About the Museum of Hoaxes
The Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. (Click here for opening hours, etc.) On our blog we post about whatever dubious-sounding claims come across our path on a day-by-day basis. In our archives we have hundreds of articles about the most fascinating and notorious deceptions throughout history, from the middle ages to the present.
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Hymen Repair and Fake Virginity Certificates
Status: Strange forms of deception
In Hippo Eats Dwarf I define 'Secondary Virginity' as: "Virginity regained by abstaining from sex for a time." But apparently many Muslim women in Europe are using other means of regaining their virginity. The Associated Press reports: [Dr. Nathan] Wrobel is one of an unknown number of gynecologists in France who are willing to repair hymens, the membrane usually broken by the first act of sexual intercourse. He was one of the few doctors willing to talk about it. Wrobel says women come to him having convinced themselves that the procedure will somehow reverse the irreversible. "They tell me, 'I'll be a virgin again. You will make me a virgin,' which in reality is totally false. … It's a secret we share." Other doctors issue false virginity certificates or offer such tricks as spilling a vial of blood on the sheets to fool families into believing the bride has passed their purity bar.
Hymen repair struck me as a rather peculiar operation, and I wondered if it was real or just some kind of medical scam. But some quick research reveals that it is a real procedure, according to Hanne Blank, author of Virgin: The Untouched History: if you're asking whether it is possible to surgically alter your hymen so that it looks like a picture in a textbook and no one would be able to tell by looking at your hymen that you'd ever had penetrative sex, the answer is that yes, some plastic surgeons will perform plastic surgery on your vaginal opening to make it appear to have a uniform, "pristine" hymen.
However, as the Wikipedia entry about Hymens points out, the condition of a hymen is a very poor indicator of a woman's sexual history: the hymen is a poor indicator of whether a woman has actually engaged in sexual intercourse because a normal hymen does not completely block the vaginal opening. The normal hymen is never actually "intact" since there is always an opening in it.