Constructing Virginity: Morality and the Hymen
By Cristina Cabrera-Ayers (they/them)
Let’s talk about virginity.
What is it, why do we talk about it, and, once we have defined how dehumanizing, objectifying and patently unhelpful these conversations are, what should we talk about instead?
First, let’s do some term definitions.
Terminology
Virginity = the concept of never having had penetrative, penile sex.
Hymen= a membrane of tissue found at the front of the vagina, which has been constructed as the indicator of whether or not someone is a virgin
Purity culture= ideas and expectations of women’s/AFAB’s behaviour to preserve their sexual ‘purity’, which often puts the responsibility of avoiding ‘attracting’ male attention onto following these expectations.
AFAB= Assigned Female At Birth; a catch-all term to describe people who are/ were considered female at birth. This term refers to people who continue to identify as female, and people who identify differently. In this article, I will be referring to ‘AFABs’, as this article largely has to do with the way that the vaginal appearance is weaponised as a tool of the patriarchy.
AMAB= Assigned Male At Birth a catch-all term to describe people who are /were considered male at birth. This term refers to people who continue to identify as male, and people who identify differently from their assigned gender. This article isn’t going to cover the virginity of transwomen because, while they will have some of the same purity culture applied to them as adults, they will not necessarily be subjected to the same, invasive interference with their genitals.
Scope
Let’s also talk a bit about scope. The examples I have used in this blog include rural districts governed by conservative interpretations of religion and cultural norms. When I refer to ‘places’ and ‘cultures’, it is not always geographic. While we tend to assume that AFABs’ rights are worst in economically depressed, less developed rural areas, the harmful cultures of purity and subordination to AMABs which underpins the idea of virginity can be found everywhere in the world.
The regions I mention within this article have visible scenes of virginity testing. The conversation of virginity testing happens, to some degree, on public platforms, where local and foreign media alike can refer to specific cases and anecdotes. These regions have scenes of research associated with their virginity testing practices, and identifiable subjects who have had the tests or administer them within the community. Likewise, these subjects are part of local conversations about why these practices are still occurring, and, often, grassroots movements that aim to dismantle the patriarchal thinking that goes into these practices.
It is easy when writing from a position of alleged allyship rather than embedded cultural experience, utterly unhelpful to point out the manifestations of patriarchal thinking in non-white, non-Anglo-Saxon groups without acknowledging those within our own cultures. When we, as writers from and/or embedded in the Western world, consider virginity testing it is easy to assume non-white, non-Christian communities and immigrant enclaves “brought it here”. This belief suggests the issue of virginity testing ends with non-white and non-Christian communities, and the patriarchal control over virginity is at its worse in these communities. I would like to acknowledge and ensure discussion on this topic is not to be repurposed to lessen the humanity of ethnic, racial and cultural minorities.
I acknowledge Anglo-Saxon Australia also has a continuing history of invasive control of AFAB bodies, invasive in different and equally violating ways. These include access to abortion, appropriate healthcare and more.
This piece is not written with the intention of voyeuristic shaming of the cultures and communities where virginity testing continues to occur. Instead, it considers the problem and commends the efforts that are being made by local stakeholders and activists, carrying on these conversations within their embedded community.
Among the resources used for this article was a Master’s thesis published by the Law School of KwaZulu Natal University by a local woman whose work I consult for the specific contexts of the examples of virginity testing in Eswatini (Swaziland) and South Africa. Her full thesis is available online and linked in the bibliography. There is also a video essay written by a Somalian-born Finnish activist, Unjuni Ahmed, who speaks on honour-related domestic violence within immigrant enclaves, by drawing on her personal experience. This resource is also linked and free to view on YouTube.
A number of articles, academic and journalistic, include testimony from a number of subjects, speaking about their experiences to rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the Fuller Project. We will touch on more visible virginity testing infrastructure that some countries have- Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan- as well as the less formalized tests, with less visibility- the United States, Canada, Australia.
Constructing virginity: blood for honour
In the most basic terms, virginity testing is a “thing” because of the value placed upon virginity. Specifically, AFAB virginity: there are no equivalent tests for AMAB genitals, and believe you me, if society wanted to find a way to test male virginity, we could absolutely find some random part of the male anatomy to associate with virginity.
We could be talking about the diameter or shape of urethra openings, or argue that vaginal enzymes dissolve your foreskin or something, but we don’t, because the concept of physical, observable virginity is designed around the control of AFAB bodies.
