group.
MARCELLA: I mean, what is she, she’s fifteen, the problems that she’s had...
(simultaneously) MOLLY: She’s got a lot of problems.
(simultaneously) JULIET: She’s like thirty isn’t she?
MARCELLA: Yeah.
DY: What sort of problems?
MOLLY: (gravely) preg-nan-cy.
JULIET: She’s got herself into so much trouble and then she comes to us to sort it out for
her, she wants us to sort it out for her, and that’s the problem.
(simultaneously) MARCELLA: She goes with so many different boys.
MARCELLA: She’s got to be careful. Like, when you’ve got a boyfriend you don’t come
and tell everyone, it gets twisted and then...
JULIET: She’s lost so many friends over it, she’s got hardly any friends left now, it’s only
us lot now that talk to her.
ALL: Yeah.
DY: What’s made this happen, because she has so many boyfriends or she talks about
it?
(simultaneously) JULIET: She’s slaggy.
MARCELLA: Yeah, she sleeps around.
(simultaneously) MOLLY: It’s all coming out now!
JULIET: (slight laugh in voice) She’s my friend and everything but I’ve told you she’s a
slag.
MARCELLA: She sleeps around and she needs to control...
JULIET: She don't even know these people.
[...]
JULIET: She does her own thing now.
MARCELLA: Clubbing.
JULIET: She’s like up Chinatown all the time, so like, (laughing) I wouldn’t feel welcome
up there and that.
[...]
DY: Is it the number or turnover of boyfriends that concerns you or is it that...?
MARCELLA: At her age she shouldn’t be sleeping with so much people.
(simultaneously) JULIET: Leave it to, like, later.
DY: So it’s the number of people she’s sleeping with?
MARCELLA: She shouldn’t be sleeping with anyone at all if you really think about it, but I
mean whether she chooses to do it, that’s her business.
JULIET: But then she shouldn’t be telling everyone about it, that’s how she loses friends.
(Interview)
Scene 3 demonstrates the virgin/whore dichotomy and illustrates both its boundaries and
the ways in which girls inscribe and police this. Within the scene the status of Su Lin as
not-virgin is quickly inferred when her “problems” are identified as “preg-nan-cy”. The
group indicates that telling people, including girls who are friends, about sexual activity
with boyfriends is a justified and common reason to lose these friends. It seems that it is
the combination of being sexually active with a succession of boys and talking about this
that leads to the naming “slag”.
The discursive practices of the group suggest that the discourse of feminine sexual
morality (and immorality) underpinning the students’ constitutions of heterosexual