Chapter 11

WAVES

Protecting against Loose-Girl Behavior

Jo is a single mother and former loose girl who has been doing her best to work though her own issues with male attention as she raises her teenage daughter. “I’m so worried,” she told me, “that I won’t be able to help her. I try to behave in ways that will show her a woman can make good choices. But sometimes it feels like a failed effort.” When I asked her what she meant she spoke about all the magazines, the television shows, her daughter’s friends, and the boys. “I feel helpless in a world that has already determined what will happen to my daughter. She’ll think everything she needs comes from some guy, and she’ll never believe in herself enough to be everything I know she can be.” After a few moments, she added, “I don’t mean that. I sound so pessimistic.”

Beyond the loose girl, beyond the shame, the behavior, the question of right or wrong, beyond all the dirty little secrets, is the culture that created this dilemma for girls. In so many ways, Jo is right. Her daughter doesn’t have a fighting chance against the cultural wave explored in chapter 1.

Parents ask me often, “How can I protect my girls?” Colleagues in psychology and education wonder, “Is it even possible to prevent what happens to girls regarding sex?” This chapter explores this idea of prevention, how we can work to overhaul the culture to do so.

When I asked Jo what she is doing, she said she’s doing the opposite of what her parents did. Her parents told Jo not to have sex. That was it. Just don’t do it. Jo recognizes that telling her daughter to stay away from boys, or to not have sex, would be useless. She said, “I don’t want to do that to her. She should have sex! Oh God, I’m sure parents all over the world would judge me for that one. I think she should be able to have sex. I just don’t want it to become her whole life, like it did for me.”

For decades, the push has been along the same lines as what Jo’s parents told her. And the results have been consistent: nothing has changed. The large majority of those who pledge abstinence at thirteen lose their virginities by sixteen and are just as likely to engage in oral and anal sex as those who didn’t pledge, according to a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.¹ With limited guidance and plenty of shame about contraception, they wind up with STDs and pregnancies. They get married too young, to the wrong person, because they just want to have sex already and not be judged as bad. Many become what we can now define as loose girls, young women who use sex and male attention to fill emptiness and need, who wind up disappointed and ashamed, unsure how to change their behavior, and terribly judged.

Jocelyn M. Elders, in her foreword to Judith Levine’s book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, wrote:

We are caught in an odd rigidity on this issue, one that is burdened with false, fear-inducing dangers about what it is to be a girl, when meanwhile the biggest danger of being a girl is how impossible it is to wade through the fear-inducing propaganda to find the truth.

When the child psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term adolescence, sexuality came to be seen as more of a test than a natural progression. It became a danger to traverse, a danger that adolescents must not allow to take over their lives to avoid future problems, such as impulsivity. Like Freud’s theories about sexual stages, this was simply another theory, certainly not evidenced by research. This isn’t to say Hall’s notion of adolescence hasn’t been immensely useful. Obviously, it has. My comment is only to point out that our panic about girls having sex is based on a man-made philosophy, not empirically supported research, and is therefore worthy of questioning.

It is important to note these odd biases, because they are so hugely in the way of us making any headway on the very real cultural issues attached to girls and sexuality. We must begin to change our minds about how to transform the culture when it comes to teen girls and sex.

Jacquie went to school in the Midwest, among cornfields and wheat. Her experience of sex education involved anatomical drawings of the reproductive sex organs (but not the clitoris, she told me when I asked) and a whole lot of information about how to protect herself from boys. The boys were in another classroom, getting their own education. When I asked what the boys learned about, she said that she didn’t know but suspected they weren’t being taught to protect themselves from girls. She’s right. Most sex education for boys is limited to anatomy, birth-control options, and wet dreams.

While she was being taught how to say no, she regularly wondered how to say yes. Was that even possible for a girl? She was itching to experiment. For one, she was horny, like any healthy adolescent girl. For another, she was curious. Incidentally, she told me, she gained nothing from her sex-ed curriculum and wound up pregnant at sixteen. She had an abortion, and her born-again Christian mother kicked her out of the house. She has been unable to have a healthy relationship with almost anyone since. She told me, “Sometimes I think I’m not cut out to love and be loved. Is that possible, that some people are just too fucked up to get loved?”

