I have made my virgin “full” post to th’Weblog, a feisty little number about Derrida and autobiography. At the time of this writing, no-one has responded, so I consider my Weblog virginity to have remained partially intact up to this point (see notes on reciprocity, below).

The category, if it is one, of the demi-vierge has always interested me - virginity being one of those things that’s rather difficult to pin down. Being cross-gender, it clearly isn’t the same thing as maidenhead - it’s more like the inward and experiential sign of outward and physical activity. Auden’s “the distortions of ingrown virginity” accordingly refers to a psychological “complex” rather than a physical symptom, although there is the suggestion in, for example, the ballad of Miss Gee that physical symptoms (such as cancer) may eventuate if the disease progresses unchecked.

Virginity is psychosomatic; or rather, it is a specific dissociation of the psychic from the somatic - as Morrissey puts it, “on the day that your mentality / catches up with your biology, / come round…”. The “loss” of virginity entails a breach of the separation between mind and body, a supposedly definitive change in one’s state of mind brought about by the things one’s body has been doing (or having done to it). The notion that prolongued virginity results in neurosis, and the eventual production of physical symptoms, implies that the dissociation of psyche from soma is only ever temporary, that something will have to give sooner or later. The choice is then between “natural” and “unnatural” growth, sexual flowering and neurotic/cancerous metastasis.

The demi-vierge would then be the person for whom the breach of the virgin’s dissociation between mind and body was not fully accomplished, the person who would be simultaneously physically sexualized and mentally chaste. Zizek’s observation that nowadays “anything goes” - but you have to wear a condom, or use a dental dam - resonates with a phrase that occurred to me a few years ago: “emancipation through prophylaxis”. Is what is called “sexual expression” in such cases a complete or fully-realized expression? But, then again, could it ever be - and what would it mean if it were? Isn’t it rather the notion that there is something, call it “virginity”, that can be lost or breached in a personality-rupturing sexual event, a definitive modification of the self through sexual activity, that needs to be questioned - along with the whole rather revolting set of accompanying prejudices against the sexually inactive?

Incidentally, it’s a lot easy to make arguments of this kind as a father-of-two than it ever was to make them as someone who remained, as I did for what seemed at the time like a long time, “technically” a virgin. There is a right to speak of such things that can be suspended or withheld: the loss of virginity entails an accession to authority, the supposed “authority of experience”, without which one cannot be considered a full member of the community of sexual persons. It is hard to challenge that authority from the outside. But since when was anybody ever not a “sexual” person?