Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (18 page)

Some of Melissa’s heterosexual friends also sense that her desire for girls could cause problems. She describes how they monitor her at parties, for instance, keeping track of how much she has had to drink, to make sure she is, in their words, “not gonna do anything stupid” or “say anything bad to anyone.” While Melissa “think[s] it’s really nice of them, ’cause I know that they mean well, and I

know that they just want to, like, protect me,” there is something about their behavior that she finds “annoying.” Melissa is thus not the only one keeping a lid on her desire; others around her police her sexuality to make sure that she keeps her feelings to herself.

At the time of our interview, Melissa is in her first sexual rela- tionship, which began when a close friend, a girl who is several years older and ostensibly heterosexual, expressed a sexual interest. Melissa was surprised because she had not “been thinking that” about this friend and, in fact, was not sexually attracted to her.
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After a history of having to hold back her sexual desire, of feeling “frustrated,” of being “hugely infatuated with straight people” and not having the chance to explore her sexuality, Melissa felt she “should take advantage of this situation”:

And I was like, kind of thrown off by it and I didn’t know what I should do, because I was kind of like, I mean I really love her a lot, ’cause we’re really close and she’s a really great person and everything, you know, it’s just like hmm, well, I don’t know, I should take advantage of this situation [laughs] and, you know, and I really do like her and I think, I sort of, I don’t know [laughs], how I feel at the moment, I mean because, first she was just like well, you know, I just wanna take care of you, and then later on she was, it was kind of clear that that’s not the only thing she wanted. And, so, I mean it became physical and, now, I mean I’m not really sure if, I, I mean I kind of think that I just really love her a lot and I really, I mean it’s such a good feeling to have someone love you that way. And I just really wanted that and I don’t know how much I’m really like attracted to her [laughs] personally.
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Feeling something is missing, as we talk about her desire in our interview, Melissa is struggling with a conundrum that comes from having had to keep her desire hidden and unexplored for so

long; if she is not sexually attracted to this girl and “it’s just sort of like I just wanted something like this for so long that I’m just tak- ing advantage of the situation,” what should she do? She knows she has feelings of want yet suspects that they are not sexual, and her hunger for a relationship is apparent—“I really wanted someone really badly, I think, I was getting really sick of being by myself...I really need someone.” The desperation in her voice, and the sexual frustration she has described elsewhere, suggest that she has “wants” and “needs” that are both sexual and relational; while perhaps re- lated and occurring simultaneously, these desires are not the same. Accustomed to keeping sexual feelings under wraps, Melissa has not had much experience sorting out her sexual feelings and deter- mining whether they are
present.
In response to my questions about her body, her desire, her experiences with this girl, Melissa realizes that her own desire is actually missing from these first sexual adven- tures, enabling her to clarify her discomfort with her new girlfriend and illuminating the importance of being aware of both the pres- ence and absence of sexual desire. Having kept her desire under cover for so long, she is finding this distinction unexpectedly diffi- cult. As we talk, Melissa becomes more certain that, while she is anxious to explore her sexuality, she would like to do so on her own timetable and in response to her own sexual desire. She feels ready for kissing and exploring another girl’s body but not for the more intimate experiences her girlfriend has initiated with her. Even though she didn’t “know how [she] was supposed to feel” when her girlfriend “started putting her hand down [her] pants,” she did know that “[she] didn’t really wanna do that” and that she “was pre- tending that it was more fun than it was.” Sorting out what is and is

not happening for her in this relationship, Melissa concludes,

I don’t really think I’m getting that much pleasure from her, it’s just, I mean it’s almost like I’m getting experience, and I’m sort

of having fun, it’s not even that exciting, and that’s why I think I don’t really like her... because my friend asked me this the other day, well, I mean does it get, I mean when you’re with her does it get really... exciting? [laughs]. But it doesn’t, to me. It’s weird, because I can’t really say that, I mean I can’t think of like a time when I was really excited and it was like really sexual plea- sure for me, because I don’t think it’s really like that. I mean not that I think that this isn’t good because, I don’t know, I mean, I like it, but I mean, I think I have to sort of realize that I’m not that much attracted to her.

