Dirty Little Secrets (3 page)

I interviewed approximately seventy-five American volunteers who had originally emailed me after reading
Loose Girl.
¹⁰
I do not claim by any stretch of the imagination to present scientific findings. These are qualitative stories from real girls who believed in this project and understood that by sharing their stories they could potentially help other girls out there who struggle with similar feelings and behaviors. Some are still teenagers, but others are older and either still act out or have learned to stop. These girls come from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Most are white, but about 15 percent are black, Asian American, Hispanic, and biracial. Some call their mothers their best friends. Some have never met their fathers. Some have happily married parents and eat dinner with their families at the same time each night. Some have been raped. Some got pregnant. Some have been treated for STDs. All of them have carried shame about their behavior at one time or another, and all of them have felt alone. Not one felt there were any guidelines out there to help them move out of this behavior. This book answers that need.

All of the girls and women I interviewed have been given pseudonyms to protect their privacy. In an ideal world, they would be able to claim their stories without needing confidentiality. But unfortunately, girls who talk about their sexual experiences often get bullied and ostracized. In my mind, this is more evidence of our need for these conversations, more evidence of how badly we need to normalize sexual desire and behavior among adolescent girls.

This book has two purposes. First, I want to simply open a discussion that aims to identify girls’ sexual experiences in our culture, how they develop as sexual creatures inside a culture that largely holds the reins on what that means. I aim to help readers understand how girls head into adolescence as loose girls, how they often wind up using male attention and promiscuity as a way to feel worthwhile, and how that experience gets reinforced once it is under way. Second, I hope to provide some suggestions for helping girls find their way out of this negative experience with promiscuity and for protecting girls from using sex in this way in the first place.

With that intention, the book is split into two parts—identifying the loose girl experience and helping girls gain power over their sexual lives. At the beginning of each chapter, I include a quote from the girls and women who have contacted me about their own sexual experiences.

In chapter 1, I examine girlhood, from puberty on, from a sexual perspective. Here girls discuss how their identities are tied up with how teenage boys view them and how they think of themselves in relation to other people. This includes the notion that girls must measure up to a certain physical standard to be worthwhile, how they can assess that measure on the basis of male attention, and how impossible it is for a girl to ever feel that she is good enough as she is. Chapter 1 also examines the ways in which female adolescent development is perfectly poised for those sorts of belief. It briefly discusses the ways this belief has remained relatively constant throughout much of our history, and is, in this way, interwoven with the female identity, even as so many other strides have been made for women over time.

Then we’ll delve into boys and discuss just what it is about them that makes them so beautiful, so free, and always so unattainable. Chapter 2 explores the fantasy that our culture builds about boys and how that gets tangled up with girls’ beliefs about them. We’ll look at how those fantasies get wound up with the idea that boys will free us from that particularly female belief that we aren’t good enough as we are.

In chapter 3, we’ll dive into that minefield that is teenage girls and sex. It is one of our long-standing taboos. And yet, teenage girls have sex. They have sexual desires and curiosity. They experiment. They have fantasies. Usually when we discuss teenage girls and sex, though, we do so in prescribed, limited ways. Girls are virgins, sluts, or empowered. In this chapter, I explore—with the help of the girls I interview and existing literature—how girls see themselves in relation to these archetypes. Together we find that they don’t often fit these constrictions, and yet because of these archetypes, they feel voiceless, shamed, and alone.

Much of the research out there suggests that, for girls to have a healthy relationship to sex, they must have a healthy relationship with their mothers. Through interviews with girls and the current literature, chapter 4 examines the ways in which severed intimacy with mothers both does and doesn’t contribute to promiscuous behavior. We’ll also discuss the issue of mothers modeling attention-needing behavior from men, and how that influences girls’ behavior as well.

Most people assume that a girl’s relationship with her father determines her future with boys and men. In chapter 5, we will examine whether, and in what capacity, this has been true for girls. This examination includes fathers’ behavior with women, their direct and/or indirect sexualizing of girls, and their ability to show appropriate attention to their daughters.

In chapter 6, we discuss other ways girls harm themselves in conjunction with promiscuity, such as alcohol, drugs, cutting, and eating disorders. How do these behaviors interact with promiscuity, and in what ways are they part and parcel of the same thing? We also look at the prevalence of depression and other mood disorders with promiscuous behavior.

Sex, rape, and losing virginity is chapter 7’s focus. As we’ve discussed, teenage girls
do
have sexual desire and curiosity. Is it possible to build a society in which we can allow them to experiment sexually, to make their own choices regarding sex, without being tunneled into the archetypes available to them?

One of the challenges tied up with that question is rape. We tend to think of rape as a black-and-white issue—you either are or aren’t the victim of rape. You either say yes or no. But the concept can become blurry when a girl acts out promiscuously because of low self-esteem or because she so often feels violated even when she consents. Rape is legally and clearly defined, of course, but the sense of violation many loose girls experience can have long-lasting emotional effects that are similar to the consequences of rape.

Another challenge is the fantasy world we apply to sex, particularly for adolescent girls. To lose her virginity, a girl must be in love. It will be the most magical, eventful night of her life. Much too often girls get drunk to lose their virginity so that they will have an excuse later, so they won’t have to take on the aura of a girl who chooses sex. Through interviews with girls, I examine these various issues and how, with them, we might build new avenues for girls’ sexual choices.

In chapter 8, we’ll look at the brave new world of dating. It was the 1980s and 1990s when I was living out the scenes that I would later share in
Loose Girl.
Computers were just beginning to enter our culture. No one I knew used a cellular phone. And yet I managed to get myself into trouble with boys again and again. We’ll examine how things are different now and what those differences mean in terms of promiscuous behavior. We’ll also explore the dangers that may come up when a girl pursues male attention, and the newer, more complex venues for this danger to play out today.

