Chapter 6

LOOSE GIRLS IN CONTEXT

Risks and Losses

When we broke up, I slept with guy after guy to fill the emptiness that I felt. I started cutting and became addicted to drugs. I became known as either “That Girl That Cuts” or “That Slut.”

In this chapter, we look at the prevalence of depression and other mood disorders that coexist with promiscuous behavior. We also discuss some of the other ways girls harm themselves in conjunction with promiscuity, such as alcohol, drugs, cutting, and eating disorders. How do these behaviors interact with promiscuity, and in what ways are they part and parcel of the same thing? We then examine the question of whether loose-girl behavior can be considered an addiction. And finally, we devote a few words to homosexuality in relation to promiscuity.

THE LOOSE GIRL, MENTAL ILLNESS, AND RISKY BEHAVIORS

Seventeen-year-old Gigi has slept with twenty-two boys. She knows her number because she keeps a careful log of every one, noting what they looked like, what she found most attractive about them, and how they dumped her. Many, she said, just never contacted her again. All times, she was drunk. She hated how she felt each time, but she kept going back for more. Then she would lie in bed, numb, unable to move herself for hours. She also cut herself, which she believed helped with the numbness. Some days she didn’t leave her apartment and just moved between the bed, where she lay staring at the ceiling, and the bathroom, where she used a razor to cut.

She had a boyfriend once. It was a yearlong relationship that ended badly. The first four months or so were OK, but soon after, things started going sour. They had fights that always ended with her screaming for him to stay. A few times she held his legs, like a child might. She threw things at him sometimes, once narrowly missing his head with a television remote. When he left for good, she tried to kill herself by taking a handful of Advil PM pills, but she called her friend soon after, terrified she might really die. Her friend took her to the hospital, where they pumped her stomach. That was when a social worker came to see her; soon after she was diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder.

One might say that Gigi is a loose girl. She was promiscuous and always felt terrible afterward. She used boys to fill her emptiness. Gigi is indeed a loose girl for these reasons. But her case is more complicated than that. She has a personality disorder, which means that she needs to work on much more than her behavior around guys and sex to feel better about herself. Indeed, personality disorders are notoriously difficult to treat because they are defined by enduring and persistent abnormal behaviors and thoughts. People with personality-disorder diagnoses often deal with the conditions for life.

Janet was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as an adult, which is a mood disorder, considered more treatable than personality disorders. But when Janet was a teen, few people had even heard of such a thing. She was a heavy drinker and pot smoker from a young age. She knows now that those things were a way to self-medicate, to stop the fast-moving, obsessive thoughts that plagued her day and night. She had a lot of sex, too, usually with strangers, and she berated herself for it later. Sex drive can increase a great deal while manic. The problem comes later, when the person—usually a female—realizes she wants more than just sex in her life. Because men are trained to think of women who are easy to sleep with as not relationship material, the sexual behavior rarely turns into more than a night or two.

Add this rejection to the shame people often feel after manic episodes. For women, promiscuity connected to mental disorders is particularly hard. The shame that comes with having a mental health disorder in the first place multiplies the shame that many girls feel about having and wanting sex, and the ways in which they get punished for it through rejection or derogatory labels (“slut” and “whore,” for instance). This sort of shame is pretty prolific, of course, when it comes to young women and promiscuous behavior. A culture that finds sexual behavior among young women unconscionable will only further punish girls who have sex because of an unresolved pain.

Gigi’s and Janet’s loose-girl behavior does not stand on its own; for them both, it’s affected by all of the issues that arise from having a personality disorder and a mood disorder. For most loose girls, it’s the same: their promiscuity does not exist in a vacuum. Promiscuity is commonly associated with almost every disorder you can imagine—bulimia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, borderline personality disorder, and bipolar disorder, to name just a few. Promiscuity in teenagers is also typically associated with adolescent depression. Sexually active girls are more than three times more likely to be depressed than girls who are not sexually active. They are also three times more likely to commit suicide.¹

Behaviors can compound these conditions. In middle adolescence, we see the highest levels of coexisting behaviors with promiscuity, such as substance use, alcohol use, and arrests.² We know, too, that those adolescents engaged in more promiscuity also tend toward more risky sexual behaviors, such as not using condoms.³ Likewise, with other types of risky behavior, we are likely to find negative behaviors around sex.

