Top Highlights

• The problem here is that we’ve been taught to think about sex in terms of behavior, rather than in terms of the biological, psychological, and social processes underlying the behavior.
• You may or may not have a hymen—a thin membrane along the lower edge of your vaginal opening. Whether you have one or not, I guarantee that virtually everything you were taught about the hymen is wrong.
• And the size of a hymen doesn’t vary depending on whether the vagina has been penetrated.5 Also, it usually doesn’t bleed. Any blood with first penetration is more likely due to general vaginal tearing from lack of lubrication than to damage to the hymen.
• What does change when a woman begins having the hymen stretched regularly is that it grows more flexible. And as a woman’s hormones change as she approaches the end of adolescence (around twenty-five years old), the hymen is likely to atrophy and become much less noticeable—if it was noticeable at all.
• From child sexual abuse to sexual assault to all forms of interpersonal violence, women are disproportionately and systematically targeted, and thus they disproportionately bring to their sexual functioning the emotional, physical, and cognitive features of a trauma survivor. In other words, if women have more “issues” than men around sex, there’s ...