Jacquie is a strong—and awfully sad—example of how sex education fails girls. It sets up the same lie girls are sold everywhere: boys are horny; you are not. Boys get what they want; you get to be there for their purposes. So be careful. And always the underlying message is there for girls: don’t act on your sexual urges or you will be immoral and unworthy. In essence, we set our kids up for failure when it comes to sex.

Clearly, the just-say-no approach doesn’t work. When we continue to take this approach, we bang our heads against the wall of increasing teen pregnancy, STDs, and exceeding confusion and desperation about what sex means. Abstinence education fails girls. The statistics bear this fact out. There is no difference statistically between those who pledge abstinence and those who don’t. In the 1990s, there was a slight drop in teen pregnancies and STDs, which, not surprisingly, abstinence advocates jumped all over as evidence that abstinence works. But both the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined through closer research that the drop was due to increased contraceptive use and increased engagement in sex other than vaginal intercourse.³ Unprotected vaginal intercourse had declined, not intercourse and sex itself.

Judith Levine writes, “Abstinence education is not practical. It is ideological.”⁴ And still, we cling to it. This is likely because conservatives see teenagers having any sexual relations as the problem. But as we’ve explored in this book, the harm is not in the sex but in the circumstances in which sex can happen, such as girls having sex solely because they want to feel cared for, or girls having sex without protection because they want to please the boy more than they want to protect themselves.

Good sex—when a girl wants to have the sex, both physically and emotionally, and when she does what she needs to protect herself physically—cannot be a bad thing, and certainly not any worse than it is for a boy. We all know that teen boys and girls are sexually desirous creatures. They want sex! And they will have it. Holding fast to the idea that sex is bad for teens has no useful purpose except to harm teenagers by shaming them—particularly girls—when they do have sex.

In 2000, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy took a poll and found that almost three-quarters of girls who had had sex regretted it, where about half the boys did.⁵ It shouldn’t surprise us to learn that a spokesperson for the campaign said that the results showed that teens were taking a more cautious attitude toward sex. But if we look at the numbers through a different lens, we can see that the statistics translate more into shame than caution—and of course girls carry the larger burden of that shame. A handful of young women approached me after reading Loose Girl to say that they related because they had premarital sex and wished they hadn’t, evidence that in too many girls’ minds, any sex before marriage makes them disgraceful. I’ve asked a few of those girls why they thought that made them disgraceful, and they all answered that they shouldn’t even have wanted to have had sex.

Missing from sex-education curricula is really anything that might help a teenager know what to do with her sexual feelings. Sure, she can identify the ovaries on the diagram, but she knows nothing about her desire, or a boy’s desire, or how to protect herself physically and emotionally during sexual acts.

One listen to Loveline, the late-night call-in radio show with Dr. Drew Pinsky, reveals the intense lack of sexual self-knowledge among teens. And most of it is attached to shame. By example, three times in two weeks various girls called in to find out whether there was something wrong with them because their vaginas got very wet when they were excited. Dr. Drew had to reassure all of them that each person has different amounts of secretion when sexually aroused. Go to any of the teen sex Q&A websites and you’ll see questions about whether anal sex can get you pregnant or about whether something is wrong when a girl orgasms just thinking about a sexual fantasy.

Included here are ideas for sex education that might truly help girls (and boys!) understand what sex is about, what is happening in their bodies, and how to make decisions about both.

TRUE SEX EDUCATION

1. Talk about Desire

How would you answer this question from your daughter: “How will I know when I’m ready to have sex?” The answer is, of course, individual to each girl, but very few mothers, educators, and therapists think to include some attention to a girl’s sexual desire as part of their answer. The bottom line about girls and healthy sexuality is that this must be part of how we talk to girls about sex. Usually, we hand down to them the same useless, often harmful myths. We tell them that sex will get in the way of their happiness and growth. We tell them they must be in love. We tell them that good sex happens only when you are in love. None of those aphorisms is true—not one. Sex and sexual feelings are essential to our happiness. Sex does not make sense only when you are in love. And sex with someone you aren’t in love with can be just as good as sex with someone you do love. Add desire—the acknowledgment that girls have sexual desire—into the answer, and everything can change. Everything becomes more—true.

