Trigger warning: this article contains explicit material, most of which is not true.
The UK government is making plans to criminalise ‘virginity testing’ and hymen repair surgery – called hymenoplasty – which attempts to recreate the thin membrane which partially covers the entrance to the vagina. The surgery has links to many religions and cultures and is often described as a form of honour-based abuse and is heavily criticised by feminists due to its misogynistic undertones.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has stated that the presence of a hymen is not a reliable indication of having refrained from intercourse or not. The hymen can tear for a myriad of reasons aside from sexual intercourse, such as playing sports, using tampons or riding a bike.
With the efforts to ban it being grounded in misinformation and the ‘myth’ that the hymen can be used to differentiate virgins from sex-havers, let’s look at some other bizarre myths our ancestors had when it came to female sexual health.
Myth 1: Sex on your period causes deformed babies
According to the writers of The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation, the Romans believed that the deformity of the God Vulcan was a result of period sex between Juno and Jupiter. It wasn’t just the Romans who were wary of intercourse during the crimson wave. In France it was long believed that menstrual sex would lead to a child that would be “puny, languid and moribund”. The French also believed that a child conceived from such activities would be more predisposed to diseases such as leprosy, syphilis and ulcers of the skin.
Myth 2: Periods weren’t periods
Once upon a time any behaviour deemed unusual or improper would land women the label of ‘hysterical’, and they were frequently diagnosed as such by doctors. It was once thought that periods were the result of women needing to “bleed out” their emotional and hysterical nature, rather than that they were a key process carried out by the reproductive system. 19th Century Britain also believed that menstruating women could spoil food and kill crops in a way akin to popular “signs” of witchcraft. It was also theorised that a ham would suffer if it were to be cured in the hands of a menstruating woman.
Myth 3: You could sneeze out babies
In Ancient Greece Soranus – a Greek gynaecologist – wrote that as a man ejaculates his female partner “must hold her breath and draw herself away a little, so that the seed may not be hurled too deep into the cavity of the uterus. And getting up immediately and squatting down, she should induce sneezing and carefully wipe the vagina all round”. Essentially, this would have been the Ancient Greek version of the modern day ‘pull out’ method, where instead of pulling out, you sneeze to expel the semen from the woman’s body. Both methods of contraception seem equally unreliable.
Myth 4: The roaming uterus
Another myth courtesy of Ancient Greece was the belief that a woman’s uterus was separate from the rest of her body and was free to roam around as it saw fit. This led to the belief that if a woman wished to become pregnant, she should place something with a sweet odour in her vagina to attract sperm to the womb. Likewise, if she did not wish to become pregnant, she should place an object with an unpleasant smell in her vagina as this would keep the uterus far from the sperm.
Myth 5: Microscopic babies
In the 17th and 18th centuries it was a popular belief that at the time of conception there was already a completely formed embryo – but that it was microscopic in size. They believed that after fertilisation the embryo would then grow to the size of a fully-grown baby by birth.
With women’s bodies consistently being up for scrutiny and debate when it comes to sexual health, there is no doubt that one day in the future the concept of being able to test a woman’s virginity via the hymen will earn its own entry on a long list of bizarre myths: taking its rightful place amongst those many things so unbelievable that it’s hard to imagine anyone ever thought they could be true.
