Legacy of the virgin queen

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The truth about Britney Spears had to come out some time, and if Justin Timberlake, her ex-boyfriend, is even remotely to be trusted, it just did. On Wednesday, he announced to a fellow passenger on a flight: "Everyone thinks she is still a virgin, but that is a joke. She lost her virginity a while ago - and I should know." Since there was nobody left in the Western world who believed her anyway, this isn't going to shatter any earth.

But the deception can't pass without comment. Brit's virgin stance isn't a quirk of her own. The whole No-Sex-For-Me-Please! number isn't even limited to fellow members of her happy-clappy Baptist clique. Teens all over America are taking virginity pledges, acting out abstinent role-plays (they mainly go "No! No, no, no!" - it's not a very imaginative movement), and scrawling True Love Waits on their exercise books, rather than Nikki 4 Brad 4 Ever!!!!

Behind all this virtuous fervour is the abstinence-only education movement - an ideology that can be traced to the Seventies, but didn't really gather any steam until the election of George Dubya Bush. Last week, he earmarked a further $33 million for abstinence-only education, despite the fact that there is no evidence for its efficacy. If it is passed by Congress, it will take the total budget for abstinence training up to $135 million and outstrip spending on regular sex education (you know, where the biology nerd puts a condom on a test tube) for the first time.

If this sounds anodyne, it isn't - abstinence-only education forbids teaching about contraception, thereby denying teens information they need. It is not unusual for such programmes to make outlandish claims, such as: "You can catch HIV from deep French kissing". Many of the slogans sound like a Fifties joke ("Girls, if you don't aim to please, don't dress to tease!").

Abstinence is the new abortion, splitting the country into polarised positions, with the conservatives banging the drum for individual responsibility ("Your body - your responsibility" is another favourite), and the liberal lobby saying, well, look, teenagers will have sex. Can't we just try to keep them safe while they do so?

At least with abortion, though, the battle raged principally about grown-up women who can argue for themselves. The victims of abstinence policy are teens whose vulnerability is an unavoidable consequence of their hormonebased interior monologue (which goes sex-sex-sex-sex, with a bit of Teenage Dirtbag as background music). It's just not fair to turn them into the cornerstone of a conservative family policy.

And this is where Britney comes in. The strongest possible argument for giving teens a broad, health-based sex education is this: no matter how incomparably pure a teen is, in mind, deed, midriff and upbringing, at some point he or she is going to have sex anyway. Because they'll, like, feel like it.

And nobody embodies the truth of that more than Spears. Although she clearly didn't mean to, she just might have come to the rescue of the next generation.

Alternatively, it could be that the Blairite attack on anti-globalisation protesters - that they lack logical rigour; that they attack the system yet offer nothing to put in its place; that they behave unintelligently - has finally stuck, and support for the movement has diminished.

But say what you like, you won't find people who look like a cross between Britney and a woodland fairy on a Countryside Alliance march, nor do members of the Trade Union movement take their tops off (OK, so one youngster had scrawled "human" across her chest in defiance of a political system that treats her as a statistic - but those were still very real breasts she had on show). Not even the poll-tax marches could have matched May Day for sheer subversive chic - and if attendance hasn't gone up again next year, I'll be extremely surprised. They might not have found a viable alternative to global capitalism, but they've definitely got a sense of strategy and forward planning.

Now, this is a revelation. All along, we've been led to believe that Di was seen as some crazy hell-beast, when, in fact, she sounds more like a cross between a cryptic crossword and a freak summer shower.

What is it with the Royal Family and their mealymouthed feuds? I mean, no one's asking for expletives, but they could at least familiarise themselves with some terms of abuse - "psycho", "bitch" and "complete nightmare". Understatement is so 20th century.