Geri bares all in online chat

On stage there's no doubt sex is what helps sell gyrating Geri Halliwell to adoring fans. With midriff bare, skintight shorts and songs with titles like Feels Like Sex, Shake Your Bootie Cutie and Scream If You Wanna Go Faster, the message couldn't be clearer: this is a girl who knows what goes on between the sheets.

However, an intriguing internet chat session suggests the real Geri Halliwell may be very different - a much more naive and diffident character that she appears.

Indeed, she may still have been a virgin at the ripe old age of 21. And it could even be the case that she is a virgin still. The former Spice Girl was taking part in a discussion in the chatroom to warn teenagers about the dangers of underage sex. However, during the 45-minute exchange on the new website for under 16s, likeitis.org.uk , she managed to contradict herself as to the state of her virginity.

First she claimed she was still a virgin and minutes later hinted that in fact she lost her virginity when she was 21, when she met her first serious boyfriend.

Asked what to do by a virgin girl feeling pressured into having sex by her school friends, Halliwell replied: "Take some respect in yourself, feel proud that you're choosy, vaginity(sic) is precious and a gift and is something to be proud of.

"It's not some villanous (sic) disease that you've got to get rid of as soon as possible. Feel proud to be a virgin - I am!"

This from the singer whose onstage antics have always caused controversy. For last year's Brit Awards she caused a furore when she strutted from between the slowly spreading legs of a giant, plastic woman lying on her back.

Although she did once say that when she goes on stage "all those little sexual moves, it's not actually me", her friend Robbie Williams clearly disagrees.

In a Radio 1 interview with DJs Mark Radcliffe and Marc Riley, Williams, 27, famously said: "We are just friends and we have the occasional s**g."

Halliwell also reassured a 17-year-old Croatian girl called Antonia, who had not yet started her periods, that she did not start herself until the same age.

The internet site, developed by Marie Stopes International, aims to reduce Britain's rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and promises youngsters information about sex.