Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (15 page)

I really enjoy doing now, like one of those things that doesn’t like physically pleasure me, as like, you know, if I had sex myself but that, but it’s something that I really enjoy doing a lot, I feel totally comfortable with it.” Eugenia distinguishes the pleasure she feels in giving her boyfriend pleasure in this way, on her own terms, from her own physical pleasure; at the same time, she recognizes that she is not supposed to find this activity pleasurable, that such pleasure must be “perverted.” It is a judgment that she does not allow to get in the way of what she actually feels but that she also does not question, even though it is at odds with her own experience.

In contrast to the stories of so many girls, whose experience of first sexual intercourse “just happened” and whose desire and active choice were absent, Eugenia’s story about having sexual intercourse for the first time is unequivocally a story about her desire:

I started feeling like it was something I wanted to do and, you know, so we talked about it like a lot, and finally I decided ...I definitely wanted to do it, and so... it was a big deal in that I wanted to make sure that it was with like the right person? You know, and I felt comfortable? And so, well, I talked to my mom about it, and she took me to the gynecologist, and we talked about birth control. But I also wanted to make sure that I didn’t wanna, like, have any regrets about it at all ... And, I mean, I loved my first time, it was like [laughs] one of my favorite times ever having sex, and I heard that some people say, you know, that you shouldn’t get your hopes up, because sometimes it can be really awkward or whatever, but it was such a great experience like...I think I was really, like, pleasantly surprised that it was just, that it did feel good, you know? But um, so maybe that’s what helped to make it more enjoyable, ’cause, or maybe I was just lucky, ’cause I just really was. It’s like even if, you know, we

got, you know, started hating each other and then broke up, it’s like I’d never regret that time, just ’cause I knew that I wanted it so badly, and like, you know, it was so great then.

Eugenia identifies both the physical pleasure and the fact that it was her idea as making it one of her “favorite” sexual experiences. Within the safety of this relationship, with her mother accepting and respecting her well thought-out decision, and taking full responsibility, Eugenia does not have sex that “just happened” to her. Her first experience of sexual intercourse comes after a lot of other sexual experiences, also pleasurable and reflective of her own desire, with this particular boy, whom she trusts and loves, who helped to make it safe for her to act on her desire.

So how is desire a dilemma for Eugenia? If she is making safe choices in a mutual, committed relationship, isn’t that an ideal context for adolescent sexual expression? In trying to explain a time when she did not communicate her discomfort with a sexual experience to her boyfriend, pretending to feel pleasure instead and then feeling bad about violating their trust, the outline of her dilemma emerges. Her story turns the usual explanation for “fak- ing” on its head, because the dilemma lies with her disquiet about having pleasure and knowing her body rather than with sacrificing her feelings to make him feel good for pleasing her. In an example of remarkable communication (as much so for adults as for ado- lescents), her boyfriend had asked her how he could touch her so that she would have an orgasm. She explains that she could not answer his question: “I don’t exactly know how to like make myself have an orgasm. I mean, we’ve kind of talked about that once, and ’cause he asked me to, we were just talking about it, and he said, ‘well, why don’t you show me?’ And I said, ‘I don’t really know.’ ” Eugenia says that she has had orgasms during sex, but only when it “kinda just happens” because of “how your bodies are fit to-

gether.” While she feels entitled to sexual desire in her relationship, it is only in that context that she feels this way about her sexuality. It is safe for her to feel and respond to her desire when chaperoned by her boyfriend, but it is not when by herself.

