This Valentine’s Day, many couples will be displaying their affection with traditional gifts of the season: a bouquet of roses, a box of chocolates, a romantic meal out. Others may be opting for much more extreme gestures—such as paying for “recreational” hymen surgery, or even artificial hymens—to gift partners with the “virgin experience.” But far from being a romantic gesture, the commercialization of the hymen is a troubling example of outdated ideas meeting business interests.
It’s hard to think of a part of the human body as simultaneously useless and troublesome as the hymen (even the humble appendix seems positively useful by comparison). Society’s obsession with this little piece of tissue, which has no known biological function, stems from widespread and false claims about its ability to reveal whether someone is a virgin. Virginity itself has no real medical or scientific meaning; it is a mere reflection of the higher value placed on penis-in-vagina sex than all other sexual encounters and experiences. Nevertheless, so compelling is the idea of the virginal hymen that an entire market has emerged to monitor, repair, and replicate it.
Hymen surgery and virginity testing have been available in the US for years. (After all, virginity testing hit international headlines in 2019 when the American rapper TI claimed that he took his daughter to an ob-gyn annually for examination of her hymen.) More recently, nonsurgical virginity products like artificial hymens and...
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