Teens fourteen and older are twice as likely to have sex under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Older teens who drink alcohol are seven times more likely to have sexual intercourse and are twice as likely to have four or more partners. Drug-using older teens are five times as likely to have sex and three times as likely to have four or more partners.⁴ A Washington University School of Medicine study found that alcohol dependence and conduct disorder contribute to having a higher number of sex partners among older teens.⁵ And a relatively notorious study that came out of a U.K. university noted that women who drank were 40 percent likelier to have abortions—notorious because pro-choice parties were dismayed by the researchers’ choice to point to abortions rather than something less politically charged, such as sexual activity.⁶ The other criticism leveled at this and the previous study was the lack of attention to the stigmas applied to drunkenness among women and how that relates to abortions or sexual intercourse. There is a long history of the alcoholic woman as an acceptable target of sexual aggression, with more than one court proceeding leading to the “blame the victim” status given to women who drink and then become victims of rape.⁷

Eighteen-year-old Niesha told me she only has sex when she’s drunk or high. For her, all the activities together are what she’s after. She likes the whole experience, the sense that she can get pulled out of her life, which currently has very little direction. Her parents made her move out the day she turned eighteen, and so she lives with a couple of friends in a tiny apartment. They all work in chain restaurants during the day, and at night they party. They invite some of the guys they work with, who bring fifths of liquor, cocaine, and pharmaceuticals, and they party until four or five in the morning. Invariably, one of the guys winds up in Niesha’s bed. It’s been a rotating cycle; she sleeps with whichever one gets there first. The next day she is always late for work, with a pit in her stomach about what happened the night before.

When I talked to her, she asked me whether I thought she had a drug and alcohol problem. I told her it sounded as though she were using a number of substances and situations to try to soothe something inside.

Of course, adolescence is a time of risk taking. Most adolescents use these years to experiment with their own boundaries, with what they can handle, and with identity. Promiscuity is, in many ways, a perfectly normal part of that experimentation. But as with substance use, because sexual behavior is stigmatized, many teens turn it into self-destructive behavior. When we see other types of self-harming behaviors in teenagers, we tend to also see sex used in negative ways. This is important, because it describes the difference between normative sex—normal sexual exploration—and sex used to harm oneself.⁸

In almost every email I receive from readers, girls ask me why they can know their behavior hurts them, and yet can’t seem to stop. They know they are having sex for the wrong reasons. They know they need something from it that they won’t actually get, that they are setting themselves up to feel even worse. There are many answers to why loose girls have trouble stopping the behavior, but an important one to consider is that the behavior is an addiction.

ADDICTION AND THE LOOSE GIRL

I’ve gotten some flak for using the word addiction attached to the idea of loose-girl behavior. While promoting Loose Girl, I gave a number of readings from the book with follow-up question-and-answer periods. Inevitably, there was one person in the audience who was unhappy with the fact that I’d suggested that being a loose girl was an addiction. One man said, “I almost died from my addiction. Did you?” Of course, I could have said defensively that I could have almost died from HIV or some STD. I could have died when, as a young girl, I put myself in danger by going off with strange men. But this isn’t really the point. That man in the audience was angry because he had surely seen a number of issues showing up lately as addictions: sex addiction, love addiction, relationship addiction. And perhaps he felt that calling these issues addictions took away from his own struggles with chemical addictions.

But these issues are rightfully addiction, too—they are not chemical addictions, no, but process addictions, which is an addiction to an activity as opposed to an addiction to something that is ingested. Process addictions include spending money, gambling, Internet use, and—you guessed it—sex and love. A person with a process addiction is after psychological gratification and will indulge in their “drug” of choice enough that he or she build up a sort of dependency. The danger of process addictions occurs when the activity gets in the way of one’s daily life functioning or leads a person to harm his or her body, as with eating disorders. Sex and love addictions are example of pseudorelationship addictions, a type of process addiction, which are so integrated into our society, often considered the norm, that it is tricky to decipher what is truly an experience of addiction and what is simply a bad relationship.

Perhaps it helps to define addiction. Craig Nakken, author of The Addictive Personality, defines addiction as an attempt to control the uncontrollable cycles we all experience in our lives.⁹ We all experience loss and heartache. We all don’t get what we want plenty of times in our lives. But when a person uses a particular object, event, or another person to try to control how that feels, to produce a desired mood change, and when that person has to use this thing to feel better, that is addiction.