Outside that limited domain, Eugenia is filled with questions, concerns, fears, and worries that keep her from exploring her own body or other aspects of her desire, which also limits her pleasure and connection in her relationship. All other situations are suspect and frightening, not necessarily in the eyes of other girls or boys or adults, but in her own eyes. Eugenia’s struggles are with “danger- ous” desires that are in fact intensely private: masturbation, some- thing she “can’t just let myself relax enough just to, you know, put everything aside and just like think about myself ”; and also phone sex with her boyfriend. Not feeling able but wanting to masturbate is particularly disturbing to her: “I do think that somehow like society does say that it’s wrong. I mean it’s not something, it’s not something you, ah, like in health class not something you ever come across really either.” She believes that being able to “be” with herself in a sexual way will strengthen her knowledge of herself and improve her “confidence,” which in turn will enable her to have a more authentic and joyful connection with her boyfriend. The pressure not to acknowledge what she knows—that masturba- tion is “natural,” and that it can enhance her sense of self and her sexual subjectivity—renders the topic contentious and difficult, something about which Eugenia thinks a lot but does not feel safe discussing with anybody else.

Some of her thoughts “intimidate” her—imagining the possi- bility of sex with another girl, fantasizing about having a sexual experience with two boys at the same time, having a one-night stand. While she is confident that she can “control” her desire when she is with her boyfriend, and keep it within what she believes are acceptable or normal contours, she finds her own desire scary

when she imagines sexual experiences outside this safe zone. For Eugenia, it is not that these desires might become evident to other people; her thoughts and feelings are not visible and thus not judged by others. It is the internalized Other (de Beauvoir, 1961), what Dana Jack (1991) has called the “Over-Eye”—a moral code or order that defines and enforces the rules of femininity, in this case delimiting female desire—that keeps Eugenia’s desire in check unless it occurs in the sanctioned space of conventional sexual behavior in a specific type of heterosexual relationship.

Sophie: Desire Weaves and Bobs
Lithe and energetic, Sophie is the girl who feared she had been selected because I had somehow discovered she was a “bad” girl. Much to my surprise, she is completely engaged in our interview. She has a playful, impish quality about her and exudes a comfort with herself that is contradicted by her habit of adding a question mark to the end of many sentences, as if she is not sure about what she says or is hedging in case what she knows is somehow suspect. She has not yet had sexual intercourse or “a really big relationship.” Whereas many of the girls think about their sexuality in terms of whether to have intercourse, Sophie explains that she “enjoy[s] the feeling of being attracted and the sort of fun little games that you can play, but it doesn’t ever have to come to anything. And you can just enjoy it that way?” In contrast to her distress about a girl who had sex to “join the club,” her sense of entitlement to her own sex- ual desire is striking; as she says, she chooses to “fool around” with someone because “I just feel that way.”

Sophie’s ability to speak so straightforwardly about her sexual feelings is extraordinary. Her compass is her own desire. She has never faked pleasure; it doesn’t make sense to her: “I don’t see any reason, the whole point of sexual things is enjoyment and fun.” She tells me how some of her friends feel “guilty” if they do not have an

orgasm when a boy is doing something intended to yield that response, a feeling she does not share: “I’d never feel guilty. And I don’t feel like it’s my responsibility.” She is one of three girls in the study who say they masturbate, and she “can’t understand if some- body can’t do it.” She argues, “this is your body and if there’s any- body that you’re closest to, it’s yourself.” She is also the only girl who answers my questions about oral sex in terms of cunnilingus. She describes fellatio as “fun” but says that “when it gets to be too much [for me] I don’t keep doing it. Because I wouldn’t want him to sit there and be unhappy with it, then I would just like go on with my hand or something like that.” She believes that a girl’s not knowing what she wants sexually contributes to her vulnerability: “I don’t think [a friend who has a lot of sex out of relationships] knows what she wants? I think that’s part of the problem... she’s just willing to do what the people around her are doing.” She believes that sexual experiences should be “exciting” for girls, “either physically good or emotionally good.” Sophie has not yet experienced these two aspects of sexuality working in tandem.

