A tooth fairy for the hymen

We might think of the hymen as the correlate of milk teeth that serve a purpose early in life and then fall away when they become unnecessary. Instead, the hymen became immortalised as a symbol for a set of anxieties and losses that are inculcated into young women as if these were the natural effects of heterosexual sex, writes Amrita Narayanan

Last month, I was on a podcast, Love Matters, with sex educator Leeza Mangaldas, during which we began a conversation about the idea of “positive gossip” for women’s sexuality. We know from empirical studies that women’s sexuality worldwide is controlled by negative gossip — real or imagined mumblings about the woman’s reputation. Negative gossip is underwritten by an unconscious belief in the sexual politics of virginity, under which the number of sexual partners a woman has had reduces her overall credibility as a person. In positive gossip, the idea that a woman has sexual agency would be an aspirational aspect of her overall identity. Then, gossip about sexuality could be — as it is about people’s careers — positively envious, which is to say something to clearly want instead of something to want to judge.

Virginity politics

A familial pattern that socialises girls to the dangers of losing their literal or metaphorical sexual innocence hinders this possibility. Reading the empirical studies on gender socialisation in the last 20 years, it continues to be the case that girls’ gender socialisation hinges upon a collective imagination of their nature as essentially sexually shy, monogamous, and in need of emotional protection. Their male counterparts on the other hand are perceived as desiring beings. Socialising girls to sexual innocence doesn’t prevent them from experiencing sexual pleasure, but it might reduce their confidence and their capacity to be playful about sex.

Sexual confidence — which is different from confidence in one’s desirability — is harder to acquire for women than it is for men because women are not allowed as much practice. While psychometric instruments could easily be used to measure gender inequality in sexual confidence, it is hard — as of now — to imagine such a study being funded. We would be more likely to receive funding for violence prevention against women; virginity politics — the institutionalisation of the idea that men are desiring beings from whom girls require protection — is as much a part of the sciences as it is of our social architecture.

Virginity politics is built on a belief system that in turn constructs itself upon a biological certainty: the hymen. The hymen, a piece of tissue covering or surrounding part of the vaginal opening at birth, is designed to protect the sensitive infant vagina from urine and faeces; it naturally thins over time as the vagina becomes more robust. We might think of the hymen as the correlate of milk teeth that serve a purpose early in life and then fall away when they become unnecessary. Instead, the hymen became immortalised as a symbol for a set of anxieties and losses that are inculcated into young women as if these were the natural effects of heterosexual sex. Virginity politics depends upon hymen anxiety which in turn has the effect of producing an apprehension that haunts women’s heterosexual experiences beyond the normal awkwardness common to all intimacy. The anxiety is threefold: imagined pain (of the hymen breaking), anticipatory fear of being discovered (by those who are invested in its politics) and a fear of abandonment (the idea that the men they have sex with will disappear, leaving the girl bereft of both her partner and hymen).

Agential thinking

If the hymen is like a milk tooth, what would be the equivalent of the tooth fairy for the hymen? Men of all generations speak of informal bro circles: an older male friend who reinforced the pleasure (and conquest) of a first sexual experience via a congratulatory backslapping. For women, until recently still largely perceived as sexually yielding rather than conquesting, there is no certainty of an older female confidant for sexual experiences. Empirical studies tell us that older women — especially mothers — are largely charged with the social duty of transmitting patriarchal sexual values to young women. Amidst women, this leads to an uncertainty of inter-generational support for agential sexual behaviour: younger women are anxious about confiding in older women because they are not sure their sexual exploits will be celebrated by those who may have grown up with a narrower range of freedoms. Older women may be likewise cautious about sharing their sexual stories with younger women because they feel a sense of unconscious loyalty to virginity politics.

Sexual maturity

Institutional practices — in universities and in Ob-gyn offices — unconsciously enforce aspirational virginity by foreclosing on a definition of what it means to be sexually mature. Last year, while I was speaking at a university in Bengaluru, a college professor insisted that college-going girls lacked the maturity to engage in sex. “Don’t you think,” she asked, that we should ask them to control themselves until they can acquire maturity? The fantasy that maturity arrives suddenly, like manna or wisdom belies the truth: sexual maturity — like other forms of maturity —is acquired via experience and a process of reflection upon what is experienced. What the professor was actually suggesting was the virginity politics version of maturity in which sexual maturity is synonymous with patience and forbearance (especially female forbearance) which serve the ends of virginity politics — to keep sexual knowledge and confidence in male hands, literally.

Start a conversation

Unconscious purveyors of virginity politics, such as the college professor with her inaccurate view of sexual maturity, double down on the anxiety around women’s sexuality. A magical view of sexual maturity, in which it arrives like a Christmas present rather than a process, lends unconscious support to the sexual politics of patriarchy. To see the process of sexual maturity unfolding in action we need an open dialogue about sexuality that begins in early adolescence and continues across the lifespan to give us diverse models of what sexual maturity looks like and how it is achieved. In its absence, slut shaming and fear of being slut shamed, preserves the architecture of virginity politics in which women feel inhibited in confiding their sexual escapades in joyful and celebratory ways.

As our podcast came to a close, Leeza — who is a generation younger than me — said in her characteristic gleeful way, “So people should look at you and me and say Leeza and Amrita are enjoying their orgasms and I want to too.” I agreed but I flinched at this truth, and then noticing it, asked her if we could retake that section of the video.

(Amrita Narayanan is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is
the author of Women’s Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (OUP, 2023))