Many cultures around the world value virginity, especially in girls. And because of the high value placed on virginity, people assume that there must be some way to tell whether or not you are a virgin.
First of all, many people assume that you can tell whether the person you have sex with is a virgin just because of how it may feel or whether or not there is bleeding. This just isn’t true. But even if the person you are having sex with can’t tell, most people believe that a doctor can tell, especially if she does a careful exam of the genitalia. This isn’t true either.
Women’s hymens are different shapes and sizes. And, as we explained in the previous chapter, the hymen should have an opening, whether or not the woman is a virgin. Even when doctors use incredibly careful examination techniques, they cannot necessarily tell whether someone has had sex. Half the time, women who have had sex have absolutely no changes detectable by a doctor using a special camera with 10x magnification and measuring the actual width of the hymen’s opening to within a millimetre. In a careful study from 2004 of females aged between thirteen and nineteen, 48 per cent of the girls who admitted to having had sex had some small changes on the edge of the hymen. But 52 per cent of the girls who admitted that they had had sex showed absolutely no findings in even this very detailed exam. So, more than half of the time, when a girl has had sex there will be no changes. Therefore you cannot prove that someone is not a virgin based on what you can see.
And if doctors doing this kind of exam cannot tell if someone is a virgin, there is no way that you can tell either.