Specifically, the control is exerted by AMAB bodies: baked into the concept of virginity is the assumption that your vagina will be penetrated by a penis. A cisgender penis, at that- for whatever reason, it doesn’t count if you’re penetrated by a toy or some other appendage, although it’s supposed to be down only to the state of your hymen. Many virginity tests reflect this obsession with a uniform, imagined vaginal shape in the way that they interpret the physicality of your vaginal opening, which we will go over later in this blog.
The two most common types of virginity test, the world over, are described below:
Two finger test: testing the narrowness of the vaginal canal + for the ‘blockage’ of the hymen
Liquid test: pouring liquid into the vaginal opening. The amount of liquid which goes in depends upon the size of your opening; if a small amount goes in, you are a virgin. If a large amount goes in, you have been penetrated.
(Olson & Moreno, Mishori et al, 2019; Crosby, Oleng, Volpellier, et al, 2020)
One of the other popular ideas is that a person will bleed, the first time they have penetrative sex. Presumably, this blood comes from the perforation of the hymen. A little later in the article, we will go into the reasons these tests are neither reliable nor valid ways of judging whether someone has had penetrative sex.
As of 2018, according to the UN’s report on virginity testing, there are roughly twenty countries that have a formalised, legalised infrastructure of virginity testing as barriers/requirements for employment (Ndebele, 2020, p3; Moreno & Olson, 2017). For example, a report from Human Rights Watch in 2014 found that Jakarta, as well as five other Indonesian cities, required AFAB recruits to undergo virginity tests before they could be sworn in as police. The process was universally traumatizing, amongst the recruits, and yet was not taken seriously when the authorities were complained to (Human Rights Watch, 2014; Diep, 2017). Apart from employment, the maintenance of one’s virginity can be a condition of obtaining a marriage proposal. In a specific example from rural Morocco, described by an anti-virginity testing activist in the city of Safi, women are virginity tested and given a certificate if they pass. This will then be shown to their prospective husbands as proof of the woman’s sexual worth, and how well she can be considered to have upheld the community’s social values and morals.
Women who are not able to attain a certificate are often at risk of violence from family, potential partners and an ostracization from the larger community for failing to do so (Mishori et al, 2019). An article published by the Fuller Project describes several North American women’s experiences of virginity testing, reporting that some of the women’s parents were also given certificates ‘proving’ virginity after the process (Jones, 2019). Similar situations were reported by a 1994 Human Rights’ Watch on Turkey and continue to be an issue today (Human Rights’ Watch, 1994; Kale, 2016).
More broadly, places practicing bride-prices (where the bride’s family is paid by the groom’s) may drop the value of the price if the woman is known or thought to have lost her virginity prior to marriage. An example included in Ndebele’s thesis relates how one traditional community is known to add an extra animal to a dowry payment as ‘compensation’ for a daughter’s compromised virginity (p4; Ndebele 2020).
Preserving the appearance of virginity by submitting to these tests is sometimes a condition of safety from one’s immediate family, or community. Getting said daughter down the aisle to her marriage is a sort of secondary goal, compared to surveilling the AFAB bodies within the community and virginity testing is the tool by which this surveillance is managed. As such, there is great pressure to comply with virginity testing.
A lot of virginity tests are administered from the teenage years, while the girl still lives at home and therefore easily pressured or coerced by their family to undergo the procedures. To discuss the nuances of minors consenting to incredibly invasive procedures with the dogmatic messaging that tends to be around virginity testing, we would need another thousands-word long article. It should suffice to say that there is an incredible societal and familial pressure upon the subject to comply with a virginity test.
An SBS article detailed how one Australian woman, born to conservative Greek orthodox parents, underwent virginity tests with her sisters as a teenager- she was not in the position to refuse testing. In her adult life, sex became traumatizing because of the messaging she had grown up with. (Syron, 2022) There have also been reports of virginity testing within Orthodox Jewish and conservative Christian communities, as well as more recent immigrant communities. Many of the doctors approached for virginity tests have been told that the girls in question risk violent reprisals from their immediate families, or larger communities, if they are not able to obtain evidence of virginity (Crosby, Oleng, Volpellier, et al, 2020; Mishori et al, 2019; Ahmed, 2020).
Now that we have established the meaning attached to a hymen and how virginity is constructed, let’s talk about what’s actually going on up there.
The hymen as a physical reality: it’s not a freshness seal, folks.
