Dirty Little Secrets (4 page)

Age of menarche, a girl’s first period, does not seem to be lowering, however. In other words, many girls’ secondary sex characteristics—breast development, pubic hair growth, and widening hips—are developing early, but first menstruation, which means ovulation and hence the ability to get pregnant, does not arrive with those secondary sex characteristics. (Researchers theorize that increasing amounts of obesity and estrogen in our environment (via Bisphenol A [BPA], pesticides, compounds in cigarettes, and phthalates) cause the earlier onset, but no studies have been conclusive.)
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Caucasian girls’ average age of menstruation is 12.6, which is not significantly earlier than it was in the 1970s. We do know, though, that black and Mexican American girls’ median age of menarche has always been lower—12.06 for non-Hispanic Blacks and 12.25 for Mexican Americans.
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As I alluded to briefly in the introduction, when adolescence hits, there is also a vast overproduction of brain cells and neuronal connections. It is during the early teen years that kids prune out the connections they don’t use. At the same time, their frontal lobes, which control judgment, logic, and organization, are not yet well developed. New teens have access to most emotions, but they don’t yet have the skills to deal effectively with them.

For girls, these developmental changes are particularly affected by what happens in the environments surrounding them, and most particularly in the ways they are sexualized by our culture. The images that control our understanding of girls are, in fact, so pervasive, such an ordinary part of our lives, that they are almost unseen. To even say that girls are sexualized in our culture verges on not saying anything at all.

Images of womanhood, of who we are supposed to be, are fed to us from infancy—go to any store that sells toys and there is a distinct “girls’ aisle” where everything is pink and tulle and satin. It doesn’t matter that there are also career-themed Barbies, or other dolls and playthings meant to encourage independence. The point is simply that everywhere a girl looks, from the moment she comes out of the womb, but then especially once she reaches adolescence, the media establishes clearly that
it
owns her sense of self.

What we speak of less, though, is how that wave of objectification and those mixed messages—“be sexy but not slutty”—are so strong that girls really don’t have a fighting chance. Magazines, billboards, commercials, Internet ads—these are just the tip of the iceberg. Take a quick glance at some of the top teen girls’ magazines and you see these headlines: “How to Get a Guy’s Attention,” “383 Ways to Look Hot,” “Look Pretty,” “How to Get Perfect Skin,” “Get Pretty Now,” and “Be Irresistible.” Girls see more than four hundred advertisements per day telling them how they should look.
⁹
The images are so pervasive that we barely notice them.

Naomi Wolf calls the sexy-but-not-slutty images “flattened beauty,” attractiveness defined by a cultural ideal that has nothing to do with girls’ organic, individual beauty.
¹⁰
Airbrushed bodies and flawless faces sit on the cover of every popular women’s magazine. The television runs a reel of size zeros and twos, of symmetrical faces and perfectly styled hairdos. Such people populate some of the most popular shows teenagers watch—
iCarly
,
Gossip Girl
,
The Vampire Diaries
, and
Glee
. Models, celebrities, and pop stars plaster advertisements, billboards, and screens. These people are all we see, which is a constant reminder to average-looking people that we are not that, but that we should certainly spend every moment trying to be that if we, too, want to be seen.

The most pervasive and scrupulous of these images, however, are the ones pertaining to sex and romance. Everywhere we look is a carefully designed suggestion of sexiness and the clear message that girls’ primary interest should be getting a boy’s attention through her looks. Open any teen magazine. Watch any commercial aimed at teen girls. She washes her face, wears a tampon, buys school supplies, and wears sneakers all in some sexy manner that reveals the intention of getting boys to notice her. And it starts way earlier than the teen years—just about every Disney princess plot revolves around snagging a man.
The Little Mermaid
is a perfect example. The main character Ariel doesn’t even speak, and then she gives up her entire identity as a mermaid and singer to get her guy. The meaning has been the same for decades: be available but not too available and, most important, get male attention at all costs. Girls have limited choices in how to respond to these messages. If they want social acceptance, though, the options vanish and there is really only one message left: “be sexy but not sexual.” The message is only made worse by the sheer number of outlets available to deliver it.

