What advice did you give? I think I'd say, "Just turn her out into the woods for a few years; save yourself some heartache," and then laugh, and then say, "Eh, you'll do what you can."
I had a friend, by then in her 30s, who commented that she didn't use tampons because she thought once you peed the tampon was useless.
I never got those ads. I was like, what, you think you're having sex with the tampon?
Then again, the idea of penetration wasn't so clear to me back then, so I guess I wasn't quite getting what they were worried about.
2: Oh wow. You always hear stories about guys who have ideas like that, but a woman in her 30s?
Sometimes a tampon will get you pregnant and just totally leave you in the lurch. Bastards.
I never got those ads. I was like, what, you think you're having sex with the tampon?
I think the idea is that you need to preserve your hymen, so when your parents-in-law come to look at the sheets after your wedding night they won't freak out and have all your husband's male relatives stone you to death.
6 gets it right.
Our generation may place importance on maintaining one's virginity, but the idea that "virginity" means a physical object rather than a state of being sounds like something from hundreds of years ago. Especially since men now have virginities too.
But would anyone on earth say, "Welp, Suzie, you're six and you've had a bike accident that took your virginity, so I guess we might as well sell you into prostitution now. No more white wedding for you, my wee slut"?
3: Yeah, I found the anatomical drawings in the package insert illuminating -- I hadn't quite figured out how everything was spatially related until then.
You know, I think people, by which I mean including adult women, find the whole hymen concept puzzling. It's written about as if it were generally something that would seriously get in the way of, say, inserting a tampon, but in practice it really isn't for most people, I don't think. Certainly wasn't for me. Might your aunt have been wondering if that might be a problem?
The hymen was always being brought up in the sex/anatomy articles in teen magazines- always with the horseback riding example of a way it could get broken while you were still a virgin.
I don't think I had a hymen. There was no virginity to lose.
First time I was living in Germany I studied that package insert, too. Not the kind of vocab you learn in school!
In fact, to bring in TMI, I was never particularly aware of having had or broken a hymen -- presumably I lost it through tampon-use or something in teenage years (or, literally through the magic of horseback riding), but never noticed pain, bleeding, or any anatomical change. Either I never had one, or it 'broke' imperceptibly.
Hymen is teh new appendix! Centuries from now, they'll be asking, "What the hell was that for?"
a bike accident that took your virginity
Well girls riding bicycles is grounds for stoning right there.
16: I don't think it is uncommon, but you'd think it was to hear people writing about virginity. I wouldn't be half surprised if Becks' aunt were in the same boat, and were wondering about how teenagers who weren't hymenless freaks like her managed tampons.
12, 14: Same here. I remember shocking my mother somewhat shortly after getting my period for the first time by telling her I picked up some tampons on my way to the beach. Were you all right? You weren't too scared or worried? Um, actually hadn't even occurred to me that there might be anything to worry about. Score one for good old NE Corridor liberal suburban sex ed.
15, I don't think you can be pwned on an anecdote from your own life.
6: There's a hilarious Isak Dineson story about that. An aristocratic family has a hall where the wedding-night sheets of each generation are displayed. Every sheet but one has its proper bloodstain. Dineson gives the backstory of the white sheet.
Being repeatedly told, "Lots of girls are scared or worried about X; being scared and worried is totally normal!" is the only thing that ever made me scared and worried. Like, losing my V would have been a lot less stressful had I not been told my whole life that "Some women are so frightened of the pain that they clench up and it makes it much worse, but that's totally normal!" Erm, that's not helpful.
8: No, no, of course not, he muttered, shuffling some papers back into his briefcase.
Come on, the hymen is the seal guaranteeing that the cyanide killer isn't gonna getcha. Would you eat yogurt with a broken seal?
Not the kind of vocab you learn in school!
I double-dog dare you to work "Jungfernhäutchen" into the vocab lesson in your intro German class.
Will try.
I've had occasion before to teach them Mutterkuchen, so it's not unimaginable.
Like, losing my V would have been a lot less stressful had I not been told my whole life that "Some women are so frightened of the pain that they clench up and it makes it much worse, but that's totally normal!" Erm, that's not helpful.
I'm sure it's helpful to some people.
This is the problem with all advice about sexual stuff. If you say, "It's normal to feel boredom and revulsion toward sex!" then it creates a self-fulfilling expectation that it is then abnormal not to feel boredom and revulsion. But if you say, "It's normal to have screaming, multiple orgasms during sex!" then you make people feel as if they're "broken" somehow. Which is why the word "normal" should be banned from booklets about sex for teens.
