Read Online Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank - Free Book Online

hymens must look alike. Nothing could be further from the truth.
    The hymen type that seems most common in the popular imagination is actually one of the least common types of hymens in terms of what actually occurs in women's bodies. Many people imagine that the hymen actually covers the entirety of the vaginal opening with an unbroken expanse of skin, like the paper-covered hoop through which the circus lion tamer makes his charges leap. Hymens like this do exist. The condition is called imperforate hymen, and it is considered to be a minor birth defect. It is caused when the canalization of the vagina does not quite finish going all the way through the body wall, and instead of having a vaginal opening, a layer of skin remains over the place where the opening should be. Imperforation of the hymen is the most common malformation of the female reproductive tract, but estimates of frequency range widely, from one in twelve hundred to one in ten thousand. Because it makes menstruation impossible, imperforate hymen is corrected surgically. A hymen with no opening is a bug, not a feature.
    The diameter of the opening of the hymen, like most other parts of the human body, starts out small and grows as the child does. It typically starts out at two to three millimeters in diameter and increases at a rate of one to two millimeters a year until the child reaches puberty, so older children are more likely to have larger hymenal openings than younger ones. Lest it be thought that all virginal hymenal openings are minuscule, a study published in 2000 showed that 93 percent of the virginal girls examined by Dr. Astrid Heger and her team had hymenal openings large enough to permit the doctors to view part of the interior of the vagina without using a speculum or any other tool.
    The size of the hymen's aperture is only the beginning of a veritable cornucopia of variety. Hymenal tissue itself appears in a number of forms. It might be fragile and barely there, or resilient and rubbery. It might be so scanty as to be overlooked, or appear in plentiful, tender, flowerlike folds that double over on themselves. The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, in line with many medical textbooks, identifies five primary hymen shapes: annular, crescentic, redundant, fimbriated, and septate.
    The most common hymen shape is annular—a word derived from the Latin annulum, meaning "circle" or "ring." A ring of tissue is precisely what the annular hymen is, outlining the vaginal opening all the way around. Similarly named for its shape, and almost as common, is the crescentic hymen. This crescentlike hymen is roughly U-shaped. According to a comparison of hymen research studies done by Astrid Heger and Lynne Ticson, annular and crescentic hymens together account for over half of all hymens, and may account for as many as four-fifths. It is difficult, however, to get an accurate statistic in terms of precisely how common each one is, because some annular hymens appear to have some propensity to change shape as girls grow older, turning into crescentic hymens.
    The least common hymen shape, by contrast, is septate. A septate hymen can be thought of in two different ways, either as a hymen whose opening is divided by a bridge, or septum, of tissue, or as a hymen with more than one opening, each opening divided from the next by a thin strip of tissue. Rarely, septate hymens that have more than two openings are seen. They can in fact have multiple openings, each separated from the other by a thin strip of membrane, creating a hymen that bears a certain visual resemblance to a kitchen colander. Because of this, they are also sometimes called cribiform or cribriform—from the Latin cribrum, meaning sieve—hymens.
    Less common than annular or crescentic hymens but more common than septate hymens are the redundant hymen and its relative, the fimbriated hymen. The redundant hymen is a particularly extravagant variety, formed of sufficient flesh