I flirt with everything that moves. Exceptions include very creepy people and most animals. But if someone is into light innuendo and mojitos, our conversation will sooner or later enter the dimension of ‘flirty’. It’s inevitable. That’s my natural way of dealing with humanity, especially after a couple of cocktails, and as long as I manage to physically restrain myself in the presence of handsome tutors, all is well.

Except that sometimes it’s not. Occasionally I come across a person who takes my coquettish ways as a sign of genuine intent and the result is often very awkward. Of course, I’m not saying that I am the world’s most desirable woman and boys and girls fall at my feet whenever I flutter my eyelashes, but neither am I unappealing.

The problem I am trying to describe is unintentionally leading someone on, and then not knowing what to do about it. Like when you spend an entire crewdate pennying one pretty guy and laughing at his drunken stories because that’s just what you do, but then at Park End you realise that he’s buying you lots of drinks and all the girls are giggling about your conquest.

Or when you’re dancing with the man in a Batman costume at a bop because you fricking love Batman, and forget that sexy-dancing may send a message you don’t really want to send. Of course, no one should feel entitled to sex just because they bought someone a few vodkas. On the other hand, you can understand how it would make a guy feel like a girl’s into him. No one has ever been nasty or unpleasant to me when I rejected them after hours of apparently not-so-harmless flirting, but the awkwardness is tough.

I’m not going to lie and pretend that having someone’s (non-creepy!) attention isn’t a massive ego boost. Still, the oh-my-god-aren’t-I-the-greatest effect wears off pretty quickly, and you start feeling, as my grandmother would put it, like a tease. I’ve been used in this way before.

A sexy man, usually in a suit, usually from Christ Church, suddenly appears in whatever bar I’m in and after some heavy flirting and my raised expectations, he decides to leave my life forever. Maybe he doesn’t really fancy me. Maybe he just likes to tell women what he’d like to do to them later (it was relevant to the conversation).

Either way, I’ve boosted his ego, served my purpose, and now I’m dismissed. I was played, and didn’t even get to see him naked. Surely, after an experience like that, I should be more sensitive and flirt responsibly? Not constantly lead people on? Like any good resolution, I don’t expect it to last past the next crew date…

Somehow my self-conscious indulgences have spilled over from term to term without me being asked to leave and never return. For me personally, there is at least some amusement to being asked to get drunk on my own inadequacy on a weekly basis. But this week, it’s a bit different. I don’t want to talk about why I am incapable of going seven days without doing something fucking stupid.

Because though it’s funny, it sometimes gets a bit too much. This week I have an audition. Perhaps that sounds very mundane to you. It’s rather different for me. I find auditions rather similar to Oxford interviews; I walk in with a familiar sense of inadequacy. Within seconds I make my first assumption: they don’t like me.

My legs start shaking, my mouth is dry, and I feel the heat rise in my cheeks. Their faces give away nothing as the torture ensues. In my head a chant rises, lacing together kind words of failure. As the audition ends I run away as fast as casual walking can look, leaving the thrones of authority to laugh at my shrinking back.

This ‘torment’, means that auditions cease really to be a thing for me. I’m one of those bastards who doesn’t turn up. Sometimes I claim I’m ill, or I’ve forgotten a tute, and sometimes I don’t even email. Sometimes a friend forces me to go along. But beginning my fifth term at Oxford, I could count the number of auditions I have been to on one hand.

I got out of my worst audition, mentally blocking their email so I wouldn’t have to receive the official rejection. I squirmed at the thought that these two people, from whom I now flee in clubs and in Tesco, would forever define me as the worst actor their eyes had ever seen.

That is unless they were looking for someone who was exceptionally good at acting like they can’t act. At this point you lift your head from the page and say ‘man up’. Good timing.

Because this week something strange happened. I raise my hand to tick off the next, and I go along. And it feels awful. I feel the fear and once more I shrink.

