Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (25 page)

light important aspects of the girls’ experiences. For instance, another approach would be to read for Hollway’s (1989) “have/ hold discourse,” in which women are the subjects in that “it is women who want and need commitment” (p. 64). Hollway’s dis- tinction between discursive analyses and psychoanalytic interpreta- tions would also be an important avenue to explore in developing further the Listening Guide technique I outline here.

The technique I used enabled me to braid together the two per- spectives or interpretive lenses that anchor these analyses: (1) the individual developmental theory that girls’ experiences with their desire are highly contextualized by their individual circumstances and (2) Adrienne Rich’s feminist theory of how female sexuality is organized by the institution of heterosexuality. These perspectives led me to identify specific voices expressing how each participant speaks about herself (by listening for the self) and how she speaks about her desire (by listening for two desire voices and a voice of the body). I am among the first researchers to have used this method, about which I have already written extensively (Tolman, 1994a, b, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001; Tolman & Szalacha, 1999), and I am actively involved in broadening its use for a larger range of research questions about personal experience.

Listening for these voices was fruitful for most of the narratives told by these girls. Most narratives contained erotic and response voices that were not difficult to discern; and when these voices were absent from a narrative in which a girl is describing an experi- ence of sexual desire, what was missing proved informative. The prevalence of these voices across different stories suggests to me that they reveal aspects of the experience of desire that are viable for these girls. The descriptions of the voices that I offer are far from complete or all-inclusive, however.

The matter of reliability of “coding” voices is a complex one for this kind of qualitative analysis. Calculating “agreement,” such

as the relative percentage of words that two analysts underlined separately, is neither feasible nor sensible given the epistemology of this approach to research. Such precise quantification assumes a single, objective, replicable truth that can be identified in precisely the same manner by any two individuals. In qualitative research, the concept of reliability differs somewhat. The practice of inter- pretation is premised on the understanding that different individ- uals will react to and make sense of the same material in various ways. Thus, calculating correlations between two coders’ identifi- cations of precisely the same words is not a meaningful way to determine reliability. Instead, an interpretive process is considered reliable if a second person can follow rather than reproduce what the original coder claims she did in making the interpretation, and then find those claims credible, even if the second coder disagrees with the ultimate interpretation (Maxwell, 1996). To establish this form of reliability, another woman listened to a random sample of these narratives using the same criteria that I did. Following my criteria, she was able to identify the presence of each of the four voices in all of these narratives. We were in solid agreement about which parts of the text could be underlined for each of the voices for which I was listening. Most important, she found my claims about what I heard in listening to each of these four voices credi- ble, that is, she concurred that the claims I made were supported by the evidence I offered for them.

I underlined for the erotic voice when I heard girls describing or signifying (by laughing, breathing sharply, or taking long pauses) strong feelings or representations of strong feelings, such as “I was really sweaty.” I underlined any descriptions of the process of wanting, any instances in which a girl described or revealed an understanding of her own wanting, whether she specifically labeled it as sexual or not. I counted as examples of the erotic voice any time a girl voiced her knowledge of desire, from her own experi-

ence or from other sources, such as observations of others. When I say “knowledge,” I include both conscious and subconscious knowing, that is, I underlined metaphors for the erotic that a girl did not necessarily state was her experience of desire but suggests some kind of knowing about it that she carries in her psyche or body, including any descriptions of her knowledge of how sexual desire operates in herself and others. I also made note of when a girl described knowing the wanting of others as another contour of knowledge of desire. Another aspect of reading for the erotic voice was to focus on the explicitly anti-erotic, the vociferous denial of sexual feelings, which I conceptualize as a part of the erotic voice.

