I am working on the first few lecture of my class for the spring semester. Lecture 2 is anatomy, and this year, in response to last year’s surprise interest, I have a whole PPT slide on the hymen. To write that slide I’ve been doing research.
And it turns out that everything culture teaches us about the hymen is wrong.
The closest thing to true is the idea that the hymen can be painful when it’s not used to being stretched – it’s one of a number of potential causes of pain with penetration, but it is by no means the most common.
However: the hymen doesn’t break and stay broken forever, like a freshness seal (with accompanying “use by” date). If a hymen tears or bruises, IT HEALS.
And the size of a hymen doesn’t vary depending on whether or not the vagina has been penetrated. It’s about 2.75mm. There, now you know roughly how big your hymen is.
And it usually doesn’t bleed. Any blood with first penetration is more likely due to general vaginal tearing from lack of lubrication.
What does change when a woman begins having the hymen stretched regularly is that it grows more flexible. Um, is it appropriate to say that, metaphorically, vaginal intercourse is like yoga for your hymen?
So. Pain with first penetration might be the hymen stretching, maybe. Or it might be a variety of other things. And chances are first penetration will just feel really complicated and novel and nothing like what you expect.
We know from research that a small amount of pain over a longer time span results in lower perceived pain than a large amount of pain over a short time span (in other words, tear the band-aid off slowly, don’t rip it off in one go). So if you want to break your own hymen, do it gradually and gently, teaching it to stretch, rather than forcing it to break.
Side note: this is my 400th post!
Just for the sake of completeness…there is more than one kind of hymen. My hymen is/was septate. The first penetrative sex I had was exceptionally painful and bloody, due to the tearing of that band of tissue. It has never grown back together, nor, would I expect, any ever do.
http://www.youngwomenshealth.org/hymen.html
Mine was septate and didn’t break until I’d been active for about 2 years; I had to be careful not to let my partner insert on the “wrong” side or it hurt too much to do anything. After it broke during some drunken sex, it never healed either (thank FSM for that one).
I remember being absolutely gobsmacked to find out that the hymen was actually a real physical structure. I had assumed for years that it was a literary conceit of some kind — just a stand-in for words like “honor” or “purity” or “virginity.” A little like the bit in the beginning of Peter Pan where Peter is all confused about what a kiss is, and thinks it’s a physical object. Or maybe like the heart being identified as the seat of love, when that’s not in any way literally true.
The other thing I couldn’t figure out is how on earth anyone who actually masturbated would have anything left of a hymen by the time they got round to having intercourse. (Another reason I had trouble believing it was a real phenomenon — what, you’re telling me that a hymen magically knows the difference between a penis and fingers?) This was before I realized that most girls don’t use digital penetration at that age — probably because duh, it hurts. And I *definitely* didn’t know that there are people who don’t masturbate until after the age when they have intercourse. As a child of the 70s, I assumed everyone started (masturbating, not intercourse) by ten or twelve, maybe twelve or thirteen for guys, occasionally much younger.
So anyway, I guess I must have been one of those girls who never had any to begin with, because every description I’ve read or picture I’ve seen is nothing like anything I remember ever having. (And yeah, I’m pretty sure I was not abused.) This is all like getting to read up on alien anatomy as far as I’m concerned. Fascinating.
FYI, 90+% of women who masturbate do so with no vaginal penetration. It’s normal with and without, it’s just more frequently without.
I love the description of vaginal penetration being like yoga for the hymen. I have problem with vaginal intercourse, so it makes it sound much less threatening and more like a process.
In my native language they actually devised a new word for the hymen because the word for hymen makes it sound like this thin film of whatever covers the vaginal opening until it is penetrated (virginal membrane), the new word was vaginal garland, basically. I kind of like it.
I’m sure you’re right about penetration being a minority method, but I have a hard time believing it’s under 10% (especially as you’ve previously said this figure was from just one paper, which you were still trying to track down). I suspect there’s a ton of social and cultural variation, not to mention variation across one’s lifetime. And I thought Ian Ironwood made a pretty good point about sex toy sales in the comment at http://enagoski.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/bullshitness-of-rabbit-vibrators/#comment-2910.