Wanting both a relationship and sexual pleasure, a chance to explore closeness and her sexual curiosity, and discovering that this relationship leaves out her sexual desire, Melissa is again frus- trated: “I sort of expect or hope or whatever that there would be some kind of more excited feeling just from feeling sexually stimu- lated or whatever. I would hope that there would be more of a feel- ing than I’ve gotten so far.” The absence of her sexual feelings in this relationship has left her with a conflict: “I’m not that attracted to her and I don’t know if I should tell her that. Or if I should just kind of pretend I am and try to ... anyway.. .” When I ask her how she would go about doing that, she replies, “I don’t think I could pretend it for too long.” Melissa speaks often of feeling guilty about her sexual feelings: guilty about having desire for girls who are not accessible because they are heterosexual, guilty about not having sexual feelings for girls who desire her. It is not desire itself that causes Melissa to feel discomfort; it is finding it so difficult to play out her feelings authentically that makes her feel bad.

desire politics
A third and very small group of girls stand apart from the others in this chapter and from the others in the study as a whole. While making unapologetic claims on their desire, these girls also speak

about desire in a matter-of-fact way, as an aspect of their experi- ence that they simply expect to have. They offer sophisticated and critical analyses of gendered sexuality as the context in which they deal with their own sexual desire. Fully aware that they are not sup- posed to be desiring girls, and fully aware of the consequences for doing so, they simply refuse to deny their feelings. Not only do they feel entitled to their own sexual feelings, since they believe such feelings are normal and acceptable, they think that the “reality” of gendered sexuality is a con of immense proportions. Thus, there is a conscious political edge to their resistance to gendered sexuality, tinged with their outrage at being unjustly muzzled. They under- stand how their sexuality is perceived from a “male gaze” but do not embody it. Instead, they embody sexual subjectivity as a form of resistance with both psychological and political contours. They are agile at consciously “working within the system,” as a kind of guerrilla tactic to maintain their integrity, or just rejecting it as unfair and oppressive. Their resistance is thus both overt and political.

Rather than accept the limits of unreliable pseudosafe spaces for their desire, these girls defy the very categories of good and bad, recognizing how this hierarchy separates girls from one another and diminishes and undermines them all. They are outspoken, irate, and defiant about their right to their own desire and pleasure in mutually acceptable circumstances. The girls tell stories about balancing pleasure and danger, refusing to be hemmed in by the fear of a bad reputation, insisting on taking appropriate precau- tions to protect themselves from physical consequences, and mak- ing active decisions about what sexual experiences they want to have and doing so in the relational contexts that make them com- fortable. They not only are aware of the double standard but also know what is wrong with it; and they not only see that it is unfair but also pinpoint what is unfair about it. Though they do not use the word themselves, these girls are adamant
political
resisters.

That is, they are engaging in a conscious refusal to comply with constrained constructions of who they can be and insisting on breaking rules they know to be unfair in order to be authentic and have integrity with themselves and others (Brown & Gilligan, 1992). In the realm of sexuality, overt political resistance consti- tutes a girl’s unabashed claim to her own sexual desire and sexual subjectivity. And it risks dangerous reactions from people or insti- tutions that are threatened by such a refusal to accept condoned conceptions of normality and morality (Freire, 1970; Lorde, 1984; Taylor, Gilligan, & Sullivan, 1995). Refusing to engage with the framing of their desire as a personal dilemma, these girls under- stand that the problem they are dealing with is not simply their own but one with deep social roots.

Paulina: The Power of Desire
Paulina looks me straight in the eye as we sit down to our inter- view. She is serene but with an air of defiance. Having emigrated from Eastern Europe five years earlier, Paulina speaks quite excel- lent English, with a strong accent but an unwavering clarity about what she observes, knows, and feels. Her answer to my first ques- tion, about what she has heard regarding girls’ sexuality in her family, resonates with many other girls’ responses: “I would say [my family is] not very open about it, I mean, they don’t want to discuss it, or talk about it, my grandmother just doesn’t bring up the subject, and if it ever comes up, she just ignores it. Like it doesn’t exist.” But Paulina is quick to follow with her critique of social norms that silence female adolescent sexuality. Having her sexuality framed as “trouble” or the road to pregnancy or even something that “doesn’t exist” does not jibe with what Paulina her- self believes and knows about girls’—and her own—sexuality. This message from her family directly contradicts her own experience. Clearly grounded in her own body, Paulina has no trouble describ-

ing what her own desire feels like; when she feels desire, she “feel[s] really hot, like, my temperature is really, really hot... And my body would have like, I would like have a feeling going up my spine.”

