just a teenage girl in her twenties: on lorde’s ‘virgin’
How a Pop Record Becomes a Feminist Text on the Body
The Teenage Girl as Prophet
On Pure Heroine, Lorde came across like the kind of teenage girl who saw the whole system for what it was—hyper-verbal, emotionally clairvoyant, working-class in affect, and just a little bit smug about knowing better. It was thrilling, that clarity. I first heard her at fifteen, earphones clamped tightly as the 204 bus wheezed past schoolgirls in sweat-dampened uniforms and men asleep under tarps, laundry strung like faded flags between old houses, the same gray-green anonymity of a town where everything important seemed to happen elsewhere. And here was ‘a young girl from Auckland’ who, seemingly, came into the world fully formed—all teeth and oracle pronouncements, scowling at disco balls and smelling of crushed velvet and wet eyeliner. She gave me, at fifteen, something like a theory of self-possession: that if you stared down the adult world hard enough, it might blink first.
But, for the past two records, Lorde sounds like someone who’s lost faith in her own story—still articulate, still self-aware, but circling around doubt rather than conclusions. On the opening track, she says as much: ‘I am ready to feel like I don’t have the answers.’ I suspect that’s why she calls this one Virgin: she is admitting, in so many words, her naïveté. It is a sort of enlightened regression into unknowing. A kind of retrospective purity, arrived at only after having inhabited the world too fully. She says she’s ‘born again’—like, as we all said, our virginities during the pandemic. There’s a line from Walden I often think about. Thoreau said, “Not till we are lost… do we begin to find ourselves.” And this is her, I think—the pure heroine, made featherweight and virginal again. Whatever that means.
A Grown Woman in a Baby Tee
There is a particular affect circulating online now—easily dismissed as meme or moodboard, but symptomatic of something deeper: women in their twenties who still speak, move, and feel like teenage girls. They live, to borrow a term from Derrida via hauntology, among the spectres of girlhood—unable to cross over, yet unable to go back.
Who is this twenty-something teenage girl?
She is a woman out of sync with time. She lives among the afterimages of girlhood. She treats nostalgia like a drug—chasing high school Decembers, the first time someone called her “intense” like it was a compliment, the summer she drank gin for breakfast and cried in the Whole Foods parking lot. She remembers the exact shade of sky when she first heard Video Games or Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, and the way the world felt. She journals in long, swan-necked sentences. She still believes the stars mean something. She sets votives to the year she first read The Perks of Being a Wallflower. She has not given up on metamorphosis, only revised it. Not caterpillar to butterfly—but girl to siren, girl to witch, girl to other. She wants gills, claws, sea-slick tails. She wants to belong to no taxonomy but her own. And the world, with its tedious pragmatism, does not know what to do with her.
The coordinates of “womanhood” once promised by feminist progress and pop-cultural representation have turned out to be largely aesthetic: the pink-blue architecture of self-care, empowerment slogans drained of historical memory. Growing up, as it’s now imagined, is something you perform, not something you undergo. Womanhood, as we’ve been given it, is often just a better lit version of girlhood’s grief. (‘It made me a woman,’ the 28 year old singer tells us on If She Could See Me Now, ‘Being hurt like that.’)
Lorde, at her most honest, seems to recognize this. But she can’t yet say it plainly. So she mythologizes instead. Circles. Haunts.
On GRWM, Lorde flips the internet’s most banal acronym—“get ready with me”—into something far thornier: “grown woman.” It’s a bait-and-switch that mirrors the song itself. It starts in the familiar language of online femininity—ritual, performance, product—but quickly veers into something more jagged and self-revealing. It’s a kind of inverted influencer script, where the face isn’t the point so much as what’s leaking through it: “mama’s trauma,” the blur of early drinking, the disorienting feedback loop of becoming visible too soon. The phrase “a grown woman in a baby tee” is the emotional fulcrum of the song. The image collapses adolescence and adulthood into one uneasy aesthetic: hyperfeminine, infantilized, sexy, tired. It’s funny and devastating. The grown woman knows better. The baby tee still fits1.
Here’s My Cervix
Virgin starts, as all holy texts must, with a girl on the brink of menstruation and madness. Her briefest album, it plays like a cigarette burned too quickly—thirty-four minutes and it’s gone, leaving behind the faintest scent of something anxious and intimate. Lorde has always written in cities, through cities, but this one is different. This is New York in July. Radiator heat, busted intercoms, a vapor-thin trace of someone else’s Chinese takeout coming through the vent.
