Reviving Ophelia (33 page)

I developed a sexual decision-making course. We role-played seduction scenes. I role-played the seducer with lots of animated tips from them. They were their embarrassed and inept selves—they giggled, looked down, barely whispered their objections and were easily cowed by small amounts of pressure. With lots of practice, they learned to deliver a loud, firm no. If the guy persisted, they learned to shout, push, punch and escape.

Then we talked about making decisions to be sexual. I explained that a girl’s first sexual experience is important. It’s a template for later experience. If she’s fortunate, her first experience is with someone she loves and who loves her, and sex occurs in the context of an emotionally committed relationship. If she’s fortunate, the lovemaking is gentle, passionate and deepens the caring between the two participants.

Almost none of the girls in that group were so fortunate. Their experiences had been confused, hurried and impersonal. Intercourse happened to them. Most of them had been coerced into sexual encounters. None had had sex as the result of a conscious choice to share love in a relationship.

I helped them do imagery work. Until they could picture a good experience, I doubted that they could have one. So I told them to have fantasies of good dates with respectful guys who were interested in where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. The date should last all evening and include compliments, talk and fun. At first they found this impossible. They didn’t think dates like that occurred, but gradually they could conceive of a decent date.

These girls desperately wanted acceptance and would do anything, including have sex with virtual strangers, to win approval. I taught them to develop their own list of criteria. At first the lists were heart-breaking. One girl said, “The guy should spend money on me—you know, take me to McDonald’s or someplace.” Another said, “The guy should say he likes me.”

We started where they were. Any criterion was a step in the direction of assuming responsibility for making conscious choices about sex. They learned that they could decide who was a worthy sexual partner. After a few weeks some of the girls developed slightly tougher criteria.

All girls need help making sense of the sexual chaos that surrounds them. As opposed to what they learn from the media, they need to be told that most of what happens in relationships is not sexual. Relationships primarily mean working together, talking, laughing, arguing, having mutual friends and enjoying outings. Girls need to be encouraged to be the sexual subjects of their own lives, not the objects of others’. They need help separating affection from sex.

Girls want to be sexy but respected. They want to be cool and sophisticated, yet not jaded and promiscuous. They want to be spontaneous, yet not die of AIDS. Lizzie and Angela are examples of girls with typical problems with sexuality in high school. Lizzie is a good student; Angela is a dropout. Lizzie comes from a strong family and Angela from a broken home. Lizzie was popular and well adjusted, mature for her age; Angela was immature and impulsive, with few close relationships. Both girls were casualties of our cultural chaos.

Lizzie was referred by her school counselor because she wanted to transfer to a different school. Lizzie drove to my office for an after-school appointment. She was a willowy senior dressed in a plaid skirt and fashionable sweater. She was friendly and polite, but cautious about therapy. Early in the session she said, “I think I’m a healthy person mentally. I’m not sure I should be here. All my problems are in the real world, not in my head.”

I asked what those real-world problems were. “My friends,” she said. “Or rather the people I thought were my friends. At this point, most of them aren’t talking to me.”

She told me her story. Lizzie was from a working-class neighborhood. As a girl, she fished with her father and bowled with her uncle Leon. She had a loving grandmother nearby who taught her to cook. Her parents worked in a tire factory along with most of the parents of her friends. The children had attended the same schools, played on the same soccer and baseball teams and hung out in the same parks and cafes. Lizzie had been well liked by both the girls and the boys. She was a good athlete in elementary school, and in junior high and high school she was a cheerleader.

Her sophomore year she started dating Paul. She had known him since kindergarten, but they began dating after a church hayrack ride. For over a year it was a wonderful relationship. He was a handsome football player. All of Lizzie’s friends told her how much they envied her. Lizzie’s parents liked Paul, and his parents liked her. Their junior year they were homecoming prince and princess. Everyone was sure that their senior year they would be king and queen.

