I can clearly recall the first time someone introduced me to the idea of a hymen. I was in middle school at the time, and already fairly skeptical of my peers when it came to information on sexual matters—they had proven so wrong so often before. In the days long before Google and Wikipedia, we could not reference an encyclopedic source of knowledge on the spot, and occasionally this meant that we would have silly arguments about things that we should have simply looked up in the school library. That particular argument went something like this:
CASEY: No, seriously. There is a flap of skin that sort of blocks the opening.
DAMION: I don’t believe it. What could that possibly be good for?
CASEY: No idea, but it’s real and sometimes people need an operation for it.
DAMION: That makes no sense at all. Why would God even do that?
And that had him cornered, pretty much. We both agreed that God was a beneficent and intelligent designer, but this particular anatomical structure sounded less like a feature and more like a bug. Nevertheless, he convinced me to check it out in the library the next day, and to my astonishment, I found that (for once) I could rely upon secondhand sex talk from my fellow middle school boys.
I sincerely wish we would have gone to our Southern Baptist youth group minister to help sort this one out, because he would have been able to refer us back to our authoritative source of divine wisdom which has issued a fairly definitive ruling on the subject (emphasis mine):
If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her,
And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid:
Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate:
And the damsel’s father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her;
And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter’s virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city.
And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him;
And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days.
But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel:
Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.
To sum up: If your new bride doesn’t bleed in sufficient amounts upon your marriage bed, you may have her family publicly shamed and have her stoned to death for failing to do so. Lawfully, according to the Divine Lawgiver from whom all moral injunctions flow.
(People actually believe all this stuff. Alas, I used to be one of them.)
The teleologicial implication is clear enough: The hymen was intelligently designed by God as a foolproof virginity litmus test. Either that, or else the Lord God Almighty wasn’t particularly concerned with the problem of false positives, which would seem somewhat less than compassionate.
These days, you hardly ever hear about Jews performing crude bedding-based virginity tests, but the toxic obsession with the notion of virgo intacta persists in all of the Abrahamic faiths. In Islam, for example, we can see Aussie imams fretting about whether young women might damage the tokens of their virginity by engaging in sport. In contemporary Christianity, we have seen the rise of purity culture, which includes purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls, which are possibly the creepiest dance events known to all humankind.
Outside of retrogressive fundamentalist movements which look to holy writ to justify sex-shaming, there are those who create hashtags to shame women for having sex in the digital age.
https://twitter.com/idontcare308/status/522553468502827009
https://twitter.com/idontcare308/status/527228625636978688
I’m fairly well convinced that this Shlomo fellow is just a garden variety troll, but almost a year later he seems to have really touched a nerve somewhere.
How "no hymen, no diamond" becomes a men's right's mantra http://t.co/90vqLtw4lJ pic.twitter.com/qneZJxxbfG
— The Daily Dot (@dailydot) September 24, 2015
A Facebook page is under fire for suggesting all women should be virgins when they marry http://t.co/Zs17nVo2CH pic.twitter.com/3tRxwfHZzY
— TrendMagnetHQ (@TrendMagnetHQ) September 30, 2015
A misogynistic Facebook group is trying to shame women who aren't virgins. http://t.co/OtD3FOf13G pic.twitter.com/QgrTdQe4f4
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) September 30, 2015
So now this old hashtag is suddenly a mainstream news story. No idea why, but I’d wager it is because someone got upset that people were pushing ideas on social media which have been considered divinely inspired by Bible and Quran believers for at least a couple thousand years.
Talk about playing catch-up.
