I thought we'd gone over this in the past few years enough times that folks knew this information already. But it seems like we need a review because authors still don't seem to know where the hell the hymen is.
We went over this in the Bosoms for about six pages, and we've joked about it here for pages and pages more.
But it seems that the hymen still eludes us, specifically WHERE IT IS.
It is NOT Up the vaginal canal by a few inches.
IT IS NOT INTERNAL.
IT IS EXTERNAL.
Here is a professor of anatomy, someone whose JOB it is to KNOW the HUMAN BODY, who has an advanced degree or two in Where Things Are In or On Your Body:
Speaking as you were on the blog of virgins, I have a long standing smart bitch bitch with writers who have no idea where the hymen is located. This is amazing to me, as most romance authors are female and should have a better knowledge of their own anatomy.
Some have it placed correctly and as the act BEGINS, the virgin feels stretching and pain. The hymen, if present, is a curtain or ring of tissue at the entrance of the vagina. This is how the British medical people could verify by sight, that the intended royal bride was a virgin.
It is not, as some authors repeatedly write in book after book, located somewhere in the middle of the vagina, causing discomfort halfway through depth of penetration during the act.
How, oh how, can we make writers aware so I don't end up throwing books across the room and screaming out loud????
JL
Disgruntled Romance Reader and Anatomy Professor
Let's talk about it scientifically. The hymen is a “membrane that surrounds or partially covers the EXTERNAL VAGINAL OPENING.”
Even Lance Goddam Armstrong's LIVESTRONG website knows this: “A common misconception about the hymen is that it is inside the vagina. It is actually a mucous membrane that is part of the vulva, the external genital organs.”
How is it that freaking LIVESTRONG can get this right, and we can't? I am so baffled why this anatomical fallacy remains part of the genre. You'd think we'd know all this by now but NO. I get scenes like this one:
He guided himself into the slick heat between her thighs. But despite her apparent readiness, his entry wasn’t easy. He gritted his teeth and fisted his hands in the quilt, forcing himself to go slow, to give her time to adjust to his size. His muscles ached with the effort of holding back and his heart pounded against his ribs as he inched a little farther, swallowing her soft sighs of acceptance, of pleasure.He frowned when he felt an unexpected resistance, but before he could begin to comprehend what it might mean, her legs lifted to lock behind his hips, pulling him deeper so that he pushed through the barrier of her innocence.
Royal Holiday Bride, Brenda Harlen, December 2011
He inches along, like you do, and feels some barrier? COME ON NOW. He wouldn't be able to inch into anything, much less feel a barrier of any sort once he was partially in because….
THE HYMEN IS EXTERNAL.
Say it with me here. IT IS OUTSIDE THE BODY.
(Also: not only did this scene follow with the obligatory “If I'd known you were a virgin I'd have done it differently” scene, but the hero says that he “should have realized” [because virginity has a scent?] AND that he “had a right to know.” ON WHAT GODDAM PLANET is her sexual experience within his rights of knowledge or any of his business at all?)
Anyway, back to the hymen.
I think I need to tell everyone again where it is.
It is not up the canal by any means! It's not a portcullis halfway to the cervix! It's not a barrier up the valley, a logjam obstructing the path of the river of love, a dam in the reservoir of passion. IT IS NOT INSIDE ANYTHING.
THE HYMEN IS EXTERNAL.
I don't know why this myth is allowed to propagate but it does, like binder clips in a desk drawer.
DON'T MAKE ME START POSTING PICTURES, PEOPLE. Neither of us wants that.
I've read one of these scenes every time there's a virgin becoming devirginized, and it has to stop. There's too many. This has to stop. It's ridiculous. It's embarrassing. It's biologically incorrect, and insulting to boot. If romance is supposed to depict the female experience in every variety, and if we are supposed to believe these are, you know, HUMANS, everyone needs to quit getting basic biology so very, very wrong.
I think I'm going to start tagging books I read and review with the words “does not know where hymen is” to create a record of which books contain this biological inaccuracy.
What about you? Does this drive you batty? Have you read a scene like this recently?
I think a large part of the problem is that a lot of writers produce their first romance novels so many years after losing their own virginity that they’re operating on vague memory and hearsay and matriarchal legend as much as anything. I mean, seriously, unless you have had a REALLY bad first time that stays with you in nightmares ad infinitum, your memory is going to distort the experience one way or the other and eventually wear the details off to the extent that you’re not going to be able to describe it accurately years later. So they resort to the old “this is the way it’s always been written so this must be the way I have to write it” syndrome.
And “portcullis at the gates of love” FTW. I now have visions of the guy pushing his way in and this big pointy drop-gate slams down on his wang.
