The V-Word (20 page)

Being Ready

Let's forget the
go, go, go
for a minute and focus on figuring out when
you
are ready to take on sex.

With real driving there's a program: take the written test, drive with a learner's permit, maybe take driver's ed. Eventually you spend an excruciating morning at the Department of Motor Vehicles and then—boom!—you're qualified. It's not so easy with sex. After all, you're facing this big unknown experience. It's hard to know if you're ready for something mysterious that you've never done.

Jo Langford says, “A person is ready for sex when their brain, their heart, and their crotch all come online and are functioning at the same general level. But hearts and crotches fire up for many people before the brain can catch up, and that can lead to poor decisions and unfortunate consequences. For some people this combo of drive, emotional readiness, and logic-plus-education doesn't happen until their twenties. It's the rare person who has all of this going on before sixteen.”
³⁴

Amy Lang's perspective is similar. For her, being ready means being able to “wholeheartedly say yes to everything. Yes to open communication. Yes to being on birth control. Yes to condoms. Yes to getting STI testing. Yes to this particular partner. Yes to understanding what sex means to the relationship. Yes to having a safe place to do it. Yes to knowing this is the right person, time, and place.”
³⁵

In the Moment

This is it.

You're hot.

You're ready.

This person next to you is the one.

It's time to get swept away in the moment but not the time to get sucked into doing things you don't want to do.

Sexual agency—the power to choose what we want to do sexually—is imperative. There is no time during a sexual encounter where you have gone too far to say
I want to stop
. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do, and neither does your partner.

Consent sounds like—

Can I kiss you?
Yes!

Is it okay if I touch you there?
Yes!

Do you want me to do this?
Yes!

It's not the dialogue from a porn script. It's not the sultry pillow talk of romance novels. But jubilant consent is sexy.

As we said at the beginning, the real V-word—the most important one—is
VOICE
. Saying
yes
, saying
no
, saying
I'm not sure
—using your voice is an essential part of having feel-good, thrilling sexual experiences.

Now—

In the moment—

With protection, intention, and
yes
, you can enjoy being closer than close to another person. It's a big deal, especially the first time. Take it seriously. Be kind. Give and receive.

And have fun.

A Conversation between Kelly Jensen and Amber Keyser

T
he women who wrote the essays in this book did so because words are powerful. The way we talk about our bodies and our sexual experiences matters. When we tell our stories, we shape the lives we are actually living. We offer them to you in the hopes that these stories will illuminate the range of possible sexual experiences. Sometimes stories are mirrors held up to our own experience.

Our stories illuminate the universals. We want to love and be loved. We want to belong. We want to find our own path amid the expectations of friends, family, religion, and culture. We want to be the heroes in our own lives.

When it comes to sex and all the wonderful, complicated ways it intersects with the rest of our lives, more stories can only be a good thing. This chapter is a conversation between me and Kelly Jensen, a teen media specialist, about depictions of sex in media, particularly in young adult novels. We hope it will give you some good ideas about where to look to find the mirrors and windows you need to take charge of your own sexual life.

AMBER: Conversations about sex can be hard because of language. We know words matter, especially sex words. They can be clinical or nasty or euphemistic. How does media directed toward teens reflect the language we use to talk about sex and sexual experiences?

KELLY:
It's not very good.

Our experiences can only be filtered through our words, so when our language is euphemistic or clinical, we can't describe the female sexual experience in an authentic way. Vagina and clitoris describe physical parts, but they're not words that roll easily off the tongue. The vast majority of slang terms for the female anatomy are insulting in one way or another. They're words that describe anatomy rather than experiences or feelings relating to sex and sexual experiences.

It's easier to describe what happens when a boy is turned on. We say
he gets hard
, and everyone knows what that means, what it looks like, and how it feels. It's not clinical or derogatory. It's an action. For girls an entire range of physical reactions can happen during arousal but we very rarely read descriptions of the process.

Author E. M. Kokie wrote a great blog post called “In Our Own Words” (
http://emkokie.com/attractive_nuisance/2013/05/09/in-our-own-words
) about the lack of language to describe female sexual experiences compared to male sexual experiences. One thing she notes is that romantic and intimate scenes often fade to black. Readers don't hear a female character talking about what's happening to her body, how she's reacting to touch, what it feels like physically, or the changes she's experiencing. Maybe she's aware of it and maybe she's not, but it's just not there in most books for teens.

Lauren Myracle's
The Infinite Moment of Us
offers an honest and solid portrayal of female arousal. It's forthright but feels neither clinical nor nasty. The main character, Wren, describes how when she's turned on, her breathing changes, her nipples get hard, and she grows wet. More powerfully, though, Wren doesn't get embarrassed. She is excited about her body being her body and doing the things a body does when it's ready for pleasure.

AMBER: It seems like no one ever has a neutral conversation about sex. People have pretty strong feelings about the topic and tend to jump on the judgment bandwagon right away. How do labels like
slut
or
prude
influence the way we tell stories about sex?

KELLY:
Slut
and
prude
are value judgments used to keep a woman in line or put her in her place socially. A
slut
is easy and worthless, while a
prude
is uptight and naive. Labeling takes away sexual autonomy from women. There is a whole spectrum of sexual experiences that we can choose to engage in or not. Labels give a false, limiting sense that a women's sexual choices make her good or bad—often called slut-shaming or prude-shaming.

