The Guide to Getting It On (20 page)

• Claire Yang, MD, Department of Urology, University of Washington
  
• Alessandra Rellini, Ph.D., University of Vermont
  
• Marca Sipski, MD, Director of Neuroscience Rehabilitation Research, University of Alabama at Birmingham
  
• William W. Young, MD, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dartmouth Medical School
  
• Maureen Whelihan, MD, Gynecology
  
• Roy Levin, University of Sheffield, Sheffield England
  
• Carol Tavris, Ph.D. and Leonore Tiefer, Ph.D.
  

Some of the illustrations in this chapter were strongly influenced by:

• Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy,
  Second Edition, Robert Latou Dickinson, The Williams & Wilkins Company, Baltimore, Maryland, 1949
  
• A New View of a Woman’s Body
  by the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers, Illustrations by Suzann Gage, West Hollywood, California. If you found the drawings in this chapter helpful, you are encouraged to purchase the classic New View directly from the authors at:
  www.progressivehealth.org
  

CHAPTER

8

The Hymen

T
he hymen is a collar of tissue around the opening of the vagina. It is the source of myth and legend, and it remains a mystery to much of modern medicine. Not that many primary care physicians can even accurately locate the hymen. When we recently polled a group of gynecologists and women’s sexual health experts, few could say what happens to the hymen of a sexually-active woman over time.

Some of the better studies on the hymen have only been done in the last couple of years, and some of these contradict each other. The research that’s been done on hymens is mostly related to investigating sexual abuse, so it’s not particularly helpful if you are trying to understand the hymen in a context of healthy sexual activity.

In this chapter we will present much of what is known about the sexually-happy hymen. If there are holes in our knowledge, it pretty much goes with the territory.

How Your Hymen Came to Be

There are some helpful things to know about hymens—and just knowing two of these will help you to understand more about this small collar or ring of tissue than—oh—99% of the population.

But first, we need to get our anatomy right.

The hymen is located just inside the opening of the vagina. Unfortunately people often refer to everything that’s between a woman’s legs as her vagina, which is like saying “New York” without specifying whether you mean New York City or upper state. So to see the hymen, you need to pull apart the labia and look inside the opening of the vagina.

In understanding how the hymen came to be and why it is where it is, you need to know the difference between the vulva and vagina, because each had a hand in the development of the hymen while the woman was still in her mother’s womb.

VULVA:
This is the part of a woman’s genitals that are on the outside—the part that you actually see and that’s been the focus of many a porn site and magazine centerfold. It includes the mound that the landing strip sits on, the tip of the clitoris, and the lips or labia. Some people think the vulva is what they named the car known as the Volvo after.

VAGINA:
This is the part of women’s sexual plumbing that’s on the inside. The vagina is a tube-like structure that’s located inside a woman’s body. It’s where a tampon and penis slide into. The vagina starts just inside the vulva, where the hymen is, and runs all the way back behind the cervix.

The Hymen—Where East Meets West

The vulva and vagina did not come from the same kind of embryonic tissue. So what you have are two different kinds of tissue, with the hymen being the border or checkpoint between the two.

While this analogy might be stretching it a bit, think of when two different land masses collide and a mountain range is created at that spot. The Himalayas are a case in point—a fine example when you consider that both
hymen
and
Himalayas
start with an “H.” What’s especially interesting about this embryonic junction is that the tissue on the inner side of the hymen comes from the vagina which is estrogen-sensitive. So when the girl begins to go through puberty and her estrogen levels rise, the hymen changes considerably. As you will see, it becomes more elastic and no longer covers the opening of the vagina.

How the Hymen Changes—It’s Puberty and Not the Penis That Does It

As the body changes, so does the hymen. Before puberty, a girl’s hymen is often crescent-shaped, although there are certainly variations. The hymen is stretched across the opening of the vagina and it is almost translucent. You can actually see some of the capillaries in it and it covers much of the opening of the vagina.

By the end of puberty, the hymen no longer drapes across the opening of the vagina, but becomes more like an O-ring or collar, allowing a penis to have full entry. This change is due to the impact of estrogen on the hymen tissue, which has estrogen receptors in it just like the walls of the vagina. Since the estrogen makes the hymen more elastic, our modern notion that the hymen “pops” like a cherry during the first intercourse is silly.

The estrogen that comes with the start of puberty causes the hymen to become shorter and thicker, more like a hedge or collar than the former drape or a wall that it was during childhood. With this thickening comes elasticity.

So it is puberty that changes the hymen, not the first intercourse. In fact, it’s as if nature is changing the girl’s hymen to make it ready for intercourse.

From Saran Wrap into Spandex

Researchers often have trouble distinguishing between the hymens of teenage girls who are sexually active and hymens of teenage girls who are still virgins. That wouldn’t be the case if hymens were like the tops of pop bottles or “Cherries that pop.”