Vagina dentata…
I mean, of COURSE it does, it makes perfect sense, otherwise we would all explode when we start menstruating.
Favorite sentence ever… LOL
Glad I’m not the only one who doesn’t remember much about the first time other than the location (front seat of a pickup) and the partner. I don’t recall any pain, though I do remember sliding off the seat because the seat cover was slippery.
It’s irritating, but not as irritating as the “after” bits you mention (“You should have told me”, “This changes everything”, “I should have known”). Ugh.
What I would like to point out, however, is that this isn’t *totally* the authors fault. True, they should not be describing the act in that way, but their editors said nothing about it. Seems like some fault would also lay with their Editors who aren’t catching this ridiculousness before the book goes to print.
Or it might just be a mass conspiracy to drive everyone crazy. Seems to be working.
Dani said:
“Bad anatomy in romance isn’t just aggravating, it’s probably causing real harm and anxiety to people who don’t know better and think that the books are right and somehow it’s their bodies that are wrong.”
….
…
..
Wow. I have been married for over a decade, and I NEVER UNDERSTOOD WHY ON EARTH THE WEDDING NIGHT WAS SO IMPOSSIBLY DIFFICULT until this thread!!
Why??
Because the flipping romances I hid in my closet led me to believe the hymen was internal, so when DH and I couldn’t get, ahem, IN without me wincing, boy oh boy was I convinced I was Built Wrong.
And THIS POST is the first time I even heard about this (and I am otherwise very well educated, medically and sexually). How was this left out of my education??
Dani, you nailed it. I was traumatized by that experience those years ago, and it’s directly because of the books I read.
Wow.
THANKS FOR THIS THREAD!
The ultimate in birth control.
A GP (General Practioner) told my daughter the hymen is 4 inches inside the vagina! At my next visit to my doctor (same practice) I suggested his colleague should do a refresher of female anatomy. What makes it worse is that my daughters dr is a woman!!
What a hilarious conversation! I must say, however, that it is entirely possible for a girl to grow up riding horses—even showing them in competitions—and still have a hymen. And yes, I do know where it is located and I make sure my virgin heroines feel discomfort immediately.
I even had one who lost hers twice. Someone commented in a review on how unbelievable that was, but once more, entirely possible. If you got interrupted before it tore completely, there’d still be some tearing necessary another time. 😉 Another of my virgin heroines has no hymen. I figured it’d be fun to mix it up.
“how-not-to books about sex”
That shit cracks me up!
If anyone is interested, there are some drawings of hymens/vaginal coronas here
http://menstruationresearch.or…
I really want this to mean something to me…I really wanted to shout from the roof tops that The HYMEN is EXTERNAL! But…sigh…I really don’t really care…but beautifully written characters and a story that can draw me in and can provide an escape for a few hours…well then its worth some inaccuracy’s
I hadn’t come across any “loss of virginity” scenes in romance until AFTER I had sex for the first time. Not long after, as a matter of fact. And boy, did it ever mess with my head! Wait, that was supposed to hurt? I was supposed to bleed? Something is supposed to pop? Seriously, what’s wrong with me??? Then I talked to people and read a few things and realized that my own experience was actually pretty typical. So ya, shame on you, romance novels, for freaking out poor inexperienced girls.
Oh dear, I hope that I’m not thrown off the ship for admitting this: I honestly did not know until this very post that the hymen is external. I just googled pictures. I’m in my twenties, I’m married, I am thisclose to having a degree in (micro)biology, and I had no idea where the hymen was located. I can say that I do not particularly recall any such membrane on my person, nor was my loss of virginity anything like a romance novel.
But, see, I think that calling it “external” gives one the image that it’s stretched over the vulva like a sheet of Saran Wrap. But it is a little bit inside—it’s not on top of the labia majora or anything. I don’t have one (and yes, I am a virgin, but [TMI] there was a painful fall on the crossbar of a bike when I was 10), but I have what the gyno called a “hymenal ring”—the remnants of it, and I’d definitely call it “internal.” Just not 4” in or up by the damn cervix.
Like many, many others, I didn’t figure out where the clitoris is until I was in my 20s. And i had sex ed at 4 different schools. Glad my education panned out.
I TOTALLY disagree with this – “AND that he “had a right to know.” ON WHAT GODDAM PLANET is her sexual experience within his rights of knowledge or any of his business at all?” If you’re going to sleep with someone, their history is your business just like their history is your’s. It’s called avoiding things like STDs. I don’t care if I’m about to get hot and heavy with a guy who has the speaking voice of Alan Rickman, the singing voice and piano playing skills of Barry Manilow, and a body so sexy he’d make Adonis weep with jealousy – I want to make sure I’m not about to get HIV or herpes from him before we do the deed. Just like he should know about my sexual history right down to the fact I’ve never really enjoyed the act and could live happily without it.
