Read Dirty Little Secrets Online
Authors: Kerry Cohen
One of the activities I like to do with girls is to have them find at least five images in their daily lives that give them a message about their sexual identities. The girls come back to me with many more than five images. They have magazines and phrases scribbled down from bathroom stalls. They have television shows and older men checking them out from their cars. They’ve got billboards and bus boards and posters. One had porn magazines she found in her brother’s closet. They come back angry. Some come back nonplussed, perhaps desensitized to our hypersexualized culture. Then we discuss what the messages mean and who the girls want to be in the world. They tell me their truths about the boys they like and what they’ve done and how it made them feel—the good stuff and the bad. And I listen, which is all they want.
If parents could do this for their girls, if they support their girls as they question the culture they live in, they will help them to be a little stronger against those waves. My hope is that with this kind of support, mothers like Jo, who we met at the beginning of this chapter, will have daughters who are much more powerful in the world than their mothers felt they were as teens.
Recently, I received an email from a woman who didn’t want me to know her name. She described her years of loose-girl behavior and how no one knows. She wrote, “I’ve spent my whole life hiding from the world, from myself. At this point I don’t know who I am or what I want. I’m lost…I wish we could talk honestly about ourselves, but loose girls can’t do that. The shame is eating me alive.” This brave woman’s pain is not that she had sex. Her pain comes from feeling silenced, from living an unnecessarily unspeakable life.
My hope is that this book begins some movement toward cracking that silence, toward the conversations we need to have with one another, and toward the transformation we need in our culture to change the direction teen girls have been herded into for so long. We
must
have these conversations. We must speak honestly. We must be louder.
Mostly, we have to tell our stories, because in our stories lie salvation for other girls and women. It seems so cliché—stories save lives. But that’s true. It was a story that laid the foundation for my own healing. I was a senior in high school, seventeen years old, and I took an elective English class called Minority Voices. We read stories about teenage girls who felt lonely, exiled, confused about who they were, and my whole world broke open: I wasn’t alone. There were others out there who felt what I felt. There were others expressing what I couldn’t yet express. This changed everything for me. Not yet, not in a tangible way. I was still going to hurt myself again and again. I was still going to let every crush I had, every boy who looked my way, consume my brain. I was still going to choose boys over self-enhancement. But those stories were there, in the back of my mind. They lingered. They made me want to write. And eventually, I found a way to write my own story, hoping a girl would one day read it and see herself, would keep my story in the back of her mind, and would one day tell her story, too—all these stories in a round, all these stories breaking the silence.
PART THREE
RESOURCES
APPENDIX
FOR SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS
Discussion Questions
SUGGESTED SEX-EDUCATION EXERCISES
Girls Will Be Girls
Ms. X
Students write questions for a teen sex-advice column. They can be real questions they have or questions they would expect to see in such a column. Put the questions into a hat and have them each choose one. Then, they work in twos to answer each question as though they were Ms. X. Finally, discuss their Ms. X answers as a class, encouraging them to pay attention to the question, What about girls’ desire?
SUGGESTED TRAINING CURRICULUM FOR SCHOOL COUNSELORS DEALING WITH SEX AND RELATIONSHIP ISSUES
FOR PARENTS AND CARETAKERS
Tips for Talking about Sex with Your Teenage Girls
FOR COUNSELORS AND THERAPISTS AND SELF-HELP FOR POTENTIAL LOOSE GIRLS
Loose-Girl Behavior Assessment
If you answered yes to at least half (five) of these questions, you likely have loose-girl behavior.
CRITERIA FOR SEX AND LOVE ADDICTION
Addiction experts have identified the following criteria. If you answer yes to all or most of these, you likely have addictive romantic behavior.
The Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous website has a forty-question self-assessment to determine whether you have the signs of sex and love addiction (
www.slaafws.org/download/core-files/The_40_Questions_of_SLAA.pdf
).
—From Kelly McDaniel,
Ready to Heal: Women Facing Love, Sex, and Relationship Addiction
(Carefree, AZ: Gentle Path Press, 2008), 31–32.
WORKSHEETS AND EXERCISES
The following provides cognitive-behavioral approaches to build awareness about and to treat loose-girl behavior.
Build Awareness
When a boy loves me, that means I am _______________.
When I don’t have a boy wanting me, I believe I am _______________.
When I am needy, I do _______________, and believe I am _______________.
Hold on to the first list set below, and after every encounter with a boy, rewrite a new list set based on what happened. Compare the lists to see what you want versus what you actually get.
When I engage sexually with a boy, I want most
1. for example, to believe I’m desirable
2.
3.
4.
5.
When I engage sexually with a boy, I actually get
1. for example, momentary physical attention
2.
3.
4.
5.
Tracking Triggers
Use the following chart to track events that trigger loose-girl behavior:
With your therapist, review what you might have done differently in each situation.
Tracking Self-Harming Thoughts
Use the following chart to track thoughts that trigger loose-girl behavior:
With your therapist, determine how your false beliefs set off loose-girl behavior and how you might better deal with those damaging thoughts.