CHESHIRE, UK – After years of being the lone contributor to her village’s sacrificial blood rituals due only to the fact that she is a virgin, 18-year-old Josephine Paine finally spoke out in an effort to draw attention to the unfairness of her plight.

“I just want to know why my blood is so much more special than anyone else’s!” she huffed, wrapping a bandage around a puncture wound on her arm after a bloodletting that very morning. “Because every time we all gather to place a curse on the town next door, it’s all ‘Bring forth the virgin,’ this, and ‘Josephine, only thy blood can summon the locusts’ that, but no one ever gives me a reason for it.”

Jonas Fletcher, village blacksmith and head of the local cult, was hesitant to talk about the inner workings of his followers’ rituals, but maintained that he was just following orders from above.

“It’s the way it has always been,” he explained, taking a break from carving Satan’s horns into the underside of his bed frame. “You can’t argue with tradition. Lucifer demands only the purest blood. I’d do it myself, but hey, I get too much smock, if you know what I mean.”

Despite threats of being branded as a witch by the village mayor, Josephine is refusing to back down in her quest for equality.

“I know for a fact that Thomas Brooker down the street is a virgin too, and no one goes running to him when it hasn’t rained in a month,” she fumed, after recovering from a short anemia-driven fainting spell. “I’m just saying, I feel like I’m being punished for not being married five years after most of my girlfriends have had their third child.”

At press time, the village elders were unsuccessfully attempting to explain why layfolk could give blood to the yearly harvest ritual if they really wanted to, but men who had recently lain with other men could not.