Dirty Little Secrets (5 page)

Sexual desire for anyone doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Indeed, desire is very much a socially constructed experience, and our society is not keen to include teenage girls in a discourse about sexual desire. We quickly divert such conversations into discussions of virginity and abstinence-only education, the perils of teenage pregnancy, or girls as sexual victims. Certainly all of these topics are valid, but nowhere do we have a means for girls to direct the narrative of their own sexual desire.

I can’t help but imagine a society in which girls are allowed this sort of direction. What would it mean for girls to look inward to their talents and strengths and uniqueness, rather than at billboards and television shows and magazines, to find out who they are sexually? What would it mean for girls if they could define their passion through internal avenues of desire? Imagine a girl able to express herself sexually with a boy, unconcerned about how her body looks or whether he thinks she’s sexy. Imagine a girl who trusts that when she does express herself in that way, boys will respect her as an equal partner and the rest of her community will celebrate her strength and passion rather than judge her as a whore.

If we are to break down all the reasons we aren’t there yet culturally, we must first look at why girls aren’t permitted to have this freedom. For a girl, sexual feeling itself becomes tied to being looked at. Without any cultural guidance about sexual desire, we can only ascertain that we must look a certain way to even have sexual feelings. Well-known feminist author Naomi Wolf notes: “Men take this core for granted in themselves: We see that, sanctioned by the culture, men’s sexuality simply
is
. They do not have to earn it with their appearance. We see that men’s desire precedes contact with women.”
¹⁶

Women’s desire does not always come before that of a man’s desire for her. We know, in fact, that women’s sexual desire is often dependent on being desired. In a
New York Times Magazine
article about female desire, the psychologist Marta Meana determined that “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic. It is dominated by the yearnings of ‘self-love,’ by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.”
¹⁷

In other words, a women’s physical arousal is in direct relation to how much she is wanted—gazed at, one might say—by another. It is difficult to imagine how such desire is not at least somewhat culturally created, how it is at least partially, as Wolf suggests in her quote, tied up with a sense of permission—it is safe to be a desiring woman now that someone else has suggested I am acceptable.

Charlene is a good example of this. She grew up in a tough neighborhood. She watched her single mother scramble to pay the bills. Her father was long gone. She had one sister who was four years younger, so she didn’t feel like she had anyone she could relate to. The first time she felt a boy look at her with longing in his eyes, she knew it was something to pay attention to. She spent the greater part of her teens “boy hunting,” she said. She wanted to feel that she was desired, because at home she felt so completely undesired. When she felt sexual desire, she told me, it was entirely about that fantasy. If some hot guy with status wanted her, she got turned on and couldn’t help herself from having sex with him. The feeling, she said, was intoxicating, because those were the only times her body felt alive with desire, which made her feel alive, period.

These false beliefs—“I’m not good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, quiet enough…”—are one of the defining features of girlhood. For loose girls, sex and sexual attention become the answer to these beliefs. They possess the potential to make us good enough, pretty enough, lovable enough. This is why promiscuous behavior for a loose girl doesn’t end in adolescence. It often grows into an addiction of sorts. We try and try again to make the sex mean something about us. But ultimately it only harms us further.

Often, too, teenage girls’ experience of desire is subverted and redirected into narratives about male attention. This might be partially due to hormones, but certainly it’s also a result of cultural expectation. Genuine sexual desire is lost inside the power of getting that attention. The influence of this, the heady control of getting a boy or man to look our way, to desire us, is perhaps the easiest way for girls to feel any kind of influence when it comes to their sexuality. In a culture where girls’ genuine sexual desire is shrouded in silence, where there is no language of ownership for girls’ own sexual feelings, it is easy to see how girls gravitate toward this kind of power.

Like Faith at the swimming pool, a girl’s sexual maturity must be something of a paradox. Look, but don’t look. Touch, but don’t touch. In this way, being a girl is invariably tied up with need and negation, and with how a girl must negotiate those opposing forces.

