Dirty Little Secrets (8 page)

I can’t assume anything about how Ramona really feels. Perhaps she truly does enjoy her conquests. But while I applaud the idea of a girl going out there and doing with sex whatever she damn well pleases, I don’t quite believe that such an achievement is uniformly possible. As Jong suggests, we have much too far to go. Our society is still much too steeped in a double standard about sex for me to believe that anyone, particularly anyone so young, can exist so entirely outside cultural expectations. Also, girls having sex with whomever they want, whenever they want, and without the desire for anything more, seems, like Levy noted, to be a little too close to men’s fantasies about girls and women. I’m not convinced that this should be the primary model we put forth for women’s sexual freedom.

REAL EMPOWERED GIRLS

Let’s imagine what empowerment might look like regarding females and sex. Girls and women who wanted casual sex, not love, would be accepted and respected. In fact, girls and women would want casual sex because it would be understood that wanting sex without strings is a perfectly honorable thing for a girl to want on the basis of where she is in her life. It makes sense for a teenager or young woman in her twenties, for instance, to not want the intensity and sometimes burden of a relationship because she wants to focus on other, more important things: personal exploration, travel, career building, and more. Likewise, if she wants to have sex only with someone she loves, then that’s honorable as well, just not more so than the other choice. An empowered girl wears what she wants—she can show off her breasts if she wants to, but she certainly doesn’t have to for her to be sexy. She doesn’t need to lift her shirt or participate in wet T-shirt contests to be sexually powerful. She doesn’t need to have a long list of conquests.

Empowerment has nothing to do with these things. Sexual power is always about a woman’s—and a girl’s—core sense of herself as a desiring, desirable being whom she is entirely in control of. She decides who touches her and when. She decides how much to share her body or not. And no one else has the right to dictate what that says about her, or to shame her, or to silence her. No one else gets to say, “I’m good at this, but because you do it differently, you aren’t.” That, my friends, is empowerment.

THE LOOSE GIRL

A loose girl is not empowered. She doesn’t secretly want to be a virgin. And she’s not just a slut, although she probably embodies some truths behind the slut myth. She falls between and beneath these archetypes, the ones our culture has told girls they can be as sexual creatures. The loose girl has so completely lost herself and her desire in her other wants that sex has become a way to control others, to try to make them want her. And because that authenticity in her relationship to her own desire is so skewed, she almost never gets what she really wants.

For many, many years, I knew that I had a relationship to boys in my life that I didn’t understand. I knew there was something about the way I felt about them, how they made me feel, something about how I had used them in my life, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Nothing in the world spoke directly to what I felt, to the particular way in which I struggled. Yet at the same time, almost every girl who came into my therapy office, almost every grown woman I knew, had those exact same feelings. We had spent our lives desperately pursuing boys or believing entirely that a boy would save us from whatever pain we felt. We searched each room, each party, each sidewalk, each store and bank and post office, for boys who might give us attention. We made the possibility of our sexiness, our attractiveness to males, a project. We could not work out at the gym without the idea that doing so would get us male attention and, therefore, meaning in the world. We could not try on clothes in a dressing room and not imagine what a boy would see. We cultivated our tastes in music, in politics, in religion, all with the idea that this would make us more pleasing to men. And more often than not, that need for attention had turned into sex, usually sex we wanted, but sometimes not.

More important, we lost our connection to our own desires. In fact, our natural sexual desires had morphed with our desire to be wanted, to be chosen, and—yes—to be loved. We gave up more desires than just sexual ones—traveling, friends, career paths, so many opportunities to be more whole.

Why did it take me so long to understand what had happened to me and to so many others? I read as much as I could, I talked to friends, and I listened to their stories. I wrote and wrote and wrote, trying to find what it was I wanted to say. In particular, I wrote one scene—a scene from when I was twelve and went into Manhattan with my two friends to meet boys.
¹⁴
We got all the way there and had to leave, so we tried to get all the way back, but our bus took us only as far as a spot that was ten miles from my house. We went to wait in an all-night gas station, and the attendants there, who were probably in their early twenties, promised to take us home when they were done with their shifts, which would be at five in the morning. On the way home, the guy who drove us reached over and put his hand on my crotch. The first time I wrote that scene, I wrote about the shame and humiliation and hurt. Indeed, that was all true. But I also knew that there was something I was missing, something I wasn’t quite getting at. So I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote some more until one day I got to a new understanding, a truer one. Although the scene in that car was one beyond wrong, it was also true that I liked it. I liked the power I felt. I liked feeling wanted and chosen.

When I understood, when I admitted that truth, everything came clear. This was my dirty little secret, the same one so many girls and women shared with me. I had been after something all night. I had wanted this male attention, and now I was getting it. The dirty secret was that I liked it, even as I was ashamed and humiliated, even as I was a victim.

Truths like this one are terribly difficult to find. They are lost inside the noise of our culture that determines who girls are allowed to be. They sit in silence while we struggle to make sense of what we feel. The biggest problem is not that we are silent about teenage girls and sex. Rather, the problem is, as the cultural historian Michel Foucault noted, that we police people—perhaps girls especially—with endless rules about what they can talk about and about what they can claim from their sexuality.
¹⁵

Josie, who is sixteen, identifies herself as a loose girl. When she was little, almost everyone she loved abandoned her. She can’t remember a time when she didn’t believe that if a guy touched her or wanted to have sex with her, she would be happy and fixed. In the past two years, since she lost her virginity, she has slept with so many guys that she’s lost count of how many. She doesn’t remember the names of half of them, and probably never knew most of them. Some were friends. She only actually dated one or two of them. Josie says: “I am lonely. There is something missing. Having sex and being in the heat of the moment is a high. And when I’m there and doing it, I don’t feel alone anymore.”