As for the hymen issue – well, maybe it’s time that all would be romance novelists be required to pass an anatomy class before being allowed to write sex scenes.
Huh. I think Lois McMaster Bujold has the right idea in her Vorkosigan series concerning the customs on Beta Colony. On (or should I say in?) Beta Colony, when girls are 13, they go to the doctor, have their hymens removed, and get mandatory BC implants. And they also get their ears pierced. At least, that’s how I remember it from the books.
I personally didn’t have much of a defloration experience, but I was 24 (yes, I know), so I guess what with tampons and what have you, there wasn’t much tissue. Or maybe I just never had much. Anyway, no trauma, just a weird (and not necessarily unpleasant) stretching feeling.
Well, heck, Dani, you actually in a way had it better than me. My very first gynecologist TOLD me I was deformed down there. (This is the same guy who didn’t believe I was a virgin just because I was 18 and ripped my hymen when he rammed the stick in for the pap smear.) He said I was “abnormally small” and the reason I had pain during exams was because I “had vaginitis from too many bubble baths.” He didn’t believe me when I said I rarely took bubble baths and always showered afterwards.
It was years upon years before a doctor told me that I was perfectly normal down there. In fact, it was just two years ago I finally heard I was normal. And the reason for the pain during the exams – my latex allergy. I don’t have vaginitis nor am I “abnormally small.”
My first GYN was such an asshole.
Heh, I lost my hymen to a vaginal ultrasound and a rough handed doctor so I can’t compare stories there, but a couple of people have mentioned that they believe your romantic/sexual history IS the other persons business and on that I utterly disagree. I get a full workup for STD’s once a year just to make sure, though I’ve never had sex without a condom and have no intention of starting. Those are the facts my partner is welcome to, and in fact I’d be happy to show him my paperwork proving I’m STD free. That and I make it clear that if they pester me about going bareback they will be summarily booted from my bed. Anything else is my goddamn business, just as I’ll never ask more of them than std, safety questions.
The hymen way up inside bothers me too. But I have to admit, it was a thread just
like this one a couple of years ago where I learned where it actually was. It sees to be a very common misunderstanding. I certainly don’t remember it being covered in any sex ed class, by my mum or in any book I was given. Now that I know where it is, I appreciate the books which get it right and I do get annoyed by the ones which perpetuate the myth.
It does. It drives me batshit crazy.
Well….not to get too personal (too late, probably,) but I grew up on horses. I rode on a working farm, so I rode hard, and I rode a lot. And I definitely had a hymen the first time I had sex. So the “hymen of steel” is possible. 🙂
I generally assume the “inching” description is like, he’s between the labia, going forward. But there are some scenes I’ve read where I’ve been like, “Are you kidding me?” Romances also seem to reinforce the “there will be pain and bleeding” myth. Nothing annoys me more than reading a contemporary where the woman is a virgin in her thirties and her hymen breaks and it’s painful and bleedy. I’m sure that happens, but considering the hymen’s elasticity increases over time, if you lose your v in your thirties, you’re more likely to just stretch your hymen, rather than break it. But I recently had a conversation with someone who believed that the hymen was a membrane that completely covered the entire vaginal vestibule, so the misinformation, it is plentiful.
OMG this bugs me to no end! Bravo *Standing ovation*
From context I’m guessing that primrose is yellow, but that always throws me off because most of my mom’s primroses in her garden are a lavender color. Which, now that I think of it, shouldn’t be a problem because when people say “rose,” most know that to mean a form of pink even though roses come in many colors.
Um. Not everyone who rides horses or is involved in a lot of physical activity breaks/stretches their hymens into non-existence before losing their virginity.
Rode my horse nearly daily from pre-puberty until I lost my virginity in my early 20s. Also competed in a lot of high-activity sports, including soccer, softball and field hockey. Had a pretty intact hymen nonetheless and bled a fair bit. It’s not impossible.
I’m more annoyed by the pain-free, effortlessly orgasmic virgins.
If the hymen is stretchy, it may take a few inches of penetration to break it. Also, the vagina is quite elastic and elongates during arousal. Anyone who’s had a pelvic exam knows that the ob-gyn can often feel the cervix with fingers. And yet, a penis of much greater size (one hopes) fits nicely. I’m not saying that the hymen moves deep inside the vagina during arousal, but the cervix certainly does.
