Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (14 page)

She posits a connection between her lack of sexual experience with girls and her lack of clarity about her desire for them: “my vagina doesn’t act up when I just see a guy. More of like when I’m close to a guy, touching a guy, kissing a guy, and I haven’t done that with girls.” Yet she has been in a situation where she was “close to” a girl and narrates how she silenced her body in its first stirrings:

There was this one girl that I had kinda liked from school, and it was like really weird ’cause she’s really popular and everything. And we were sitting next to each other during the movie and, kind of her leg was on my leg and I was like, wow, you know, and that was, I think that’s like the first time that I’ve ever felt like sex- ual pleasure for a girl. But it’s so impossible, I think I just like block it out, I mean, it could never happen ...I just can’t know what I’m feeling...I probably first mentally just say no, don’t feel it, you know, maybe. But I never start to feel, I don’t know.

It’s so confusing. ’Cause finally it’s all right for me to like a girl, you know?

Megan details her resistance to her embodied sexual feelings, describing how she “mentally” silences her body by saying no, pre- empting and dissociating from her embodied response. Echoing dominant cultural constructions of sexual desire, Megan links her “blocking” of her desire for girls with fear: “you can picture your- self kissing a guy but then if you like a girl a lot and then you pic- ture yourself kissing her, it’s just like, I can’t, you know, oh my God, no [laughs], you know it’s like scary ... it’s society... you never would think of, you know, it’s natural to kiss a girl.” Megan’s fear about her desire for girls is different from the fears associated with her desire for boys. Although being too sexual with boys brings the stigma of being called a slut, she has a fundamental belief in her entitlement to heterosexual desire. Given what she knows about the heterosexual culture in which she is immersed—the pressure she feels to be interested in “guys”—and also given what she knows about homophobia, there is an inherent logic in Megan’s response of confusion to her feelings for girls.

For Megan, a keen awareness of compulsory heterosexuality undergirds her fear of rejection. Megan keeps herself from feeling the feelings that could lead to disappointment, embarrassment, frustration, or even retaliation, keeping her safe from these nega- tive consequences. But at what price does she buy this temporary stay on her desire, this momentary safety? If Megan has to con- stantly engage in an active process of denying her desire, like Inez, then not only is her ability to develop a healthy sexual self impaired but she must funnel a lot of energy into maintaining this silencing, into keeping herself cut off from the reality of her own feelings. If she were able to acknowledge her feelings in relationships with her

peers, she could think about rather than think away what her feel- ings are, what they are like, and what she might choose to do in response to them.

As Teresa Bernardez (1988) has observed about anger, another feeling regulated out of the repertoire of femininity, cultural pro- hibitions on powerful embodied feelings in women turn into psy- chological inhibitions, which “prevent rebellious acts,” with the result that women come to feel complicit in their own misery, and in fact do in some sense become complicit. Society’s dominant cul- tural construction of femininity encourages girls and women to be desirable but not desiring. The association of femininity with the absence of hunger incites in girls a wish for what Elizabeth Debold and I have called a “no-body body” of femininity, “an image [that] is flat, has no feelings, is silent... can have no appetite, no hunger, no desire, and no power of its own.”
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This wish is substantiated and supported by the rule book of gendered sexuality, by the carrot of romance and the stick of a maligned reputation.

The girls in this chapter negotiate their own personal dilemmas of desire by resisting their sexual feelings. While they are aware— some more, some less—of the power, pleasure, and possibility embedded in their sexual desire, they feel acutely vulnerable to its dangers. The more dangerous they feel desire to be for them, the more unequivocally they resist their desire. Working within the institution of heterosexuality, they do not hold boys or social con- ventions accountable for making sexuality dangerous; rather, it is
their own sexual feelings
that constitute both the problem and the answer. These girls all evidence awareness, at some level, that if they bring their desire forthrightly into their relationships, they will be in conflict with others in their lives, and with themselves. Some, like Inez, resist consciously: she tells her body no. Others,

like Rochelle, respond more psychologically and reflexively, as when her own desire frightens her to the point of tears. Still others, like Emily, vacillate between a recognition of their own desire and a painful discomfort with accepting it as a normal feature of who they are. Megan voices an acute frustration with her resistance to her desire for girls; perhaps her experience of desire with boys offers her a foothold for identifying her difficulty with desire for girls.

