in turn. Their daughters would then be more appealing to J: he men of other households or clans, bait for attracting useful allies.

Raising daughters of quality became another mode of production, as valuable as breeding healthy sheep, weaving sturdy cloth, or bringing in a good harvest. As the head of his household or clan, the patriarch took ultimate responsibility for its productivity and performance. A clan's standing or honor could be affected by its ability to compete economically. Status could similarly be affected by whether the clan brought properly virginal daughters to the marriage market. The gesture is now generally symbolic in the first world, but we nonetheless still observe the custom of a father "giving" his daughter in marriage. Up until the last century or so, however, when laws we're liberalized to allow women to stand as full citizens in their own right, this represented a literal transfer of property from a father's household to a husband's.

If an inopportune loss of virginity jeopardized this system, it could be catastrophic. It undermined the father's and the clan's status. But far more than mere loss of face hung in the balance. Virginity lost before marriage often rendered the woman unmarriageable, useless on the marriage market. When a valuable commodity is destroyed, the owners seek recompense from the person who destroyed it, or at least the nearest person to whom blame can be made to stick. Thus the unmarried woman found to be (or merely reputed to be) no longer a virgin might be disowned, sold into slavery, beaten, mutilated, or killed in order to redress the loss of property and face.

An excellent and well-known example of how this worked in practical terms comes from the second half of the twenty-second chapter of the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, written down around the seventh century B.C.E.

^I3
If a man takes a wife, and goes in to her [to consummate the marriage], and hates her,
^I4
and speaks libelous words against her, and calls her by evil names, and says, "I took this woman [as a wife], and when I went to her [as a husband], I found her not a virgin,"
^I5
then shall the girl's father and mother bring forth the tokens of the girl's virginity unto the elders of the city, at the city gate.
^l6
The girl's father shall say unto the elders "I gave my daughter to this man as his wife, and now he hates her
¹⁷
and has libeled her, saying 'I did not find your daughter to be a virgin,' yet these here are the tokens of her virginity." And the parents shall spread the cloth before the city elders.
^l8
Then the elders of the city should take the man and flog him,
^I9
and fine him a hundred shekels of silver to be given to the girl's father, because he [the accuser] has cast an evil name upon a virgin of Israel. She will be his wife [the marriage will be upheld as valid] and he may not divorce her.
²⁰
But if this thing [accusation] is true, and the tokens of the girl's virginity were not found,
^2I
then they will bring the girl to the gate of her father's household and the men of her city will stone her to death because she has done an obscene thing among her people Israel by committing whoredom in her father's house. So you will cast evil away from you.

In the Deuteronomist's formulation, wrongfully accusing the father of the bride of having presented "damaged goods" constitutes a crime against the bride's father. Slander is a civil crime, not a religious one, as indicated not only by the language used to describe the offense but also by how it is remedied. The father who is slandered by having his daughter falsely accused of having not been a virgin at marriage is paid damages for the damage to his reputation, and whatever social or material gains he had achieved through the marriage of his daughter are solidified because the marriage is upheld. Despite the fact that it was her virginity and her honesty that were impugned, however, his daughter is not perceived as having been slandered by a false accusation. She is never compensated for any damage done to
her
reputation. Because her marriage is valid, she is considered to have nothing to worry about.

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

P
UT 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 ever 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 hymenal 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.