A far more harmful misconception perpetuated by romance novels is that most women orgasm from vaginal intercourse, with no contact to (or even mention of) the clitoris! That’s the real bugger IMO.
I think that many women would like to reimagine their first time as more meaningful, because in real life it is often disappointing. The hymen breaking in romance is symbolic.
I’ve only written one virgin female character, a teen in a subplot. She felt pain and asked her partner to stop. He did! That scene felt powerful for me because it’s what I *wish* I’d done. I wish I’d been brave enough to say “take it out!”
When your first time is awful or forgettable or unromantic, reading a novel in which the hero *cares,* and the moment is meaningful for both partners, can feel powerful.
Had a gal pal in the teen years who actually had a hymen that was SO thick she would need surgery to have sex. Well, her parents LOVED that. She didn’t believe the doctor so she and her BF at the time gave it the old college try. Needless to say it didn’t work. I believe she didn’t have the surgery until after she was 21. Talk about built in chastity belt.
It doesn’t bug me about the hymen placement. I’m not reading romance for EXTREME VAGINAL ACCURACY. Although I laugh like a loon every time the guy gets mad at the girl post coital about “YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD MEEE!” 90% of the time the heroine does tell him and he won’t believe her yadda yadda. As long as everyone gets to home base and no one has an accidental baby, it should all be golden. Don’t spend your post coital moments ranting! Spend it going “YAY We like orgasms!”
Yes. Yes, yes, YES! A bunch of us were just talking about this on Twitter a few days ago, because I’d read something (by an author I otherwise adore) that just made me want to throw the book across the room (I refrained because, you know…Nook). There was inching. There was a LOT of inching, there were MANY inches involved. I thought, “How many inches has he GOT, anyway?” because it seemed like he’d used up at least half of them by the time the cherry popping occurred. And yeah, I guess I can buy that for some people there’s stretching before the breaking sensation so it seems internal, maybe? But c’mon, get out a ruler and take a long look at two, three inches and consider the actual schlongs you’ve been acquainted with.
Nobody’s hymen is THAT stretchy. Unless the heroine was secretly Elastigirl. Unlikely in a historical.
Thank you SO MUCH for this post! This is one of my personal pet peeves, and it just drives me up the freaking wall. Can we also dispel the myth that it will always hurt and there will always be blood?
This conversation reminds me of an old Jon Stewart joke about vaginas. It’s dark, mysterious and shrouded in shrubbery. lol. Maybe the younger folks are getting a better sex education than I/we did, but what I learned of the female reproductive organs was the ovaries, the fallopian tubes, the womb and the vagina! That cross-section illustration in biology books are not very helpful. Everything looks like it is inside! Teachers don’t make it very clear that the urethra and the vagina are two different openings!
In high school bio and sex ed, we learn all the ins and outs (no pun intended) about the penis—wet dreams, orgasms, the refractory period, semen, and how many calories are in semen. (I’m not kidding.) We didn’t learn about female orgasms—they don’t even broach the subject of the clitoris. (It wasn’t until I took a sex ed class in college that I learned the outer/external part of the vagina was called the vulva. ._. ) All we learn is that every 28-32 days we bleed from our vagina and one day a penis will enter it painfully to rid us of our virginity. (Wow, how hetero.)
So, in all seriousness, I did not know until I read this article that the hymen was external and I’m 39 years old with two kids!
Slightly off subject, I remember being 14 or 15 years old in high school math when one older teen shouted out (I don’t know why): “That hangy thing on the top of your ***** is called a clitoris!” I thank goodness he said that because I certainly wouldn’t have learned it until my college sex ed course.
I’m going to disagree with a few people here…. I’m fairly sure that you don’t stretch/break your hymen horse riding, or doing gymnastics. (I did a bit of research in medical books in the library on the hymen. Fun times!) If you think about it, what part of riding or horse, or doing the splits, involves anything akin to stretching the entrance to your vagina as if to penetrate?
The medical texts (those that didn’t gloss over the topic of the hymen entirely) said that (1) no cases of women being born without a hymen have been documented, however (2) for many women, the hymen will be sufficiently stretchy that it doesn’t tear during sex, or pelvic exams, and that nothing short of childbirth will phase it. It’s only women whose hymens are not so elastic who bleed on losing their virginity (or similar penetrative fun).
For my personal bit of TMI: As a kid I remember doing something similar to falling on a bike’s crossbar (but narrower!) and bleeding a little. This accident didn’t do anything to my hymen. (Perhaps if I fell on something pointy, it might have?) As an adult I had problems penetrating myself with anything bigger than a finger. My doctor said I didn’t have an abnormally thick hymen (which was my idea) but diagnosed vaginismus (involuntary clenching of the vagina). I got sent home with a set of nesting dildos, and worked my way up from the smallest to largest over time. My hymen tore when I got to the largest one (my childhood misadventure notwithstanding!).
