Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (16 page)

My friend [Allison] was on the phone, and he was like chasing me around, like we were totally joking. He was like chasing me with some like bat or something like that? And I like went to get away, and he like pinned me down. It sounds like cruel and like ferocious, but he was like holding me down, and I was like, Alli- son! But I was literally like, I was like, Allison! But she knew that I liked him [laughs], so she was just staying on the phone. And he was just right above me and had both my arms down, and it was like, I knew that I was acting like I just wanted to get away, but really I just would’ve wanted to just totally kiss him or some- thing? And it is those great brown eyes, he just looked right at me, and he’s just so—it’s that sexual desire thing, you just feel a certain way, and it was just like, it’s almost like a waiting feeling?

By her own admission, this performance of passivity is fueled by her desire. She has, she admits to me, “provoked the first move” and disguised her real feelings with predictable and scripted fake cries of distress. Yet she is not conscious that the script she is using to her advantage is problematic—she “does not know” why she did this—and instead she attributes her behavior to “just the way [she is],” a claim that rings rather hollow in light of what else she has told me about her sexuality. The vulnerability embedded in this

role is also evident, though only indirectly and not necessarily to Sophie, in her description of this boy’s “cruel” and “ferocious” behavior. In fact, a melding of fear and excitement is evident in Sophie’s story and makes sense in a culture that eroticizes danger and women’s, especially girls’, vulnerability. Sophie’s story illus- trates once more that just a tinge of danger, especially with the safe proximity of a friend, is a kind of thrill. She has only a fleeting hold over this scenario as it unfolds. In telling this story in this way, Sophie seems both to know and at the same time not to know (or not wish to know) the potential for danger—other than what she is consciously trying to elude, being seen as an assertive, desiring girl—that is braided into pleasure for her in this situation.

Given that girls her age are “supposed” to want to be in a roman- tic relationship, the fact that Sophie does not sets her apart. Why not take advantage of this safe space carved out of her social land- scape for exploring her sexual feelings? Why risk the judgment that being a desiring girl outside a relationship, in her eyes and the eyes of her peers, brings? It is quite possible that she has, simply, not met anybody yet. This choice could reflect her unwillingness to get so serious with one boy at her age. There are those who might argue that she is uncomfortable with or not ready for the intimacy that goes along with a serious relationship, that she has a “prob- lem.” Normalizing the wish for romance pathologizes her rejec- tion of it. Under the institution of heterosexuality, a girl who does not want to be in a relationship is weird or abnormal, has some- thing wrong with her. An alternative possibility is that Sophie has noticed that with long-term heterosexual relationships comes pressure to have sexual intercourse, which she does not want to do. Her concerns could be even broader, that her current freedom to anchor her sexual experiences in her own desire may be difficult to sustain in the kind of relationship that promises some semblance of safety for her sexuality. For now, being the mistress of her own desire is Sophie’s top priority. Without a critical perspective on

why this choice is one she should be but is not actually wholly free to make, Sophie weaves and bobs through her dilemma of desire.

desire under cover
The second group of girls in this chapter also feel entitled to their sexual desire and deal with the dilemma of desire in a way that privileges and protects their sexual subjectivity, but at a price. Like the girls who are overwhelmed by danger, these girls too have a highly heightened awareness that their desire can get them into trouble. Excruciatingly aware of the dangers of their desire, they are just as keen about their entitlement to their own sexual feel- ings. Their strategy is to try to manage the circumstances in which they experience sexual feelings to mitigate danger and to create space for their desire on their own terms, while keeping it obscured from others. The logic underpinning their psychological and rela- tional processes is that if they can keep what they know to be their own desire out of the view of others, then they can avoid incurring consequences for having or acting on their feelings.