Emmers, in Heather Corinna’s S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide, the hymen is called the vaginal corona. http://www.amazon.com/X-All-You-Need-Know-Progressive-Sexuality/dp/1600940102
Oh, and the best single piece of advice I ever had about sex (at least about the early years thereof) was that becoming sexually active was a process, not a single event.
So it IS true. All this time I’ve been telling everyone that if I don’t have sex often enough that thing will seal back up. Now I have science on my side!
Well, maybe. With the hormone changes at adolescence, the hymen becomes more elastic (usually), so once it’s stretched, it’s stretched (usually). Pain with intercourse after long abstinence is more likely to be about either lubrication, vaginal muscle tone, or overall hyper-sensitivity.
This is interesting. I did not know any of this. Why not, when I supposedly had sex education at school and have had access to all sorts of information since? Thanks Emily and commenters.
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So… where exactly did all those cultural memes come from, then, about the hymen being this membranous seal that breaks the first time for every woman, down to all the nonsense about bloody sheets being so important?
This isn’t exact, but from literature, it most likely had something to do with the importance of a woman being a virgin at marriage, and the idea that she was ‘ruined’ by having sex before that: since virginity was so prized and special, it could never be recovered, and the hymen became a physical manifestation of that idea of purity: another, very common name for it was ‘maidenhead’. And being a virgin at marriage became important because of the introduction of inheritance laws: a man passed his earthly goods onto his eldest legitimate son, so it was important that his son was actually his, something only guaranteed by his wife never being with anyone else sexually, and having an intact hymen was proof of that (though it was apparently quite common for women to get married while on their period to guarantee the bloody sheets). I will say that I’m an English Lit major though, so I can’t say that this is entirely historically accurate, but it seems legit to me!
Good question. It’s easy to find old medical texts on Google Books that talk about considerable blood loss. The wilder ones even have accounts of women bleeding to death from their hymens — I can’t think this very likely except perhaps in the rare case of a woman with hemophilia, but it’s true that bad vaginal lacerations bleed like stink. (A grown woman having that degree of laceration just from PIV sex/rape seems unlikely to me, though. Major vaginal lacerations aren’t all that common even during childbirth.) Some give anthropological references to customs of displaying a nightdress, holding up a bloody sheet, etc.
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what is 2.75 mm? the thickness of the membrane? It would be such a waste to read that exact informaton and not find out what it described.
Width. The thickness varies greatly from individual to individual and changes with hormonal changes across the lifespan.
Width? 2.75 mm is about a tenth of an inch. Did you mean centimeters?
Nope.
Okay, I’m still confused about what’s being measured here. Hanne Blank’s _Virgin: The Untouched History_ says that the *opening* in the hymen starts out at between 2 and 3 mm in *babies* and increases at the rate of one to two millimeters a year until puberty. (See books.google.com/books?id=V6IPvgFKGFUC&pg=PA36 at bottom of page and following.) If she’s right about that, how could the hymen as a whole, or even the opening of it in an adult, be only 2.75 mm wide? Indeed, how could an annular hymen be any other width than the width of the vaginal opening?
In post-adolescent women, the hymen has been through changes from childhood, which means that the hymen by then really is just a fraction of an inch – heck, a fraction of a centimeter – which I think underscores the extent to which pain with intercourse is not about the hymen. I’m currently at home sick in bed without ready access to the reference (it’s bookmarked in my office) but – and I could totally be misremembering – I think it’s from Paul Joannides’ Psychology Today blog on sexuality, sometime in 2009 or 2010.
Thanks! The Joannides reference appears to be http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-it/200806/new-york-times-is-wrong-about-the-hymen-they-are-not-alone which clarifies that it’s the width of the hymenal *rim* you were talking about (which is a measurement that honestly never occurred to me, which is why we were talking at cross-purposes).