There is a common misconception at least with people I know especially when we were younger that in order to put anything in your vagina, you have to break through the hymen which is portrayed to be a membrane that is completely shut. When I was in high school, all of my friends and I were terrified of putting anything in there out of fear of excruciating pain that people (actually health teachers trying to scare us into being abstinent) told us would be present because of the hymen literally physically popping or being punctured. We were told that when you "break" your hymen, it is gone and that people who are not virgins or used tampons or masturbated internally didn't have hymens anymore. The first time you had sex was the only time it hurt because that is when you "lost" your hymen and if you don't bleed the first time after having sex, that would indicate to your husband (because if you're having sex, you must be married or else that is wrong) that you were not a virgin even if you said were. However, to try and seem like they weren't shaming people outright who didn't have hymens that tore, they said you can "break your hymen while innocently horseback-riding". Apparently, a high impact bump to the crotch that you might experience when a horse trots can cause a women to physically break your hymen. That gave an image to me like popping a balloon but it is a piece of skin that bleeds. Yes, my health teachers said all of that. I didn't even go to a Christian school and the sex education taught at my school was considered "progressive". Sex education in this country is beyond deplorable but that's another topic completely.

The hymen can tear and wear away and it does quite frequently do that. But it isn't like you have to pop it in order to make a tampon go in or something. Perhaps that was already clear, but for me personally with my upbringing, whenever I hear someone says "break your hymen", I think of what I was taught in my high school sex ed classes and object to it.

However, I will say that the hymen has a hole in it that I think I read somewhere is on average about the size of a finger or a tampon before being stretched or torn in various other activities. I believe the statistic is something like 1 in 200 women do have a condition where the hole in the membrane is too small to get anything in it in order to stretch it. Instead of jamming a dildo or a penis up there as hard and fast as humanly possible to burst through it yourself (as my sex ed classes implied was necessary), there is a very simple and commonly done surgical procedure to open the hole wider to allow women afflicted with this condition to have sex and use tampons.