7 Virginity Myths Men (and Women) Need to Stop Believing
With some helpful illustrations to clear up the confusion
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My friends make the same request whenever we take an Uber or Lyft ride - please don’t chat with the driver. Their request is mostly for safety reasons. Drivers have this odd habit of sharing tragedies with me, and it’s a bit hard to see the road through tears. I am not sure why this happens. Perhaps it is the lull of the road or the confined space, but when people are trapped behind those car doors,… bizarre shit comes out of their mouths.
I once had a confessional conversation with a Taxi driver from Saudi Arabia. You know, the kind of conversation where you keep silently repeating, “This. Cannot. Be. Happening,” while looking for the hidden camera.
His tale began innocently. He told me his bride would be coming to the U.S., and they would be married soon after. He planned to give his bride a gold belt to symbolize his commitment.
“And what will she give to you to show her love?” I asked.
He looked at me in his rearview mirror and narrowed his eyes. “Her virginity.”
Well, I wasn’t expecting that answer.
Now, I must confess that I was a bit tipsy, or at least at the saucy point of inebriation. Plus, I love messing with people. So, of course, I asked the obvious…
“And what if your bride is not a virgin?”
As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I cursed that second martini. His answer made me calculate the velocity of the cab in case I needed to jump out.
“Then we kill her.”
“Ah, excuse me? You..what?”
“We kill her. Ok, not exactly. Her father would. It would dishonor my family if he did not.”
At this point, I kept my mouth shut and was thankful the plexiglass prevented me from clawing his eyes out. But the question that I wanted to ask circled in my mind all night — how would you know she was a virgin? And even more disturbing, how would she prove she was a virgin?
Throughout history, women have been tortured in the name of virginity. In ancient times, a Vestal Virgin had to prove her purity by entering a snake-filled cavern and feeding the snakes some barley cakes. If the snake ate the cake, she was a virgin. If the ants ate it, she was impure. Nonvirgins were then entombed alive. I am pretty sure snakes don’t eat cake, so this test seems rather unfair.
In the thirteenth century, doctors performed “two-fingered” internal exams on a woman to determine her virginity by the tightness of her vaginal opening. And piss prophets — doctors who used urine to diagnose illness — claimed they could tell if a woman was a virgin if her urine was ‘sometimes white, sometimes sparkling.’ Before carbonated beverages, god knows how women faked that sparkle.
Virginity was also often a public affair. During the Renaissance, aristocratic new brides hung their bloody sheets out after the wedding night to prove their virginity. Sometimes, a young bride had to squirt her sheets with animal blood to prevent dishonoring her family.
Virgins do not have sparkly urine, they don’t always bleed, and they certainly can’t charm snakes into eating cake. Here are a few other virginity myths for men who might possibly murder their wives on their wedding night.
Myth 1: A hymen is a barrier to the vagina that is broken
The hymen is remnant tissue that surrounds the vaginal opening. It is not a barrier unless she has an imperforate hymen —a rare congenital disorder in which the membrane obstructs the vaginal opening.
The hymen’s shape differs in every woman, and some women are born without one. The tissue also varies in flexibility and will stretch and change shape as a girl enters puberty. Here are a few examples of hymens.
Myth 2: An intact hymen is a sign of virginity
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