Dirty Little Secrets (14 page)

Because it is so socially unacceptable for a girl to want sex outside marriage, she will often create fantasies around losing her virginity, such as believing that she is in love or that her relationship with a boy matters much more than it actually does. According to a series of surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation and
Seventeen
magazine, 50 percent of girls ages 15–17 believed that they would marry their first sexual partner.
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While boys get the luxury of just trying their damndest to get laid for the first time (laden with their own cultural pressures about losing virginity, of course), girls have to devise rituals around it. They must be in love, or they must do it after a romantic night at the prom. They have to wait for the timing, the mood, the meaning, and the guy to be just right. Some girls tire of this eventually. If things don’t line up the way they planned, they wind up just getting it over with. The truth about the first time is that 23.4 percent of first sex experiences are one-night stands, and about two-thirds of U.S. teenagers who’ve had sex wish they’d waited longer. At the same time, 26 percent of teens think it’s embarrassing to admit they’re virgins, and more than half believe that their peers think that having sex by fifteen is socially acceptable. Most believe that their friends have already done it, even when they haven’t.
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So why do girls lose their virginity? Most do so because they are simply curious; they want to know what it’s like, and they want to know if they will change in some essential way. So much hoopla surrounds girls and sex that one can see how they would believe that they might be changed. But often that belief leads to disappointment or deflation.

Lola lost her virginity because, she said, she wanted to. She was dating a guy a grade older than her, and her friends were dating his friends. Her friends had already started having sex, so she wanted to, too. Her biggest fear was that her boyfriend would decide he could just find someone else who would have sex with him if she didn’t. So, one night at his house while his parents were downstairs, they had sex.

She made him light a candle first—some small part of the romance she figured she needed to not judge herself later. It was, in fact, a detail she always included when she told friends her story about losing it, hoping they wouldn’t judge her, too. It was quick, she told me. He used a condom. She didn’t feel much pain or see any blood, which had happened to a few of her friends. Then it was done. Afterward, she went to the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror thinking,
You’re not a virgin, you’re not a virgin, you’re not a virgin
. But she didn’t feel any different. Lola had it easy in some ways. She knew she wanted to lose her virginity, and she just happened to be seeing someone who—even though she may not have been in love with him, and he with her—was kind to her and responsible enough to put on a condom.

Lola’s story is probably no more typical than a different sort of first time, one where the girl is date-raped, or pressured into it, or drunk. Alcohol is a common gateway to lost virginity, and although some wake up the next day upset with themselves that they got drunk and went all the way, others have confessed to me that they got drunk for exactly that reason.

Nikki told me she got drunk one night because she wanted to lose her virginity. Later on, she wound up puking in the bushes outside her friend’s house, but she said there was no other way she could do it without her peers thinking she was a slut. She didn’t have a boyfriend, but there was a guy she found attractive, a guy she knew wouldn’t go out with her but would definitely have sex with her if she said that’s what she wanted. So, she did exactly that. She got drunk enough to go right up to him and say, “I want you.” They went upstairs to a bedroom, and she lost her virginity to him. The next day, her friends felt sorry for her that she been taken advantage of. They supported her as a victim. I was the only one, she said, who knew the truth.

In chapter 1, we examined the idea that girls tend to associate sexual desire with being desired. A curious twist to the disallowance of desire is that in our culture, girls are permitted to want sex if love accompanies it. They cannot want sex without it, lest they be sluts. I’ve heard often from girls that their initial masturbatory experiences involved stories about boys wanting them—her hand on her crotch was a boy’s hand, a boy who tenderly loved her as he also enlivened her sexual arousal—whereas boys’ stories of first masturbations usually include images, something they saw, or something they might do to someone else.

Because of this need for real love to be involved, sex among teenage girls often “just happens.” They get drunk and black out. They dissociate from their bodies. Alcohol is an easy out, a way not to take responsibility for one’s actions, sexual or not, boy or girl. People say, “I was drinking—I didn’t know what was happening,” or “I have no control over myself when I’m drunk, so if I did it, it was the alcohol, not me, making the choice.” Alcohol has long been a regular gateway drug to sex. Often, boys take advantage of drunk girls, thinking that the drunkenness gives them license.

But many girls, like Nikki, admit that they get drunk to loosen up sexually. They get drunk because a drunk girl doesn’t know what she was doing and therefore can’t be a slut. In my interviews, many let me know that they used alcohol often as a sort of lubrication, as a way to open themselves more easily for boys’ passes. One noted, “If I could blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-alcohol [referring to a Jamie Foxx song] I could get away with anything I secretly really wanted with a guy.”

Jessica told me that when she was as young as twelve, she started drinking because she was unhappy with herself. It was a way to be someone else, she said. Someone who could hang out with friends and not constantly compare herself to them, who could be around boys she liked and not feel fat or ugly or unappealing. Pretty quickly, too, she learned she could be flirtatious and open with boys in a way that got her attention, which turned quickly to sex. She liked the attention and the sex. She liked finally feeling like she could attract boys, like she was comfortable in her skin. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the way she was treated the next week in school. Everyone knew. She was called a “whore” and a “slut.” Friends started excluding her. At first, she became depressed. She drank more. She had more sex, just trying to feel better. One morning, a friend who hadn’t deserted her said, “Jess, you’ve got to stop drinking. It makes you do stuff with boys, and that’s why everyone’s being so mean to you.” Her statement was like a lightbulb for Jessica: “It was the alcohol. She could say it was the alcohol.”

And sure enough, the next time someone made a mean comment about her being a slut, she laughed and said, “I’ve got to stop drinking! I have no idea what I’m doing when I do. Cuervo is making me a slut.” The girl, who had once been her friend, laughed too, and over time they were friends again. Jessica learned the powerful lesson that it is OK to be sexually active with boys if you’re too drunk to have chosen to do so.

