Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

by Emily Nagoski

You may or may not have a hymen—a thin membrane along the lower edge of your vaginal opening. Whether you have one or not, I guarantee that virtually everything you were taught about the hymen is wrong.5 The closest thing to true is that during intercourse the hymen can be painful if it’s not used to being stretched—that’s one of a number of potential causes of pain with penetration, but it is by no means the most common. (The most common is lack of lubrication.) But the hymen doesn’t break and stay broken forever, like some kind of freshness seal. If a hymen tears or bruises, it heals. And the size of a hymen doesn’t vary depending on whether the vagina has been penetrated.6 Also, it usually doesn’t bleed. Any blood with first penetration is more likely due to general vaginal tearing from lack of lubrication than to damage to the hymen. What does change when a woman begins having the hymen stretched regularly is that it grows more flexible. And as hormones change with the end of adolescence (around twenty-five years old), the hymen is likely to atrophy and become much less noticeable—if it was noticeable at all. The hymen is another example of the wide variability in female genitals. Some of us are born without hymens. Others have imperforate hymens (a thin but solid membrane covering all of the vaginal opening) or microperforate hymens (many tiny holes in an otherwise solid membrane). Some have septate hymens, which feel like a strand of skin stretching across the vagina...