women both as individuals and as a group.
Scene 4: virgin girls, slapper girls and other girls
DY (the researcher, mid/late twenties, woman, White)
MOLLY, NICOLA, DIANE, ANNIE, MILLI (year 11 students, girls, White)
Sitting in a group around a table in the year base while the rest of the tutor group
are in a PSE lesson. The group are debating whether or not particular boys are
virgins.
DY: How do you know if people are virgins or not?
MOLLY: I dunno, because people don’t give a shit.
DIANE: (indicating NICOLA) she ain’t.
NICOLA: (shouting, high pitch) I am Diane!
MOLLY: (laughing) she ain’t.
DY: How do you know?
MOLLY: It’s just the way she goes round.
DY: What about...?
MOLLY: (interrupting) Puts herself across to boys.
DY: What does she do?
MOLLY: She goes running up to them and cuddling them and (impersonating NICOLA)
„Oooh’.
NICOLA: (screeching) No I don’t!
DY: She flirts a little bit?
MOLLY: Yes, and she goes, „Ah, I’ll have sex with you later if you open the door’.
NICOLA: (laughing) I do not say things like that!
[...]
MOLLY: And [boy] goes „Ok come on then, lets go’ and she actually walks up to him and
goes „Come on’.
NICOLA: (more serious, agitated) But I’m still joking around, I’m just having a laugh
Molly!
MOLLY: Yeah but people like [boy] and [boy], they’ll take it differently and think „Ah, she’s
a right little slapper’ and that. Think about what happened to [girl].
NICOLA: Sorry, I ain’t gonna spend the night shagging someone if I don’t love them and
trust them, I ain’t gonna shag anyone that I ain’t going out with.
(Interview)
In Scene 4 Diane and Molly assert that Nicola is not-virgin, and, by extension, at risk of
being slag or whore. Nicola begins by contesting vigorously this constitution. Diane and
Molly do not suggest that Nicola has told them of her sexual activity. In the light of the
imperative for silence detailed in Scene 3, it is unclear whether Nicola has divulged this
information directly and she is not offering me this information. Given the risk of slag,
the silencing of feminine desire, and the centrality of virgin to the constitution of
valourised heterosexual femininities discussed above, it is unsurprising that Nicola denies
the charge laid by the other girls.
The scene illustrates that it is not simply the „fact’ of virgin/not-virgin (whore) that is at
stake. The “way” Nicola “goes around” and “puts herself across to boys” is also