Why is their formulation of their desire as a route to danger a problem? Why should we worry, for example, that Ellen and Inez silence their bodies in response to their own desire? After all, for Ellen, this is the road to staying safe until she completes her educa- tion, and for Inez, it is a way to gain respect and avoid sexual inter- course. Given current arrangements, this strategy not only makes sense, it even conveys a certain wisdom. But if we anchor our assessment in the belief that having sexual desire is normal, we ask a different question: Why should the girls’ responses have to be so extreme? Why should they have to cut themselves off from them- selves simply to stay safe, complete their education, maintain their reputations?

The girls in the previous chapter did not feel desire and thus, in essence, described an unconscious response to the denial and den- igration of girls’ desire. The girls who feel desire but resist it are more likely to cast it as an individual problem they have to figure out. Because they have internalized the notion that girls’ sexual desire is anathema, they do not talk with anyone about how they might deal with these feelings. Embodied desire, which Inez recog- nizes and knows can bring her pleasure but feels she must silence, is not part of the lexicon of how anyone—her friends, her family, her school, or her community—talks with her about sexuality. These girls’ internal focus, illustrated so well by Inez’s microman- agement of her own sexual feelings, distracts them from asking

what might become obvious questions if they felt entitled to their own sexual feelings, including the question Megan is on the verge of asking: Why do I have to protect myself from boys’ sexual desire? Why aren’t my feelings accounted for, inquired about, re- sponded to?

PARAMETERS OF PLEASURE

For some, the dangers of sexuality . . . make the pleasures pale by comparison. For oth- ers, the positive possibilities of sexuality, ex- plorations of the body, curiosity, intimacy, sensuality, adventure, excitement, human connection... are not only worthwhile but provide sustaining energy.

—Carole Vance, “Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality”

While it is almost a cliché to say that the personal is political, listening to all of these girls struggling with the various incarnations of the dilemma of desire reminds us just how personal the political actually is and how political the per- sonal is. Calling attention to the possibility and importance of pleasure and passion rather than focusing exclusively on the need to diminish danger and threats brings the political nature of gen- dered sexuality to the fore. This double-edged quality is at the heart of the politics of female sexual desire.

In the last few years, resistance to societal denial and denigration of adolescent girls’ sexual desire has been brewing, among adult activists and scholars and among adolescent girls themselves. Web sites, magazines written by and for girls, “zines,”
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and books such as
Deal with It! A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain, and Life as a gurl
provide information about female adolescent experience that has traditionally been taboo or unconventional. In some zines girls write “rants” about their fury at being objectified, violated, or

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abused, and about their right to their own sexual desire (see, for example, Carlip, 1995). Such girls consciously claim an explicitly politicized perspective on beliefs and master narratives, which serve to normalize the denial of girls’ desire and sexual subjectivity within and through the institution of heterosexuality. These girls are “resist[ing] the temptation to . . . simply correct . . . for male perspective [which makes] the framework... invisible” (Gilligan, 1990, p. 509). Specifically, they can discern how “reality” is shaped to make a desiring girl a “bad” girl, and, because they can identify the pressures they are under to adopt this point of view and how it does not serve their interests, they are able to resist it. In so doing, they gain a standpoint from which to see how concepts such as “femininity” and “slut” function to keep them from acting on, feel- ing entitled to, or even knowing about their own sexual feelings. What is necessary for such resistance, however, is the ability, courage, and willingness to see and critique these highly institu- tionalized processes that work because they are so hard to pin down.
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It requires an awareness of the politics of desire and a com- munity dedicated to changing the situation, because resistance in isolation is extremely hard. When girls can say what they really know and experience to others in relationships, this knowledge becomes more stable.