Paulina conveys how her sexual interactions include and express
her
feelings; she links her sexual experiences and choices to her feelings about her partner and her acceptance of her body and comfort with what she is doing. She thinks that “it depends how, how a girl feels about her body, for her to enjoy it... I’m not ashamed of it, I’m just, that’s the way I am.” While she notices that other girls avoid oral sex because they are worried about how someone might react, she does not think that is a good reason: “Because there’s a lot of girls that I know who just wouldn’t do it, they’re kind of like, they wouldn’t have oral sex with somebody because the person might think something of them. And I don’t really care what the person will think, because the person will know me well enough, so if I want to, I just do it.” When I ask her why, she answers simply, “Because I would want to.” Like Eugenia, she had sexual intercourse for the first time on her terms, with her current boyfriend, who had been a friend before their relationship became romantic: “In the beginning when he would like try to do anything, he would ask me and I would say no. And if he would touch me I was just like, I don’t think so. Then like one day, I thought about it a lot and, and I said like, if you use precautions and everything. I just wanted to, because I wanted to see what it was like.”

Paulina does not take her sexual freedom for granted, however. She makes a rebellious claim to her sexual desire, angrily telling me how she refuses to participate in the usual double standard:

It’s okay for a guy to have any feelings. Usually a guy makes the first move, not the girl, or the girl’s not supposed to do it, the girl’s supposed to sit there going, no, no you can’t. I [won’t] do

that...I mean the guy expects the girl to be a sweet little virgin when he marries her, and then he can be running around with ten other women, but when he’s getting married to her, she’s not supposed to have any relationship with anybody else. You’re sup- posed to be holy . . . and pure ...I just don’t think so...I think she can, a woman can do whatever they want to, why shouldn’t they? I mean, they have the same feelings, they’re human, why should they like keep away from them?

Her sense of entitlement is grounded in a critique of current gender arrangements and strengthened by her outrage at what she considers this imposition on girls’ and women’s humanity: “I think that women have the same feelings as men do, I mean, I think it’s okay to express them too.” Throughout the interview, Paulina con- veys her conscious and constant resistance to a politics of desire that denies her own feelings.

Paulina brings this sense of entitlement to her views about sexual reputations. Like the other girls, Paulina observes, “Guys, they just like to brag about girls. Oh, she does this, and she’s a slut because she slept with this guy, and with this guy, but they don’t say that about guys. It’s okay for them to do it, but when a girl sleeps with two guys it’s wrong, she shouldn’t do that, she automatically becomes a slut.” Other girls in the study note this inequity, but when I ask them why they think this distinction exists, they all say, “I don’t know.” Even as they know that this distinction is unfair, they worry about being called a slut. In contrast, Paulina has an analysis to offer. She has made the link between gender and power: “I think males are kind of dominant, and they feel that they have the power to do whatever they want, that the woman should give in to them.” From this amazing perspective, which is more sophisticated than those of many adult women, she can explain why she has made a conscious choice not only to ignore but to defy what she

realizes is a form of social control over her sexuality. And she puts this analysis to work in her own life. Even when in platonic friend- ships with boys, she has had to contend with knowing looks and assumptions that all relationships with boys are sexual. Paulina understands that what she actually does or even says does not mat- ter, that anyone can say anything they want about her: “I just real- ized that they’re gonna talk anyways, that it doesn’t make, even if you say a word to somebody, they’re still gonna talk, they’re gonna still make up something.” She also realizes that for this threat, which so often has nothing to do with her actual behavior, to work she has to care. To dissipate this control on her sexuality, Paulina— unlike Trisha and Inez, who also understand that such talk is beyond their control—has “just stopped caring.” She refuses to let fear of this label interfere with her right to choose with whom and what sorts of relationships she will have. Like Barbara, Paulina also refuses to participate in enforcing this inequity. She does not shun girls who get called sluts and stays friends with girls who have bad reputations, despite the personal consequences: “I don’t care what they are, they’re my friend, but it doesn’t always get accepted in the community, and if I’m friends with that person, they’re looking like, oh she’s probably the same way. They just assume it, they don’t know me, but because somebody does something that obviously I must too.”