Excerpted from Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Parts by Helen King—on sale Jan. 28, 2025. Copyright © 2025. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
When does a girl become “a woman”?
This has never been a simple question, and answers have focused not only on the outside—breast “buds” and pubic hair—but also on the inside, where first menstruation is often thought to mark the transition. Alongside these changes, further external signifiers might indicate a departure from girlhood.
Historically, signaling this transition to others has often meant changing hairstyles or wearing different kinds of clothing; in 19th century western Europe, a girl’s putting her hair up at around the age of 15 was seen as a marker of womanhood, while at the same time her clothing would become longer, heavier and more closely fitted to her body.
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Of all the parts of the body associated with entering womanhood, the elusive hymen has perhaps come into play the most. The hymen has been presented as a clear, physical, nonnegotiable marker of virginity, its presence signaling purity and its loss marking womanhood. Journalist Sophia Smith Galer commented, “The myth that it defines a woman’s sexual history consumes the globe.” But it has also been labeled, variously, as a “notoriously unstable and ambiguous concept, with an anxious and uncertain history” and “a source of infinite misunderstanding.” At both ends of the spectrum from certainty to doubt, such claims are made for no other body part, not even the clitoris.
But is the hymen imaginary? Is it a body part at all? Real or not, how has it featured in women’s lives? And why?
In very many societies, virginity and the manner of its “loss” have mattered for women, as well as for the men who use women’s bodies as currency in transactions between families. Projected on to specific body parts, this concern with virginity extends beyond the physical realm. It should come as no surprise that the Virgin Mary’s hymen, or lack of it, has been a particularly significant topic across the history of Christianity, but it has been of substantial interest in medicine and diagnostics too.
As Helkiah Crooke already noted in 1615, the wider question of whether virginity can be read from the body is an “old question and so continues to today.” Many parts of the body have been scrutinized; according to 16th-century medical writer Melchior Sebisch, firm nostrils are evidence of virginity, whereas floppy ones are not. The color of the nipples and labia has also been thought to change after defloration. Crooke suggested checking whether the diameter of a woman’s neck was greater than the distance from the tip of her nose to the sagittal suture—a joint between the back sections of the skull—a test drawing on the classical idea that loss of virginity widens the neck and deepens the voice. In 1660, Samuel Pepys noted in his diary that he had learned something new to him: “To Price’s, and there we drank, and in discourse I learnt a pretty trick to try whether a woman be a maid or no, by a string going round her head to meet at the end of her nose, which if she be not will come a great way beyond.”
Analogies between the top and the bottom explain this couplet in Ysbrand van Diemerbroeck’s 17th century anatomy textbook:
Men’s tools according to their noses grow,
Large as their mouths are women too below.
And it’s not just bodies. … In the premodern Western world, a virgin’s demeanor, sensitivity to touch or smell, modesty, posture and voice were all considered important. This range is not confined to the West. In KwaZulu-Natal, “loose buttocks and a flabby stomach” are warnings of virginity lost because “the stomach of a virgin is taut and tight. Breasts are firm. Buttocks are held high. They do not shake much when walking.” Other signs of virginity include particular lines under the eyes, behind the knees, and on the breasts; ankles and wrists should not have dimples.
Four hundred years later, Sophia Smith Galer wrote, “You might think at this point in the 21st century, the concept of virginity and its associated values might not really affect young women anymore. I get no pleasure in telling you that it very much does.”
Even today, the common trope of the “virginity-loss movie”—for example, The Last American Virgin (1982) or The Last Virgin in LA (2016)—remains a feature of the contemporary West, although with more than one possible script on offer: Some films focus on saving one’s virginity for the “true love,” while others portray it as stigmatizing and to be lost as soon as possible. As always, between these two extremes lies the less-laden perspective of a first sexual encounter being merely a step in a process—although that is not much of a plot device. Not just romance or rom-com genres get a look-in; one trope common to horror flicks is the association of virginity with supernatural power. …
But while virginity can still be part of the plot, it need not involve a hymen, and challenges persist not just to the relevance of this body part to ordinary women’s lives but to its very existence. Whereas the current reading of the clitoris posits that it is real and more extensive than previously thought, the message of the hymen can be the reverse. While the clitoris is supposed to be humorously impossible to find, the history of the hymen paints it as an even more controversial part; its existence, its meaning and its use are all cast into doubt.
This post was originally published on here