Those mood changes can also be thought of as intoxication. So when a sex addict experiences an uplifted mood while in a sex shop, that is a sex addict acting out her addiction. Or when a boy looks at a loose girl and smiles, and she winds up forgetting all the other plans she had for that evening so she can focus on making that boy hers, that is the loose girl acting out her addiction. The point that crosses this behavior over to addiction is the loose girl’s inability to attend to anything else in the face of feeding her desire. When her life has become unmanageable, to use the language of the twelve-step programs, when she has lost something that ultimately matters more to her, such as a long-term, loving relationship, a chance to have children, a career, she has entered into a phase we can frame as addiction. Or, perhaps put best, when she keeps doing it even though she really, really wants to stop, she has entered the world of addiction.

One way that loose girls are different from, say, girls who are just moving through a phase, or from girls who really want sex and are only troubled because it’s not accepted by society, is that loose girls know that what they are doing hurts them, but they can’t seem to stop. This is why I classify the behavior as addiction. This is where it is different from healthy sexual behavior. Loose girls don’t have sex for the right reasons, or at the least for reasons that will benefit them. They have sex to maintain the addiction, which is the same reason smokers keep smoking long after they want to quit or that pot smokers keep waking and baking long after they’ve decided their drug use isn’t working for them anymore.

Beth wrote to me after coming out of rehab for heroin use. She said her addictions to men and heroin are remarkably similar. If a man rejects her, she turns to heroin to get that good feeling back, and she has spent many months homeless and on the streets as a result. If she is off heroin, she man hunts to get the feeling back again. The pain she feels, she said, is so deep and awful that she cannot stay away from one or the other. She had two years of sobriety from both, after which she felt like she’d really done important work to move on.

She met a man she thought was different. But it turned out he was just like the others in her pattern. He was unavailable, unable to give her what she needed. He treated her like he cared for her, slept with her willingly, but said he wasn’t interested in more than friendship. So she wound up on the streets again for seven months. She slept with five random guys, feeling deep pain about the guy who sent her on a bender. She wants so badly to break free, to stop turning to things that hurt to try to get away from hurt. She recognizes the irony. She sees how irrational her behavior is. She knows, too, that she should never talk to that guy again, erase his number, stop answering his texts, but she can’t. She feels trapped in the cycles she’s built for herself because her only other option is terrible despair.

The object of a person’s addiction—the heroin, the drink, the boy, the porn—is always a stand-in for a real relationship. It becomes, in fact, an addict’s primary relationship, meaning that the addict finds it much more difficult to have successful romantic relationships. The main point here is that, while those with pseudorelationship addictions desperately want some sort of real relationship, they actively avoid intimacy through their addictions. In general, too, like any other addicts, they head further into their addictions because of the shame and pain their addictions cause them. Every time they prove to themselves that they can’t have love, they act out further, digging themselves even further into their inability to have love.

Also, it’s important to acknowledge what is beneath the addiction, which is always the kind of tremendous pain and despair we saw in Beth’s story. So many addictions are attempts to escape anguish. The more the addict escapes it by pursuing his addiction, the more tremendous and unmanageable that pain seems to be. With chemical addictions, that sense becomes reality because the addict literally changes the brain’s ability to feel pleasure. With process addictions, that sense of terror about one’s pain is largely a result of anxiety. When a person avoids the thing causing her anxiety, the avoidance becomes evidence that the thing is worthy of feeling anxiety about. It’s a sort of circular reasoning we do when it comes to anxiety. In reality, the thing causing the anxiety is rarely as horrible and terrifying as our anxiety makes us believe it is. So, while the pain behind addiction is very real, it is usually not as insurmountable as we feel it is. It might be initially, because it’s been unattended to for so long and because it’s a new thing to feel it, but over time we desensitize to its false strength.

It is very human, this desire to categorize and label and understand. We’ve seen a fascination with process addictions in our media over the last decade or so. David Duchovny was one of the first celebrities to admit his sex addiction after playing the role of a sex addict on the television show Californication. Russell Brand admits to being a sex addict. Tiger Woods went to a treatment center for sex addiction after revealing his long list of female sex partners while married. Dr. Drew Pinsky produced and starred in Celebrity Sex Rehab, which followed a number of celebrities through their rehab for sex addiction (and one for love addiction). Sex and love addicts are also prone to voyeurism and exhibitionism. Although one can imagine feeling tremendous shame while shooting up on-screen, if you’re a sex addict, you probably don’t mind acting sexy in front of a camera.

This fascination has at times made me hesitant to commit the loose-girl syndrome to an addiction model. It is important to determine what really is addiction and what is shame with respect to behavior that is simply culturally unacceptable. As with everything surrounding teenage girls and sex, the lines are blurry. Our society is so firmly opposed to any teenage sexual behavior, particularly from girls, that it would be easy to say that all sexual behavior is negative and should be treated as addiction. But teenage promiscuity isn’t always the result of severe pain or low self-esteem. Statistically, that is more often the case, but as with any statistics, it is important to acknowledge that there is a percentage of girls who develop low self-esteem because of how society judges and punishes them for wanting and having sex.

