Many of Dr. Red Alinsod’s patients are not looking for a new state of mind, they want a new hymen. They come to his clinic in Laguna Beach, Calif., and pay $5,000 because their honor, and sometimes their lives, depend on it.

“Right now is the start of my busy time,” he says, “because in spring, or during summer vacation, the women go overseas and get married and they have to be all repaired by the time of their arranged weddings in the lands of their birth.”

Alinsod’s typical patient may have been born and raised in the United States, but with significant family in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, the Middle East. Without evidence a new bride is a virgin, she risks being rejected, or, worse, the victim of an “honor killing.”

“These women are very scared,” Alinsod says. “The majority do fear for their lives. So this is a life-saving procedure in the majority of women I deal with. They are afraid they will be killed by the youngest member of their family, or the youngest member of the groom’s family,” because young men are often given light jail sentences for the murders.

There are other, less extreme reasons for the surgery. Baker, the Florida surgeon, who, like Alinsod, has made uro-genital cosmetic surgery a specialty, says one patient gave her virginity to her husband in the Asian country in which they lived and then came to the United States to study medicine, staying for several years. Though she remained faithful to her husband, when it came time for her to return to her country, she felt as if their lives were about to begin again. She wished she could be revirginized, too.

Once in awhile, Baker says, she’ll get a patient who just wants to give a present to her husband. “One patient of mine gave it to her husband as an anniversary gift," says Baker. "She was not a virgin when they got married so we re-attached her hymen to reproduce that experience.”  

Like Baker, Alinsod reports seeing about 100 patients for the procedure each year. The surgery itself is not overly complicated. It takes about an hour and involves stretching flaps — the remnants of the hymen — from the vaginal walls and securing them with sutures to form something resembling a drum head with a hole in the middle. 

Like a virgin?
But whether this can literally make somebody a virgin depends upon one’s point of view. When Carpenter did a study about what she called “secondary virginity,” she found wide disagreement not only about the plausibility of secondary virginity, but also about whether “virginity loss should be understood as a physiological or an emotional-experiential phenomenon.” Interestingly, of the 61 women and men interviewed, “three-fourths of men adamantly declared secondary virginity to be impossible, compared to about one-fourth of women,” though men sometimes declare that they are born-again virgins, too.

While we may not agree on what virginity means, or even how we lost it and if we can get it back, it does have meaning, Carpenter insists. “If virginity did not mean anything, we would not have movies like 'American Pie.' It does matter. The content or the definitions may change, but the need or desire to mark the transition to being a sexual adult persists.”

And we do have at least some baseline definition of sex. “We are not so flexible that we say masturbation or sex toys count,” Carpenter says. Her research has found that almost everybody agrees that sex involves genitals and another person.

Everything else is just detail.

Brian Alexander is the author of the new book “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction."

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