In studying the role of relationships in girls’ psychological devel- opment, Lyn Brown and Carol Gilligan (1992) suggested the notion of an “underground” as a kind of safe psychological space, comparable to the secret safety provided by the Underground Rail- road for bringing slaves into freedom. Brown and Gilligan found that some early adolescent girls take their true thoughts and feel- ings into such a conscious psychic retreat, remaining aware of what they actually think, feel, and know but keeping it to themselves and out of their relationships. This is one way girls respond to their developing sense that “certain” thoughts and feelings are not considered acceptable for girls to have or to express to others, and that if they do not comply with or capitulate to the norms of femininity, negative consequences, such as conflict, humiliation, or rejection, await them. This practice has both psychological and

behavioral dimensions, such as girls acting friendly to someone who has hurt them in order not to incite the anger or antipathy of the other person, which requires that they cover up their own dis- tress. While effective in the short run, this strategy can be costly over time. Brown and Gilligan suggested that when girls take their true thoughts and feelings out of relationships, they risk losing the ability to see and know, to discern the chasm between what is said about them and what they actually experience.

Some girls engage in a similar practice when it comes to their sexual desire. Rather than simply hiding their true feelings, though, the girls who take their desire under cover are acting on it covertly. At the level of their own embodied experience, the girls who utilize this strategy resist the societal suggestion that their sexual feelings are immoral, not normal, or just too dangerous to have. Yet, while they can identify and reject the social denial and denigration of female adolescent sexual desire, they continue to orchestrate their behavior and appearance out of their concern about the repercus- sions they know can result if others find out that they are desiring girls. These girls take great pains to obfuscate their actual sexual feelings, reacting to and acting upon them but making certain that their secret is safe.

Trisha: Context Is Everything
Trisha’s advice to other girls who wish to learn about their own desire is this: “if you feel a certain way ... [go] with your feelings, instead of listening to what everybody else says, go by what you feel, inside of you.” In the context of an ongoing relationship, Trisha feels free to express her desire or make it evident to a person whom she trusts, whom she believes “know[s]” what she wants, and who can read her signals. Although she will not “come out and say” to her boyfriend that she is feeling desire or what she wants to do, she is willing to act on it: “If I just, if I want it, I’ll just

go after it, I mean I’m just, I’m just like that [laughs]. If I want, like um, if I ever wanted to kiss my boyfriend, I’d just go right over to him and start kissing him, I mean, I have no problem with it.” Unsolicited, Trisha tells me she believes “one hundred percent in birth control... always,” noting that seeing her friends pregnant and with babies makes her “scared.”

Knowing what she does enjoy and feel comfortable with, and why, she can say what sexual experiences she does not want. For instance, she is not interested in oral sex: “the way TV always made it seem, it was gross and it was dirty and all this, and it just, it kinda makes you think, you know, just thinking about it just makes me feel uneasy, I just, I’ve never had it done to me, I’ve never done it to anybody else, and I refuse, I just, that’s just not me. I think if you were meant to do something like that, you’d be three feet high. To be honest, to be honest with you, I just, I just don’t like it.” Even though she was molested as a child, Trisha believes both that she deserves to have pleasure and that she has the right to say no: “if the person’s doing something you don’t like and you don’t want them to do it, you’ll tell them to stop and if they don’t stop, then it makes you, you know, not want it anymore, it takes the pleasure right out of it.” She offers an example of how she feels no com- punction about interrupting and correcting a sexual experience that is not working for her:

Sometimes when you’re having sex with someone, I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you, but you really have to go to the bath- room, and I mean like he’s inside of you, and then he’s hitting your bladder, and it’s just like you just want him to stop, so you’ll scream, “Get off! Get off! It hurts, you’re on my bladder”...a couple of times I had, I would literally have to force him off of me and say, “I have to go. Now.” You know, whether or not he got off on it or not is his problem, I have to go, I’m goin’.

Trisha reports that she has never faked pleasure, and she finds this idea funny; while other girls in the study brought up the infa- mous “deli scene” in
When Harry Met Sally,
in which Meg Ryan gives a virtuoso performance of faking an orgasm as something they could relate to, Trisha thought it was “stupid.” For her, not feeling pleasure is a sign that there is a problem. Unlike other girls, Trisha does not conclude that something is wrong with her if she does not have an orgasm nor does she feel guilty. Instead, she takes it as information: “I mean, if you don’t, I mean it, something’s wrong, ’cause I think something would be wrong. I mean, if you don’t, then either he’s not doing it right or it’s not somebody that you wanna be with, because if you don’t, then, what’s the sense, I mean, it’s like sitting there, I don’t know, playing cards with some- body [laughs]. You might as well just sit there and play cards.”