One of the best examples of how and why these labels are damaging is explored in Mariko and Jillian Tamaki's
This One Summer
. Rose and her family hit the same beach every summer for vacation, where she is reunited with her younger friend Windy. This particular summer, Rose and Windy find themselves tuned in to the kids who live in the resort town year-round, and Rose starts referring to some of the girls as
sluts
. Windy calls her out on it, and Rose has to pause and reflect upon why she's using the language she is to describe girls she doesn't even know, what those judgments really mean, and what it might feel like were she at the receiving end of such labels.

In Jennifer Mathieu's
The Truth about Alice
, we see what happens when one girl's sexual reputation becomes the focal point for a tragedy that rocks the town. It's a tough look at how rotten people can be toward a girl when she is seen as little more than the town slut. Labeling Alice allows people to ignore and dehumanize her.

A small number of titles like
Pure
by Terra Elan McVoy and
Purity
by Jackson Pearce explore purity pledges, a growing movement in the United States in which a girl vows, often in the presence of her religious community, to remain a virgin. Hardly any books look at virginity as a personal choice made by a girl and what the social ramifications are for her.

In
Looking for Alibrandi
by Melina Marchetta, Josie decides she's not ready to have intercourse with her boyfriend, despite the fact she enjoys the touching and exploration going on with him. She tells Jacob that she's not ready. The place isn't right, the mood isn't right, and her virginity is something she wants to enjoy sharing with someone on her own terms. Jacob rebuffs her, suggesting she's being a prude about going further, but Josie tells him that making a choice about her body is something only she gets to do. He's upset at first, but eventually he realizes that he's the one being a jerk.

Diana Peterfreund's duology
Rampant
and
Ascendant
features girls who grapple with their choices about virginity as well.

The bottom line is that we need to be careful with language. Labels and the judgments they carry limit our ability to talk about what a sexually fulfilling and empowered life looks and feels like.

AMBER: I love watching
Modern Family
,
Orange Is the New Black
,
The Fosters
, and
Orphan Black
. It's awesome to see same-sex relationships and transgender issues depicted in such a normalizing way on television. Can you talk about depictions of sexual orientation, gender identity, and the shifting nature of sexuality?

KELLY:
There is an increasing number of excellent books featuring LGBTQ characters and themes for young adult readers like
The Difference between You and Me
by Madeleine George,
The Miseducation of Cameron Post
by Emily M. Danforth,
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
by Benjamin Alire Saenz,
Empress of the World
by Sara Ryan,
Two Boys Kissing
by David Levithan and
Openly Straight
by Bill Konigsberg.

But I want to go into more detail about titles that push the boundaries even further.

Far from You
by Tess Sharpe features a bisexual main character, who actually uses the word bisexual to describe herself. This goes back to our conversation about the power of language. It's important and validating for readers to see precise descriptions of sexuality.

Nina LaCour's
Everything Leads to You
is a solid lesbian romance in which the main character, Emi, is a person of color. Another fantastic, racially diverse story is
Not Otherwise Specified
by Hannah Moskowitz. Bisexual main character Etta is open and positively
owns
her queerness.

In
Adaptation
and
Inheritance
, author Malinda Lo depicts a main character who can't choose between a boy and a girl. She's got feelings for both that she wants to pursue. In a great twist, Lo allows her main character to have both partners at once. It's a relationship to which they all consent and an arrangement which brings them all satisfaction. Alaya Dawn Johnson's
The Summer Prince
features bisexuality and polyamory in a nonwhite society.

I've got to mention Libba Bray's
Beauty Queens
here. Though it's a satire, Bray offers characters who explore and identify all along the sexuality spectrum in a way that's not just refreshing but reflects what our world looks like.

Notable transgender and transsexual stories include Kirstin Cronn-Mills's
Beautiful Music for Ugly Children
and Julie Anne Peters's
Luna
. The nonfiction work
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out
by Susan Kuklin profiles transgender and gender -neutral teenagers, giving us an important look at real teens who are exploring their gender identities. Two additional nonfiction memoirs about gender reassignment to note include
Some Assembly Required
by Arin Andrews and
Rethinking Normal
by Katie Rain Hill.

For a non-Western story of sexuality, there's Sara Farizan's
If You Could Be Mine
, set in Iran. Farizan's novel is about two girls who are in love but legally can't be together, so one considers a sex change, a procedure legal in Iran, in order to be with the girl she loves.

Liz Prince's memoir
Tomboy
shows what it feels like to be pressured to conform to what society sees as acceptable gender appearances. Prince doesn't like dressing in a manner that girls are “supposed to,” and must confront what it means to be true to herself.

Stories like these capture the reality of today's world. It's not all straight and white, male and female. It's a variety of colors, shapes, and desires. Sexuality is a spectrum, and gender identities are not set in stone.

AMBER: For women especially, how we feel about our bodies is a huge part of how we experience sex. That's a theme that came out in many of the essays in this book. How do you see the relationship between body image and sexuality intersecting in fiction?

KELLY:
How often do we really talk honestly about body image? There's a Body Image and Eating Disorder Awareness Week, but we live in a world where “plus-size” models are size ten, and everything is photoshopped. We applaud underwear companies like Aerie that don't retouch models in their advertising and get emotional about Dove soap campaigns featuring women of varying shapes and sizes. But even these companies only showcase a tiny fraction of the range of body shapes, sizes, and features found in real women. That's weird, isn't it?