The summer of Lizzie’s junior year she worked all summer at a camp in the Rockies. It was great. The kids were fun, the scenery was breathtaking, and she liked one of the counselors. At first she and Myron were just friends. They took walks in the mountains and canoed on the clear lake under the cold stars.

Myron was from Chicago and on his way to Northwestern in the fall. He was everything that Paul was not—worldly, sophisticated and new. Lizzie resisted falling for him, but he was around every day and, as she said, “It’s easy to fall in love in the mountains.”

One night after talking for hours under a blanket on the shore of a mountain lake, they began kissing. Myron took off her shirt and then her slacks. He was eager for sex and Lizzie, while not quite so eager, was eager to please Myron. They became lovers that night.

The summer sped by. Lizzie answered Paul’s weekly letters carefully. She told Paul that she missed him but was too busy to call or write long letters. She never mentioned Myron.

In late August she said good-bye to Myron. He invited her to come visit Chicago, but he didn’t believe in long-distance relationships and warned her that he would date other girls. Lizzie was hurt about this, but told herself that, after all, they weren’t engaged.

When she returned home, Paul asked, “Did you sleep with anyone?”

Lizzie looked stunned but didn’t deny it. Paul interpreted that as an admission of guilt and he began to sob. They talked far into the night. Paul was hurt and upset, but communicative. He left saying he wanted to be friends.

The first few weeks of school were fine. Her friends were happy to see her and she was busy with cheerleading and the yearbook. She had some classes with Paul and his friends, which at first were comfortable, then awkward, then unbearable. Paul quit speaking to her. When she walked down the hall, Paul’s friends called her names—slut or bitch—names she was surprised they would use, especially with her.

Lizzie tried to talk to Paul but he refused. His friends grew more belligerent and even warned her to leave him alone. She tried to wait it out, but time didn’t seem to help. In fact, more friends chose sides over time. Most of the boys and several of the girls whom she’d known all her life quit speaking to her.

In October she was not invited to the party for the cheerleaders and athletes. She resigned from the cheerleaders. She considered talking to her parents, but knew that they would be most upset that she had had sex. So she went to the school counselor’s office.

Telling me about all this, Lizzie was sad and angry. She knew this wasn’t fair. She knew she had a right to decide who she would date. She resented being called a slut.

At first we managed the crisis. I encouraged her to cry, shout and do whatever helped her express all her feelings. We talked about immediate practical problems: Who could she sit with at lunch? (There were a few friends who had remained steadfast.) What should she do when guys called her names in the halls? (She decided to look them in the eye and say, “I hope you never have to go through something like this.”) How could she spend her Saturday nights? (She decided to work at a shelter for abused women. That would help her feel less sorry for herself.) She decided to stay at her school. She didn’t want to give Paul’s friends the power to drive her out of her school in her senior year.

We talked about basic issues. I asked her, “What kind of people do you really want for friends? What do you have to give other people? What really makes you happy? What makes you feel proud of yourself? How do you set priorities and make good decisions about your time? How do you have a life that truly reflects your values?”

Meanwhile Myron no longer answered her letters. He wrote three times after they parted, but each letter was shorter. Lizzie admitted that the relationship was more important to her than it was to him. Having sex had also set her up to feel more pain when they separated. She felt some guilt about her decision. A part of her believed the boys who were hissing in the halls that she was a slut. Suddenly sex seemed fraught with peril.

Lizzie developed her own policies about sex, policies that were mature and thoughtful for a high school student. She decided to wait until she was in a long-term relationship with someone who cared for her at least as much as she cared for him. She wanted to discuss how sex would affect the relationship, and she wanted protection from pregnancy and STDs. She also decided that she would make her decisions to be sexual in the cold, clear light of day, not in the heat of passion on a date.

For now, Lizzie developed ways to treat herself after the long tough days at school—walks in Wilderness Park, good library books and trips to the coffeehouse with a friend. She reminded herself that there was life after high school. Lizzie begin looking into college.

