You want some really good information about hymens and virginity? The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education provides it. It’s definitely a better source than some embarrassingly bad 1980s movie romp about eager teenagers trying to lose their virginity, that’s for sure.

Virginity – what does it mean?
Discussion of virginity revolves around whether a person has ever had sex. In most people’s minds, the main question is whether or not someone has had vaginal intercourse.

Virginity is a vague concept based on perceptions and myths, chiefly concerning female sexuality, that RFSU (or Scarleteen!) would not wish to endorse. For one thing, virginity is often associated with a heteronormative view of sex restricted to vaginal intercourse between man and woman (in other words, insertion of the penis into the vagina). For another, in many languages and cultures, virginity is synonymous with innocence, the opposite of which is guilt. There is no guilt involved in having sex, and no need to feel guilty about it. What’s more, such myths are used against women in particular; for instance as an excuse for spreading rumors and committing sexual assaults.

We sometimes receive questions about how to know whether or not you are a “virgin.” You are the only person who can decide that. Different people have different ideas about which sexual acts constitute a “loss of virginity.” Some people restrict it to vaginal intercourse, while others count other activities as well.

Is it possible to see or feel whether a woman has ever had sex?
No. Looking at a penis or a vagina, it’s equally impossible to tell whether that person has ever had sex. Neither a gynecologist nor a sex partner can tell whether you’ve had vaginal, oral, anal or manual sex (unless you have become pregnant or contracted a sexually transmitted infection). No one else can detect whether you’ve had sex.

Good to know. Unfortunately, now I’m torn between “Ha ha, you can’t tell if I’ve lost my virginity” and “Why the fuck should anyone care?”

Also interesting: the explanation for why humans (and other animals) have hymens in the first place.

When a female fetus is growing during pregnancy, her internal reproductive organs and her vagina develop separately from her external reproductive organs (the labia and so forth). The vagina starts out as a solid cord that runs from the body wall to the uterus. Between the fifth and seventh months of gestation, that cord slowly hollows out and turns into a tube. But it still doesn’t have an opening to the outside of the body — it ends at the body wall. Finally the body wall starts to disintegrate at the point where the vagina meets it and an opening forms in the body wall, and becomes the orifice (outlet or opening) of the vagina.

What the hymen is is whatever remains of that body wall cling to the inside of the opening of the vagina after the opening forms. It is the “leftovers” of the sheet of flesh that used to separate the internal genitals from the external ones before the vagina had an opening. The opening(s) in the center of the hymen are the entrance to the vagina.

I like to think of the hymen as a door frame mounted in a doorway that stands on the spot where “external” stops and “internal” starts. You can’t go in or out of that doorway without passing through the door frame. The hymen is exactly the same. It is part of the entrance to the vagina. Nothing can enter or exit the vagina without going through it.

Developmental byproduct theory for the win.

Someone wrote this angry, misinformed rant about the Ocean Sunfish, and it’s now spreading all over facebook. It’s kind of a good example of how ignorance can be popular, if it’s loud and nasty enough. Here’s a short sample:

They are the world’s largest boney fish, weighing up to 5,000 pounds. And since they have very little girth, that just makes them these absolutely giant fucking dinner plates that God must have accidentally dropped while washing dishes one day and shrugged his shoulders at because no one could have imagined this would happen. AND WITH NO PURPOSE. EVERY POUND OF THAT IS A WASTED POUND AND EVERY FOOT OF IT (10 FT BY 14 FT) IS WASTED SPACE.

It’s appalling. The guy who wrote it seems to know nothing about biology, or evolution, or fish in general, or this species in particular…but he could assemble an angry screed driven by his lack of knowledge and his subjective dislike of this one animal. I think he has a future working for Fox News.

Fortunately, someone who is better informed has decided to correct him. It’s a long and detailed description of sunfish biology, well worth reading. Again, just a taste:

Many, many animals suffer from public misperception and bad PR. Previously I have discussed how Komodo dragons are misrepresented as incompetent hunters by media, and how Atlantic bluefin tuna are almost entirely seen as a luxury dish and not as the endangered predator it is. But there are animals that have it even worse. These are species which are wrongly labeled as being just plain useless, and they include today’s subject: the Ocean Sunfish, or Mola (Mola mola).

In this case, it’s almost entirely due to a Facebook rant (http://brobible.com/life/article/facebook-rant-ocean-sunfish-molamola/) that went viral. It’s now almost impossible to see a post on ocean sunfish without seeing that rant posted. Posted by Scout Burns, the original rant has been taken down….but its text is everywhere on the Internet on every social media site. More than a few people actually have stated they also genuinely hate sunfish due to reading that rant, or that they will also will throw rocks at one. People have gone as far as to edit the Wikipedia page on ocean sunfish to further reflect their opinions on this species: someone added that a number of sunfish migrated to North America to vote for Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential elections.