Still, it’s hard to dispel the myth that the hymen is a disposable seal of virginity, like the sheet of plastic that’s fused onto the top of a frozen dinner that is torn to shreds after the first intercourse. Think of football players running onto the field and bursting through a wall of painted butcher paper that cheerleaders are forever holding the sides of—that’s how we think of the first intercourse. In actuality, the hymen of a woman who is past puberty looks a lot more like the stargate in Stargate Atlantis, minus the cool-looking chevrons that were embedded within it. (If you are a diehard sci-fi fan, you might be better off whispering into your lover’s ear that you’re hot to jump through her Stargate than referring to her vagina as the wormhole. While you would be technically correct in Stargate terms, calling a puss a wormhole is asking for a world of hurt.)

Your First Intercourse

We also assume that there will be blood after the first intercourse. Yet way more than half of the women who take our sex survey say there wasn’t any blood.

As an indicator that the cherry-popping myth has simply morphed rather than gone away, a number of the women who answered our survey felt that the reason they didn’t bleed during their first intercourse was because they had already torn their hymen while riding a horse or doing the splits, or while their boyfriend was feeling them up.

Researchers who were investigating athletic injuries in girls’ crotches, including splits- and inline-skating related trauma, found that it wasn’t the hymen that was bleeding. In cases where the hymen most certainly should have torn if it were going to tear, it was the vagina itself that split and bled rather than the hymen. And why horseback riding would wear away a hymen makes no sense physiologically unless the woman is sitting on the horn of the saddle.

While a hymen will most likely be stretched during a first intercourse, it shouldn’t ordinarily tear. If it does, or if there is pain, there are at least two possible causes:

• Not Fully Estrogenized:
  In some women, the hymen doesn’t become fully estrogenized or elasticized during puberty. One healthcare provider who does premarital exams told us that she sometimes prescribes estrogen cream for her abstinent patients who are getting married whose hymens haven’t become very elasticized yet. So if you haven’t had intercourse and are concerned, this would be a good question to ask a gynecologist—Does your hymen appear to have been adequately estrogenized for intercourse? (As for the effect of hormonal birth control on the hymen, no one knows. No research has been done.)
  
• Clumsy or Not Aroused Enough:
  Another reason for why a first intercourse can be painful is when the male partner is inexperienced, rough, has poor aim, is really big, or there’s not enough lubrication. As a result, the hymen might tear or bruise, in the same way your gum might when you chomp on it mercilessly. There is an entire chapter on your first intercourse later in the book, Chapter 41:
  Bye Bye V-Card—Losing Your Virginity.
  Hopefully, it can help prevent a painful first time.
  

Another thing researchers have discovered is how quickly the hymen heals itself. Medical examiners have been surprised at how normal the hymen can appear to be in girls who they know have been sexually molested. The latest research has found that tears in a hymen usually heal quickly, often within 24 to 48 hours.

So if your hymen does split or tear during intercourse, the bleeding gum example is a pretty accurate comparison. Your hymen should heal as fast.

Tag

A hymen can start bleeding for the first time years after a woman has been having intercourse. This might be due to a tear in a “hymenal tag,” which is a remnant of the hymen. These tags are like any of the other folds of skin inside the vagina, except they might look like pointy bits where there would otherwise be smoothness. Hymen tags are fairly common, but most women never detect them because they don’t feel any different from other parts of the vagina.

What Happens to the Hymen Over Time

One gynecologist we consulted believes that the hymen wears away with intercourse. The larger the penis, the more it wears. She believes she can accurately guess the size of a partner’s penis based on how worn the hymen appears to be. Another gynecologist disagrees, saying that you can’t predict anything about the number of sexual partners or their girth by the appearance of the hymen.

Needless to say, a bit of research might be nice, but one would need to examine the hymens of young women before they had ever had intercourse, and then a few years later. You would also need to know the dimensions of their partners’ penises, approximately how many thrusts they would receive per average intercourse, and how often they had intercourse. (We’re right on it—have the grant applications ready to file as soon as this edition of
The Guide
goes to press.)

All of the experts who we consulted with did agree that it’s not unusual to see fronds of the hymen protruding from the vagina. These might have been tags from the hymen that became stretched. They also agreed that childbirth would be a hymen’s worst nightmare, causing a fair amount of stress on the hymen as an infant passes by.

Warranty Repair: Revirginization

“Revirginization surgery,” is when a surgeon takes the tattered edges of a hymen and purse-strings them together. None of our consultants were excited about it. The explicatives that some of them used in describing the wisdom of “revirginization surgery” are not appropriate for a family book like this. However, if the alternative is being stoned in the village square...