That said, addiction is often a very real part of loose-girl behavior. The feelings and bad behaviors have lots in common with other process addictions, such as sex and love addictions, but they are distinctly their own thing. We can define the loose-girl affliction as needing male attention to feel worthwhile. Sex addicts are obsessed with sex. They think about it constantly, need more and more sex to reach the same high, and are dysfunctional in their lives because of it. Love and relationship addicts are obsessed with getting love, with having relationships, and they spend a great deal of time ritualizing how to get them and how to keep them. If a relationship is threatened, they focus obsessively and act compulsively to keep the relationship or get it back, and they experience unbelievable despair when a relationship ends. All these addictions include being trapped in a cycle of pursuit and pain. All of them have a great deal of fantasy tied to them, and those fantasies get in the way of being able to have any kind of real intimacy with another person.

Pseudorelationship addictions are also about power and control. Kelly McDaniel, a love, sex, and relationship addict therapist, writes, “Women who become addicted to relationships and sex are escaping not only painful feelings, but the painful cultural inheritance that places them in an inferior position to men. Sexual power can turn the tables.”¹⁰ Young women learn to use sex to try to control their relationships, to try to make men like them. Sexual attention is easy to get when you’re a girl, so girls often use it to try to make things go where they want, to try to maintain the good feeling that comes from being wanted. One can see how easily that can slip toward sex again and again—how gratifying it feels to a girl to have a boy’s attention on her and no one else—even if the addiction is not to the sex. Taken further, one can see how the girl who winds up having sex again and again with random boys feels awful and used.

Perhaps some of this sounds familiar to you. Perhaps you, too, try to heal something inside with a relationship or with a man. Throughout the book, I’ve noted that it is almost impossible to be a girl in our culture and not feel that way. Everywhere we look, we’re told that everything we could ever want, every wish we want fulfilled, will come with a man’s love. If we follow this, then almost everyone has the potential to become a love addict. Or perhaps, too, you think about sex constantly, or you use sex to get something else. Since girls aren’t permitted in our culture to have sex without wanting love, and since girls want sex just as much as boys do, perhaps you might potentially fit the bill for sex addiction.

My story in Loose Girl has been called the story of a sex addict and love addict. When Marie Claire published an interview with me, they titled the piece “Confessions of a Sex Addict,” which was followed by that Jezebel blogger who wrote that I wasn’t a sex addict; I was just a typical girl. I absolutely agree. I wouldn’t define myself as a sex addict, and I would categorize myself as a typical girl. And if we follow the definition for sex and love addiction, almost every woman has behavior that has at times crossed into love addiction or sex addiction. It is how we try to have control in a world where girls are not allowed control over their sexual identities, their desires. It is how we have power—false as it is—in a world where girls aren’t given much power.

For this reason, focusing on the label “addict” doesn’t always make sense, nor does unpacking which addiction you have—especially since so many of them overlap. Most love addicts are also loose girls. Most sex addicts are also love addicts. Most loose girls are also relationship addicts. It’s not terribly useful to try to narrow down which ones you are. More useful is to examine the addict aspect of your condition, to see yourself as a person with an addictive personality, and to simply note how easily you keep those addictions alive (see the appendix for addiction criteria).

Of course, it might be useful to get diagnoses for some conditions, especially those for which there are empirically tested treatments. If we have well-researched solutions, by all means, let’s use them. But it is also my opinion, after counseling many girls with relationship issues, that most process addictions—including the loose-girl condition—should be treated not as disorders but as culturally cued issues, as should the addictions we developed as a result, which we must wrestle with as we aim for more fulfillment in our lives. We must work with them personally, and we must work with them culturally, meaning that we must work on ourselves, and we must do what we can to transform the culture that sets us all up to be addicts.

LOOSE GIRLS AND SEXUAL ABUSE

Sex abuse and molestation are commonly associated with promiscuity. The assumption is that when children’s formative experiences with sex are some sort of violation, they will be unable to have a normal relationship to sex in the future. This makes perfect sense until we address the question of what makes for a “normal” relationship to sex, particularly when we’re discussing teenage girls. Is the fact that they are having any type of sex somehow abnormal? I can’t help but notice, for instance, as I read through various studies about adolescent boys, that sexual activity is almost never listed as a “problem.”