It seems to make sense at first: how can any animal that looks like a decapitated head can be competent at surviving? But this is a gross misunderstanding of what evolution is. Evolution has no standards except reproductive fitness, and the very existence of a species is proof enough that it’s not useless.

But there are worse problems with the rant. Almost everything about that rant is wrong. Most of the information on it is actually from outdated research, or outright unsupported by anything. Yet it is taken as fact by most of the people who read it.

So, having played advocate for two animals that were either dismissed as incompetent or ignored entirely, I think it’s about time I spoke up in defence of a not-really-useless fish that looks like an amputee.

Read the rest. It’s good stuff.

It’s feeling chilly here in Minnesota this morning. Then I realized it could be worse — I could be adrift in a soulless, nearly empty void, sensing a sharp drop in the frequency of encountering rare particles in the vacuum as I crossed a boundary into interstellar space. Yeah, I was just reading about Voyager 2 leaving the heliosphere.

It’s far, far away.

From beyond the heliosphere, the signal from Voyager 2 is still beaming back, taking more than 16 hours to reach Earth. Its 22.4-watt transmitter has a power equivalent to a fridge light, which is more than a billion billion times dimmer by the time it reaches Earth and is picked up by Nasa’s largest antenna, a 70-metre dish.

It’s traveling at 55,000 km/hour, it’s been zooming out there for about 42 years, and it’s only 16 light-hours from Earth? That puts those silly SF novels in their place. 8,760 light-hours in a single light-year…Voyager has barely started out.

The two Voyager probes, powered by steadily decaying plutonium, are projected to drop below critical energy levels in the mid-2020s. But they will continue on their trajectories long after they fall silent. “The two Voyagers will outlast Earth,” said Kurth. “They’re in their own orbits around the galaxy for 5bn years or longer. And the probability of them running into anything is almost zero.”

Maybe…maybe I should just crawl back into bed and snuggle up under the covers. It’s warm in there, and I’ve only got a little while.

I submitted a DNA sample to 23andMe, and now they send me periodic updates on what they’ve figured out lately from my genes. For instance, they’ve informed me about traits I might have.

This is strange. I know what I take away from it, but I wonder what the general populations learns from this kind of list. Here are the two important messages I learn from this kind of revelation:

• Notice all the “likely”s and “less likely”s? That will never change, because if there’s one thing we can be confident of, it’s that every trait is the product of multiple genes interacting in complex ways. It says I’m not likely to have a cleft chin, but I know for a fact that under my beard there is a cleft chin, and that I’ve passed that on to my children and inherited it from my father. It doesn’t mean 23andMe did something wrong, it means that they’re missing information about all the factors that contribute to chin shape, and are estimating from knowledge of a few genes. They’re drawing on correlations in the large database that they have, but can’t infer mechanisms or the full range of interactions that occur during jaw development.

• What’s really depressing, though, is how trivial all these traits are. Does anyone really care that I’m less likely to get dandruff? Wouldn’t I get better information about that by checking my shoulders than by analyzing my DNA? Part of the reason for the triviality is that they also have a “health report” that they charge extra for which summarizes more substantial predilections, which I haven’t paid for. It would have exactly the same kind of probabilistic statements. It might, for instance, say I’m genetically predisposed to heart disease, but I could probably guess that from the fact that my father died young of heart disease, and would be better off going to my doctor to have my cholesterol and blood pressure checked (as I do regularly, and no worries — I’m in good shape for a man of my age).

So what I take away from this is a lesson in uncertainty and doubt; is that the information they’re trying to share with the general public? Because that’s not what I get from their “traits tutorial”, which starts off “Our Traits Reports are a fun way to explore how your DNA makes you unique.” Where’s the fun? Where’s the uniqueness? Am I special in my resistance to bunions, or am I supposed to be entertained with the news that I probably have blue or green eyes? (Not blue, by the way, more green, kind of hazel; I usually say they’re the color of rich algal swamp mud).

My general impression is that this is “fun” in the way taking Myers-Briggs tests and horoscope readings are fun; it’s mostly bogus, phrased in a way to seem positive, and we can poke through them for affirmations of stuff we were pretty sure of, already.

I signed up mainly for the ancestry component, but even there, it’s vague.

My god, I’m a white guy! Who’d have guessed?

Meanwhile, this is just nonsense.

Yes, I’m a member of haplogroups that include European royalty, which is true of almost all the white people from Northern Europe. You might as well announce that I have pale skin, just like the kings and queens of old Europe! Whoop-te-doo! I am fun and unique.

I am not opposed to the idea of 23andMe, and think they’ve gathered a lot of potentially useful information. I just feel that the way its presented to the public is biased to reinforce false ideas of genetic determinism to induce people to participate, and that worries me.