A lot of people don’t know what the hymen really is—even doctors. People generally think that the hymen is “something” in the vagina that seals it off until you have had sex or until you are no longer a virgin. This is not true.
First of all, the hymen is not technically in the vagina. It is a thin layer of tissue outside of the vagina (in the vulva) that partially conceals or covers up the vagina. When a female fetus is developing in the womb, there is originally no opening or hole in the hymen, but there is an opening by the time the baby is born. Long before you lose your virginity, your hymen already has an opening.
There are some women who do not have an opening in their hymen because normal development did not occur in the womb. This is a problematic medical condition known as imperforate hymen. Once a girl begins menstruating, if there is no opening in her hymen, then the menstrual blood builds up in the uterus and vagina. This is not a common problem; it only occurs in one in two thousand females. An imperforate hymen is rarely diagnosed until girls begin menstruating and they discover that a big, painful mass forms in their belly around the time of their period (a mass of blood that cannot exit the vagina). In order to fix an imperforate hymen, a doctor must perform surgery to create an opening in the hymen.
MYTH, HALF-TRUTH, OR OUTRIGHT LIE?
A doctor can tell if you are a virgin or not
Many women who have had sexual intercourse have absolutely no detectable changes in their hymen when carefully examined by doctors (including the use of a special camera with 10-times magnification and measurement of the actual width of the hymen’s opening to within a millimeter). In a study from 2004 of eighty-five females ages thirteen to nineteen years, 48 percent of the women who admitted to having had sex had some small, visible changes on the edge of the hymen. But 52 percent of the women who admitted that they had sex exhibited no change in the look of their hymen even on this very detailed exam. More than half of the time when a woman has had sex, there will be no visible change.
Let’s face it—if doctors conducting such an exacting exam can’t even tell if someone is a virgin, you sure won’t be able to tell, either, so this is a myth.