Does any man really want to marry a virgin?

Years ago, the music scene where I was living was gatecrashed by a duo of philistine scallywags from Liverpool, who churned out an act that had nothing to do with musicianship and everything to do with naughty-lad personality.

These two would set the tone for their performance by loudly enquiring of the audience, “Are there any virgins in tonight?” It was extra “funny” because, as Liverpudlians, they pronounced the word “vairgins”.) Cue giggles and silence from the girls. None dared say anything for fear of being ridiculed. To keep quiet and imply she wasn’t a virgin invited accusations of being a slag, slut, tramp or whatever word was fashionable. But to say she was a virgin would be to brand herself as a hoity toity paragon of virtue, too good to be true and in love with herself.

That was then, you might say, and this is now. Or, since it was not in Trinidad and Tobago, that was there and this is here. But boys will be boys and girls will be girls all over the world.

It is a classic double standard.

Young men want to get their hands on as many women as they can, yet they reserve the right to stigmatise their conquests the moment they have finished.

The post-encounter “walk of shame” is one of the most appalling inventions of the generation known as millennials, many of whom will no doubt think again when they have daughters of their own. For their part, young women have the same innate desire to go through the motions of procreation, although in most cases to actually get pregnant is not the idea at all.

But does any man really want to marry a virgin? I would suggest that not too many of the jack-the-lads have ever really thought about it, and that if they did, they would want to have a few clauses inserted into the contract. She should be untouched by any other man, not for health reasons but for the sake of his ego, but should be naturally skilled in the art of physical love and willing to go along with whatever practices he wanted.

For a teenage boy, his own virginity is a burden to be lost as soon as possible and lied about in the meantime. And he lacks the emotional maturity and perhaps the intellectual capacity to apply different criteria to the girls who, he is always hearing, are more mature than boys anyway.

Men have been falling foul of this accelerated female maturity since the dawn of time, or at least since the first primitive boy and girl creatures emerged from the primordial swamp and the guy couldn’t see that the vision before him was only seconds old while he had been around for a full two minutes.

We just can’t tell. I once went to see a car mechanic in the heart of Tobago and was all but hypnotised by a young woman who roamed the garden, swinging the skirt of a full, womanly dress so that it swirled like that of a Jane Austen character at the annual summer ball.

“That your daughter?” I asked the man, since there was a much older woman around who was presumably his wife.

He nodded. “I bet you have to keep an eye on her,” I added, in what I hoped was a fellow-father sort of way. He looked at me impatiently and said, “She’s only 12.” And 12 she might have been, but a blossoming, rapidly maturing physical 12 with a heart full of desire for love and a head full of inquisitiveness.

Frankly, I’m glad I don’t have daughters. My Dad never really came to terms with the fact that my sister was of the vulnerable, lusted-after gender. He was clearly glad when my brothers and I showed an interest in girls, but not happy at all when boys came sniffing around his young female pride and joy.

A father’s protectiveness goes way beyond the loss of his daughter’s virginity (an event he probably can’t even bring himself to think about) and age limits must obviously be respected, but for prospective husbands to see anything short of mint condition as a deal-breaker, as they do in certain parts of the world, really calls into q u e s - tion our w h o l e way of thinking about sex and the journe y to adulthood.