Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (2 page)

a sex symbol, consciously turning her body into a commodity, an object of admiration and desire for others, obscuring how or even whether her own desires figure in her willingness to do “whatever keeps me in your arms.” In her memoir
Promiscuities
(1997) Naomi Wolf observed that even today “girls must speak in a world where they are expected to be sexually available but not sexually in charge of themselves” (p. 136; see also Orenstein, 1994). And so the conundrum: while
sexualized images
of adolescent girls are omni- present,
their
sexual feelings are rarely if ever portrayed.

We remain disturbed when forced to face the possibility that girls, too, might be engaged in a process of sexual maturation that involves more than developing breasts and getting their periods. According to current estimates, 65 percent of girls have had sex by the age of eighteen;
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in 1995, 49 percent of girls aged fifteen to nineteen had had sexual intercourse at least once (Abma & Sonen- stein, 2001). However, it is not simply girls’ sexual activity per se that troubles us, since we believe that, for various reasons, girls “give in” to boys’ supposedly relentless demands for sex or that they are intractably bad. It is evidence of their sexual
desire
that is more often than not met with shock, a diagnosis of pathology, and impassioned calls for the imposition of social controls. A dis- tressed mother of a teenage boy wrote to Ann Landers to complain about teenage girls who had telephoned and left a flirtatious mes- sage that unmistakably conveyed their interest in him. The column provoked twenty thousand responses, causing Ms. Landers to comment, “If I’m hearing about it from so many places, then I worry about what’s going on out there ... What this says to me is that a good many young girls really are out of control” (Yoffe, Marszalek, & Selix, 1991). Girls who step out of the bounds of appropriate, controlled female sexuality instigate what has been called a moral panic (Foucault, 1980; Petchesky, 1984; Nathanson, 1991; Jenkins, 2001), a kind of societal nervous breakdown. Con-

sider whether Ann Landers would have published or, more to the point, even received a letter from a concerned mother of an adoles- cent girl complaining that her daughter had received this tele- phone call. Such behavior on the part of boys might be considered rude or even harassing, but what are the chances that such a letter would get this kind of response? While girls may have more degrees of sexual freedom now than in past generations, sexual girls continue to make and get into trouble (Kamen, 2000). If we not only accept but in fact expect healthy adolescent boys to have strong sexual feelings they need to learn how to deal with, why don’t we expect the same of girls?

It is significant that such resistance is identifiable not only at the dinner table and in the media but also in developmental psychol- ogy. When I searched the literature to find out what psychologists knew about adolescent girls’ sexual desire, I found that no one had asked about it. In the many hundreds of studies that have been done to determine what predicts adolescent girls’ sexual behavior, only a handful had identified girls’ sexual desire as a potential fac- tor.
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We tend to conflate adolescent sexuality with risky behavior, to define “sex” only in terms of sexual intercourse without distin- guishing its various component parts, such as sexual feelings and desire, and the different types of behavior that express those feelings. This tendency, an artifact of public policy and funded research geared toward avoiding the risks of sexuality, leads us to single out girls as the receptacle of our concerns. Our fear about girls’ sexual behavior thus conceptualized has understandable roots, since it is still girls who suffer overwhelmingly the physical, social, psycho- logical, and material consequences of unprotected intercourse.

This fear offers a partial explanation for the intensity with which we deny girls’ sexual desire. If girls do not really have sexual feel- ings to explore, then they are necessarily at some level being exploited. And this fear has generated a virtual cottage industry of

research that amounts to a relentless surveillance of female (but not male) adolescent sexual behavior. We maintain careful records of whether girls are using contraception—and now, in the age of AIDS, whether they are successful in asking their partners to use condoms—and how many partners they have had. We have also begun determining how old their partners are and what their abuse history is (newly identified risk factors for bad outcomes of sexual encounters). There is rising alarm about adolescent oral sex (read “fellatio”), with hysterical demands to know who the troubled girls are who engage in this behavior and how often, par- adoxically coupled with the refusal of adults to give consent for their children to report this information so that we would actually know. We chart and follow the pregnancy rate, with inordinate attention to the shifting differentials between girls of different races and ethnicities. There are hundreds of studies in which pre- dictors of “good” and “bad” outcomes of girls’ “sexual decision making” are identified.