Trust me, something doesn’t have to go in to break it. It happened to me and to several other women I know. Bodies are weird.
How would they document a woman being born without a hymen? It’s not like they poke around in little girls (god forbid). I am inclined to distrust medical texts on this—far more inclined to trust the experiences of actual women and occasionally feedback from gynecologists, etc.
And since I know for a fact that I don’t have a hymen AND I have never had sex, and i know that my first gynecologist’s visit didn’t tear anything, I was either born without one or it was torn in my childhood accident. So.
I have two heroines for whom it hurts. The one who’s much older and has a lot of awareness with her sexuality likes the pain. The younger one feels like she’s being split it half and begs him to stop; for her (also not TSTM), the pain was shocking because she hadn’t expected it to hurt.
Argh, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I feel an obligation to represent a dissenting experience.
The first time I engaged in sexual intercourse, I second-guessed my decision to have sex and held back, not quite allowing the man in question to penetrate me fully. He’d penetrated some distance—I didn’t break out a ruler, but it felt like a few inches. I don’t recall any pain during the event, but I didn’t expect any. I’d been taking care of my own business for years, and I didn’t think there would be much resistance by that point.
The next time I endeavored to engage in sex, there was a definite physical resistance impeding his efforts, and he had to push through it. It hurt, and I bled. We were both shocked. (I also orgasmed and immediately wanted to do it again).
But here’s the important part, besides me being a surprise virgin: the second time I had sex, it felt like the resistance he encountered was a little ways inside of my vagina. I realize that hymens are an external membrane. I really do. I don’t doubt that mine was. But that doesn’t mean it FELT external. If a penis presses it inward, if it stretches with that pressure but doesn’t break immediately, could it not feel as if it were internal?
For me, it did.
That’s why I don’t bat an eyelash at love scenes in which heroes encounter resistance half-way up, because for me, that was how it felt. What I’m looking for in a romance novel is the depiction of an individual woman’s sexual experience, not a medicalized (and necessarily generalized) description of sexual intercourse.
As has been noted, hymens are quite individual in shape and thickness, though probably not placement. Therefore, it seems likely that each women might experience the breaking of it in a different manner. Some might stretch inward before breaking, more like plastic wrap; others might snap immediately like thin, hard candy. Human anatomy is relatively consistent—but only relatively. Some of us have three-headed biceps, despite the implications of “bi” in the “biceps” name (like the guy we dissected in comparative anatomy); some of us have bony plates that never fused as they should (like me). Most of our anatomical differences are asymptomatic and never discovered until post-mortem, but rest assured, my body is not your body, and my body is not exactly like the one depicted in medical illustrations. Nor is yours! Those illustrations are guides to the average human body construction, but any doctor would tell you that surprises abound once you start looking closely at individuals.
Oh Sarah. That was hilarious.
Yes, I have come across far too many stories with:
a) hymen in the wrong location
and
b) heroine stiffens in pain, but goes onto have a miraculous simultaneous orgasm w hero
and
c) hero remorse and outrage (!!) because he would’ve done it differently if only he’d know she was a virgin.
I just roll my eyes and keep reading.
As others have said, perhaps it’s editors who should have this issue flagged up to them?
With regard to sex education…. mine was mostly about basic anatomy (with the emphasis on internal tubing), puberty, menstrual cycle, contraception and pregnancy. We probably never mentioned the hymen even once. This won’t have helped educate future authors about its location, but at least it kept my sex education class away from focusing on the concept of virginity, and from giving virginity undue importance.
It would have been nice if our sex education had covered orgasms, and how to have them, but that would probably be going too far for many parents.
Snarkhunter: no tearing and no bleeding is perfectly common, according to what I read, and doesn’t prove the absence of a hymen (i.e. it might be scanty and very elastic). But I know what you mean about not always trusting the medical texts.
One of the most interesting books I found that covered the topic was about forensic medicine and what a doctor might look for when determining if a child has been sexually abused. It talked about errors that had been made in this field of research, whereby doctors used to be taught that xyz means abuse, only to realise years later that this was incorrect.
It’s curious, because if anything, you’d expect this to be something male authors get wrong more often than female ones because well, they might plausibly have never devirginised anyone. I thought hymens were always internal (and invariably produced massive blood and pain) until I read otherwise in BHB. It’s odd how sex myths especially can be so durable among people who really ought to know the truth.