For one, we can encourage girls to learn to trust their bodies and what their bodies tell them. We can also tell them that just because they want it sexually doesn’t mean it will be worth it or any good. We can tell them that sex with someone who wants you to enjoy yourself is a hundred times better than sex with someone who doesn’t care about your experience, and sex with someone you love and who cares about your experience might be even better.

2. Talk about Outercourse

Another assumption we make as a culture is that to fulfill sexual feelings, people must have intercourse. This is absolutely untrue. Sex therapists use the term outercourse to describe the numerous acts that create sensual and sexual pleasure but do not include penetration. Think hand jobs. Think second and third base. Think phone sex. For teens who are experiencing that hormone rush but aren’t ready to expose themselves to possible pregnancies and STDs, outercourse is perfect.

More than that, outercourse allows a teenager to explore and test intimacy, which is essential for building the self-confidence girls need to be both powerful and self-protected in the world of relationships. One sex therapist notes that communication is enhanced during outercourse. Because the sexual sensations can be less intense, there is more opportunity for closeness, for talking, and for full consent from both parties. And, let’s face it, the likelihood of a girl having an orgasm via outercourse is much better than during intercourse. Boys benefit too. Boys receive plenty of cultural pressure to have as much sex as they can, even when they aren’t ready to do so emotionally, so outercourse is a more gentle introduction into the world of sexual feelings and intimacy. In case I need to clarify, I believe it makes sense to include outercourse in sex education.

3. Talk about Masturbation

It also makes sense to include masturbation in a sex-education curriculum as a healthy, satisfying way to fulfill sexual desire, especially since a greater proportion of girls between fourteen and seventeen years old report solo masturbation than any other sexual activity. Adolescents have sexual desire. More so, they are in the process of learning about their sexual desire. What better way for adolescents to learn than to explore on their own? Likewise, what better way to help them explore their sexual desire without putting themselves at risk for STDs, pregnancy, and all the emotional ramifications of sex with other people? I’m not the surgeon general and won’t get asked to resign for saying so. But conservatives would be outraged. Why? Because they are stuck in the old, rigid ways of thinking about teenagers—particularly teenage girls—and of believing that any teenage sex is inexplicably, unfoundedly immoral. They are determined to hold on to their beloved abstinence education, which has done not one thing for the state of sexual behavior in our culture, except encourage extremely detrimental shame.

4. Talk about Emotions

In our cultural landscape, sex and sexual feelings are too often removed from emotions, and yet for most people, they are intricately entwined. When we don’t talk about the ways teenagers might feel about having sex or sexual activity, we ignore an essential part of sex education, one that can make all the difference when kids decide to engage in those activities. They need to examine their expectations about sexual activity—what they hope for when they engage in this way. Such a discussion also provides space for teens to discuss how peers and their parents receive their behaviors and whether they are prepared for the repercussions of various sexual acts.

FIGHTING THE WAVES

We live in a culture in which the determinations of who a girl must be are like tidal waves crashing, one after another. Try to recover from one, thinness, and another wave, breast size, comes quickly after to knock you down once more. When parents ask me how to fight the waves, I tell them they can’t. But they can do a few things to move the odds a little more in their daughters’ favor.

If girls can believe that their bodies and minds exist for something other than boys’ gazes and preoccupation, they might have a chance. Maybe they will become interested in sports, art, theater, history, math, writing, singing, guitar—anything, really, other than boys.

A girl’s sexual self is tightly tied to a girl’s body image. We know, for instance, that overweight girls are more likely to be sexually active than those who are not overweight.⁶ Most marketing for teen girls focuses on what they look like and whether boys will like them. They must be thin, Caucasian or with Caucasian features, and flawless. Nothing else will do. Girls’ bodies are so commoditized that it is extremely difficult for a girl to understand her body as fine just the way it is. When girls look in the mirror, it is not really to see themselves but to assess themselves, and inevitably to decide that what they see is not good enough. Girls are continual victims of themselves. For being so self-conscious, their lack of awareness about this is disturbing.

