Why Hymens?

[Psalam]

(For those of you for whom English is not their mother tongue and the rest of you who don't get my sense of humor let me start this thread by stating categorically that it is here to be funny. While I expect some "serious" stabs at this (some people can't help themselves) I hope this will wind up garnering a chuckle or two.)

 

Since I am among those "who believe in science" it is my opinion that things evolve in a way that is advantageous to the species - at least as a whole and in the big picture. Two eyes give stereoscopic vision. Paired organs in general give a "spare" if that is needed, and so on. There are, of course, exceptions. Why do humans have an appendix? Why do male humans have breasts which are, to be concise, as useful as tits on a boar. 

 

So, my question is, why do humans have hymens?

 

As a first attempt at answering this let me postulate that the reason for the existence of the hymen is that there is a God and she is a Catholic nun.

[DocClox]

10 minutes ago, Psalam said:

So, my question is, why do humans have hymens?

 

From the way you phrase the question, it sounds more like God is a Geordie. ("Why Hy, Man!)

 

... although if you don't know much about the Geordie dialect, that probably falls a bit flat. Oh well...

[Guest]

Interesting question. Psalm. I asked myself the same question when losing my virginity. It was god damn painful and additional pain caused the jerk who just wanted to penetrate me without caring how do I feel. Anyway, some religious people clams that virginity gives you more clearer understanding of deity since body is evil. Therefore hymen is kind of "fuse" of keeping purity. This isn't my theses, of course, I'm just saying what I read.  Never studied scientific approach thou. Anyway, for me, hymen is unnecessary addition Mother Nature gave to females which isn't fair. She should give one to males too

[Heroine HoneyCrotch]

51 minutes ago, Psalam said:

So, my question is, why do humans have hymens?

Being that I'm not religious im not certain but I'm pretty sure the bible would have an answer for that.  

[Heroine HoneyCrotch]

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/whats-the-purpose-of-the-human-hymen

 

Gives no answers, science just dont know. 

[lampuiho]

15 hours ago, Heroine HoneyCrotch said:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/whats-the-purpose-of-the-human-hymen

 

Gives no answers, science just dont know. 

 

It's scientifically impossible to test out the theories. You would have to clone a bunch of people genetically with hymen and put them into a certain environement. and another half without to test them out. We also don't have a lot of information to guess how it got evolved to this state.

 

All we know is that the inner labia is equivalent (forgot the correct term for this) to the scrotum which is closed off in male but split apart in female. It did not split entirely because it probably doesn't mattter and in fact males prefer to reproduce with younger females who are more likely to have intact hymens as that signifies their youth.

[Mr. Otaku]

Some things in nature are byproducts of other processes that took place for legitimate evolutionary reasons, some other things are somewhere in between being such byproducts and being remnants of features that would've been useful if fully developed but nature decided it wasn't necessary mid-way (reason why male humans have breasts, very very underdeveloped breasts). Similarly the hymen is a remnant of tissue that appeared during very early development, so naturally it's not the same for all women as some have very thick ones and some barely do.

 

Personally i believe it was just Azura committing some mischief, but noooooo i'm a lunatic conspiracy theorist. They deemed me mad! Such a grand and intoxicating innocence!! I'm telling you this was Azura using her powers to spawn interdimensional aliens through women with these vaginal daedra tissues and hefty mommy milkers to make us forget our true goal to make Skyrim great again! IT'S ALL COINNECTED, DO YOU HEAR ME?? I HAVEN'T BEEN TOUCHED BY A WOMAN IN YEARS!!

[Gukahn]

1 hour ago, EvalovesEP said:

 hymen is unnecessary addition Mother Nature gave to females which isn't fair. She should give one to males too

 Great now i imagine my first time and instead of her in pain (i really, really hate the fact that it has to hurt so much.. took that little bit excitement away we had <_<) sheding a fine lair of skin.. Actually, that wouldn't be so bad ? Disgusting but not as bad.

 

Hymnen are utterly useless.. I even knew a Women who had sex but never got it broken so she said so why even have something like that? It doesn't protect anything that should be protected until the first time and even if.. Why not after that..? As for the religious bullshit... We have a little morbid phrase in germany for dead virgins.. "ungeöffnet zurück."  Back unopened..

 

33 minutes ago, Mr. Otaku said:

Personally i believe it was just Azura committing some mischief, but noooooo i'm a lunatic conspiracy theorist. They deemed me mad! Such a grand and intoxicating innocence!! I'm telling you this was Azura using her powers to spawn interdimensional aliens through women with these vaginal daedra tissues and hefty mommy milkers to make us forget our true goal to make Skyrim great again!