In part 2, we’ll look at a few ways that girls can gain power. Too often we assume that younger girls act out sexually but learn to control their impulses and ultimately find intimacy when they mature into women. The more common truth is that girls carry these struggles into adulthood. In chapter 9, we’ll hear stories from women who still feel addicted to that attention from men.

In chapter 10, we’ll explore various ways girls have come to new and better places with promiscuity and with their need for male attention, and how we can help them make those changes. We’ll also look at those who haven’t been able to change and the dangers involved in that inability to change, and we’ll consider the possibility that change is only partially possible and depends on the particular situation of the person trying to make that change.

Ultimately, if we are to make true change for girls, we also need to transform our culture away from one that positions girls as sexual objects and only allows particular archetypal figures for girls engaging in sexual activity. Chapter 11 explores how girls might take the lead on that change, including through transformation of our sex education programs.

My hope is that women young and old, parents, therapists, and school administrators, will see this book as an opening, a break in the silence surrounding teenage girls and sex.

PART ONE

THE LOOSE GIRL

Chapter 1

GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS

Female Sexual Development

As years went by sex became exactly what I wished to win, because it told me that I was valuable and beautiful, and those things were so important to me
.

W
hen Faith was eleven years old, she went with her family to the community swimming pool like she had each summer. Every summer prior, she had pushed through those gates, pulled off her outerwear, and jumped right into the deep end. She prided herself on her back dives and her handstands and the fact that she could swim underwater from one end of the pool to the other without once coming up for air. But this summer, something was different. Faith felt hesitant. She walked more slowly. She was hyperaware of her body, of the small breasts that had ached and pressed beneath her chest during the fall and spring, and of the fact that her inner thighs now touched.

There were boys at the pool. Boys! They had been there every summer, of course. How had she not noticed? The boys didn’t turn to look at her as she walked along the edge of the pool, which suddenly mattered in a terrible way. Was there something wrong with her? Was she ugly? Was she fat? Was she not sexy? Rather than jump right into the pool she lay on a lounge chair and considered how she appeared to the boys who might look at her. She lifted a leg so her thigh fat wouldn’t spread. She left her sunglasses on even though that might make funny tan lines on her face, because she thought she looked good with them on—glamorous, like a movie star. Faith’s mother, concerned, asked why she wasn’t going in the water, but Faith just shrugged. She wasn’t going to tell her mother the real reason—that she felt watched, desperate, both embarrassed that the boys would see her and terrified that they wouldn’t.

Lana, just a little older than Faith, was always an exceptionally pretty girl. Her father, especially, took tremendous pride in her round, blue eyes and blond curls. When she was little, he liked to bring her to the fire station where he worked and show her off to his coworkers. His friends told him he better be careful when she grew up, and he laughed and rolled his eyes, but Lana could tell that he liked that they thought this. She was quite aware of all of this, actually—her father’s admiration of and pride in her looks. And she was equally aware of her mother’s jealousy over the way he treated Lana. From a very young age, she did what she could to be extra pretty. She smiled sweetly. She spoke politely to her father’s friends, answering all their questions.

When she started puberty at ten years old, though, her father distanced himself. It was subtle, but it was clear: where once she had been her father’s daughter, now she was handed off to her mother. Lana continued to do everything she could to be pretty, and—following cultural guidelines—sexy. She wore shirts that showed off her young breasts. She wore skirts that exposed lots of leg. She wore makeup and nail polish and perfume. Her mother felt she was out of control. Her father became stricter and told her she needed to focus on her schoolwork, not boys, which only made Lana feel betrayed.

So, at the young age of twelve, Lana began to pursue boys. She let them touch her however they wanted. She gave blow jobs regularly. She worked her way through the boys at school. At the same time, she grew withdrawn and depressed. She fought with her parents. She started bringing in bad grades. One day her mother said to her, “Where did my Lana go? I don’t even know who you are anymore.” Lana didn’t know who she was anymore, either.

Before girls become women, they are whole, energized, excited. They take on the world without hesitation. They are their own directors, in charge of their lives. But then things almost always change. Mary Pipher famously described this seismic shift that comes about as girls enter puberty. She writes, “Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle.”
¹
As girls enter adolescence, they also enter another culture, one in which how they appear to others becomes how they exist. “Girls stop being and start seeming,” Pipher notes, quoting Simone de Beauvoir.
²

Sally Mann, my favorite photographer, captures this transitional time in her collection
At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women
. In each photograph, girls are on the cusp of something. They are both children and too knowing. In some, it is obvious by the ways they hold themselves that they know too much. In others, you can see the light that has begun to fade. Ann Beattie writes in her introduction to the images, “Twelve-year-old girls know what brought them to the present moment, but that’s as far as they’ve gotten.”
³
In other words, they fully know themselves, even as they have begun this change, but they can’t see where they are headed.

Boys and girls enter adolescence—they become “tweens”—already amid challenges. They go through their greatest physical and emotional growth since infancy. Puberty—a well-known test for most—comes earlier these days. Although the average age of puberty onset is 10.5, with most girls entering puberty between the age of 8 and 13, there is evidence that this age is dropping.
⁴
In 1997, a landmark study of approximately seventeen thousand girls found that 15 percent of Caucasian girls and 50 percent of black girls already started to show signs of puberty by age 8.
⁵
More recent research suggests an even further drop to age 7. A fifteen-year study out of Denmark published in 2009 determined that the average age of breast development for girls has dropped a full year—from 10.88 years to 9.86 years.
⁶