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A Gift of One’s Own Was Britney Spears really a virgin until the age of 21? From 1992 to 1994, preteen Britney epitomized wholesome American girlhood as a Mouseketeer on Disney TV’s revival of The Mickey Mouse Club. The young girls who admired Spears then helped propel her to superstardom a few years later, buying her first album and mimicking her wardrobe and dance moves by the millions. When Spears’s debut single reached No. 8 on Billboard ’s pop charts at the end of 1998, she was not yet 17.1 By 2000, the 18-year-old Spears boasted a decidedly sexy public persona, strutting the stage in skin-tight leather while crooning lyrics like “I’m not that innocent ” and “I’m a slave for you.” In the first flush of success, Britney embraced the job of teen role model, explaining to a reporter from Rolling Stone, “You want to be a good example for kids out there and not do something stupid.”2 Among her exemplary attributes were regular church attendance and disapproval of smoking, drinking, and premarital sex. A fawning 1999 biography told of the 17-year-old innocently flirting with members of the popular boy band ’N Sync while on tour as their opening act, and “blushing” to admit that she’d kissed “[f]ive or six” boys in her lifetime.3 Most famously, Britney openly shared her desire to remain a virgin until she married. “I’ll try not to have sex before marriage,” she told one interviewer. “My girlfriends always say once you do that, there are so many other emotions involved , and I can’t deal with that right now.”4 Britney’s purported hometown sweetheart, Reg Jones, confirmed her claims in a British tabloid, saying, “She treasures her virginity above fame and fortune.”5 In short, whether as a result of her small-town, Southern Baptist upbringing or as a move calculated to reassure her young fans’ parents and her own corporate sponsors, Spears described her virginity as something she treasured , or as a gift. 3 57 Some male fans took Spears’s avowed chastity as a challenge. In 2000, when the singer was just 18, a wealthy American businessman reportedly offered to give her over $7 million if she would lose her virginity with him. Britney was outraged, telling journalists, “It’s a disgusting offer. He should go and have a cold shower and leave me alone. . . . I want to wait until I get married before I sleep with anyone.”6 Her reaction, perfectly understandable for any young woman not keen on a career in prostitution , took on an additional resonance given her understanding of her virginity as a gift. The women and men that I spoke with who drew on this metaphor invariably appraised virginity as a very valuable gift, based on its uniqueness, nonrenewability, symbolic import, and status as an extension of the giver’s self.7 Typically, people see the value of a gift as reflecting the worth of its recipient and, accordingly, bestow the choicest gifts on the special individuals in their lives. Recipients conversely tend to interpret gifts as tokens of their own value in the eyes of the giver. When a virgin who views virginity as a gift decides to give her virginity to a speci fic partner, she is effectively declaring that he (or she), and their relationship , are valuable and unique. From the perspective of the gift metaphor, virginity is far too special to be purchased by a stranger; it is literally priceless. Spears was lauded from many quarters for publicly taking such a traditionally feminine stance on virginity. A typical magazine columnist commended her for being “very sexy” but still having “strong principles and religious views.”8 Even officials from the Church of England praised Britney as “a great ambassador for virginity,” in the wake of her confessed crush on her royal contemporary, Prince William.9 Those who lauded Spears seemed to suggest that if all young women similarly valued their virginity, teen pregnancy, AIDS, and even welfare-dependency would become problems of the past. In a decade that had seen a proliferation of virginity-cherishing young women in American mass media— Donna Martin on TV’s Beverly Hills 90210 being the best known—Britney was the reigning queen of Virgin Cool. But it wasn’t long before the pop star’s increasingly sexy image—with ever-skimpier stage outfits, more suggestive dance routines, and...

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