It is not difficult to argue that there are palpable dangers associ- ated with adolescent girls’ sexual behavior. For young women, the dangers of pregnancy and early parenting lurk in the shadows of sexual activity. If using no contraceptives, fifteen- to nineteen- year-old girls have a 90 percent chance of becoming pregnant (Harlap, Kost, & Forest, 1991); at any given time three-quarters of adolescent girls who have had sex are at risk of unintended preg- nancy (Kahn, Brindis, & Glei, 1999). Each year one in five sexually active adolescent girls becomes pregnant (Alan Guttmacher Insti- tute, 1999). Although pregnancy rates in the United States are declining, they still rank the highest of any in developed countries (Singh & Darroch, 1999). Adolescents are one of the fastest grow- ing groups at risk for contracting HIV (DiClemente, Hansen, & Ponton, 1996), and adolescent girls may have a higher risk of con- tracting sexually transmitted diseases than do adult females (Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1998).

Additionally, statistics indicate that sexual violence is preva- lent in the lives of all female adolescents. Sexual harassment is pervasive in junior high and high schools: 83 percent of girls re- port having been sexually harassed in school (American Associa- tion of University Women, 2001), and girls are significantly more likely than boys to report being negatively affected by harassment (Bochenek & Brown, 2001). Recent research suggests that one out of five female adolescents has experienced dating or sexual vio- lence during their high school years (Silverman et al., 2001). Half of all rape victims are under the age of eighteen.
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Of girls age six- teen and younger who have had sexual intercourse, 24 percent had involuntary or forced sex; for those fifteen and younger, the figure is 40 percent (Abma, Driscoll, & Moore, 1998; Moore, Driscoll, & Lindberg, 1998). In the most recent findings from the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey of adolescents in the ninth through twelfth grades, 12.5 percent of girls reported having been forced to have sexual intercourse (Centers for Disease Control and Preven- tion, 2000).

Girls have to contend not only with physical consequences but also with social fallout. The so-called Madonna-whore split is sur- prisingly alive and well in the public imagination and in the lives of adolescent girls; even girls who do feel entitled to their own sexual- ity negotiate this label. One fifteen-year-old girl writing on a teen web site, who described herself as “unashamed” about being “sex- ual,” recognized that such behavior by a girl is still frowned upon: “I am a slut... to some people it’s someone who sleeps around, and to others it’s someone who is open about her sexuality. Either way, I guess that’s me” (missclick, September 18, 2000). While some girls may fear being labeled a prude, this moniker is not about their own desire but about their refusal or failure to meet the sexual demands of boys. Though the possibility of being thought a prude may be uncomfortable for some girls (Shalit, 1999), the threat of being branded a slut still looms large for teenage girls

and unmarried women (Lees, 1993; Wyatt, 1994; Tannenbaum, 1999). Some girls and young women do openly resist being placed into these categories (Carlip, 1995; Edut, 1998; Kamen, 2000), but many more girls continue to report living in constant fear of a ruined reputation, although the dynamics underpinning pres- sure on girls to restrain their sexuality are more subtle and variable than in earlier generations (Moore & Snyder, 1994; Kitzinger, 1995; Martin, 1996). Fear of a sullied reputation has a multiplying effect on the physical dangers of sexuality for girls, because girls who use the pill, carry condoms, or ask boys to use condoms are fair game for the label (Holland, Ramazanoglu, & Thomson, 1996; Hillier, Harrison, & Warr, 1998). And so it is not simply physical danger that sexuality poses for teenage girls. To act upon one’s own sexual feelings and desire is still, for girls, to invite the risk of being known as a “bad” girl, a girl who deserves any consequences she suffers, a girl who loses her eligibility for social and legal protec- tions against sexual harm (Tolman & Higgins, 1996). The endur- ing split between “good,” chaste, feminine girls and “bad,” sexual, aberrant girls is a crucial aspect of societal denial of female adoles- cent sexual desire. On the larger canvas of social hierarchies, this categorization is premised not only on girls’ perceived behavior but also on assumptions about their race, ethnicity, and social class (Gibbs, 1985; Caraway, 1991; Fine, Roberts, & Weis, 2000).

