Virginity, me and Bill Clinton

When I lived in Kuwait in the 1970s, I used to hear young Kuwaiti girls talk about going to Beirut to 'get fixed'. They'd say it with a giggle and a sideways glance, in much the same way as a 50-year-old today slyly confesses that she does, indeed, have botox injections every three months.

It took me some months to discover exactly what they meant. In advance of marriage, these young women needed to be - where their hymens were concerned - physically intact. So they'd whiz off to the Lebanon to be stitched back together by easy-going doctors and thus ready for the moment on their wedding night when their husband would believe he was the first person to enter them.

Virginity is a funny thing. Personally, I believe I probably actually lost mine (or my hymen, at least, if I ever had one, as each woman is built on slightly different lines) because I spent all my teenage years astride a horse jumping five bar gates when my nerves permitted.

But I well remember the moment of first sex - of that feeling of being decidedly changed by my first act of sexual intercourse. It was a rite of passage, when I passed from being a girl into being a woman. According to Freud, at that moment I should have developed a "hostile bitterness against man" due to my inbuilt penis envy, "which," the good doctor alleged, "would never completely disappear". I am happy to report he was utterly wrong.

Male virgins, on the other hand, suffer not one bit. Nice girls were always meant to preserve themselves for their wedding night, but nice boys who didn't know how to do it by the time they married, were, well, wimps.

And when exactly, do you cease to be a virgin? At the moment of penetration, at the rupture of the hymen, or after you've had your first good snog and fumbling fingers have sneaked their way into your pants in your early teenage years?

Virginity's very elusiveness has kept it a potent subject over the years, as Anke Bernau's Virgins: A Cultural History invigoratingly demonstrates.

African men believe that to have sex with a virgin will cure them of Aids. And now, sweeping across America, there are growing cults of 'the virgin' in which young women wear chastity rings, making vows at the age of 13 that they have a gift - a gift that will only be unwrapped when they throw away that cheap plastic band in favour of a real gold one, a separate gift from the husband to whom they'll be loyal and faithful for life.

This might be a cult which has, as you might expect,  flourished under George Bush, but, says Bernau, President Clinton is thought to have supported it as far back as 1994 with his "$400m campaign against teenage pregnancy which turned virginity into a matter of public health, not just private morality". And Bill, of course, has long been an expert on private morality.

As well as Bernau's book, we now have Mitchell Lichtenstein's movie Teeth, in which Jess Weixler, playing the innocent Dawn, leads her school 'virginity cult' and makes pious speeches to adoring 14-year-olds about virginity's power and importance.

Unfortunately for our Dawn she's been born vagina dentata (an age-old myth which holds that some women have a set of powerful teeth lurking inside their vaginas that are just waiting to snare the luckless fellows who attempt to get inside) and the film quickly turns into a horror story, replete with dire consequences for the young boys who fancy her.

I found it hard to grasp exactly what Lichtenstein was trying to say - Is virginity good or bad? Are some women born intrinsically evil? - but the movie makes one thing abundantly clear: virginity, and all the myths, lies and confusion that surround it, is still alive and very potent today.

And that is a pretty extraordinary phenomenon. ·