In a meta-analysis (a study of studies) performed in 2001, researchers found a significant correlation between sexual promiscuity and childhood sexual abuse.¹¹ But when we look more closely at the data, we see again that promiscuity is undefined. What does this mean to the various authors of the studies? Does it mean simply sexual activity, which tells us nothing at all? Or does it mean sexual activity that makes the subjects feel like garbage? And do they feel like garbage because of the sexual abuse they suffered?

Many advocates for sexual abuse survivors have argued that this assumption that victims inevitably become promiscuous is offensive. Sexual abuse is a situation in which a person’s autonomy is taken away from him or her, and when we make assumptions about the effects of this, we take away autonomy once again. Heather Corinna, owner of the blog Scarleteen: Sex Ed for the Real World, notes that she can’t imagine that there is any group of people more conscious of having sex when they want it versus when they don’t than sex abuse survivors. Think about it. When you’ve had an experience that was clearly unwanted, then you are more prepared to recognize it when it approaches again. She additionally writes:

So, while statistics tell one story, beneath the statistics are the more personal stories, the ones that deserve our attention and that might be more accurate than studies. The point here is not that some of those who’ve experienced abuse don’t act out promiscuously; it’s that some do and some don’t, and we don’t always know what’s behind people’s reasons for having sex. Danger always lies in making quick assumptions about people’s sexual behavior, especially when those people are female.

HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE LOOSE GIRL

I realize it’s odd to segue into homosexuality here, since being gay is not a mental illness, a self-harming behavior, or a transgression. But in examining the various associations with promiscuity, we must take a look at homosexuality. For years, the gay community has been stereotyped as promiscuous. This association came about mainly in the 1980s, when HIV/AIDS swept through the political and social landscape. Gay men are the ones most associated with promiscuity, and then bisexuals and transgendered people. Many assume that gay women are quick to commit, thus downplaying promiscuity. But homosexual people are just as likely as heterosexuals to want monogamy, or to use sex to feel loved, or to feel shame about sexual desire. The statistics bear out this truth. According to a survey administered in San Francisco, 58 percent of gay men and 81 percent of lesbians are in long-term relationships.¹³ Another survey of 156 male couples showed that the average length of relationship was 8.9 years.

Miriam, nineteen years old, has slept with five men and more than fifty women. She grew up as one of eight kids, a middle child, and felt lost in a sea of children at home, no more visible than any of her siblings. Eventually, she grew up and left home. She moved in with a girlfriend who brought people home as “gifts” for them to share. At first, Miriam said, she couldn’t believe her luck, but over time she started feeling bad about herself. She needed every woman who came through the house to want her more than they wanted Miriam’s girlfriend, which also made her feel bad. Eventually, she started an affair with one of the women. She knew she was hurting her girlfriend, but she didn’t know how to stop herself. The other woman made her feel so special, like there was no one like her, which was of course the opposite of how she’d felt growing up. When I asked Miriam if she considered herself a loose girl, she said she absolutely did. Just because she liked girls, she said, didn’t change that she had those same feelings, that craving to have someone make her matter.

LOOSE GIRLS IN CONTEXT: A CONCLUSION

Promiscuity is bred among all sorts of mental illness, substance use, histories of sexual abuse, and sexual orientations. It is listed as a symptom of various problems teens may run into. And yet almost no studies have isolated it to learn about how to treat it. Many girls and women who have approached me for help have noted that they’ve had plenty of therapy in their lives, often for depression, anxiety, or adjustment disorders—a term therapists use when a person comes to therapy for basic life-adjustment issues, such as divorce, empty nest, job loss, etc. But even with all that counseling, they have felt like no one could ever help them or even adequately address their loose-girl issues.

Some of the problem is due to the relationship between the client and therapist. Sexual behavior tends to be underreported because of the sense that talking about sexuality is taboo, particularly across generational differences. If clients bring up transgressive sexual behaviors at all, counselors often assume that the best approach is to get their clients to stop the behavior. Even more likely is that the promiscuity as a separate issue doesn’t get attended to: we assume that if we treat the more general issue—substance abuse, depression—then the promiscuity will resolve itself as well. But unfortunately, girls who learn to act out sexually tend to keep doing so until they address the core issues surrounding those actions; usually those issues include a tremendous amount of shame and neediness. And that point—that shame and neediness sit at the heart of loose-girl behavior—is probably the most important one a counselor to a loose girl can know.

Next we look at how losing one’s virginity ties in to loose-girl behavior and how loose girls experience continual violations throughout their sexual lives.