This budding beauty might one day have the world at her feet. Virginity is paradoxically erotic. Every harlot was a virgin once', maintained William Blake, the poet and visionary. The novice who becomes a 'Bride of Christ' is curiously maiden and wife at the same time. The notions of the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth, of Mary as mother yet virgo intacta are all contradictory.
Virginity is trauma.
Young girls arrive at adolescence, a time which can be irrespressibly joyful or tragically sorrowful, and find they are hemmed in by so many taboos that they become bewildered and completely overcome by their mental and physical metamorphosis. Some sail through adolescence with great ease and happiness, but others find it a traumatic or unsettling time. Virginity is a challenge. Virginity is self-regarding. A young girl studies her new shape continuously, gazes at it and then covertly compares her development with that of her friends, some of whom will already be almost mature women at a very early age, whilst others remain childlike and underdeveloped.