a virgin anymore. Fuck my brains out!'. That's not what I sang at all. 'Like a Virgin' was always absolutely ambiguous", she explained. The term "Madonna wannabe" was created to describe the thousands of girls who tried to emulate Madonna's style; both Adam Sexton and William McKeen noted that most of the singer's admirers were young girls raised with an image of old-fashioned female stereotypes, and saw in the artist a role model, someone who "injects middle-class ideas of femininity with examples of what feminism means to her [...] equal opportunity". Madonna became the "last word in attitude and fashion. The epitome of cool". Enio Chola concluded that with the song, "[Madonna] became a liberating mainstream sexual force"; author Debbi Voller added that "Like a Virgin" gave rise to "the icon Madonna". According to Chuck Arnold, "Like a Virgin" paved the way for female artists to "unapologetically explore the sexual wilderness", adding that "no one had to act like a virgin anymore" following its release. On the same vein, Thomas Harrison wrote that the "sexually charged" imagery of the song and its video, encouraged other female performers to embrace their own sexuality. For HuffPost, Caroline Sullivan pointed out that before Madonna, no other female singer had ever "shoehorned the subject virginity into a pop song so bluntly, or made it clear that no matter what you were - virgin or sexually experienced - it was absolutely fine". A similar opinion was shared by Jude Rogers from The Guardian, who claimed that until Madonna emerged, "the V-word" wasn't used by female singers "unless they were singing Christmas carols". Outs Nathan Smith gave a detailed analysis: From a contextual perspective, another appeal of 'Like A Virgin' was the way it reconstituted sex in mainstream music within discourses of religion and innocence. In a decade plagued by mass hysteria because of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the way sex (for both heterosexual and homosexual couples) was characterized by illness, viral exchanges, and the threat of 'contamination'. Madonna's song moved away from discussing the seemingly abject nature of sex, in an epoch so preoccupied by the dangers of sex and illness. 'Like A Virgin' told women that they could be in charge of their erotic agendas, could, should, and would enjoy their sexual escapades, and did not even have to be virgins to do so. (Maybe just act a little virginal?) Track listings and formats