Free Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank

for the simple reason that they fall apart too easily to ever be noticed. It is probable that some of the women who, due to lack of any evidence to suggest the contrary, thought they must have been born without a hymen have in reality merely had very fragile ones, so slight as to be negligible.
    Far from being a uniform bit of female anatomy, hymens prove to be a motley crew indeed. From a practical perspective, this means that merely saying that someone has a hymen is, all by itself, a bit like Saying someone has skin: "knowing that they have it doesn't tell us what it looks like, whether it is rough or soft, scarred or smooth. Certainly knowing that someone has a hymen, as all but a very small percentage of women do, does not tell us whether or not she has had any sexual experiences. All we know, when we know that someone has a hymen, is that it exists . . . although this itself was for centuries a matter of hot debate.

CHAPTER 4
     
    A Desperate and Conflicted Search
     
    In som virgins or maidens in the orifice of the neck of the womb there is found a certain tunicle or membrane called of antient writers Hymen . . . But I could never find it in anie, seeking of all ages from three to twelv, of all that I had under my hands in the Hospital of Paris.
    —Ambroise Pare, 1573
    I T IS EASY TO ASSUME that our ancestors understood things sexual in the same way we do today. After all, human sex organs and the range of sexual acts we have at our disposal have been roughly the same since the time the human species began. It simply doesn't occur to us to think that while our predecessors may have had all the same bits and pieces we do, and may have put them to use in substantially identical ways, they may well have thought—and indeed often did think—of them very differently indeed. Sometimes historical conceptions of the body and its parts can be. so different from ours as to seem bizarre. To wit: the saga of the hymen.
    Various ancient writings from Egypt, Greece, the Middle East, and Asia Minor make reference to virgins and virginity, yet none of them mention the hymen. We can read what the Talmud has to say about the signs of virginity, consult the Old Testament about virgin brides, and survey the myths and legends of Artemis, Cybele, Athena, and other virgins both earthly and supernatural and find no mention of the hymen anywhere, nor any suggestion of such an anatomical tidbit. Why not?
    The answer is so simple that most historians have missed it: for our ancestors in the ancient world, the hymen did not exist. This doesn't mean that women of that era weren't born with hymens as part of their bodies, but rather that neither they nor anyone else knew that they were there.
    We might wonder how the physicians of the ancient world could have possibly missed such a thing. In part the answer is that they literally weren't looking. At that time it was strongly taboo for male doctors to examine women's bodies directly. Occasional exceptions did occur, but in all the medical texts attributed to the school of Hippocrates there are only two examples of a physician carrying out a vaginal examination, which gives the impression that these instances were rare indeed. Examinations on women were done by midwives, not physicians.
    Even if doctors had performed gynecological exams every day, though, they still probably wouldn't have found a special thing called a hymen inside anyone's vagina. For one thing, they wouldn't have been looking for it. Having no concept that such a thing should be expected, they would have been unlikely to notice it as anything but just another of the various ridges and folds of the female genitals. The second-century physician Galen's exhaustive anatomical treatise De usupartium, for example, makes no mention of it, and this from a meticulous observer who identified and explained the foreskin, buttocks, labia, and clitoris—something that a startling number of later anatomists managed somehow to forget was