Sometimes, too, girls find ways to dissociate without alcohol. A young woman told me about her first time with a stranger twice her age, a man she met on the Internet. “He came over one night and he popped my cherry. I was so scared, but big girls, mature girls can’t be scared, so I blacked out. I completely blacked out.” Another said, “I can’t even remember the things I do with boys. It’s like the time disappears. Is that weird?”

Maybe girls want to have sex. Maybe they want to lose their virginities. Maybe they even just want to be sexual beings. But without a culturally acceptable avenue to act in such a way, they often feel they have to be blank—not there—in the process.

Drunk, they can avoid the emotions that come along with the cultural weight of having sex for the first time, and they only have to feel bad about it the next day, when it is too late and the deed is done. Girls rarely feel in charge of their own desire when it comes to sex, and certainly this starts with their first time. It’s easy to see why girls might revert to choices they later regret, and it’s easy to see why they often don’t know what it would even mean to feel “ready.”

Some may wonder, then, whether I think there is an age or developmental passage at which point I think a girl is officially “ready.” But the answer to whether a girl is ready to have sex is entirely individual. Judith Levine, in
Harmful to Minors,
shares one of my favorite stories: a thirteen-year-old girl asks her mother how she would know when she was ready. Her mother replied, “When you want it so much that you feel you can’t not have it.” She went on to note that sex changes the way you feel about the other person, and that once you do it with that person, you can’t undo it or unfeel what you felt.
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This mother honored her daughter as a sexual being. She told her to listen to her own desire but also to recognize that there are emotional consequences to sex. If only all teenage girls could receive the same advice about losing their virginities, my guess is that a lot more girls would feel in control of their sexual lives.

NO—THE MANY FACES OF VIOLATION

Jennae was raped during Hurricane Katrina. While the rest of the country was terrified about the children and the dogs and the levees and the homes and all the people lost, Jennae experienced her own, very personal devastation. It was easy, sure, because no one was looking. It was easy because everyone’s eyes were glued to the television, or making plans to get out, or gathering in the Superdome. It was easy because Jennae just lay there, unsure what else to do. No one was around. She didn’t think anyone would care. She had already been called a slut at school. She had already had sex with seven guys, the fourth being her boyfriend’s best friend, who she hadn’t really wanted to have sex with, but he came into her bed one night, and she didn’t know how to say no. That was a violation, too, of course, but Jennae would say it wasn’t. Or she wasn’t sure. Because every guy she slept with she sort of wanted to, or she liked the attention, and a few she really wanted to, so she wasn’t sure how to separate the two—rape and not rape, violation and not violation.

But this time, it was surely rape, because she is almost sure she said not to. She’s almost sure she tried to push him off. She can’t be sure. They all run together sometimes—the one she really liked, the one she didn’t know if she liked but thought she could, the one she definitely didn’t want to have sex with. They had all led up to this moment for Jennae. The boy had come by because she hadn’t evacuated with her family because she had been fighting with them, and she had said she could handle things herself. He wasn’t violent, but he was intentional, forceful. He didn’t even try to kiss her. He was from her school. He knew she was a slut. And with her panties off, she saw that she couldn’t really handle herself. She knew in that moment, her head to the side so she wouldn’t see his face, that she wouldn’t handle anything again.

Jennae’s story is heartbreaking, and not just because she was raped. It’s heartbreaking because violation for her, like so many other girls, was a thing without clear outlines. The sex she had with boys before her rapist was also violating—maybe. The lines remain unclear because how she felt regarding sex, her intention, what she wanted and didn’t want, have all long been blurry. Jennae is typical in this way. Like any other girl, she received all the confusing messages about sex. She had normal sexual desire. She got something from sexual attention that was both easy to get and hard to get elsewhere.

Danita told me about how she came to be a loose girl. A neighbor boy molested her when she was eight, and ever since then, she has felt unable to connect in the ways she wants with a boy. She said, “I like sex. Who doesn’t like sex? But it’s like every time I try to be close with a guy, I feel like he wants to push me where I don’t want to go. I don’t want to tell them I was raped. It’s, I don’t know, a turn-off for most guys. So usually I just go along with things, even when I’m not that into it.” When Danita met someone she really liked and got into a relationship with him, she stopped wanting to have sex. She didn’t want him to touch her, which confused her. She said, “After all those times I had sex, I couldn’t understand why I would suddenly feel sickened by sex with someone I wanted to be with.”

These experiences of having sex when you only sort of want to, or even don’t want to, is one of the defining qualities of loose-girl behavior. We have sex because we want something from it that has nothing to do with the sex itself—in Danita’s case, it’s the assurance that the guy will still want her, that he won’t go away. It’s so hard to say no when you feel like a boy’s desire for you means so much about you, when you believe it will make you worthwhile. Add to this the fact that boys’ sexual aggression is generally considered a normal part of their sexual development—boys will be boys, and they can’t help themselves. The end result is usually a sense of violation, much like the violation a person feels after rape. Once Danita got comfortable and safe with a man, her body finally reacted to that violation. She shut down.

Beatrice asked me outright how to say no. She felt like she needed a script—a polite set of lines she could follow each time—so she would stop having sex with men she didn’t want to have sex with simply because they wanted her to. We came up with a few responses she could feel comfortable with, including white lies about why she couldn’t: “I have to get up early tomorrow,” “I’m not feeling well,” “I have a boyfriend.” Some may judge her for the white lies. People may think Beatrice should simply say, “I don’t want to” and leave it at that. Of course she should be able to do that, but she didn’t feel ready. Saying “I don’t want to” meant they wouldn’t try again. It meant she would have to let go of the idea that their wanting her mattered in a larger way. She wasn’t at a stage in her recovery where she could do that yet.