These risks are real, pose significant threats to adolescent girls’ health, and must be diminished. But acknowledging that we need to prevent unwanted, unintended, or undesirable pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases, or to eliminate violence against young women or their vulnerability to ruined reputations, does not fully explain our obsessive surveillance of the sexual behavior of adolescent girls. If these risks were our deepest concerns, we would be pouring funds into effective, accessible forms of birth control and protection against diseases, providing comprehensive

sexuality education, widely disseminating information on mastur- bation and mutual masturbation as the safest forms of sexual exploration, declaring “zero tolerance” for sexual violence or the threat of it and for homophobia. And if these risks accounted for all our concerns, we would be conducting many more studies of adolescent boys’ sexuality, since boys too are vulnerable to becom- ing parents, getting sexually transmitted diseases, and being vic- tims of violence.
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An examination of our conception of male adolescent sexual desire sheds light on this tendency to deny girls’ sexuality.
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It is, indeed, a frightening conception. We believe that desire is a demanding physical urge, instinct, or drive, embedded so deeply in the body that it gains a life of its own once ignited. It is impossible to control, absolutely necessary to satisfy (through sexual inter- course), and aggressive to the point of violence. It is the un- stoppable artifact of testosterone overload. In our worst scenarios, we think of desire as a kind of selfish, exploitative monster, as a force that demands its bearer find satisfaction at the expense of or without concern for someone else. Desire is uncivilized. It is all about individual needs and has nothing to do with relation- ships. It is male, and it is masculine. Thus conceived, desire is not only incompatible but at odds with society’s conceptions of femi- ninity, precluding it from being part of the array of feelings and behaviors that we expect from girls who are developing in an acceptable fashion (Bartky, 1990). Given these beliefs, no wonder we think of those first stirrings of adult sexual desire in adoles- cence—either “healthy” boys’ sexual desire or “bad” girls’ sexual desire—as dangerous.

What I have just described and illustrated are
conceptions
rather than definitions of desire, and of male and female adolescent sexu- ality. They are social constructions—cultural beliefs or stories that provide a way for us to make meaning out of our experiences and

give us the sense that these meanings constitute objective facts or reality (Gergen, 1985; Tiefer, 1987). As Richard Parker and John Gagnon (1995) have observed, this epistemological stance diverts us from understanding and researching sexuality as a set of be- haviors, pushing us instead to attend to the cultural norms that produce and give meaning to sexual acts. These organizing cultural stories or “master narratives” are so compelling that most of us come not only to tell them but to live them and feel them to be the “truth” of human experience. This perspective on sexuality is not meant to reject or usurp the place of the body. Rather, researchers have noted how the “material body and its social construction are entwined in complex and contradictory ways which are extremely difficult to disentangle in practice” (Holland et al., 1994, p. 22; see also Cosgrove, 2001). Such a social constructionist perspective, then, while acknowledging a role for hormones in the vicissitudes of desire, shifts the debate about the differences in male and female sexuality from purely physiological explanations (lust) toward the importance of how we make meaning out of our bodily, emo- tional, and relational experiences (desire). Even research that specifically addresses hormonal fluctuations in pubertal develop- ment finds that they are but one contributing factor in adolescent sexual behavior and also that, especially for girls, societal factors outweigh or affect biological ones (Udry, Talbert, & Morris, 1986; Halpern, Udry, & Suchindran, 1997; Halpern, in press). The stories that we do—and do not—tell about normal female adolescent development reflect what Michelle Fine (1988) has called “the missing discourse of desire,” marking our insistence on defining female adolescent sexuality only in terms of disease, victimization, and morality and our avoidance of girls’ own feelings of sexual desire and pleasure. At the heart of the interlocking stories that organize girls’ and boys’ sexuality are the complementary ideas

about the ferocity and omnipresence of male adolescent sexual desire and the utter absence of female adolescent sexual desire.