I've had occasion before to teach them Mutterkuchen, so it's not unimaginable
This aspect of German vocabulary is so wonderfully descriptive: Mutterkuchen, Gebärmutter, Befruchtung, Eileiter, Schleimhaut, etc.
Count another one for the "did I ever have a hymen?" group. I think what happens is that you kind of slowly lose it over time. Maybe? Is that possible? It certainly didn't break when I started using tampons (I think it was a few years after getting my period), and there wasn't any great trauma the first time I had sex (although yeah, it hurt a little). But I did a lot of horseback riding and bicycling as a kid, so maybe it was all moot by the time I started using tampons at 14.
Don't forget Kitzler. That is one awesome word.
see what happens if you do away with those little old ladies who inspect young women to see if they are suitable to marry into the family? nobody knows if they had a hymen, is what.
I believe that Foucault and others talk about normalization that way. For example, once sexual freedom became normal, celibacy became abnormal.
Normality is tremendously weird, because it can have a pure statistical meaning (like mean, median, average, or modal), or it can just mean "not pathological", but it is very often used aggressively to stigmatize something or someone.
Oh, and the "tampons make you not a virgin" thing was definitely still around when I was a teen, but mostly because I had a bunch of Muslim friends whose mothers/older sisters forbid them. Which we would get into endless arguments about. Every time they complained about their periods, I was like dude, if y'all would just switch to tampons, it would be a lot better. You know that virginity is about whether you've had sex, not whether there's some membrane over your vagina, right?
I was kind of annoying.
What were you girls doing with those horses? Did anyone film it? Aren't great big things like that scary and incomfortable?
These were the same girls who we would talk about our various non-intercourse sexual activities with boys, too. My other standard argument was "if you're going to do things your parents don't want you to do and that your religion forbids, may as well do something that makes your life easier and more pleasant." No go.
the "tampons make you not a virgin" thing was definitely still around when I was a teen
We used to have a Mexican baby sitter who used to hide her tampons when her mother came to visit for precisely this reason.
When Mrs Ruprecht attended her wedding in Mexico, she got a big kick out of attending the dinner the night before, where all the Mexican aunties were giving the 30-year old bride-to-be counsel about what to expect on her wedding night, and she was all like, "Oh, I'm sooo nervous, I hope it's not too frightening" while winking to my wife across the table.
I hid my tampons, too. My mom didn't even use them herself until she was 45 or so and started having really heavy periods.
Don't forget Kitzler.
I never forget the Kitzler, Blume. I'm just that kind of guy.
37: The various bad things they were doing didn't objectively reduce the value of the product, you see.
In Taiwan in 1983 hymen-reconstruction was supposedly a common medial procedure.
Not to turn this into a swimming thread, but... There was a girl on the high school swim team who refused to wear tampons. Which we learned one day after finishing a set and observing the big pink puddle on the deck where she'd been sitting.
Yuk. Major cooties. Did the guys know?
43: What happened next? Was she pelted with sanitary products like in the shower scene of Carrie?
I suspect the case for 41 is only going to get stronger.
"Major" does not even begin to describe the cootie magnitude of 43.
44, 46: Oh, get over it. It's a little blood, and you didn't get any on you.
I suspect the case for 41 is only going to get stronger.
The intersection of a menstruation thread and a swimming thread is arguably worse than the unfortunate collision of the analingus thread and the incest thread.
Okay, cooties in 43, sure. But 41? g, get the fuck over it.
44: Come to think of it, I don't know if the guys ever learned of it.
45: There was a bit of an "intervention" in which several teammates sat her down, explained tampons in thorough and complete detail, and made abundantly clear that they would thenceforth be used.
The incident was thereafter referred to as "The Exxon Valdez Incident."
With no poor little sea creatures killed, I assume.
The poor thing. That really was incredibly clueless of her
Oh, get over it. It's a little blood, and you didn't get any on you.
No, only those swimming in her lane....
Hymen-deficient here, too. Good thing I didn't live in medieval times.
One of my sisters believed for a while that tampons were against God's plan, and for the life of me I have no idea where she conceived that idea given that she had a mother and three other sisters who used tampons.
Did anyone else take the "using tampons is like having sex" rumor literally and attempt to masturbate with them?
52: Yeah, you're probably right. Now I feel bad telling the story....
re: 55
A friend I knew in high school once listed every household object she had used for the purpose -- the list was comically long -- but I don't think even she listed that one.
55: No, but I did masturbate just a little to, shall we say, ease insertion. It seemed a reasonable alternative to the Vaseline Mom recommended.
Would you eat yogurt with a broken seal?
That's so awesome.