Feminism and the sexual revolution have obviously made sig- nificant inroads in revealing and undoing women’s and girls’ sex- ual oppression but just as obviously have not fully solved the problem (Jeffreys, 1990; Ussher, 1997). Listening to the girls in the previous chapters reveals how entrenched gendered sexuality and the double standard continue to be (see also Kamen, 2000). The sexual revolution began to challenge the demonizing of women’s desire, but complete freedom for female sexual desire was not won.
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The good girl–bad girl dichotomy has been challenged but not dismantled. In fact, it has become even more confusing

because it is now riddled with caveats, such as girls should not be sluts but they should not be prudes. In this context, girls are now expected to be sexual, but primarily in ways that cater to boys’ desire rather than to their own (Wolf, 1997); stringent and shifting social constraints upon their desire remain in place. The girls in this chapter describe experiences that reflect the advantages and limits of this destabilized situation.

In contrast to the girls in the previous chapters, all of the girls in this chapter are certain in their belief that they are entitled to their sexual desire. Rather than negate their bodies or try to juggle mixed or truncated messages about girls’ sexuality, these girls nar- rate their attempts to work around the social, physical, relational, and psychological implications they are well aware await them if they refuse to give up or feel uncomfortable about their sexual feelings. Like the girls who have silent bodies or resist their own desire, however, most of these girls also experience their desire as a dilemma of personal proportions.

Like the girls in Chapter 4, this group of desiring girls have dif- fering assessments of the specific contours of their dilemmas. Their choices, more and less conscious, of how to work within, around, or despite gendered constructions of sexuality are evident in their strategies for dealing with the dilemma of desire, trans- forming consequences into opportunities. Although they share a conviction that they deserve their desire, they differ in the extent to which they appreciate the politics of female sexual desire, in partic- ular, the sexual double standard.

entitlement maneuvers
To claim safe spaces for their desire one group of girls utilizes the degrees of freedom they find within the conventions of romance, maneuvering into secure spots and around minefields that go

along with that territory. Some seek refuge in long-term heterosex- ual relationships with boys who defy characterization as sexual predators; others consciously manipulate the role available to them. All make choices that allow them to express their sexual desire but only in circumstances where the dangers of desire can be muted. These girls speak of a kind of freedom to question and to get to know their own bodies and the parameters of their own pleasure, and they also describe experiences of both equality and mutuality in their different manifestations of this kind of relation- ship. Entitled to their sexual feelings, they strain against the limits of the good-girl category without shattering it. In a sense, these girls are figuring out how to have it both ways. They reach the lim- its of this arrangement and find that it affords only partial protec- tion for certain forms of desire rather than for the full range of their feelings. Yet they also reproduce the distinction between girls whose desire is “worthy” and those who should be demonized and devalued for not living up to their standards of “purity.” Without an explicit politicized perspective on their sexual subjectivity, their stories reflect how the parameters of pleasure thus remain con- strained for them.

Eugenia: Desire with a Safety Net?
Tall, slim, blonde, and fair, Eugenia, like Jenny, fits the image of the desirable “good” girl that is readily available in magazines and on television. As we begin our conversation, I am struck by her intelli- gence and her authentic interest in participating in this project. Eugenia offers detailed knowledge of and comfort with her own desire; her embodied sexual feelings are simply a part of who she is. The “emotional part” is a feature of her sexuality to which Euge- nia refers often. In contrast to Inez, who describes how her mind and body “fight” about her desire, Eugenia is aware of the connec- tion between her mind and her body in producing and sustaining

sexual desire: “like it kinda starts off just like in your mind, but somehow it, it works out so that it goes to your body too [laughs].” In contrast, she can also speak articulately about what it is like to have sexual experiences without any desire of her own: “like when [my first boyfriend] would do things, like he fingered me, and it was just so, I could’ve done my homework, you know, I, it was just so, there wasn’t any like fulfillment out of it.” Juxtaposing the plea- sure of desire with the boredom of being a sexual object, Eugenia grounds her objection to being denied her sexual subjectivity in her experience of what she feels entitled to want, “fulfillment.”