Guinevere slept with more than one hundred guys before she turned twenty-five. She had the looks and body to attract plenty of men, but, in her words, “I lacked the brains and confidence to use those things to get what I wanted.” What she wanted was to be found truly appealing, beyond just her looks. She wanted men to want to spend time with her. She says, “All those years I never realized that given a choice most men or boys will take what they can get whenever they want. I made it incredibly easy for them to get it.” She went on to explain the many ways she gave herself away. She didn’t make the connection, she told me, between how easily she gave herself away and how lonely and desperate she felt. She was nice to guys, good to them, gave them whatever they wanted. They laughed together; they seemed to like her. But after they had sex, the boys were gone. She constantly wondered what she did wrong. Was she not good enough in bed? Was she too loud? Not loud enough? Was there something wrong with her?

Guinevere’s confusion about what boys want is an extremely common feeling among loose girls. They get the clear message from media and peers that boys like sex, that boys like girls who are sexy. But then, again and again, the boys leave after sex. Loose girls almost always assume it’s about them—they are simply not lovable enough. There is something horribly wrong with them. They also know the other message that bears down through the schools and Christian organizations: boys don’t like girls who put out. So, loose girls shame themselves. The fact that they can’t help their neediness, their desperation to be loved, they believe, is surely why boys leave.

Many of the girls I spoke with who identified as loose girls shared with me the ways they acted out in their neediness. They called boys too much. They texted and emailed them constantly. They pushed them away with their desperation. When they tell me these stories, I can see their eyes move to the floor. I can hear their voices drop. They hesitate. The shame they feel about their neediness is much worse than any shame they might feel about their sexual behavior.

Cynthia told me that after the last guy had sex with her and never called again, she texted him five times before he finally wrote back, “Don’t contact me again, freak.” She spent the rest of the day in bed, unable to move. His words had confirmed for her exactly what she feared was true about her: there was something different about her, something different from every other girl, who seemed to be able to take or leave a guy, whereas once she got a boy’s attention, she could think of nothing else but how to make him love her.

Cynthia’s dirty little secret is not sex. Like that of all loose girls, her dirtiest secret is her need.

Loose girls come from every walk of life imaginable. They are black, white, Hispanic, Asian, poor, rich, middle class—you name it. Many had great childhoods. Others did not. For some, we can track back to what happened with their parents—mothers and fathers—to get some sense of why they headed down the paths they did.

Chapter 4

BEST FRIENDS AND ROLE MODELS

Mothers and Loose Girls

My mother was my first teacher when it came to getting men to notice me.

C
icely’s family fit all the stereotypes of a normal, nuclear family. She lived with her younger brother, mother, and father in a middle-class home. Cicely’s mother had prided herself on making choices for her family that included sit-down meals every night, checking their homework, and always knowing where they would be and with whom. She and Cicely were extremely close, right up until Cicely turned fourteen. That’s when things took a turn. Cicely began to want to wear clothes her mother would not allow. She began to sneak out at night to meet boys, then come home with hickeys all over her neck. Her mother tried everything: reasoning with her, grounding her, sleeping in the living room so she would hear whether Cicely tried to escape through the front door. Nothing worked. Cicely, meanwhile, grew more and more resentful of her mother’s tactics. She felt increasingly isolated from her family, but got a sense of comfort from her friends, who understood her. Mostly, though, she got comfort from boys, who made her feel special in a way she had never felt before. When they didn’t call or liked one of her friends instead of her, she felt devastated, but that initial rush, that feeling that maybe this boy would love her, was worth it all.

Cicely’s story is probably familiar to many mothers with teenage girls. Their daughters are precious, lively, compassionate kids. Their mothers know how to reach them. They enjoy their time together. And then all of a sudden something switches. The daughter goes away. She stops communicating. When the mother tries to talk to her, wanting open discussion, the teen gets angry and stomps away. She yells, “You don’t understand!” and slams the door. But of course the mother understands. She understands better than anyone.

And yet, according to studies of mothers and adolescents, mothers understand less than they think. According to studies by James Jaccard, Patricia Dittus, and Vivian Gordon in
Child Development
, mothers tend to underestimate their daughters’ sexual activity.
¹
Most all the girls I spoke with affirmed this pattern with their mothers. Plenty told me that their parents would freak out if they knew the extent of what they did with boys—threesomes and oral sex, for instance. They’ve hidden hickeys and lied about where they were going and who they were spending time with. One said, “My mother thinks I’m such an angel. She tells her friends how sweet and smart and together I am. It makes me want to puke. She has no idea who I really am.”

Much research supports that a healthy mother-daughter relationship is prohibitive of promiscuity among teens. Adolescents’ perceptions of their mother’s disapproval of premarital sex and their satisfaction with the mother-daughter relationship are significantly related to abstinence for teens, less frequent sexual intercourse, and more consistent use of contraception among sexually active youths.
²

However, in a survey of one thousand fifteen- to twenty-twoyear-old girls and one thousand mothers of teen girls conducted by
Seventeen
and
O Magazine
through the research firm Harris Interactive, only 4 percent of girls claimed that their beliefs about sex were influenced by their mothers, and 40 percent said that talking to their moms about sex didn’t really affect their decisions.
³

All these mixed messages for mothers don’t help the already-terrifying process of raising teenage girls. Lydia, a self-proclaimed loose girl, told me that her mother relayed those mixed messages in the home. She walked around naked saying, “We’re all girls here.” She encouraged her daughters to feel comfortable with their bodies. But she also told them they should not have sex or lead on boys, who would do anything to get into their pants.