As long as we're talking about myths, whatever happened to "She got hit on the breast with a beachball and got cancer"? That was common knowledge in the '50's, has it disappeared completely?
Yeah, that one's gone. I've seen it before, but only mentioned in books written in the 70's or before.
"She got hit on the breast with a beachball and got cancer"?
My college girlfriend once assured me that women could not do regular sit-ups because they would tear their wombs.
Teenage boys tend to find the insert diagrams intriguing as well. Then again, teenage boys feel that way about many things.
a bike accident that took your virginity
Has apo, at some point, linked to every possible form of sexual deviance? The evidence says yes.
Teenage boys tend to find the insert diagrams intriguing as well.
What? It never occurred to me to look at one of those. Perhaps due to biologist dad explaining the "where babies come from" with Gray's Anatomy starting when we were fairly young.
41 was funny; are you all on the rag, or what?
59: That reminds me of a story an ex-girlfriend of mine told me about gynecological appointments in Eastern Europe when she was a teenager.
69: Okay, I don't think you are allowed to go presidential unless you actually tell the story.
Hence the non-presidential name.
I was under the impression that to this very day, there are some Muslims and some Jews in this country whose traditions include a post-wedding family party during which the bride and groom withdraw for a while, and when they reappear, the bloody sheets are proudly displayed by the bride's female relatives.
Friend of mine, a liberal vet of WWII, attended one of those only a few years ago, ultra-orthodox. Damnedest thing he ever saw.
58: A sort of feminist Rabelais/Gargantua?
Would you eat yogurt with a broken seal?
this is one of the seals that got injured by the exxon valdez, right?
i don't know--do marine mammals digest fermented dairy products?
73: More like, in Ceauceascu's Romania, attractive young female gynecologist masturbates blushing teenage girl to orgasm following examination in presumably medieval stirrup chair.
When she told me this story (and she told it well, if you know what I mean and I think you do), I ... well, for a moment I feared I would lapse into unconsciousness.
on topic:
virginity fetishes are way weird, not in a good way.
and worse when virginity is reified and localized in an evanescent piece of tissue.
i think ideally we'd make up something like this for men--you can't get married if you've ever had a hangnail, or some crap like that. if you've ever cut your hair, then we get to stone you. to death. while calling you ugly names.
conversely, the de-reification of virginity, the dissolution of hymenomania, is a good thing, in as much as it leads to people *getting the fuck over it*.
77: Don't we call that thing, for men, "homosexuality"?
78--
virgin:female :: straight:male?
maybe; doesn't sound quite right to me though.
(in addition to violating the ban on analogies.
he made an analogy! it is a violation! stone him! stone flippanter!)
Maybe there's no such thing as cooties, but if there are, #43 is a five-alarmer.
hymenomania
Hymania?
"Don't be so hymanic, Dovid, she probably just rode horses as a kid."
There are also little chicken-blood thingies the damaged bride can sneak into the marriage chamber if necessary. The presumption is that the groom will be too excited to pay attention to small deatails.
I hope it was clear that I do not endorse violence against trollops or confirmed bachelors, but rather that I thought the worst sexual sin for men was different than for women.
"Worst" in society's eyes, not mine. Don't shoot, I'm a guilty white liberal.
85--
stone him anyway! stone him anyway!
I admit that 76 created lust in my heart. Of course, I condemn the implicitly non-consensual nature, etc.
87: You have no idea. Have I mentioned the time I came home to find her cleaning my apartment in a maid uniform? Or the time we had sex in our boss's office? Or the green-ivy-patterned thong she wore on my birthday? Or the time ... I'd better get back to work.
76, 87: Porn gold.
88: Ceaucescu was obviously not all bad.
Is porn gold like fool's gold? All teh glitter of sex, none of the value?
76,87: Which one - the creepy doc or the blushing teenager?
Hymen-deficient here too. On the other hand, prepared though I was for getting my period, I did not anticipate that I would wake up one day to find myself in a scene of such gore that you would have thought someone had stabbed me in the night. Who would have thought the young box had so much blood in't?
93: Long before your arrival, a year and a half, I shared my epiphany about this from having taken over doing our laundry, with a teenaged daughter. It is possible to be sheltered from it and I think most men are.
From first reading of 94 it appeared to be written by rfts's father.
So all of the ladeeez here were ever hymen-free? Did bookishness rob us of our more delicate ladybits?
My daughter bears a strong resemblance to rfts, but no. Arrival on this blog.
96: I've actually wondered if the perceptible hymen is more unusual than the reverse, and all the bloody-sheets rituals you hear about were conventionally faked (that is, you never hear stories about failing the bloody-sheets ritual, and from the number of hymenless types around here, it must have happened all the time). But I don't know.
