What is ‘virginity testing’ and why is it going viral on TikTok?

Hard-wired myths around female virginity have commanded the lives of women and their role in rites of love for centuries.

But just as we might be inclined to believe that practices around proving sexual “purity” are a thing of the past, social media users have noted a surge in videos of “virginity testing” ceremonies amassing views upwards of 10m on TikTok.

Despite widespread condemnation of its various forms and conceptions, it is believed that more than 20 countries worldwide continue to harbour the custom in some form.

The Western world has taken pains to somewhat stymie the prevalence of virginity testing – indeed, the UK government is in the process making it illegal in England and Wales to the tune of condemnation by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UN agencies, which deem the practice a human rights violation.

But with a sudden surge in footage which captures the cutoms online taken out of their original community contexts, experts are emphasising the importance of understanding what is behind the ceremonies users are being shown.

Virginity tests often involve visual or physical inspections of the hymenal membrane by a medical professional, though there is broad consensus among medical professionals that there is no biological proof of this being a legitimate appraisal.

The videos being shared widely online, however, show a different custom performed by members of the Roma community in western Europe, specifically in France and Spain.

This test is instead centred on the existence of the honra, described by social anthropologist Paloma Gay-y Blasco as a “tangible, physical feature which they say is located inside a woman’s vagina.”

Explaining the ritual, the lecturer, from St Andrews University, says: “For a girl to be considered truly untouched she has to have rosy, tight external genitals. However, she is thought to be a virgen (virgin) until her honra is spoilt or lost.”

She says Roma communitues in Spain believe that inside the body of a virgin woman there is an uva (grape) – “a white or greyish hard grain the size of a small chickpea which contains her honra.

“This is a yellow fluid which is spilt and hence lost when a woman is penetrated by a man for the first time or when she is deflowered by a professional woman at the wedding ceremony.”

Its retreival – which is intended to demonstrate and celebrate the virginity of the bride – is the central point around which Roma nuptials are structured.

To obtain the honra, an ajuntoaora – a professional woman who is called on to “check” whether a girl is a virgin – will tell the bride to lie down on her back in a room and spread her legs while a cushion is placed under her lower back.

The woman will then open the brides’ external labia with her fingers in order to examine the colour and tightness of her internal gentials.

Confirming her virginity, the ajuntoaora states: “She is as when her mother brought her into the world,” before inviting other old or experienced women to verify her statement.

She then “deflowers” the girl with a white handkercheif adorned with ribbons or lace which, once wrapped around the professional’s forefinger, is pushed into the vagina of the bride to “burst” the “grape”.

This action is then repeated to obtain the yellow stains, referred to as “roses”.

Journalist and author of Losing It: Sex Education for thr 21st Century, Sophia Smith Galer, explains that the ajuntoaora, in fact, presses the Bartholin’s glands – “a pair of pea-sized glands found just behind and either side of the labia near the entrance of the vagina,” she wrote in a Twitter thread.

“They’re what help us lubricate and so that’s why the handkerchief isn’t stained with blood, it’s stained with sort of whitish-yellowish stuff.”

The existence of the honra is, however, broadly rejected by doctors, and is therefore a “virginity test” for which, like others, there is no biological explanation.

In a TikTok video debunking the practice, Smith Galer says that the videos of the Roma ceremonies flodding her “For You Page” have been on the internet for some time, with one – among four she had spotted in a single night – tracing back to June.

She is keen to assert that the so-called test has “absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s sexual history.”

“No physical examination can determine anything,” she reiterates.

Gay-y Blasco says that the emphasis on virginity tests in Roma cermonies “revolves around a dual moral standard: women should dominate their wishes much more than men.”

“While being grounded in the perception of intercourse as enjoyable, and of sexual desire as integral to what men and women are like, [Roma] morality puts great stress of control,” she writes.

Roma “invarianly link marriage to the loss of female virginity,” she says, so much so that the word for an unmarried woman (moza) is a synonym of virgen (virgin).

The WHO has called virginity testing “a violation of the victim’s human rights”, which it associated with “both immediate and long-term consequences that are detrimental to her physical, psychological and social well-being.”