Even those images that seem to support independence and strength—ass-kicking girls like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars, or self-contained girls like Bella’s character in the
Twilight
movies or Elena Gilbert on
The Vampire Diaries
—often maintain impossible standards of attractiveness. More important, they are almost always caught up in the process of trying to make a boy love them or of keeping a boy’s love. Bella, for instance, is painted as an everygirl. In the
Twilight
books she is not supposed to be anywhere near as attractive as the actress who plays her in the movies. But even in her ordinariness, a stunningly gorgeous vampire wants her and only her. He has eyes for no one else. Bella begins as a self-contained teenage girl who knows who she is and is not swayed by others’ opinions of her, but soon after Edward falls for her, her entire existence hinges on his love. Stephenie Meyer encourages a fantasy most all girls have: to be as plain as they are but to be adored and chosen by a really hot, really respectful guy.

Elena from
The Vampire Diaries
is exceedingly attractive, so it makes perfect sense that two hot vampire brothers spend much of their time trying to get with her. Although Elena’s character, like Bella’s, is supposed to be independent, not swayed by boys, the plot shifts soon enough so that her entire life depends on the love she shares with the brothers.

Yes, we’ve had shows like
Ugly Betty
, starring a more realistic looking female someone who didn’t have that “flattened beauty,” who didn’t spend all the episodes trying desperately to be loved. But the show was so unique in this way that the entire plotline had to involve the fact that she wasn’t our cultural ideal. The show’s name even called this very attractive woman “ugly”! And anyway, while viewers raved for one season, by the second season, they were over it, ratings fell, and the show was canceled. This disappearance is familiar. Darlene Conner from
Roseanne
and Angela Chase from
My So-Called Life
, also long gone, were strong, sarcastic characters who really didn’t care what you thought of them—but even then, cool, plain Angela spent pretty much all her on-screen time chasing Jared Leto’s character, who was, let’s face it, super good looking but equally vapid and dumb.

Recently, Lauren Zizes’s character on
Glee
gives new hope. Puck, the attractive, popular player, falls for her. First, the focus is on her large shape. He tells her he loves her curvy body, but, unimpressed, she says, “I look like what America looks like.” Finally he admits he likes most that she’s more of a badass than he is.

Even if we were to assume that a violent female, an “asskicking” female, equals a strong female, one study found that in films where females participated in violent action, 58 percent of those female characters were portrayed as submissive to the male lead and 42 percent were in romantic relationships with them.
¹¹

So, even Lauren Zizes is guilty of this. (Her character still defies all expectations of what’s come before, and, hey, she’s on prime time, so I cannot feel disappointed.)

If our media has an obsession with romance and love, then it shows sexiness to girls as the way to get that romance. Generally, when we talk about girls in the media, people express outrage about excessively sexy images, which they argue lead to promiscuity. It’s true that sexual behavior and images of sex in our media have increased rapidly over the decades. Partially, this is simply because of increased tolerance for sexual imagery. Also, the modes of technology—places where we can see those images—have multiplied. But I would argue that our concerns about sexualization are mostly misguided. When given a bare-backed, tousled-hair photo of Miley Cyrus, only adults see a postcoital image. Kids generally don’t pick up on the subtleties of sex in images until they become more sexually experienced. Images alone don’t create promiscuity. The real problem is that girls see those images as their tickets to male attention and romance.

Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne write in their book
Sexy So Soon
: “[S]ex in commercial culture has far more to do with trivializing and objectifying sex than with promoting it, more to do with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that sex as portrayed in the media is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical.”
¹²
In other words, our media shows sex as something artificial, unnatural, maybe even porn influenced. Think about some of today’s female singers, such as Ke$ha, Rihanna, and Beyoncé, who have expressed their sexuality by accentuating cleavage, wearing stripper heels, and pouting at the camera. How does that have anything to do with real sex or intimacy? Girls learn that male attention—and potentially then romance and love—comes from
appearing
artificially sexy.