Wouldn't it be hard to fake, though, if the guy wasn't in on it?
From first reading of 94 it appeared to be written by rfts's father.
From beyond the graaaaaaave! Appropriate for the holiday.
100--
in my experience, most guys are completely unaware of the amount of faking going on.
And if he were, he'd have leverage against expectations. And god knows people must believe it. Somebody must know more than we do about this.
99: I've covered that above. When a guy's all excited he's not attentive to detail. The little squeegee of chicken blood goes unnoticed.
A guy who wasn't madly excited on his wedding night presumably wouldn't care much.
104--
as was 101, true. i have a bad habit of mentally incrementing the commenting i'm commenting on, in anticipation of the eventual incrementation of my own comment.
98: Yeah, I wonder that too, although a couple of days ago on Jezebel there was a post up about unbreakable super hymens: surgical interventions, buckets of blood, etc. Lots of me-tooing ensued in the comments. Crazy.
Actually, when they used rusty sea cables to pull out the original tampons, them'd be the worst threads ever.
You beat me to it, oudemia, but here's a link to that very interesting Jezebel thread:
http://jezebel.com/gossip/tmi/hymens-the-new-old-chastity-belts-315680.php
I don't think I ever had a hymen either. When I told the first guy I had sex with that I had been a virgin (too embarrassed to admit it before the act, cuz I was, um, older than "normal" virgins), he said "are you sure?" Like, yes, I'm sure I never had sex with anyone before you. No, I'm not sure sex with you should count because it sucked.
106, 108: Yow. There's a thread that had me crossing my legs. Yet another data point for 'People differ, lots.'
My favorite comment in that thread:
I remember them telling us in health class that you could break it by doing gymnastics or riding a horse. I remember thinking, WTF? You have to be in The Olympics to break your stupid hymen?
Back on the veldt, some women saved their ova for only the strongest, most determined men, men unfazed by screaming and gushing blood.
Me, too, no hymen. My chief concern during the whole thing was where to put my feet and whether it would be impolite to mention the elbow-on-the-hair was a tad annoying...
A classmate of mine in college married a strange woman - before marriage, she had only allowed what was then called "heavy petting". After marriage, she would only allow heavy petting. ['Get that thing away from me!!!'] Her OB/Gyn was confused when she turned up pregnant, virgo intacta. [I will spare you the details as related by her husband one drunken evening.] I suspect strongly that she was a very repressed lesbian, that still being an era wherein nice Jewish girls were not encouraged to consider coming out, even to themselves, as an option.
108: No, I'm not sure sex with you should count because it sucked.
By that criterion, I didn't have sex with my first husband during the entirety of our very short marriage. He, BTW, when I announced the marriage was over, brought up all of his "good" points in an attempt to convince me to reconcile. One of them was "I married you even tho' you weren't a virgin." Good grief, even the kid at McDonald's had to learn how to desecrate cowmeat...
[I will spare you the details as related by her husband one drunken evening.]
OK, Dom, what do you want from us?
Yet another data point for 'People differ, lots.'
The takeaway from these threads nearly every day.
Just to insert (um, no double entendre intended) some non-normative hymen lore into the thread, I did bleed a little after first having sex. But I didn't bleed on the sheets (perhaps if I had rolled around on them afterward, this would have produced the necessary evidence), and the carnage was fairly miniscule.
Also: do to religious beliefs, it is STILL difficult to buy tampons in largely Catholic neighborhoods.
And: none of the wominz in the host families with whom I stayed in France and in Italy had any tampons in their homes.
114: Yeah, John Maynard Keynes ponied up.
When I was in Italy (Rome), I unexpectedly started my period early, right when I was about to get on my 8 hour international flight home. Since it was unexpected, I didn't have any supplies with me. There were none for sale in the entire airport! They didn't just not have tampons or pads for sale in vending machines in the bathroom -- you couldn't even buy them at the newsstands. I had to go around begging sympathetic-looking women in the airport in bad broken Italian until I found someone who could hook me up.
I had to go around begging sympathetic-looking women in the airport in bad broken Italian until I found someone who could hook me up.
Really? That's mortifying and hilarious.
Planes usually stock them in the bathrooms -- if you look at the console under the sink, there'll usually be a labeled cabinet.
119: Wow, that's extreme! In Catholic countries and neighborhoods (Polish and Hispanic sections of Brooklyn and Queens), I've had trouble only finding tampons; the pads were always there in abundance.
120 - Really really. And my guidebook Italian is so bad that people didn't understand what I was saying so I even had to try to discreetly mime things to try to get my point across. You would have loved it.