Lauren Greenfield captures this in her collection of photographs titled Girl Culture.⁷ In most every photo a girl is on stage in some way. She is being looked at—not seen, but assessed, evaluated. Many of the photos include mirrors inside which the girls examine themselves. As Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of The Body Project, says in the introduction of Greenfield’s collection, “Ultimately, Greenfield’s work makes the ironic point that in spite of how much American women and girls look at themselves, we are not a self-reflective society.”

Part of how we help girls battle the waves and own their identities is by having them do something other than sitting in front of the mirror, by encouraging them to be subjects instead of objects. Sports are an excellent way to encourage a girl to use her body in such a way that she understands it has more purpose in the world than just to be looked at. Girls in sports often focus on making their bodies strong rather than thin, because they can see that strength has more purpose for their goals—to succeed as an athlete—than being skinny. On teams they work together, as a unified group, for a goal that doesn’t involve boys. Of course, some girl-heavy sports, such as cheerleading, can be more about what a girl looks like than how she feels. There is nothing wrong, of course, with wanting to look good, and parents should not try to encourage their daughters away from an interest in their looks or clothes. The key is to support their sense of selves, whatever that may be.

Sports work well to protect a girl’s body image, but really, anything that can keep a girl’s attention that isn’t a boy, anything that can build a sense of self-efficacy, of confidence, is prohibitive of a girl focusing every thought on boys. This might include the arts, or music, or academics. When a girl has something that makes her feel worthwhile in the world—something other than a boy’s attention—she has the opportunity to defy the cultural pressure to think only about how to make herself attractive to boys.

This is what happened to me. My interest in writing grew, I got some encouragement, and I came to have a sense of myself as a writer, not just a potential girlfriend.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Remember the strength of those waves. They are powerful, withstanding. Feminism and human rights work have barely touched them. The waves have even grown bigger. They’ve taken on more ways—the Internet, the cell phone—to pound girls with their messages. It is so very necessary to be continually aware of that tidal-wave culture.

One of the activities I like to do with girls is to have them find at least five images in their daily lives that give them a message about their sexual identities. The girls come back to me with many more than five images. They have magazines and phrases scribbled down from bathroom stalls. They have television shows and older men checking them out from their cars. They’ve got billboards and bus boards and posters. One had porn magazines she found in her brother’s closet. They come back angry. Some come back nonplussed, perhaps desensitized to our hypersexualized culture. Then we discuss what the messages mean and who the girls want to be in the world. They tell me their truths about the boys they like and what they’ve done and how it made them feel—the good stuff and the bad. And I listen, which is all they want.

If parents could do this for their girls, if they support their girls as they question the culture they live in, they will help them to be a little stronger against those waves. My hope is that with this kind of support, mothers like Jo, who we met at the beginning of this chapter, will have daughters who are much more powerful in the world than their mothers felt they were as teens.

Recently, I received an email from a woman who didn’t want me to know her name. She described her years of loose-girl behavior and how no one knows. She wrote, “I’ve spent my whole life hiding from the world, from myself. At this point I don’t know who I am or what I want. I’m lost…I wish we could talk honestly about ourselves, but loose girls can’t do that. The shame is eating me alive.” This brave woman’s pain is not that she had sex. Her pain comes from feeling silenced, from living an unnecessarily unspeakable life.

My hope is that this book begins some movement toward cracking that silence, toward the conversations we need to have with one another, and toward the transformation we need in our culture to change the direction teen girls have been herded into for so long. We must have these conversations. We must speak honestly. We must be louder.

Mostly, we have to tell our stories, because in our stories lie salvation for other girls and women. It seems so cliché—stories save lives. But that’s true. It was a story that laid the foundation for my own healing. I was a senior in high school, seventeen years old, and I took an elective English class called Minority Voices. We read stories about teenage girls who felt lonely, exiled, confused about who they were, and my whole world broke open: I wasn’t alone. There were others out there who felt what I felt. There were others expressing what I couldn’t yet express. This changed everything for me. Not yet, not in a tangible way. I was still going to hurt myself again and again. I was still going to let every crush I had, every boy who looked my way, consume my brain. I was still going to choose boys over self-enhancement. But those stories were there, in the back of my mind. They lingered. They made me want to write. And eventually, I found a way to write my own story, hoping a girl would one day read it and see herself, would keep my story in the back of her mind, and would one day tell her story, too—all these stories in a round, all these stories breaking the silence.