But, just like my Oxford interview –somehow – it’s not rejection that gets handed to me. And I sit in the King’s Arms for my first meeting with the cast. And I think, maybe not everything has to go wrong all the time.

The first term at university is full of all sorts of new experiences – new friends, new places, new things to try. Whether or not you were straight out of school, the university lifestyle was, in all likelihood, a big change from what you had experienced before. And the word on many people’s lips? Sex. We are, unfortunately, all suckers for college gossip – who’s hooked up with who, who’s done what. And of course the big V-word. You’re a virgin? Oh, ok. You’re not? Well you’re probably up for anything then. But a girl’s virginal status does not indicate her sexual experience – having sex once doesn’t make you a connoisseur. Nor does it make you a ‘slut’. But all of a sudden you’re sexually active and supposed to be at it the whole time.

There’s so much uncertainty about virginity because we don’t actually know what this word is referring to. What defines virginity? Is it a physical or an emotional thing? Intimacy is a very personal matter – some things mean much more to some people than to others. Sex can be a casual act of carnal desire, or it can be a manifestation of emotional attachment to a significant other. The concept of virginity is given a significance that it doesn’t necessarily warrant. The first time is often not the most special, and certainly not the best – so why all the emphasis on it?

Moreover, there are different types of sex – what counts? Virginity is often defined as not having had penis into vagina intercourse, but some would argue that anal and oral count as sex. And does sex have to be heterosexual? People who would identify as LGBTQ wouldn’t necessarily have ‘p in v’ sex, therefore can one only lose their virginity by having heterosexual intercourse? Of course not. The whole concept of virginity is utterly heteronormative.

It has also been used by men as a way of subjugating women – traditionally, men wanted a virgin bride so that they knew no other man had ‘had’ their wife and that she was pure, chaste, and ‘unspoiled’ But the whole notion of a woman being a man’s possession, a sexual object of theirs, is disgustingly antiquated.

The highly publicised exhibition by Clayton Pettet, Art School Stole My Virginity, focused on this conservatism and the gender normative way in which society approaches losing your virginity. In an interview with Dazed and Confused magazine, Pettet commented that the value of a virgin has changed and one’s virginal status can dictate what people think of you. Moreover, the differentiation between a gay and a heterosexual virgin is a product of this concept of virginity. Further to this, for Pettet, “sex is sex and (virginity) is more of a mental state.”

Not only is the definition a source of ambiguity, but the social pressures regarding virginity are even more confusing. Things like social media, TV shows, magazines, are all sending mixed messages; one moment it’s all about losing it, the next it’s about trying to preserve it, even acquire it back with painful and unnecessary hymen replacement surgery.”

The winner of the 2014 Miss Bum Bum competition (yes, there is such a thing, and I can’t even begin to discuss the vulgarity of a competition that rates women’s backsides) stated that she was undergoing surgery to theoretically reclaim her virginity by having an artificial vaginal membrane created. She “wouldn’t feel good” about having nude photographs of herself if she “wasn’t exactly as (she) came into the world”. Miss Carvalho also reckoned being a virgin would give some respect to the Miss Bum Bum title.

Personally I really don’t agree with her reasoning as I think not being a virgin is not something to be ashamed of. You might recall Charlotte in Sex and the City delighting in the idea that if you abstained from sex your virginity could ‘grow’ back. Again, it is difficult to actually define what virginity is – the state of your hymen or of your sex life?

And the obsession with it seems more explicitly designed to bring women down. To be fair this is a general societal problem – boys, have you ever been catcalled in the street? Or been in a club when someone has wrapped themselves around you on the off chance you’ll find it endearing?

Virginity is a concept that is widely misunderstood and misused. It is unduly obsessed over; it has both positive and negative connotations; it is something and it’s not. Like with all these things – coy chasteness versus self-assured hussy, we’re putting this unachievably ‘perfect’ girl up on a pedestal. Can we take her down now?