Occasionally, virginity testing has also been justified as a healthcare measure to reduce the spread of HIV, either because of girls having pre-marital sex or because of assaults (Leclerc-Madlala, 2008; Mishori et al, 2019). The South African province of KwaZulu Natal and other parts of the Eastern Cape, as well as the whole kingdom of Eswatini, often perform virginity tests on school-aged girls as a part of standard medical procedures (Olson & Moreno, 2017; Ndebele, 2020). This is performed with the justification of limiting the infection rates of HIV, searching for signs of sexual abuse and cutting down on unplanned pregnancies (Leclerc-Madlala, 2008; Ndebele, 2020). Similar measures were proposed in 2003 for Jamaica’s healthcare programs by a member of parliament, but the intense public backlash prohibited the initiative to go forward. Among the critiques, the public asked why the government would not consider investment in comprehensive healthcare, or implementing more serious punishments against the (often) predatory older men contributing to the spread of HIV by assault (Diep, 2017; Leclerc-Madlala, 2008).
But… what meaningful insights can we gather regarding the body's condition by examining the hymen?
We’ve known about the hymen for a while, probably longer than the Western written records say. The first time a medical examination of that little tissue was recorded comes out of Belgium, 1536, during the (wait for it) AUTOPSY of an eighteen-year-old woman by an anatomical student named Andreas Vesalius.
Human history is a long cycle of making the same discoveries repetitively - I can say this safely, as a former history major, a lot of human civilization is trying to engineer ways not to mix our sewage with our drinking water. We are a diverse species in terms of our cultures and geographic spread, but we’re all working with the same anatomical blueprint: every culture in the world probably had a Vesalius-at-the-autopsy moment in which they discovered something past the labia. Some, evidently, decided to equivocate the hymen to virginity, and to monitor it to ensure AFAB sexual purity.
For all the importance we assign to the hymen, we don’t actually know what the hell it’s doing up there. Some theories say the hymen is keeping fecal matter out of the vaginal cavity while a fetus develops; others, say that the hymen forms a physical barrier to the entry of bacteria into the cavity. Which leads me to the question, what does Ms Hymen think she is doing when she allows a yeast infection to set in? Do your job Ms Hymen- if that is your job.
Part of the reason we haven’t determined what the hymen does is because it does not have a uniform shape that makes it easy to judge a function from it. Some come with a naturally ‘torn’ appearance, or perforate. Furthermore, hymens do not close the canal off entirely because that would leave no room for the menstrual blood to come out- in fact, that is a genuine medical condition which medical specialists have operated on. A small percentage of the population are born without any kind of hymen at all, which causes no health effects that science has been able to identify so far.
In summary, it is a lot of importance and obsession for a thin organ that serves no proven or observable purpose. In the grand scheme of a working, healthy human body, the hymen is just kind of hanging out.
Therefore, the ‘tests’ designed to check whether it is intact do not employ a realistic understanding of the hymen’s physical properties and differences. These tests also do not take into account the variety of non-sexual, non-penetrative sexual activities which can tear or perforate a hymen, or widen the vaginal canal in a similar way that penetrative sex may.
Finally, they do not address the problem of male predation on young women resulting in a number of unplanned pregnancies and other health complications. That would require comprehensive sex education, access to birth control and prophylactics, and more social engagement with the problems of misogyny which enable and encourage wide-spread sexual assaults. These address the root causes of the problems, while also giving young women and AFABs agency over their bodies and choices.
To focus purely on preserving virginity does not solve a problem, but creates them. By valuing the ideas of purity and virginity over the health and wellbeing of the people on whom it is constructed, as a society we further their dehumanization.
The tissue itself is a very thin membrane which cannot be seen (unless, say, you stick a colonoscopy camera up there) nor clearly felt within the canal. No matter the shape or size, it does not have much in the way of blood vessels- so when there is blood during sex, most of the time, it has come from a tear in the vaginal wall rather than the breakage of the hymen.
Some people do bleed when they have penetrative sex for the first time. The vagina is self-lubricating to make penetration easier, which arousal and foreplay can help with. If someone is extremely nervous about their first-time having sex, they may not become wet, which can lead to tearing. Imagine you have been raised within a culture which bases much of your value upon an arbitrary body part. You cannot be sure that the outcome of your first time will satisfy the community, your parents, your partner, and if you cannot, you may face corporal punishment and even death. That would compromise anybody’s ability to be aroused.