A key feature of Eugenia’s descriptions of her sexual desire, and her sense of entitlement to these feelings, is the context in which they occur. She has experienced desire exclusively within what is the sanctioned and safe space of a long-term monogamous hetero- sexual relationship. As Eugenia remarks, “as long as you’re with [your boyfriend], then it’s not a big deal.” Under current gender arrangements, such a commitment can indeed enhance a girl’s social and emotional safety and diminish the dangers of desire, while garnering her the rewards of the institution of hetero- sexuality; in this sense, such a relationship does double duty. Yet at the same time it provides space, it delimits what kinds of desire are acceptable for girls, offering some slack without dropping the reins. The politics of Eugenia’s desire are unconscious insider poli- tics. She claims her right to desire and pleasure without any aware- ness that she occupies a privileged position by virtue of her circumstances. She explores the contours of her feelings for her boyfriend, emotional and physical, without fear of social stigma or tainted identity and, in so doing, reproduces and supports the institution of heterosexuality.

Eugenia does not experience and does not see or critique the two-tiered system that encourages male sexual freedom and con- strains female sexuality. Yet she still operates under the entrenched,

if somewhat updated, moral code of appropriate sexual behavior for “good” adolescent girls by which she, like Emily, judges other girls quite comfortably. Eugenia says that she feels safe from getting a reputation and so doesn’t worry about it. But she notices girls who go out “with some guy one night and then . . . there’s always another guy”; girls who “seem to do it... like just to do it,” who are “just like horny,” “dirty,” or “loose” girls whose desires may be out of bounds and who thus do get “labeled.” From her morally supe- rior, privileged, and in a paradoxical sense sexually liberated posi- tion, Eugenia cannot understand why a girl would be sexual in a way that would result in others calling her a slut. She herself thinks that “maybe it has something to do with like, not finding the right person or not, feeling um accepted or loved.” She articulates more pity than disgust but is willing to categorize such “horny” girls as “dirty” nonetheless.

Eugenia knows that it is not only acceptable but virtually “assumed” that, since she and her boyfriend have been together for a long time, they are having sexual intercourse. Yet she offers clues that she is aware of the fragility of her safety net, of the instability of her status as a “good” girl who can have sex because she is in a relationship. She had promised to tell her best friend when she first had sexual intercourse, “but then, when it happened, I didn’t think I wanted to, and it wasn’t like I myself felt bad about it, but I just didn’t want, ’cause I felt good about it, and I didn’t want anyone else passing judgment on me, that’s what it was.” In the course of explaining her wish not to talk with her friend, she reveals her awareness of the bottom line within this unchallenged arrange- ment of gendered sexuality: that any girl who has sex is, in the end, vulnerable to others “passing judgment” on her. Given her own feelings for girls whom she denotes sluts, it is no wonder that these concerns are not dismissed by assurances that having a boyfriend can in fact shield her from such harm.

Eugenia’s descriptions of and stories about this relationship sug- gest that it may stand as a counterpoint to the more conventional gender hierarchies other girls have described. Some of the ways she talks about her boyfriend intimate that, like Emily’s boyfriend, he is not fully invested in gendered sexuality. There is a theme of egal- itarianism that runs through her reports; rather than feeling like the object of a boy’s desire, she expresses her sexual subjectivity and alludes to a kind of even playing field on which they are, together, exploring sexuality and intimacy. For instance, she asso- ciates the pleasure of their first kiss not only with how “sensitive” it felt, with the physical pleasure of it, but also with the sense of equality she felt in the experience: that “we both wanted to do it but we both weren’t really sure” is what “made it really nice.” She knows she has a voice and feelings of her own, which she can safely bring into this relationship and which will be respected; she feels “comfortable” and “secure.” Given how she has described earlier, unpleasant sexual experiences with other boys, there is evidence that a kind of mutual connection has been instrumental in her developing sexual subjectivity (Miller & Stiver, 1997).

She had not, for example, given a boy oral sex prior to this rela- tionship, and she describes how “he knew” how she felt because they talked about it: “and I said it was something like when we first started going out, I don’t know, that, that you know, that I wasn’t sure of, and then it wasn’t ’til like a year later, and then, so he just left it alone, you know, and it wasn’t a big deal, and um, and so then like a year later, I just, I totally wanted to, I just was totally curious, I just wanted to try it.” In the context of this relationship, they have agreed to carve out a space for her desire to develop and flourish; they waited until she “totally wanted to” because she was “totally curious,” after having been together for a year. Though she “feel[s] perverted saying it... it’s just something that I, one of those things