Fixed. :3
No, that’s what children and unwilling women are for.
And tentacles. And gooey stuff.
Pubescent girls in school uniforms?
Serioustime: One theory of why the hymen exists is that it provides a physical incentive for forming a lifelong relationship. When women have sex for the first time, their hymen typically breaks, which is moderately painful. The anticipation of this pain prevents women from “throwing away” their virginity. When a woman forms a deep bond with a man, she’s more likely to take the pain in stride. Human babies have the longest rearing time of any animal on the planet, so if humans mate for life, the two of them are better able to provide for the baby than just one of them would have been.
That’s only working under the assumption that we can communicate that painful experience to each other beforehand. The time period in which the hymen likely evolved was a time before such sophisticated communication existed. Also, the actual pain of the hymen breaking can be pretty bad, but it can also be relatively minor, to almost non-existent.
This is stupid because it doesn’t hurt all girls, and when it does, it’s usually not bad. Especially seeing as it’s highly unlikely that sex will be the first time you’ve had anything up there for any reason.
yyeeeaaaaahhh no.
You can only anticipate pain if you’ve experienced pain to anticipate.
So what, if someone threatened to chop off your hand, you wouldn’t be able to anticipate the pain and so you wouldn’t care?
You’re not very good at comparisons, are you.
But going with your hypothetical:
If I were as an infant, who had never scraped the skin off his elbow, who had never stubbed the bone in his toe, who had never felt a pain comparable to what the severing of a hand would be,
and didn’t even know I had a hand / or have never used it to touch anything,
I may very well consent to that.
Now here’s the kicker:
Once I lose my hand and experience the horrible writhing pain of its loss, once I’m able to realize what the loss of a hand is, there’s no point in putting off the severing of this same hand (until I really mean it) because it’s already gone. The pain has to be understood before the action for it to make any difference, and humans in the course of evolution didn’t have sex ed with which to anticipate hymenal pain, to motivate preservation of chastity… :rolleyes:
The possibility geekofalltrades presented? Nat ganna evolve.
But you know what? Its purpose (if there is one, other than being a random vestige) might be similar to what geekofalltrades said. Similar, yes, but a lot less romantic and christian.
Rape is a common form of reproduction in the wild. Gangs of bottlenose dolphin bachelors will surround a victim for that purpose and have at it. Male tortoises will ram their heart’s desire repeatedly, until she is frightened enough to hide in her shell, when he makes his move. Cats subdue their females by grabbing hold, by biting the nape of her neck, and pushing her chest to the ground while saddling up. Hermaphroditic sea slugs will joust with their weaponized penises, until the loser is stabbed and injected with virile fluid.
Now on a different spectrum, certain species have a trait of mating which domineers the mother of their children. The semen of certain flies acts as a glue, preventing their loves from receiving future donations. The penis of some other bugs might break off to serve as a cocky cock-block. The mere scent of a male mouse will elicit miscarriages among females who are pregnant with another’s offspring (see: Bruce effect).
Now imagine, if you will, something in between. Imagine a biological featue that keeps the first time from being gentle, even causing pain. With “luck”, the female would be impregnated, and for the near future she would associate the act with pain. She would avoid mating with other males, and if the male who was her first did in fact force her, he may repeat the process for the highest chance of reproduction.
It may continue to hurt. And mother nature’s okay with that. [COLOR=‘Gray’](In fact I theorize that presented with small penises, the hymen will not be fully broken in. If the previous perpetrator was unsuccessful in insemination, a larger penis may incite the same mildly traumatic pain to keep his partner aversive to the activity.) [COLOR=‘Black’]I’ve seen a girl, thoughts-of-hymen a thing of the past, calling her mother in tears asking why does it hurt. Her mother’s advice was to grin and bear it. Surely enough, by a week and several tries later, the pain was no longer felt… though her first time she was willing to put up with the pain, because she knew what to expect, that pain reappearing made her worry that something was wrong, made her worry too much to proceed without reassurance.
…Eventually verbal communication and societal cooperation kicked in, and we got laws, laws which include the lovely notion of consent. But we existed for a long time before that, and it would be outrageous to insist your lineage is free of forced reproduction. England had a law specifically enabling spousal rape until 1991.
There might be one more similar reason (if there is any, still). The penis of a tomcat is textured to claw the vaginal walls on retreat (which is why you may hear a cat screaming in pain during mating). This sensation, although painful, stimulates ovulation. There might be some relation to that within humans, something triggered by the pain induced, although the human analog is clearly a saturday-night-special.
Then lastly, as we’ve all accepted possible, it might just be a pointless growth that hasn’t done enough damage on reproduction to extinguish itself.
Jesus Christ Tiki, stop showing off so much.
Your e-penis can’t grow anymore :fffuuu:
^This, except replace “stop showing off so much” with “stop being such a smartass”.
ITT: Showing some actual knowledge about the topic = Being a smartass
Except Tiki’s post had nothing to do with the topic.
edit: ok, maybe it had, but still it’s mostly him showing off.
Pretty much what Tiki said, though I have a small rebuttal.
While it’s true, many species have special adaptations to the penis to cause various levels of pain, which we believe to act as a deterrent against mating with other males, humans are not one of these species. Our penises are fairly round and smooth and are better modified for stimulating pleasure than pain, and I can’t imagine it would take long for an ancient human female to figure out that only that first time was that negative an experience. ESPECIALLY since humans are naturally inclined to have sex a lot more than many other species, a trait we share with our cousins, the bonobos.
Bonobos, in fact, base a lot of their social interaction around sex, rather than violence like our closer cousins the chimpanzees. While we may often act more like chimps, we do share a lot of behaviors with bonobos, including “missionary” intercourse, something we rarely see in any other species, and again our insatiable love of sex. This sort of throws the hymen-as-sexual-deterrent theory off-balance in humans, leading me to believe the hymen may just be some weird little bit of skin that has no function but not enough detriment to be weeded out of the gene pool, or is left over from a time where our behavior, and possibly our anatomy, WAS more conducive towards such a deterrent against mating with more than one male.
People actually read what tiki says?
Unless rape is involved.
Who says rape always comes with physical pain?