The act of sex tends to be treated with so much shame, as well, causing women and AFABs to develop psychological issues and deep anxieties around ‘losing their virginity’.
Many will feel pressured to consummate on their wedding night, whether or not they are emotionally prepared or even want to have sex. Under those kinds of psychological conditions, it is no wonder that bleeding can occur in a high number of people. Add to that, cultures which prioritize virginity in such a way often also focus on male sexual pleasure. The enjoyment of the AFAB partner may be constructed as secondary, so their penetrating partner may not know or care about arousing them, thereby making the process more uncomfortable.
Virginity testing and the patriarchal attitudes which underpin it are not concerned with the wellbeing of AFABs or women- tools of control are not supposed to be comfortable, let alone pleasurable.
Virginity is a theory: the trauma of testing is not
The importance which has been assigned to a hymen and virginity is not only nonsensical, but actively harmful.
No matter what kind of testing a person is subjected to, the tests will be uncomfortable, sometimes painful, and always humiliating. These tests start early with minors being coerced into them by family members and the community.
People are not given the means to protect their privacy, especially in the cases where tests are mandated by formal, governmental infrastructure.
In recognition of this, some of the nations with visible virginity testing infrastructure have begun to contest its legality. Several Indian states have banned virginity testing to varying degrees as a result of public pressure, and various courts within Bangladesh, Egypt, Afghanistan, Finland, Sweden and Turkey with varying degrees of success (Nader, Zahra, Mashal ,2017; Jones & The Fuller Project, 2019; SBS 2020; Ahmed, 2020). Recently, the UK (which itself has had government-sponsored virginity tests in past, largely forced upon Asian immigrant women upon their entry into Britain) jumped on the ban bandwagon, in reaction to a growing conversation around the frequency of women and girls being tested or getting ‘virginity restoration kits’ to marry (Olson & Moreno, 2017 ; Crosby, Oleng, Volpellier, 2020).
We have already established that virginity testing doesn’t have a realistic understanding of the physicality of the vagina and the hymen, so why have they persisted?
These tests speak to an obsession of prioritizing sexual activity which is represented by the penetration of a vagina by a penis. When we get into it, what kind of penetration counts? Does it count if your partner uses a strap? Does it count if you are a cisgender woman being penetrated by a cisgender man, but he just so happens to have chosen to use a sex toy rather than his own penis? Is a man still a virgin if he has never had penetrative sex with his own penis, but has been penetrated by someone else?
… And if it only counts as losing your virginity when it’s your cis-male partner’s penis penetrating your cisgender vagina, why is it so exclusive to that kind of sex act? Why do we go to such lengths to exclude other kinds of pleasure, and other combinations of gender among the participants?
None of this has ever been about sex or pleasure; it is all about controlling bodies, and subjugating the people who live within them.
Bibliography
Crosby, Oleng, Volpellier, et al. Virginity testing: recommendations for primary care physicians in Europe and North America BMJ Global Health 2020;5:e002057.
https://gh.bmj.com/content/5/1/e002057Leclerc-Madlala, Suzanne. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4, Special Issue: The Contributions of Medical Anthropology to Anthropology and Beyond (Dec., 2001), pp. 533-552 (20 pages) https://gh.bmj.com/content/5/1/e002057 / https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1525/maq.2001.15.4.533
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Ndebele, Nobuhle. College of Law and Management Studies, School of Law. ‘Do the children’s act provisions which legalise virginity testing violate any of the constitutional rights of girls’, 2020.
https://ukzn-dspace.ukzn.ac.za/handle/10413/19774?show=fullJones, Sophia. “Why Are American Doctors Performing Virginity Tests?” Marie Claire & The Fuller Project, 30 Oct. 2019, www.marieclaire.com/health-fitness/a29488743/virginity-testing-america-doctors
Sane, Samidha. “Virginity Testing in Morocco: Assault on Dignity, or a Shield against Assault?” Pulitzer Center, 2 Mar. 2020, https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/virginity-testing-morocco-assault-dignity-or-shield-against-assault
Syron, Mikele. “Virginity as a Prize? “Purity Testing” and Hymenoplasty in Australia.” SBS News, 30 Apr. 2022, https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/article/virginity-as-a-prize-the-popularity-of-hymenoplasty-in-australia/y3k34n4a2
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https://psmag.com/social-justice/stupid-tests-for-stupid-people