ABSTRACT
The word “virgin” did not originally mean a woman whose vagina was untouched by any penis, but a free woman, one not betrothed, not married, not bound to, not possessed by any man. It meant a female who is sexually and hence socially her own person. In any universe of patriarchy, there are no Virgins in this sense, and hence Virgins must be unspeakable outlaws, outcasts, thinkable only as negations, their existence impossible. Radically feminist lesbians have claimed, and have been inventing ways of living out, positive Virginity, in creative defiance of patriarchal definitions of the real, the meaningful. These Virgins who connect with men don’t try to maintain the fictions that the men they favor are better men than other men. Their imagination and their politics are shaped more fundamentally by a desire to empower women and create friendship and solidarity among women than by a commitment to appease, comfort or change men.