The response voice captured how girls responded or reacted to the desire they felt, what their thoughts, feelings, reactions, and behaviors were in the wake of feeling desire. The response voice expresses girls’ resolutions to the dilemma of desire, and often their perception of it as a dilemma. This voice embeds both con- scious and unconscious responses to desire, at the point of the body (the embodied response), as well as responses that include conscious decision making. In listening for the response voice, I underlined thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that a girl described having in response to her identified experience of desire. I included anything that she identified as contributing to her response to these feelings, such as the presence of others or her fear or concern about the reactions or potential actions of others or herself. For example, I underlined for response Trisha’s explanation of what she does when she sees someone for whom she feels sexual desire: “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.” While I did not distinguish whether a girl’s response to her felt desire was conscious or seemed to “just happen” in the narrative, in the actual reading for the

response voice I did note this aspect of her response in the inter- pretations I made on the worksheets.

After reading each narrative for these voices and transferring the relevant data to the worksheets, I began to construct interpreta- tions of each voice as I had heard it. I engaged in a common quali- tative data analysis practice, looking for patterns in the data by displaying the information gathered in matrices (Miles & Huber- man, 1984). I created two separate matrices: one that organized the data according to each psychological response and one in which I compared the urban girls with the suburban girls. Using these matrices, I identified the patterns I describe and illustrate in the three chapters devoted to the findings of the study (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) and in the discussion of the differences between the urban and the suburban girls (Chapter 6).

In performing this analysis I began to notice a parallel process occurring in myself. This method demands that the listener be sen- sitive to how her own responses may contain information about what is occurring in these research relationships, information that can help a researcher understand what is and is not being said to her. This parallel process can be thought of and has been called a method of analysis (Berg & Smith, 1988). As I heard enactments of real events and took in images of violence, I tracked my own excitement, disappointment, frustration, fear, and loss of pleasure. This strategy often helped me consider an interpretation of girls’ erotic or response voices that otherwise may not have occurred to me. Knowing my own responses also increased my ability to know my own feelings and to consider whether they were providing additional information about a girl’s words or getting in the way of my ability to hear what she was saying to me; by staying attuned to my own feelings, I increased the possibility of hearing what the girls were telling me about their experience and not having my own experience supplant their words.

As a white, middle-class woman listening to girls who were poor, working class, black, and Latina, I tried to embrace what Ruth Frankenberg has called a “white anti-racist standpoint” (1993, p. 265), acknowledging the obvious limits on my ability to do so. I strove to be actively conscious of the ways in which these girls’ sexuality has been framed within their particular cultural contexts as well as particularly maligned by the dominant white, middle-class culture, and I consulted adult women from their racial and ethnic groups about my questions and experiences in interviews, as well as my interpretations of these girls’ narratives. In the same vein, I worked to resist turning “white” and “middle class” into monolithic experiences (Fine, Powell, & Wong, 1997). The first pass through the narrative, the listener’s response, pro- vides a venue for attending to these concerns.

NOTES

1. This estimate is based on information from 1997; in the previous few years, the rate of girls’ sexual activity (defined as ever having had sex, as if they had been sexually “activated”) had dipped slightly, to below 50 percent. What is on the rise is protected sex (Singh & Darroch, 1999), though there is considerable debate about how to account for substantially lower rates of pregnancy.
   

2. Tolman, 1994a. One group at the Population Research Center at the University of North Carolina has done research to determine whether differentials in hormonal levels are associated with or even cause girls’ sexual activity and motivations (Smith & Udry, 1985; Udry, 1993; Halpern, Udry, & Suchindran, 1997; see also Finkelstein et al., 1998). To do so, they utilized a scale of “sexual ‘turn on’ ” to assess frequency of arousal. The complexities that have recently surfaced about female reports of desire and arousal (i.e., Basson, 2000; Rosen et al., 2000) indicate that such measures may not capture female sexuality espe- cially effectively.
   

3. According to Tijaden & Thoennes, 1998, of women disclosing rape, 22 percent were under age twelve when they were first raped, and 32 per- cent were between twelve and seventeen years of age.
   

