Virgins in brothels: gender and religious ecotypfication

“Charlotte, we’re Jewish” says Cher in the opening scene of Mermaids, as she passes her adolescent daughter, Wynona Ryder genuflecting ecstatically at her private shrine to St. Perpetua. Charlotte abandons her worship of the martyr with a rather dramatic effect on her nascent sex life. What might it be about a young Christian woman tortured to death in the arena in third century North Africa that would so attract an American Jewish teenager as a model and ego ideal? In this lecture, I will investigate the figure of the virgin girl in both traditions, first as an ego-ideal for men and then as one for women, with startlingly different conclusions to the two analyses