And yet these singers, like most of those in the media outlets that exploit sexuality, are not trying to do anything other than appeal to our demands. Girls want direction for attracting men, and this is how to do it: girls need only learn how to appeal to boys’ sexual desire. Girls take notes on how to make themselves desirable, on how to move, dress, pout, and wear makeup. For the purpose of selling things, learning how to court the male desire for real companionship or intimacy isn’t nearly as provocative.

But while the media images encourage sexiness, institutions such as the National Abstinence Education Association, Focus Adolescent Services, and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy pressure girls to not be sexual at all. In fact, the institutions seem as obsessed with trying to control girls’ sexuality as the media does. Parents and schools often exert this antisexual pressure as well.

In today’s culture, abstinence and virginity connote morality for girls in a way that’s different from that for boys. That is, although we reference honor and strength and basic moral ideals when we teach boys about being good, we mostly reference virginity for girls. As Jessica Valenti notes in
The Purity Myth
, “While boys are taught that the things that make them men—good men—are universally accepted ethical ideals, women are led to believe that our moral compass lies somewhere between our legs.”
¹³
Virginity is not just a sexual choice; it’s the most prominent way to frame who you are as a person.

Valenti also identifies the “desirable virgin,” the feminine ideal of our culture, who is both sexy and not sexual (we’ll explore more about the virgin myth in chapter 3).
¹⁴
As most of us know, living up to such expectations is all but impossible, but it is particularly tricky for the adolescent girl who is dealing with new sexual curiosity and developmental challenges. On the one hand is abstinence-only education and on the other hand is the push to make themselves desirable: girls learn quickly that there is no happy medium.

The images and pressures are indeed so tremendous that it is sometimes hard to remember that beneath all of it there is a girl who has genuine sexual curiosity and desire, a girl who suddenly is receiving massive amounts of attention not for her intelligence or sense of humor, but for her body.

In
Loose Girl
, I wrote about how, at the age of eleven, walking on the sidewalk into the next town as I had every day that summer, an older man in a semitruck honked his horn and smiled at me, and I understood for the first time that I could get attention without having to do anything. And I understood that this was what it meant to be a girl; this is where we had power and meaning in the world.

Stephanie has a similar story. When she was seven, in the first grade, she had a boyfriend. Most all the girls and boys in her class had boyfriends and girlfriends. It was just something they said. It’s not like any of them did anything other than hold hands or kiss on the cheek. But for Stephanie, having a boyfriend felt intensely important. She explained to me that she knew even then that if a boy wanted to be with her, it meant something was important about her. Like in all the Disney movies she’d seen, the most handsome, valiant males choose the girl characters, and the girls’ destinies are fulfilled through this process. When her boyfriend decided he wanted to be another girl’s boyfriend instead, Stephanie was devastated. Her main focus became getting another boy to like her, and somehow she knew that to be liked—even at seven—she had to be physically attractive, maybe even sexy. Stephanie told me she feels like she never had a chance, that her narrative about boys making her worthwhile began so young that she has no idea who she might have been otherwise.

It is easy to see how genuine sexual desire gets submerged within each girl, even lost. In conversations with adolescent girls, researchers have found that girls will not speak spontaneously about their own desire; rather, they will only speak of their own desire in terms of relationships. In the educational psychologist Deborah Tolman’s research, she found that even when asked directly, many girls don’t quite know how to answer.
¹⁵
They note that it isn’t something they discuss. They get angry. They giggle. They say they don’t have those kinds of feelings or that they don’t want them. Or some of the young women note that girls just don’t feel desire in that way, unable to claim an “I” voice on the subject. Those who will finally speak about their desire only do so when they feel safe enough to do so, when they can trust that their words will not be manipulated.