Virginity, me and Bill Clinton

When I lived in Kuwait in the 1970s, I used to hear young Kuwaiti girls talk about going to Beirut to 'get fixed'. They'd say it with a giggle and a sideways glance, in much the same way as a 50-year-old today slyly confesses that she does, indeed, have botox injections every three months.

It took me some months to discover exactly what they meant. In advance of marriage, these young women needed to be - where their hymens were concerned - physically intact. So they'd whiz off to the Lebanon to be stitched back together by easy-going doctors and thus ready for the moment on their wedding night when their husband would believe he was the first person to enter them.

Virginity is a funny thing. Personally, I believe I probably actually lost mine (or my

hymen, at least, if I ever had one, as each woman is built on slightly different lines) because I spent all my teenage years astride a horse jumping five bar gates when my nerves permitted.

But I well remember the moment of first sex - of that feeling of being decidedly changed by my first act of sexual intercourse. It was a rite of passage, when I passed from being a girl into being a woman. According to Freud, at that moment I should have developed a "hostile bitterness against man" due to my inbuilt penis envy, "which," the good doctor alleged, "would never completely disappear". I am happy to report he was utterly wrong.

Male virgins, on the other hand, suffer not one bit. Nice girls were always meant to preserve themselves for their wedding night, but nice boys who didn't know how to do it by the time they married, were, well, wimps.

And when exactly, do you cease to be a virgin? At the moment of penetration, at the rupture of the hymen, or after you've had your first good snog and fumbling fingers have sneaked their way into your pants in