For boys, it is entirely different.

Chapter 2

BOY CRAZY

The Fantasy Girls Have about Boys

Everywhere I turned there was a new one. I can remember my boyfriend coming to see me [at college] for the first time, and I came rushing up from another boy’s dorm room having just had sex, only to then have sex with him.

K
elsey was always jealous of boys. In grade school she wanted to be Batman or Spider-Man during recess, but she had to be Batgirl or the girl being saved. She developed early, with breasts in the fourth grade. Both boys and girls teased her regularly. They called her “Chesty” instead of Kelsey, and most who used to be her friends turned on her because they didn’t want to be associated with her. She cried often, which didn’t help, and she begged her mother to move to a different school district.

In fifth grade, she began to develop crushes on boys. They were all boys she knew she could never have, but still, she made up elaborate fantasies of them pulling her aside and telling her they secretly loved her. She imagined them kissing her, how their lips might feel on hers. And she imagined them offering to take her away from her life, to live just the two of them on an island where it didn’t matter if kids went to school.

And in sixth grade, when one of the cashiers at the Burger King down the street from her house suggested she meet him in the bathroom, she did so willingly, feeling that finally someone might want her. He lifted her shirt and kneaded her breasts, and then he told her to jerk him off. He didn’t kiss her once. He didn’t even ask her name, but he wore a name tag: Greg. She said she will never forget his name. He was her first sexual experience, her first understanding that boys could do something for her, something no one else could. Even though Greg never asked her into the bathroom again, even though she felt rejected and confused by what had happened, the experience set her on a search she is still stuck inside—a search for boys’ attention. She has since given blow jobs in stairwells at school, had sex in boys’ parents’ cars parked in driveways. She has had anal sex with a friend’s nineteen-year-old brother. None of them has tried to have a relationship with her. None has fallen in love with her. None of her fantasies about what boys can do for her—save her, release her, love her—has come true. But at sixteen she can’t seem to stop. At sixteen, boys still have the only solution Kelsey can see to her feelings of being undesirable.

Kelsey’s story is painstakingly familiar. I too spent much of my life believing a boy could save me from my pain. I too felt irrepressibly drawn to boys. I too couldn’t help myself. There was something about them. Sometimes, still, I can feel it: boy crazy. Other girls feel the same way. Here are some quotes about their own stories from some of the girls I interviewed:

“I felt like a shell of a person that only came alive when a boy or a man noticed me. I felt like the whole world revolved around being noticed and wanted by a boy or a man.”

“My experiences with boys feel like obsession, like there’s nothing more appealing in the world.”

“I get completely gaga over boys.”

“Without a boy in my life I feel like I don’t exist.”

“What is it about boys?”

Yes, what is it about them? This is the question that drives this chapter. My sense is that whatever “it” is, the groundwork begins young.

Lately, my three-year-old son has been playing make-believe. He wraps a cape around his small shoulders and builds a castle out of his oversized blocks and imagines stories for himself. In all the stories, there is someone he has to save, and in every scenario, I’ve noticed, that someone is a female. I have no idea where he has learned this narrative. I try steadfastly, albeit unsuccessfully, as his mother to prune out any books or television shows or movies that involve such a relationship between boys and girls. I work hard to speak of boys and girls as equals. But the narrative of a girl needing a boy to save her, and a boy coming along to do just that, is so insipid in our culture that it slipped into his very young consciousness without my knowing.

In truth, it is easy to see how it happened. In even the most innocuous movies—beginning with the ones meant for children—if a boy looks at a girl, if he finds her attractive in any way, it becomes clear quite quickly that he is in fact in love with her. Not only is he in love with her; he has eyes for no one else. And if he loved her as a child, when they grow up, they will be reunited, usually in some way that involves him rescuing her, and he will
still
be in love with her all those years later. And then add to this that so many images of girls—in these movies and elsewhere—show them overly concerned with what boys think of them.