The most salient and overriding context for her sexuality is her keen awareness that girls are vulnerable to getting a reputation. Although Trisha says that she does not “particularly care what oth- ers think about [her],” she also tells of one time that did bother her, when she herself experienced the negative effects of being the vic- tim of a rumor mill that had “switched around” an innocent expe- rience, going for a canoe ride in a boat with a boy and another girl during the day, into having gone with him alone at night, with the implication that they had had sex. This false story was a problem for her, because it was difficult for her to refute. She believed that it made others think, “oh she’s easy, I can get off her anytime I want, you know, they’re gonna think you’re easy, so everyone else is gonna try it. And then your friends are gonna think of you lower, so it’s like, you wanna try to keep your reputation good.” While acknowledging the limit on how much she can control what others say about her, she takes action on her own behalf. She explains that “it was one of the first ones that had went around me, so it both- ered me and I was just like, I’m gonna put an end to this one. So

then I did.” Trisha felt both entitled and able to override the ru- mor with the truth of her experience, and did in fact prevail.

Given her own experience, and sense of entitlement to her own desire, one might imagine that Trisha would reject the categoriza- tion of some girls as “bad” and others as “good.” Trisha neverthe- less evaluates herself and other girls in these terms by making a crucial distinction between undeserved and deserved reputations: A girl cannot be held accountable for untruths that are said about her, but a girl who acts on her desire is taking chances:

If it’s by your own desire and pleasure, then that’s your own fault, I mean you’re just, you’re just literally saying, say this about me... If it’s kept in, then that’s, you know, then there’s nothing wrong with that, but then if it bleeds out, then you’re just gonna end up getting yourself into trouble. You just better chill. Slow it down a little... if you know that the person’s gonna say some- thing, you better—well, I wouldn’t say you better but—try and make it so that they’re not gonna say anything. Like um, if it was me, I’d just be like, I’d have to be with the person for a long time, knowin’ they’re not gonna say anything.

Because girls who act on their desire are choosing to put themselves at risk for getting a bad reputation, Trisha offers several strategies for how girls can protect themselves. She can “chill,” that is, not act on her feelings, or find a boy who’s “not gonna say anything.”
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She says that her own strategy is to express her desire and pleasure with someone she’s been with “for a long time,” whom she has judged to be trustworthy, “knowin’ they’re not gonna say anything.” But this is not her only approach to having and protecting her desire.

Trisha knows context is everything. In fact, she has an entirely different way of protecting herself when she has sexual feelings outside a long-term relationship. Well aware of the social risks of acting on sexual desire in this unsafe context, she tells me, as if in a confessional, “I’ve had my share of one-night stands, and I don’t

think I’d ever go through it again, ’cause it makes you feel kind of, I don’t know, kind of slutty, I guess. I’ve had them, yeah [laughs]. I’ll be honest, I’ve had them.” Not only is she at risk of being called names under these circumstances, she in essence thinks of herself as a “bad” girl; rather than saying this choice makes her feel vulner- able, disappointed, excited, guilty, or scared, she says she feels “slutty.” If having a one-night stand makes her feel “slutty,” if she feels safer having sexual experiences within the context of a rela- tionship, then why does she do it? When I ask her what is in it for her, she explains:

Oh, I don’t know. Just to, I guess just to see what the person’s like. I hate to say it that way [laughs] but, um, if I’m with my friends and we’re at a party, and I just look up, and there’s like a guy there that I want... And then I’ll start talking to him, like if I know the person, or someone else knows him, we’ll start talking and then, you know, nothing will, I don’t think any sparks will start flying until, you know, he asks me a question that’s gonna like, start, I don’t know, I mean, wanting him, just by [pause] him... and I know it’s just gonna be one of those one-night stand type of things, I’ll get myself trashed, and I’ll be just like, but I will still, I won’t be to the point where I’m, I don’t remember anything, just, I just, I want that person, I mean just, he’s getting to me. I’ll just have a few drinks, I mean, to the point where I get flirty, ’cause I won’t do it if I’m straight [laughs]. I have to wait ’til I get flirty and then I’ll just say, let’s go [laughs]... and then I can blame it on the alcohol and say, oh, it was because I was drunk.