Sophie is waiting to have sexual intercourse. She has watched her peers make this choice and knows she dislikes the idea of being “sneaky,” because “that’s almost what makes it seem like it’s bad?” She is impressed with a friend who is “really in a relationship and everything seems really nice,” who has told her mother about her choices. She never wants to have sexual intercourse in order to feel she fits in, which she thinks is a “pathetic” reason, as well as “stupid” and “slutty.” She believes that “being in love” and having “an ongoing thing” would constitute a good reason. She also believes that “it’s okay to like fool around with somebody that you’re just attracted to ... having fun is a good enough reason [to fool around], but having sex is more of like a commitment to me.” Because she has never had sexual intercourse, she notes that she has never worried about getting pregnant “and stuff like that. So

for me, it’s always kind of been more like a fun experimental thing?”

At sixteen, Sophie feels she is not ready to have sex and chooses, instead, these “other ways of having fun.” That she has fun on her own terms intimates that if she does choose to have sex, her own desire will be a key part of her decision. Her description of how she takes control of sexual situations, by providing boys with the infor- mation they need to give her pleasure, suggests the same thing. Because “it’s different on everybody,” she says,

when you show them then, it’s almost like when you say some- thing, it’s almost like they feel like they could say, well, where does it feel good? And you could say, well, like right there?... well, I don’t know if it feels good to them, if you kind of say, well, where do you like it, and they kind of show you, then you know that you’re not just making them completely miserable or if you were that they would speak up?...I don’t know, maybe I just like to talk, I’m really talkative.

While able to assert herself and be a responsive partner, imme- diately after recounting what would be sophisticated communica- tion for anyone, never mind an adolescent girl, Sophie “takes back” this description of her sexual agency by referring to herself as merely “talkative.” Her backtracking sheds light on her constant efforts to balance being a desiring girl with avoiding the negative judgments she fears in retribution for her sexual subjectivity. She tells me she is worried that, if she reveals experiences that weren’t “wise” to me in this interview, I might “think bad things about [her].” Sophie is extremely aware that many of her experiences have had a public quality to them, occurring at a party or a “busy place,” and that she is thus constantly at risk of being “judged,” because she does not confine her sexual exploration to long-term relationships.

Sophie says she has not had a relationship because she hasn’t “met anybody” who has the qualities she seeks: being able to share a lot and to be really open. Although she says she thinks she will feel “more secure” in a relationship, none of her actions suggest that she wants one. She avoids conventional relationships in favor of sexualized friendships and flirtations, in which she describes feeling and exerting a sense of power and control. Her desire to avoid a relationship that affords protective custody or cover for a girl’s desire seems to be both a product and a mainstay of her sense of entitlement to her sexual desire on her own terms. Resisting this part of the institution of heterosexuality while wholeheartedly embracing the division of girls into good and bad categories is the heart of her dilemma. In part, Sophie finds this arrangement dis- tressing because, while she embodies and enacts resistance to gen- dered sexuality, she has no consciously articulated critique of what is wrong with it or realization of its social foundations, which she is experiencing and dealing with as entirely personal.

Despite worrying about the risks, particularly the social ones, that her choices invite, she knows being “bad” can be part of the fun:

feeling like somebody’s attracted to you, I don’t know, feeling like you’re not in control but kind of, like, feeling like you have the power to make them feel attracted and to feel like you have power, I guess... it’s almost like that kind of adventurous stuff can make you feel sexy? Stuff that you like to do that maybe isn’t your mom’s dream come true [laughs] for you to do. Maybe it’s almost being bad that can be, feel sexy... It’s just almost feeling like good about yourself, in a certain way?

For Sophie, feeling sexy is being a sexual subject, not a sexual object, who “feel[s] good about [her]self” in part because she is having an adventure and feeling “power,” aware that both consti- tute a trespass and are in part exciting because they do.

Sophie still works within social conventions to pursue her desire without invoking too much risk, either sexual or emotional, while garnering pleasure from the experiences she chooses to have. In telling a story about a flirtation with a boy, she describes how she takes up the scripted role of a girl who is not supposed to have sex- ual desire but is supposed to be the object of a boy’s affections. Sophie narrates how she reworks this position as the proverbial damsel in distress, maneuvering within it to make space for her sexual subjectivity, and how she is completely conscious of what she is doing. She goes to elaborate lengths to disguise her desire from the “handsome” young man: