ly should be seen as accessible rather than remote. Yet Gauguin's desire to transgress racial boundaries in his attempts to depict the other most accurately were not always this successful or pure in their intent. In Loss of Virginity (1891) Gauguin chooses to portray a nearly alabaster white pubscent figure as his subject. Although her features bear the distinguishing traits of the Tahitian islanders, she is almost white-washed in an attempt to link virginity with the purity of the color white. In contrast to her eerily white body, a brown fox-like figure is draped over her left shoulder with his right paw firmly planted upon her bare right breast. In an odd way this small animal takes on a nearly snake-like function, almost phallic, for he seems entwined within her grasp. His nose is pointed toward her mouth almost as if penetration was about to occur. Here Gauguin steps away from his celebration of the dark-skinned Asian and seems to revert to a hierarchical European appraoch. For it is the fox who is seen as dark. It is the fox which seems to possess the sexual force. Here Gauguin's perhaps subconscious desire to show the male as the potent force causes him to show the woman within the convention of virginity as imbued with a stainable whiteness. The foregrounding of these two figures is subtly linked to the community by the miniscule figures painted as walking in almost single file fashion toward them from a great distance. Is it possible that in presenting these figures as emblematic of the community's watchful eye that Gauguin felt that this subject need only show the violation of virginity rather than also cut against racially encoded borders? Here Gauguin's meditaion seems to recall the observation that although sex is private, it can never quite escape its communal positioning. Paradoxically, it is private and social. Here the animal-figure helps to underscore the natural and compulsive aspect of a young w...