Not the dumbest thing i've heard this year.. But wouldn't Sheo have more fun with it then Azura?

[Mr. Otaku]

4 minutes ago, Gukahn said:

Not the dumbest thing i've heard this year.. But wouldn't Sheo have more fun with it then Azura?

Sheo is too crass to think of something so subtle and intricate. He'd have more fun replacing the vagina with a moldy cheese void that shoots out flying cows at the speed of light when you get near it, which is even dumber.

[worik]

I regard it in it's best case as just completely useless and a much overrated concept.

At worst, it's painful in one of the most memorable (but still overrated) moments of life

 

So for the reason of it's existance in this world, I am drawn between "failed evolutional thing" and "annoying reminder that life sucks".

 

PS:  this common "breaking" trope is mostly a misperception of the actual organ that it is

[MaxRex]

First of all, the hymen has a lot of mammals, it is not exclusively related to humans.

The most realistic reason for its existence is hygiene, better absence of the same.

People and animals are not exactly meant to bathe 3 times a day.

Today's level of hygiene has been applied for less than 50 years, 

You can imagine what level it was at 100 or more years ago.

The anus and vagina are very close...

[spoonsinger]

The appendix is part of the immune system.

[mirnooko]

Hymen serves a very narrow roll in the development of a baby, to keep out the feces and urin from the vaginal opening. After the baby grows, it looses this function. Some are very elastic and don't break, some break very easily.
Kind of like baby teeth.

[FauxFurry]

I am surprised that no one made the observation that it is the direct biological equivalent of a freshness seal (well, other than mirnooko's mention of separation of fluids on wastes between mother and child which is indirect or MaxRex's mention of hygiene).

[Just Checking]

 

You know what I love?  Vestigial structures.  Things we still have but don't serve a purpose anymore, or on rare occasion are even bad for us.  Evolutionary science, as we know, relies on the idea of natural selection.  Creatures that can survive in their environment and compete with other creatures will live to reproduce, passing on their traits.  All the better if a new trait that gives them a better edge mutates or develops.  Creatures that cannot, or are born with disadvantageous mutations, such as deformities, will be killed, or starve, or whatever, usually before they can reproduce and pass their bad genes on.  Over long periods of time, this weeds out bad traits from a species, and favourable mutations eventually find their way into the larger gene pool.  Over an even longer period of time, creatures that settled in one area might change in a certain way due to pressure from their environment and no small amount of random chance, while previously identical creatures that moved to another area will change differently, and you end up with divergent evolution, new subspecies and eventually new species entirely.

 

What's this got to do with vestigial structures?  Well, if your species is good enough at surviving to reproduce, even if they have something they don't necessarily need, or even if it's an outright disadvantage, that organ or trait or whatever will still be passed on.  Fun things like your appendix fucking exploding doesn't affect so many people that it prevents those with an appendix from reproducing, and given humans as a species are capable of reproducing not long after the onset of puberty, you'll rarely have the time to develop appendicitis before your monkey brain with a frontal lobe that's not done cooking decides it's a good idea to do the feel good thing and end up with a kid with an appendix.  And thanks to good old natural selection, any humans that are betrayed by their own bodies before they can reproduce just don't pass that treasonous trait on.  So here we are, with an organ in our torsos that for some people is just a timebomb waiting for the day it decides you don't get to live anymore, unless our nice, shiny, highly evolved brains are used to remove it from the body before it can do that.  The human body is full of vestiges of out past, to the point that a concerning amount of our DNA is basically junk data clogging up our genetic hard drives but otherwise not actually affecting our bodies.

 

As Mirnooko mentioned, the hymen serves a short lived purpose of protecting the body from itself before a person is old enough to do that on their own.  After that, it's basically useless from a survival standpoint, and it even seems to recognize this because it just outright stops doing its job at all as the body grows.  In a broad sense it could be considered a vestigial structure, since we can probably get by fine without it what with our modern knowledge of hygiene, the way our species cares for its young and our ability to adapt our behaviour so easily thanks to our flexible brians.  But here's the fun thing about humans and all their dumb flaws.  We're too good at staying alive.  So good, that we've basically taken ourselves out of the process of natural selection.  I'm a hayfever sufferer, which is thought to be a holdover from a time when disease threatened human survival.  Who survived that time of pestilence?  The guys with the immune system that went berserk the instant it encountered anything even remotely foreign.  Maybe over time that trait would have been worked back out of our species once its advantages were no longer more useful than its drawbacks were harmful, or a more elegant way to do the same thing was evolved that didn't cripple me for 8 months of the god damn year, but we got too good at not getting eaten by large cats, too good at not starving to death, too good at learning how to overcome environmental hazards, and now the only way humanity will change is if we get hit by some kind of cataclysm that forces use back into the natural selection cycle, if we selectively breed humans in a eugenic nightmare dystopia, or by sheer, random luck as traits just make their way around the world.