121 - After the airport experience, I don't know if I'd trust Alitalia on that front.
Planes usually stock them in the bathrooms -- if you look at the console under the sink, there'll usually be a labeled cabinet.
Ask a stewardess's daughter.
I had to go around begging sympathetic-looking women in the airport in bad broken Italian until I found someone who could hook me up
It was particularly mortifying because Italians can only communicate by extensive use of hand gestures.
True fact. I also have hidden knowledge about where to sleep in the St. Louis airport, because it used to be the TWA hub when TWA existed, and flying space-available I'd get bumped there pretty often.
I love the depo shot. My daughter cannot do tampons. She gets fussy about pads. Somehow, every period she was having was on my watch. Until the fabulousness of depo kicked in.
I am very sympathetic to the frustration of unexpected periods. I never thought I would have to carry extra pads in my car at all times.
And my guidebook Italian is so bad that people didn't understand what I was saying so I even had to try to discreetly mime things to try to get my point across.
I want Becks on my DC Unfogged charades team.
I had a hymen.
Now I keep it in a locket, nestled in my bosom, to remind me to pack tampons before I go on a trip.
94 cracked me up.
and, i am another data point for the hymen-free crowd. maybe these things are just hard to notice?
i don't recall looking too specifically, either, however.
94 cracked me up too. Hymen stitches!
Never noticed any hymen-evidence either. And was always curious about what had happened to it.
122: But in these same neighborhood stores that lack tampons, there are always aisles full of douches.
Re: 94, What, is there a database somewhere of when each regular commenter started commenting regularly, or something?
135: nah, IDP has just been making a copy of every comment on every thread --- and studying it late into the night.
is there a database somewhere of when each regular commenter started commenting regularly
Technically, yes--that would be the site database (hyper-technically, we have two tables: one that's not live, but has all the comments in it, and another one that's live and only has recent comments in it), but maybe IDP has his own database, or just a very good memory; I'm always shocked by how much people remember about what's been said here.
133 et al.
Somewhere there is a commenter with, like, 30 hymens.
It'll all average out.
Hymens safe from this crowd
http://www.intel-dump.com/archives/archive_2007_10_28-2007_11_03.shtml#1193767493
Or why we are losing
Maybe it's time for another commenter statistics breakdown? Broken out by year, time of day, pwnage and scoring the hundred-comment exclamation-point crowns.
Technically, yes--that would be the site database (hyper-technically, we have two tables: one that's not live, but has all the comments in it, and another one that's live and only has recent comments in it),
Why would you have such information? To shame me at how unproductive I have been?!?!?
I don't think I've ever encountered a hymen.
The author of The Joys of Yiddish wrote some humor books whose main character was named Hyman Kaplan.
My great-uncle's name was Hyman.
It's a hilariously common name among Jews of that generation. Closest American equivalent of Chaim.
Hyman Kaplan
Known to his friends as "Buster".
I'm no longer doing commenter statistics out of a desire to reward quality, not quantity.
I think that ship has sailed, Becks.
But how are you rewarding quality?
I'm no longer doing commenters out of a desire to reward quality, not quantity.
So does that mean you are going to do ratings instead?
150: Simulated oral sex while perched on a toilet seat.
We could shift to a Gawker-style system, with a post each week highlighting particularly good comments, and another post each week banning people.
Wait, maybe this is the first step in Becks's fiendish plot to sell the site to Nick Denton.
We could shift to a Gawker-style system, with a post each week highlighting particularly good comments, and another post each week banning people.
This proposal causes me a great deal of anxiety.
I don't think we're actually going to do that.
Closest American equivalent of Chaim.
That explains a lot. I've never been able to figure out where it came from.
Cool thing about my uncle Hy: he made musical instruments. My dad has a violin, a ukelele, and a zither that he made hanging on the wall.
Are hymens actually rare now? They're hard to miss when present ("Hmm, this isn't worki...oh, there we go!") and do tend to bleed, just not all at once.
I totally had a hymen. I would have made a great medieval bride.
I totally had a hymen. I would have made a great medieval bride.
Typical Mayflower WASP: every man owns a tuxedo, every girl has a hymen.
Maybe it's time for another commenter statistics breakdown? Broken out by year, time of day, pwnage and scoring the hundred-comment exclamation-point crowns.
Also, whether they had a hymen at time of first intercourse.
No hymen for me. Yay modern womanhood!
I didn't have a hymen at time of first intercourse.
161: I'm actually pretty surprised at the numbers suggested here, based on my rather* limited experience.
* (I'd guess most women have been at fewer of these events than I have, though)