ABSTRACT
The author defines virginity in the most general of terms as the absence of the experience of genital intercourse. It applies to all individuals, regardless of age, gender, and sexual orientation. People are likely to use a combination of psychological mechanisms, in particular denial and rationalisation, to help them deal with the anxieties that the issue of virginity may evoke for them. Denials, rationalisations, and other defensive strategies have the function of replacing the more arduous psychological task of coming to terms with deep-rooted preoccupations. These preoccupations are mostly unconscious and stemming from the subjects' early relationship to their parents, and more specifically with unresolved oedipal scenarios. Freud's The Taboo of Virginity is a mostly anthropological account of virginity as "a logical continuation of the right to exclusive possession of a woman, which forms the essence of monogamy, the extension of this monopoly to cover the past".