 

 

 

Spoiler'd just in case people don't actually care to read a wall of text.  I like this kind of science, so I got a little carried away.  Tried to punch it up a little to keep it fun.

 

 

For the wrong answers only answer:  God hoped it would deter people from fornicating, but he only underestimated just how horny he made us.

[Guest]

OK, I read some very reasonable and logical explanations about existence of hymen. Thank you guys, but according to them it appears that hymen never meant to be broken. That's why it hurts as hell. If that is the case, what the hell (whoever put it in us) was thinking how we should have sex and deliver babies?! I, therefore agree with some theories stressed here that it was some evolutionary purposeless "leftover". Again, breaking hymen alias loosing virginity is fucking painful. Theories and assumptions why is it there won't satisfy us, females, because we are the one who have it regardless of meaning of it - with or without the reason.

[Heroine HoneyCrotch]

What's interesting is the shift in perception from times far gone. Purity used to be a big deal to a man. The fact that the women simple did not have the option to lie about being virgin served the perception that purity mattered really well. Nowadays the women has taken their rightful place beside man, as equal and everything else is just falling into place,shifting and molding. If your 22+ its a virtual lock a girl is not a virgin when dating,and it's no big deal in fact its welcomed. Looks like you girls are stuck with it for awhile. It's not that bad, men have shit too. Higher dropout rate, higher homeless rate,higher death in combat or workplace,higher drug use,and so on and so on. Myself, I sexed only 1 virgin. I was sympathetic for the girl, 2nd time too. Easily,never wanted to have to go through that again and I was on the easy side. Muslims can have their 30 something virgins, I'll pass on that stuff!   

 

 

Somehow this is in association with the chicken and the egg, maybe the women came from the hymen? You know what the name of the useless skin around a vagina is called right? 

   Women   

 

 

 

[DoctaSax]

Hymens are God's not-so-subtle hint that he changed his mind about the going-forward-and-multiplying thing. Also see: childbirth.

[Grey Cloud]

On 6/1/2021 at 2:25 PM, Psalam said:

Why do male humans have breasts which are, to be concise, as useful as tits on a boar. 

Poor use of a simile here. An ash-tray on a motor bike or a chocolate teapot would have been better.

 

"Hymen".

"Lo girls".

[Guest]

On 6/1/2021 at 9:25 AM, Psalam said:

So, my question is, why do humans have hymens?

 

 

Because they evolved that way.

One evolutionary hypothesis suggests the hymen arose because it was a desirable trait, due to the common societal preference for virgin wives. But that explanation fails for other species. Instead, some scientists speculate that the hymen helps keep bacteria out of the vagina.
  

On 6/1/2021 at 9:25 AM, Psalam said:

Why do humans have an appendix?

 

Because early evolutions of humans used to be able to eat and digest raw meat. The appendix was used to store the biological material needed to do so.

New evidence suggests that the appendix is designed to protect good bacteria in the gut. That way, when the gut is affected by a bout of diarrhea or other illness that cleans out the intestines, the good bacteria in the appendix can repopulate the digestive system and keep you healthy.

 

On 6/1/2021 at 9:25 AM, Psalam said:

Why do male humans have breasts which are, to be concise, as useful as tits on a boar. 

Men have nipples because nipples develop in the womb before embryos become distinctly male or female.

Do you think about the questions you ask, and how they might make you seem less intelligent?

[Heroine HoneyCrotch]

58 minutes ago, Prince Rurik of Novgorod said:

in the womb before embryos become distinctly male or female.

I think male cats will still have the 6-8 nipples.

[Heroine HoneyCrotch]

I just cracked the case! It came with us when we came out of the water!

[MaxRex]

20 minutes ago, Heroine HoneyCrotch said:

I just cracked the case! It came with us when we came out of the water!

Darwin, is that you? sorry i didn't recognize you

[Guest]

2 hours ago, MaxRex said:

Darwin, is that you?