… at least as we know it now. According to science, the female hymen is not a good detector of whether a woman has had sex before, so we should really stop considering “breaking” the hymen to be the moment of lost virginity.

Via BBC:

Many people erroneously believe that the hymen seals over the vagina, not realising that that would mean a woman wouldn’t be able to menstruate (a minority of people do have this condition, and can get a hymenectomy to help open the channel). Instead, most hymens have an annular or crescent-moon shape, and may take many forms of varying thinness and thickness. Few of us would have been told that it can change with age, that some of us aren’t born with one, or that it might totally disappear by the time we enter sexual maturity anyway. Or that a wide variety of activity can stretch or tear it, from exercise to masturbation to, yes, penetrative sex.

But this doesn’t mean there’s any validity to the idea that you can ascertain sexual activity with a hymen examination. One small study of 36 pregnant teenagers published in 2004, for example, found that medical staff were only able to make “definitive findings of penetration” in two cases. Another 2004 study found that 52% of sexually active adolescent girls interviewed had “no identifiable changes to the hymenal tissue”. A binary idea that either we are sexually active and have no visible hymen, or that we aren’t sexually active and do have one, is simply not accurate. 

Ya learn something new every day!