Living Myths About Virginity

Laci Green grabs a thin sheet of latex, stretches it over the end of an empty toilet paper tube, and starts cutting away with a pair of scissors. "I'm makin' a hymennn," she sings before holding up the finished product to the camera, where, on the other side, more than 700,000 subscribers now await her every upload. "Ta-da!"

Since 2008, the 24-year-old YouTube sex educator has been making informational videos about everything from slut shaming and body image to genital hygiene and finding the G-spot. This particular scene comes from a clip called "You Can't POP Your Cherry (HYMEN 101)" which explains, with the kind of bubbly, web-savvy humor that makes her a popular vlogger, that the hymen isn't a membrane that needs to bleed or be broken during intercourse—it's actually just small, usually elastic folds of mucous tissue that only partially cover the vaginal opening and can, but don’t always, tear if stretched. A year and a half after it premiered, with well more than one million views, Green's video debunking one of the most enduring misconceptions about virginity is also one of the most popular segment she's ever recorded.

For a lot of women (and men), Green's message is hardly news, for any number of reasons. Several comments on the video, which still arrive almost daily, point that out. But : that