You have to wonder how Mary got everyone to believe she was a pregnant virgin. Sure,  that whole Immaculate Conception was a pretty clever ruse, but Joseph had to be at least a little suspicious on their wedding night.

I wondered the same thing when I heard guys were bidding millions to be 22-year-old San Diego-based Natalie Dylan’s first. Earlier in the fall, Dylan (not her real name) auctioned off her virginity to the highest bidder in order to help pay for graduate school to become a marriage and family therapist.

Bids came in from more than 5,000 men and ranged from $1 to $3.8 million. If I’m spending that kind of dough, I’d want proof.

But, the fact is, there’s really no way to prove whether a girl has done it. The most popular idea that an intact hymen is proof of her virginity is completely false, says Hanne Blank, American historian and author of Virgin: The Untouched History.

Hymens run the gamut, says Blank, from thick and resilient to thin and fragile, making them easy to break in a myriad of ways and therefore lousy indicators of whether a young woman has had intercourse yet.

In fact, medical research isn’t really sure why women even have a hymen. Some research suggests that it is simply vestigial tissue — that is, tissue that possibly once had a function in a different evolutionary stage but has since become redundant, much like our appendix.

Unfortunately, says Blank, they found a use for it when men become landowners and needed to know who their kids were so they could hand down their property (known as the paternity-property hypothesis in biology and anthropology circles).

The easiest way to do this was to marry a verified virgin. And proving that this flimsy bit of membrane was still intact seemed a plausible enough method of verification.  

Except, as mentioned, given its flimsy nature, the state of a woman’s hymen is a lousy way to prove virginity.

As result, people have come up with all kinds of ways to create this proof, like inserting a vial of pig’s blood in the young woman’s vagina on her wedding night so it would burst and stain the sheets, or undergoing hymen restoration surgery, increasingly popular among mostly Muslim immigrants in Europe who want to have their virginity “restored” for marriage.

Saving your virginity until marriage is a personal choice made for health, moral and/or religious reasons. Fine.

But undergoing surgery to “restore” your virginity or spending millions for a one-night stand with a virgin seems like a high price to pay for something you can’t even prove.

In the business world, this would be considered a really bad investment.

– Josey Vogels is a sex and relationship columnist and author of five books on the subjects. For more info, visit www.joseyvogels.com.