15 Shocking Things A Woman’s Body Can Do

8.

“As a woman in my late thirties, I learned that virtually everything I had been taught about the hymen – or rather, what had been passed down in hushed tones from friends who had older sisters, etc., because nothing about my health or so-called “sex ed” classes taught anything about the hymen – it was wrong.”

“When I started working as a sexual assault survivor advocate and taking several SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) exams each month, I learned a lot from SANEs about how the female body works and doesn’t work really.

More importantly, hymens are not as we have been taught to imagine them. We are always given this photo that shows the hymen as a flat plane of skin. Instead, you should imagine it as one of those darling hair ties. Imagine creating a “bird’s face” by closing all the fingertips of one hand together. Putting the little scrunchie around your closed fingers, then opening and closing it gets smaller and smaller. Estrogen is what makes the hymen the most flexible, the most wrinkled. When we are born, we have estrogen left over from our mother for a few years. Our hymen is then really flexible. This becomes less true when we are children, and estrogen decreases and then becomes more flexible again when we reach puberty.

So when the police or CPS would come to me, as the child advocate on the call, or to SANE, and ask me, “Well, did something happen?” Was the hymen broken? we should explain to them what I said above. Women in the United States should have better access to ACCURATE education about our bodies. »

—moultonpatricia