In the early Eighties my neighbour heard her two daughters, aged ten and twelve, talking about sex. ‘Well, if that’s what you’ve got to do,’ said the youngest girl, ‘I’m never having a baby, ever. I don’t care. I’m never, ever doing that.’ Now they’re both married with children, so they must have managed to do it somehow or other, but it could have been a difficult transition. Sex is an odd thing to imagine, looked at cold, from a position of inexperience. And opinions have, for a long time, contrasted wildly on whether it’s a good thing or not, and how much, what sort, with whom it is permissible or advisable, and how, when, under what circumstances, or if at all, a girl should do it. Nowadays the messages seem even more contradictory, intense, relentless and extreme. They come from everywhere: parents, peers, friends, teachers, politicians, religions, films, television, music, literature, and they all clash.

On a more basic level, we’re dealing with bottoms here, where excrement and ecstasy are close neighbours. It’s an intimate part of your body that tends to get dirty, a source of germs, and needs to be kept scrupulously clean at all times. And it can be the gateway to paradise. It’s rude and dirty, so we are often told when young; it’s also a thing of beauty, so we’re told later on. It’s private, but it seems to be everybody’s business. No wonder the young are confused. I was, perhaps more than most. So I turned to religion, because God seemed to have a fairly clear line on all this. Perhaps that’s why teenage girls often have a bit of a religious crisis while trying to make up their minds which way to go. Religion at least tells you plainly what not to do. You have some straightforward instructions to follow and some guidance through the morass. And as the worldly messages become more confusing, girls seem to be turning to God in a more extreme and ostentatious way.

A couple of years ago, Shabina Begum lost her court battle to wear her intensely modest, cover-all jilbab to school. Last summer we had Lydia Playfoot taking her school to court for the right to wear a silver ring. She was a member of the Silver Ring Thing – an evangelical Christian movement that promotes sexual abstinence – and the ring signified that she was still a virgin and intended to remain so until marriage. Eleven more girls in her school began to wear a silver ring, perhaps because teenage girls tend to whip themselves up into a Crucible-type frenzy and join in with the latest madness, which may perhaps be down to swirling hormones and sex being repressed like mad and longing for an outlet. Fifty years ago, we used to brazenly throw tennis balls over the school walls at passing builders and milkmen, but nowadays, rebellion has rather hotted up.