4. In the last few years more studies on boys’ sexual activity have been conducted in response to concern about boys’ risk of contracting HIV (i.e., Gates & Sonenstein, 2000). The work of Joseph Pleck and
   

   217
   

   colleagues is also an important addition (i.e., Pleck, Sonenstein, & Ku, 1994a, 1994b). My group has recently begun to include boys in our research program, in which we conceptualize adolescent sexuality more broadly than frequency and prevalence of intercourse (i.e., Tol- man et al., 2002; Tolman et al., in press).
   

5. In a similar vein, Wendy Hollway (1989) has identified “male sexual drive discourse” as constitutive of adult male sexuality. The question of the relative strength of male and female sexual desire, a question that dominates much sex research, is partially responsible. The study of whether or not, or to what extent, girls and women have biologi- cally driven sexual desire has a long history. This debate has played out in feminist scholarship (i.e., Vance, 1984; Tiefer, 1995) and among sex researchers (i.e., Wallen, 1990; Andersen & Cyranowski, 1995). The measurement of levels of testosterone as the only relevant hormone underpinning female sexual desire is challenged by recent research on the possible importance of the adrenal hormone oxytocin (Car- michael et al., 1994) and of estrogen (Stanislaw & Rice, 1988), as well as of adrenal androgens in initial sexual interest in adolescence (McClintock & Herdt, 1996). In the case of adolescent sexuality, we find slippage from an argument about whose libido is strongest to the obfuscation of girls’ embodied desire altogether.
   

6. This perspective has its roots in evolutionary biology. However, recent work suggests that this is only one theory of the role of sexuality in human evolution, and that there is another way of viewing primate behavior and imagining early human behavior that positions females as having active sexuality (i.e., Hrdy, 1981; Rabinowitz & Vallian, 1999).
   

7. The importance of the denial of homosexuality in men, and the ways in which violence against girls and women serves this denial, have been recently articulated in Tolman et al., 2002.
   

8. I am not referring to the process of repression, that is, unconscious pro- cesses of “exiling” desire; rather, I refer to dissociation (see Chapter 3).
   

9. Karin Martin (1996) has criticized this research for not including boys. However, the goal was not to compare male and female adoles- cent sexual experiences but to develop a deep understanding of girls’ sexuality.
   

1. voices of desire
   

   1. The range in age is due to the relatively older age of some of the urban girls, who had been held back one or more grades for various reasons, and to the inclusion of two sophomore girls from a support group for sexual minority youth. These data were collected in 1991. Well aware that many years have passed since I collected these desire narratives, I have continued doing research on female adolescent sexuality over the last decade, including interviews with girls the same age about their relationships and sexuality, supported by the Ford Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the National Institute of Child Health and Development. There is a remarkable consistency between the way the girls in this study talked about their sexual experiences and the way the girls who are participants in my current research program do. The greatest difference is that current participants are more likely to acknowledge their concern about risk of HIV when asked, although they do not identify this possibility spontaneously (Tolman, 1999). The consistency I have observed reflects that found in large-scale sex- ual behavior surveys, such as the General Social Survey, over the same time period (Michael, 2001).
      

   2. In addition, random selection provided an opportunity to conduct quantitative analyses at a later time (see Tolman & Szalacha, 1999; see also Chapter 6). Another option would have been to use a purposive sampling technique.
      

   3. I used a clustered sampling technique in the suburban sample; race and ethnicity were identified by school personnel on rosters of the entire class of junior girls.
      

   4. This strategy was designed to provide girls both the opportunity and the motivation to engage with their parents about participation in the study, to create space for “interruptions” in silences that girls may have been dealing with at home.
      

   5. Interestingly, the one study in which girls’ desire had been touched upon (Fine, 1988) had included only urban girls.
      

   6. In fact, thirty-one girls were interviewed for this study; unfortunately, technical difficulties with the audiotape of one of the suburban girls, Julia, made it impossible to include her in the analyses across the girls
      

      in the study. I was still able to discern some of the themes and qualities in her desire narratives.
      