The language is dry, clipped. The voice she uses is plain, but not dull—it’s the language of someone who’s run out of symbols and is just pointing now. She’s not being cryptic. She’s being literal. It’s her body on the corner of Bowery and nowhere, holding the bag, saying: Look. It hurts here. She’s not using metaphor to elevate the city; she’s using its literal textures—duct tape, hot pavement, humidity that won’t let go of your skin. It is, then, a kind of urban vernacular, but not the one taught by the city’s official culture. Rather, it is the language of internal exile, of women who are trying to remember their own names while sweating through their shirts.
If Melodrama was theatrical, Virgin is anatomical. Its stage is a gynecologist’s office, a broken mirror, the back of a taxi after sex. There’s the cover, for instance. An X-ray of her pelvis, copper IUD stark against the grayscale. It’s not shocking so much as it is clinical—like a medical file accidentally mailed to a poet. The image says: You wanted intimacy? Here’s my cervix2. The IUD is cold, sharp, unglamorous. It is the opposite of the Madonna. It is fertility rendered mechanical, stripped of mystique. In encasing it, Lorde turns it into a relic of post-sexuality: a uterus, fossilized.
The body is impossible to pin down. It’s both the problem and the answer. It’s a thing we live in, and also the thing that limits how we live. Elizabeth Grosz called the body a “text, a map, a landscape”—which is another way of saying: it means everything, and it’s always changing. The body in Virgin is not eroticized in the traditional pop sense—it’s indexed. “Wide hips, tooth chipped, skin scarred” isn’t seductive, it’s forensic. There’s an inventory quality to it, as this article in i-D magazine points out.
The self, throughout Virgin, is mapped through its marks: the bruises of ambition, the pelvic pain of going off birth control, the taped-down chest in “Man of the Year,” the faint hormonal afterglow of Clearblue. It invites you to sit inside the body’s weird aftermath, but there is no purified self at the end. This album doesn’t depict trauma, healing, or rebirth—it presents the ongoingness of bodily life as both mundane and extreme.
Track by Track: The Anatomy of Virgin
From the opening track Hammer, the virgin is not the soft-focus figure of Renaissance oil paintings. She’s ovulating in the heat of the city, wielding a hammer with Old Testament aggression. She’s having aura pictures taken, getting her ears pierced on Canal Street, leaning into mess, not meaning. The line “Some days, I’m a woman, some days, I’m a man” treats gender like gum chewed past its flavor.
On Man of the Year, gender nonconformity here is not flamboyant; it is low-lit, exhausted, beautifully unremarkable. Think Stone Butch Blues, but whispered. Andrea Long Chu has said that gender is an expression of someone else’s sexuality. That much of what we casually accept as “natural” self-expression—glossed lips, long hair, smooth underarms—is often just the aesthetic echo of what’s historically been designed to arouse someone else. And so, what happens when you’re no longer the girl—an aesthetic variation of femininity, among many—that someone fell in love with? (‘Relationships already had to withstand so many challenges, now you’re telling me gender’s one of them?’) Lorde’s partner ‘can’t believe’ she’s become ‘someone else’. She knows she’s becoming more like myself, which is terrifying, because it’s also becoming less like the person who was easy to love. Yet there’s apprehension creeping in here, almost a paralysing dread of ending up loveless. Femininity is not abandoned without cost—not in a society where gender is the opium of the masses. ‘Who’s gonna love me like this?’ she asks, and it is one of the most obscenely true moments on Virgin. No one’s asked that in a pop song since, well, ever. There’s radical assertion, personal misgiving and queer sophistication all in the same audacious tremble of breath. It reminds me, also, of a meme I saw on Twitter:
trying not to tell my friend the problem in their relationship is that their bf literally doesn’t view them as non-binary.
