Anthropologists might marvel to learn that in one corner of the peculiar economic and social ecology of the industrialized, post-plough West, women who are no longer virgins feel compelled to re-create that condition. They are supposed to pull off something along the lines of the miracle of the immaculate conception—to be multiparas, or women who have had more than one child, with the bodies and vaginal elasticity of nulliparas, women who have never given birth. They want not to surgically replace or fortify their hymens (as some women in the Middle East feel pressured to do before their
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