Referring to an article from nurse Carol Roy in Women’s eNews Megan of Jezebel raises two cool, cool points about what people really tend to mean when they say “virginity.”

Given how little most people know of what a hymen “ought” to look like — as though there’s only one way for it to look, which there isn’t — what exactly are these doctors reconstructing?

Roye notes, rightly, that a hymen is mostly known for its supposed effects, which is to say, the blood that is shed when a woman is first penetrated. Most people have never looked carefully at their own, let alone someone else’s, and don’t know what they are looking at. So when a doctor is supposedly reconstructing a hymen — which is as different on each woman as the rest of her external genitalia — he’s mostly making the geneialia into something that will bleed, and what people expect to see. In effect, doctors who perform the surgery are not only perpetuating the fetishization of virginity but actually constructing a new myth of what it’s supposed to look like and be.

She said it here.

Got that? People may not even know what an actual hymen is (for instance it’s amazing how many even otherwise well-written virginity-porn stories place hymens way deep inside the vagina instead of right at the vestebule) but they know what they want: pain and blood. Oh, and sometimes tightness. And never mind that they sometimes survive until childbirth or that they sometimes don’t exist at all. And really never mind that, in terms of physical sensation rather than novelty or scarcity value, for the male partner actual traditional first-time intercourse with a traditionally-passive virgin is generally more distracting than interesting**. Nope. People may not know what they want but they know what to expect! And now thanks to surgery they’ve got the technology to create it.

So that’s the physical side. Even more important though?

Roye is often asked by parents to examine their daughters and prove that they are still intact — though, under state law, she’s only allowed to answer if given permission by the teenager. The problem is that, if she can tell at all whether a hymen is intact or broken, she can’t tell whether it’s due to sexual intercourse or not. Those answers aren’t helpful to young women, or their parents, seeking some sort of yes or no without even knowing what they are asking the doctor to examine.

As someone who had sex for months with an intact hymen after losing my virginity, the larger point Roye wants to make rings the most true for me.

I believe that virginity is what the individual thinks it is. It certainly is for men, who bear no tell-tale signs of lost virginity.

The concept of virginity has an emotional connotation. It is more than just the physical disruption of hymenal tissue.

If a young woman has had a sexual relationship with her partner, and she feels that she has lost her virginity, then she has, regardless of what actually happened to her hymen during the encounter.

The problem with Roye’s logic, of course, is that it gives the woman agency over her body, her choices and her opinions. The kind of people that want their daughters’ or potential wives’ hymens parsed — or restored — want exactly the opposite.

Yup. That’s true too. One of the, um, peculiarities about the whole traditional virginity fetish is that it’s ultimately about male consumption and, consequently, about the commodity rather than human value of the unfortunate women who’s expected to preserve, maintain, and eventually surrender it — often under pressure first from her family, second from her prospective partner and (traditionally, anyway) his family — to whichever partner she chooses (if she’s fortunate enough to be born where her choice is relevant) or chosen for her.

Which, when you think about it, makes a prospective (male) partner who actually cares about such things… not much of a partner at all. A proprietor, sure. A “husband,” almost certainly. But a partner? I don’t think so. An insecure, proprietary oaf who can’t connect intimately on an equal basis with another human being as a human being? I’m afraid so.

Weird how virtually every anti-feminist assertion of male “superiority” boils down to an insistence that men must retain the emotional maturity of “but my peas are touching my mashed potatoes” three-year-olds… and an insistence that in order to preserve such “superior” immaturity women’s health, lives, autonomy, capacity for personal fulfillment, and even humanity must be sacrificed.

Um… thanks but no thanks.

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Quick note: Please don’t construe any of this post as dismissing the significance of anybody’s first time having sex. But as evidenced in Megan’s two points about surgery and disdain for women’s agency what I’m concerned about is the way virginity as a cultural fetish interferes with too many people’s first times.

[** I mean seriously! What kind of moron says “if I get a triple bypass I hope it’s the surgeon’s first time? Who says “I travel the globe searching for tennis partners who’ve *never played before?” Sure, you find people who seek mountains that have never been climbed, or plants that have never been described, but those tend to be a bit more unilateral experiences. —fl]