‘Current Affairs’ is relatable. Who hasn’t cried about a boy and when asked why you’re crying, gestured vaguely, and said: it’s not just him, it’s, like…everything. Lorde references rainforest collapse and being spat on in the same held breath, which—well, that’s dating in 2025. The news cycle, the sexual memory, the mother’s voice, the leaked sex tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s honeymoon on a boat—they’re all playing at once, layered, impossible to mute. That last bit gave pause to a lot of folks—and for good reason: Lorde seemingly romanticised the sex tape (leaked without Anderson’s consent, naturally giving her a lot of trauma) in an interview. With more context, however, it seems that Lorde seems to have been taken by the honest-to-goodness intimacy she glimpsed between Anderson and Lee which she believes was ruined by the eventual leak (‘On the boat, it was pure and true/Then the film came out’). It’s a messy metaphor. And it almost works. It captures that blurry zone where personal sexuality melts into the collective internet gaze, where love and porn and public record are all the same damn thing.
Broken Glass starts polemically; the mystique, Lorde tells us, is dead. The mystique of juice-cleansed, naturally radiant, effortlessly thin woman who exists purely on “water and Pilates” and God’s affection. Lorde shatters that glass with the force of someone who has seen things—specifically, someone who’s counted 800 calories for dinner and cried because it was 803. How does the girl on the cover of Vogue stay so thin? Well, Lorde tells us, she: she counts, she purges, she runs until her hip bones ache, and then she cries herself to sleep in a serotonin-deficient prayer pose. The anorexic, in this case, is not a victim of culture but its most faithful executor. I’m glad, particularly, about the lyric: rot my teeth about that (which references a bulimic’s teeth eroded by stomach acid through routine purging). I feel like bulimia specifically is neglected everywhere and there’s a reason for that. Anorexia is a disciplined illness, ascetic and light and holy, full of aesthetic deprivation. (‘You say she’s anorexic,’ Charlie XCX sings on Mean Girls, ‘And you heard she likes when people say it.’) But the bulimic? She binges, she barfs, she bleeds at the gumline. She is not lithe and tragic—she is cracked and foaming and unseemly. That’s why no one writes about her. She isn’t a clean death. It’s nice, then, to see Lorde say it all so plainly—even the ugly bits, especially the ugly bits.
Yet this isn’t the only form of self-harm on the album. On Shapeshifter, Lorde uses sex. She sleeps around, gives ‘nothing personal’ so she is ‘not affected’. If I am fine without it, Lorde reasons in an antique skirt, why can’t I stop. She spirals into a hall of mirrors, cycling through roles—ice, flame, prize, pedestal, wreck. She catalogs lovers with the same matter-of-factness as Tracey Emin’s infamous tent, “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With.” The song, however, digs at a deeper question; it is, in larger essence, a song about the death of eros. Women today are stuck in a failed sexual utopia. They were told: Casual Sex is Empowerment!3 Sex in quantity, sex with strangers, sex like a spreadsheet, sex in the name of choice. But no one mentioned the comedown. Because nothing, absolutely nothing, is inherently empowering—not sex, not celibacy.
Favourite Daughter is for those who suffer from—as oomfs might say, as I’m sure someone online has already said—the Eldest Daughter Syndrome (even though Lorde herself isn’t one). More universally, it’s a song about the most thankless job on the planet: being a daughter. Lorde is famously her ‘mother’s child’ (as, I hope, we all are). But here, she inherits not just her mother’s curious notion of loving someone until they call the cops, but also her genealogy beset with unresolved grief. The ache is ancestral. Of course, it is. In Clearblue, Lorde says there’s ‘broken blood’ in her body ‘passed through my mother through her mother to me’. On this song, it’s her dead uncle’s face, the one who “died of a broken heart.” It’s everywhere: the mother’s trauma in GRWM, the cry of Current Affairs—“Mama, I’m so scared.” It’s not subtle. This whole album spirals around the mother as myth, as memory, as wound. Jung would say we’re toggling between archetypes—the Virgin, autonomous and self-contained; the Mother, giving until there’s nothing left. But what Lorde gets, in the way only someone raised by a poet can, is that you’re usually both at once. The Virgin can cradle. The Mother can disappear.
Clearblue is the most poetically destabilized aftermath I’ve heard this year: ovulation as open mic night. In the opening verse, Lorde sings: I’m scared to let you see into the whole machine. It’s what you say to a man when you’re sitting on the toilet holding your breath and your future, while he’s out there sending laughing emojis in the group chat. And you don’t want to bother him. Because if you do end up with two blue lines and a prayer, you’ll have to stage your panic like a romcom plot twist—slide the test under his steak dinner, say surprise, whisper “don’t freak out” in lowercase italics. No one wants to give the poor man the fright of his life by suggesting actions might have consequences. But, also, let’s not take all the agency away from Lorde. She is so horny on this track it’s practically leaking out of the waveform. Not romantic horny, not cute horny—cellular horny, Darwinian horny, the-ocean-is-calling-my-clitoris horny. The line—“But deep in my matter, you’re changing my patterns”—is not so much a lyric as it is a sex spell written in wet ash and pinned to the lining of the uterus. Well. That’s not flirtation; that’s evolutionary biology.