   7. This rate is precisely what would be expected, on the basis of national statistics which indicate that a quarter to a third of all women experi- ence sexual abuse by the time they are eighteen years old (Benson, 1990; Finkelhor & Dziuba-Leatherman, 1994).
      

   8. Muehlenhard & Rogers (1998), in a study of token resistance to sex, found that participants’ written narratives reflected a chasm between what the researchers meant by token resistance and how the partici- pants interpreted it, thus raising doubts about years of survey research on this topic. The interview provides an opportunity to clarify what the researcher means and how the participant is making sense of the questions, and how well each is understanding the other.
      

   9. Billig, 1997. A recent innovation of this method is to videotape girls, to incorporate their body language into the interpretive process (Brown, 2001). However, given the sensitive topic and the overall design of this study, which entailed one interview with each girl, this option was not viable.
      

   10. To preserve the girls’ confidentiality, I have changed most recognizable characteristics and any specific details that could reveal their identi- ties. I did not change their racial or ethnic identities, or their sexual orientation. In some cases, specific physical qualities or specific cir- cumstances were crucial for understanding the girls’ narratives; in such cases, I changed everything I could to disguise the girls, such as what they were wearing during the interview, what their families did for a living, or what activities they pursued.
       

   11. I have focused on this difference in my other publications derived from these data (see Tolman, 1994a, b, 1996; Tolman & Higgins, 1996; Tolman & Szalacha, 1999).
       

   12. One could also frame these ways of talking about desire as discourses of sexual subjectivity (see Phillips, 2000).
       

2. sounds of silence
   

   1. It is common for women not to remember experiences of childhood sexual abuse until they are in their thirties or forties.
      

   2. Kelly, 1991. It has also been observed that the threat of danger can be experienced as exciting in a culture that eroticizes danger (Griffin, 1981; Phillips, 2000), and there has been a great deal of dissent within the feminist community about how to deal with the role of violence in female sexuality (see Vance, 1984). Some feminists have argued that controlled violence in the context of sadomasochistic relationships offers a kind of antidote to feeling out of control in society at large (Califa, 1989), while others believe that such desires of women are a result of false consciousness, a profound internalization of patriarchy that produces “unfemale” desires (MacKinnon, 1989). This argument about the nature of female sexual desire and how it relates to patri- archy has divided the feminist community, producing “the sex wars” of the 1980s, premised on different conceptions of female desire as “naturally” not aggressive or dominant and thus corrupted by patri- archy or as whatever women desire (Snitow, Stansell, & Thompson, 1983; Sawicki, 1988).
      

   3. This feeling of a constant threat of violence is experienced by gay men, transvestites, and transgendered people, who violate the norms of compulsory heterosexuality and thereby often are threatened with violence or actually attacked (Herek et al., 1997).
      

   4. I am referring here to dominant cultural (white, middle-class) conven- tions of femininity, and so too are most of the other feminist theorists whose work I cite at this point: Gilligan, 1982; Jordan, 1987; Bartky, 1990; Gilligan, Rogers, & Tolman, 1991; Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Taylor, Gilligan, & Sullivan, 1995; Brown, 1999. Although it is not only impor- tant but crucial to understand how culturally specific femininities con- struct female (and male) sexuality and relationships, and how girls and women negotiate and transform these norms (i.e., Spillers, 1984; Parker et al., 1995; Fine, Roberts, & Weis, 2000; Nichter, 2000), all girls must in some way deal with this particular form of femininity through public institutions such as school (Brown, 1999; Tolman & Porche, 2000).
      

   5. For instance, Freud’s patient Elizabeth von R. suffered paralysis of one of her legs (Breuer & Freud, 1895/1982).
      

   6. This ability soon became lost to him as he elaborated his theories of repression and other psychodynamic processes, as is evidenced in his