Virginity: Presence of the Hymen?

As I was preparing to post the virginity piece yesterday (Click here to read it), my loving wife happened to come by my desk to see what I was about to post. She read the first two sentences and decided to sit on the arm of my chair so that she could get the gist of the piece. All this while, my eyes were trained on her face. I was eager to know what she thought of the piece. She maintained a bland face and when she was through , she turned and faced me.

“Ritch, what would you have said if I had told you that I tore my hymen during sports in high school?” she asked me. “Would you not have raised a fuss?”

For once, I didn’t know what I would have done or even how I would have behaved. I smiled and brushed the question aside.

Today let us look at another angle of this shooting match. To some people, virginity and presence of the hymen are one and the same thing. In yesterday’s post I tried to discredit that notion for there are other known reasons that could cause a virgin to have no hymen and thus not produce blood on the wedding day (or rather during the first sexual experience).

Most of the time we forget that there are other ways of sexual experience apart from vaginal penetration. For instance, there is oral sex on the one hand and anal sex on the other. The question that’s racking my mind: Should a woman who has engaged in either oral or anal sex but, however, ‘produces’ blood on her wedding night, be considered to have been a virgin on her wedding day?

I am made to understand that there are so many young women and ladies who have resorted to this form of ‘chastity’ to preserve their ‘virginity’ in Zanzibar. They engage in high scale ‘anal’ sex with their ‘boyfriends’ and some of them still crave ‘it’ when they eventually get married. Thus, most of these kind of women would receive a ‘barrage’ of adulation from their families and the parents of their husbands for having presented themselves unadulterated to their sons. If only the dark of the night could talk; it would tell of the ‘amazing’ actions of people who are held in high esteem. Such hypocrisy would be smashed to smithereens.

A character in Norman Mailer’s novel Harlot’s Ghost states that in Italy, an unmarried woman had to be "a maiden before and a martyr behind," which implied that such women often resorted to anal sex, and anal sex was consistently painful (thus the usage of the word martyr).