Let me call it plainly. Virgin is:
a haunted, erotic, sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrifying, deeply embodied album about gender (in its destabilized, expanding, and duct-taped forms),
eros (in its chaotic, self-destructive, spiritually rabid manifestations),
and body horror (in the sense of the body as something that leaks, bleeds, ovulates, swells, betrays, transforms).
(also,
pretend it's 2009 and we're all still on tumblr and validation is a form of currency.)
The virgin is a woman suspended in symbolic tension—untouched, and thus unspoken-for, but also silenced, made spectral through idealization. It’s a role that flatters as much as it flattens: the virgin is the fantasy before contamination, the clean slate that others project their longing onto, the mythic figure who is everything because she is still nothing.
Yet on the album’s final chrous, Lorde sings: ‘I don’t belong to anyone’. She is asking what it means to be unclaimed again—to not have to perform maturity, coherence, empowerment. The virgin draws a line, not because she’s fragile, but because she knows the cost of being endlessly accessible. And in that way, she becomes something larger than the smallness of how we talk about virginity. Not a waiting room, but a room of her own.
The virgin here is not an empty vessel, but a site of transformation—open, aching, radically sovereign. She is a phoenix made of testosterone and rotten teeth and duct tape.
Hard Feelings, Told Softly
Melodrama is perhaps still Lorde’s pure gold baby. I’ve always relied on it in times of my heartbreak. I played it seventeen, when it first came out, not yet having tasted either a vodka cranberry or heartache. I played it again as I finally tasted both, watching my reflection come of age in stained mirrors and nightclub glass. My favourite part of the album is not the swivel-eyed, almost pirouetting chorus of Supercut, nor the banshee’s cry of Writer in the Dark. It happens at the beginning of Hard Feelings/Loveless, when she says, nearer to breath than music: go back and tell it. That’s it. That’s the spell. The line hangs, faint and silvery, like breath on glass. It’s simple. It’s brutal. And it’s true. Go back. Tell it.
Because that’s what we do when someone leaves and takes the language with them. We go back. We try to translate what’s left. The flat, sugary burn of cheap rum on a boy’s breath. The monsoon-shined pavement spitting back the scent of amaltas and dust. The receipt for three mangoes and one razorblade. Whatever the details are, however silly, we re-possess them by telling in the hope that things might eventually find their second wind, somewhere between Sunday and Monday.
And Lorde has always understood this. She lives, as Didion put it, ‘by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images’. Except this time, she’s singing about ovulation and duct tape and gym sweat and binding her chest with the same tone she once used for strobe lights and spilled drinks. But the megaphone is still to her chest, making her innermost rhythms danceably palpable. If through all her disenchantment, there’s one plainspoken bit of gospel that’s remained still true—as say her parting words on Virgin—it is this: tell it to ‘em.
And if you can’t tell it to them, tell it to the page. Tell it to the person you were when it happened. Tell it to the ceiling fan, the back of your hand, the wet patch on the pillow. Say it to the moon if you have to4. But say it. Go back. Tell it.
Which is not to suggest that maturity is incompatible with crop tops—but rather that aesthetic adolescence has become the medium through which many women now process adult experiences. This is both a commercial and psychological phenomenon.
Alexa, play “Crucify” by Tori Amos.
Or was marketed as such, for a time. The reality—as with most slogans—has always been more ambivalent. What feels like agency in theory often turns out to be repetition in practice.
If this veers toward the sentimental, it’s only because the act of narrating one’s pain remains, despite everything, a radical one.
“She remembers the exact shade of sky when she first heard Video Games or Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, and the way the world felt. She journals in long, swan-necked sentences. She still believes the stars mean something.” i am precisely the right age (and in precisely the right phase of my cycle) for this to hit me like a speeding car. i’m going to be aching about this whole piece for a long time. thank you. ❣️
what a love letter to an album i love this