And that is just the media. Beneath that is the very real cultural truth that boys simply have more freedoms in our culture. Boys can take up physical space. Whereas girls must rein in their desires, sexual and otherwise, boys can allow their legs to fall open when they sit; they can yell out the car window at girls walking along the sidewalk; and when they chase girls for sex, they are acting like “typical” boys. For these reasons, boys become appealing to girls on yet another level. Heterosexual girls are drawn to boys physically and emotionally, but they’re also attracted to the self-determination and lack of restrictions that boys are allowed in our culture. Studies show, in fact, that girls who adopt the “feminine” role—sociability, empathy, and greater passivity—do not feel as good about themselves as girls who take on more “masculine” traits, such as independence, aggression, and assertiveness.
¹

So it makes sense that girls might find ways to latch on to boys. Boys have something we want: real freedom. Since there has been no way for girls to harness this freedom, they have learned—sort of smartly, I’d say—to harness boys, the owners of that freedom, instead. And this is where the “bad boy” comes in. We all know who the bad boys are. They are charming, generally unconcerned with us, disinterested in any sort of commitment. They are sexy as only things that we can’t truly have are sexy. And they are dangerous. Girls are taught early on to stay away from these boys, the ones who will give them freewheeling experiences, including—perhaps most especially—sexual desire.

Jackie lives in Los Angeles, where it’s very easy to find what Hollywood considers attractive men. The first time Jackie and I spoke, she asked, “Did you find that you always had to have extremely good-looking men?” She described the kinds of men she always sleeps with. They are B-list actors and models she meets in clubs. I had heard of at least half the men she named or had seen them on television or in an advertisement. She told me she has a crush on a well-known performer. My first reaction was to say that many people fantasize about celebrities, but she and this man had actually exchanged smiles and stares on numerous occasions in L.A. nightclubs. As our conversation continued, I began to understand that this was Jackie’s normal experience of men: Jackie was only pursuing men who were out of her league. When she expressed heartache that one of the guys hadn’t called her again after sex, it seemed obvious to me that it wasn’t because he thought she was unappealing or unlovable in any way, which is what she thought. In my mind, these men were unlikely to date “normal” people. They would have sex with noncelebrities, sure, but they weren’t going to have lasting relationships with them.

Jackie is an intensely smart woman, so I was fascinated by her inability to see the way she continually set herself up to feel bad about herself. It struck me that Jackie liked them “unavailable.” She liked the thrill of scoring someone so unattainable. It was part of the high. At the same time, though she wasn’t aware of it then, she chose unavailable men so when they left she could falsely reestablish her understanding of herself again and again: she isn’t good enough. She isn’t lovable.

Also, Jackie’s B-list celebrities give her an opportunity to express her sexuality in ways that wouldn’t matter as much with mere “mortals,” as she jokingly calls the rest of the men in the world. If the celebrity boys want her, then she can latch on to their desirability. She ups her status as a sexual person with such bad boys.

For a girl, sex is dangerous. It is a motorcycle ride; it is rushing carelessly along a highway, heading somewhere, hair wild in the wind. On that motorcycle is the man who takes her on the ride, her arms wrapped around a firm, protective chest. That kind of wild, carefree sex is everything a girl can’t have, unless she is willing to become a slut. Unless she wants to become potentially unmarriageable, unworthy of respect. Sex
is
that bad boy. Naomi Wolf in
Promiscuities
writes, “The demon lover’s tendency toward chaos and escape and risk and selfishness may be seen as a projection of inadmissible female longings onto the male—a way of safely handling and vicariously experiencing the release of women’s own wish sometimes to be ‘out of control.’”
²
No wonder bad boys are so appealing to so many girls! No wonder they will do whatever they must to get inside that experience with such a boy! For her, sexual feeling is only allowed in the presence of a boy who can contain her, who will take responsibility for the wildness and loss of control. Boys become the stand-in for everything she can’t do herself, and she winds up playing out all her drama, discovery, and passion in her relationships with those boys.