Gradually things calmed down. Paul started dating another girl, and he and his friends lost interest in punishing Lizzie. Lizzie was not as popular as she had been her junior year, but popularity mattered less to her. She stayed close to two of her girlfriends since childhood and made some new friends at the shelter.

When she stopped therapy she was dating a college student. They made out, but stopped short of intercourse. Lizzie had decided to wait for a while. She wasn’t ready to handle the pain that followed losing a lover.

Lizzie was a strong, well-adjusted young woman, but like all teenagers, she was caught between competing values when it came to sex. Her parents expected her to be a virgin when she married. Her boyfriend over the summer encouraged her to have sex, even though the relationship would be short-term. Her high school friends were outraged, not that she had had sex, but that she had had it with someone they didn’t know. Lizzie learned some lessons from her experiences. She learned to take care of herself and withstand disapproval. She learned to think about her relationship choices and to take responsibility for sexual decisions.

I first met Angela when she was four months pregnant by Todd, her boyfriend of several months. She bounded into my office wearing a black leather skirt and a low-cut T-shirt that had SKID ROW printed on the front. In a matter of moments, Angela was spilling out her life story.

Her dad had had an affair when Angela was in eighth grade. Her mom left for Arizona with her younger brother and she seldom heard from them. Angela lived with her dad, his new partner Marie and her three young children.

Angela complained that she seldom saw her dad alone and that the kids were “spoiled and hyper” and stole her stuff. She had no privacy and her dad and Marie expected her to baby-sit so that they could go out on weekends.

I asked her about school and she wrinkled her nose. “I had to go to the learning center till I turned sixteen, but I hated it there. As soon as I had my birthday I dropped out.”

“What did you hate?”

Angela sighed elaborately and stretched her white arms above her spiky red hair. “It was boring. I hated all the junk we had to take. The girls were snobs.”

“Tell me about your parents.”

She sighed. “Mom’s ultra-religious. When I told her I was pregnant she started to pray. Then she disowned me. She likes my brother best. He’s too young to have sinned all that much.”

She leaned back into the couch. “I get on better with Dad. He’s more low-key. He’s mad, but he still loves me. He wants me to live with him and Marie till the baby is born.”

“What about after the baby is born?”

Angela said, “I want to live with Todd, but if I can’t do that, I’ll move into subsidized housing. I’m already signed up.”

“Is Todd the baby’s father?” I asked.

She giggled like the young girl she was. “Todd’s great. He’s so cute.”

“How long have you gone with him?”

She held up her hand. “Five months. That’s the longest I’ve stayed with anyone.”

“Will he help you with the baby?”

“He wants to, but he’s got two kids already,” Angela answered. “He has to pay both of their mothers child support and he has a car payment. He promised to go to the hospital with me. He’s happy I’m pregnant.”

I asked Angela for more details about her life after her parents’ divorce and listened as she told me her story in a matter-of-fact, even chatty, way. I felt overwhelmed by so many problems facing someone who failed eighth-grade math. At the end of our session I asked her, “If you weren’t pregnant, what would your goals be?”

Angela grinned and said, “I’d want to be an MTV star.”

Our time was up. I handed Angela an appointment card. She chided me gently, “You didn’t ask about the names.”

I smiled at her.

“Alexandra or Alex, what do you think?” she asked.

“I think they are beautiful names.”

After Angela left, I thought about her. Her perkiness in the face of her enormous problems was both endearing and unnerving. I liked her naivete, optimism and energy. I hoped she had enough to pull her through the next few months.

The next session we talked about Angela’s social life. Since the divorce, she escaped to a video arcade that was a hangout for the lost and troubled kids in the north part of town. Nearby there were drug busts, shootings and several rapes. Angela couldn’t have picked a worse place. Her third night there, Noah offered to take her for a drive in his truck. They drove to the country and he encouraged her to have sex.