What You Really Really Want (9 page)

Let me put it another way: The best weapon against fear is information. You find yourself held back by fear? Investigate it. Ask yourself the following: How likely is it that this thing I fear will happen, really? How bad would it be if it happened? Is there anything I can do to make it less likely, or less awful if it happens? And: Where did I learn to be afraid of this? What might have motivated the people or institutions that taught me to be afraid? Do I feel good about those motives?

Let's practice by taking a deeper look at some of the most common fears women have about sex and sexuality.

It's true that some kinds of sexual activity can put some of us at risk of becoming pregnant when we don't want to be. Fortunately, there's also a lot of good information about how to reduce and/or manage that risk.

A great place to start learning more about your birth control options is Planned Parenthood. You can visit their birth control info page online at
www.wyrrw.com/ppbc
, or, if there's a Planned Parenthood near you, make an appointment to go speak to one of their trained counselors, who can talk through your options and the risks with you and help you choose a method (or combination of methods) that feels right to you. If you can't get online or to a Planned Parenthood, another great resource is
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
which is all about women's
health and has lots of good information about birth control options, risks, and effectiveness.

If you don't have access to any birth control, or none of those methods, even in combination, feel safe enough for you, there's plenty of sexual activity you can engage in that doesn't involve pregnancy risk. Masturbation, making out, all kinds of touching that don't involve a penis touching a vagina, oral sex, anal sex, mutual masturbation—take your pick. They're all incredibly low- or no-risk activities when it comes to pregnancy, and they can be lots and lots of fun.

Still worried? It may be time to ask yourself what you're really worried about and why. Some girls worry about pregnancy as a stand-in for the greater fear that engaging in sexuality will ruin their life. If that's the case for you, it's better to realize it sooner so that you can explore the real fear underneath and deal with it directly.

Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are serious. Some of them, like herpes, can't be cured, and if you get them, you'll have to deal with them for the rest of your life. Some of them, like HIV/AIDS, can kill you. Sometimes you can be infected and not know it at all, which puts you at risk of transmitting disease to other partners.

But STDs are also preventable. Yes, the old saying is true: The only truly safe sex is sex for one. But there are some basic ways to have partnered sexual interactions and keep the risk of transmitting disease very, very low. Get educated, decide how much risk is right for you, and you'll feel the fear melt away.

There are basically two approaches, which you can feel free to use in combination: barriers and behavior modification. Putting a latex barrier securely between you and the sexual fluids (and blood) of your partner significantly reduces the chance of catching a disease. And, if that's not enough for you, you can choose to engage only in sexual activities that don't bring you into contact with your partner's fluids.

Sound a lot like my advice on pregnancy prevention? That's because it is. And you should turn to the same resources to learn more: Planned Parenthood's page on STD prevention (
www.wyrrw.com/ppss
), a Planned Parenthood counselor, or
Our Bodies, Ourselves.

And the same caveat holds true as well: If nothing quells your fears about STDs, it may be because this fear is a stand-in for deeper fears about sex. The sooner you can figure out what's really at the root of your fears, the sooner you'll be able to get what you really really want.

When we accept the blame for rape, even hypothetically, the fear of it can really hold us back. “I was taught ‘sit with your legs closed. Don't be loud. Be damn near unnoticeable,'” says Gray, when she thinks about the rape-prevention messages her family taught her. “And now I feel like there's this constant corseting I do to myself. A conceptual corseting. It sounds terrible, but at one point, I was afraid of every man I saw on the street.”

Gray is far from alone. One of the tricky parts of the pernicious myth that women bring rape on ourselves is that women
internalize the blame and then start to worry that anything we do that's remotely sexual puts us in danger of being raped.

Let's clear this up now, shall we? You know what puts you in danger of being raped? Being in the presence of a rapist. You could be wearing seventy-three layers of shapeless, baggy sweats and still be raped if there's a rapist around. And you can wear your tightest, tiniest, hottest outfit and be completely safe if there's no one around who has the drive to violate you sexually. Thing is, the fear that acting sexy or sexual will get you raped is based on a misunderstanding of why and how rapists do the horrible things they do. Rapists don't attack because they want you so bad they can no longer control themselves. Rapists attack because they like raping. And the vast majority of them prefer raping victims they already know. They pick out their victims in advance and deliberately get them into situations where they're easy to attack. That means they don't look for victims who are super-sexy, they look for victims who they think will be easy to manipulate. That's why alcohol is so often involved with sexual assault: Rapists deliberately encourage their targets to get drunk so they'll be more malleable and less likely to fight back.

So go ahead. Wear what you like. Flirt how you like. Sleep with whom you want to. None of it is going to “get you” raped, because that's just not what rape is about.

And if you're still struggling with the fear of rape (after all, as many as one in five women in the United States will be raped in her lifetime; it's not an unreasonable thing to be afraid of), instead of curtailing your own activities, I strongly recommend taking some good self-defense training so you'll have some more
tools with which to combat those fears. I'll talk more about self-defense in chapter 4.

Being called a slut or a prude hardly ever has anything to do with how much sex you are or aren't having. Girls who get labeled “sluts” are just girls who seem disobedient or threatening to the status quo. Sometimes this happens just because you have opinions and aren't afraid to speak up about them. Sometimes it happens because you've rejected blame and shame and that can seem like you're “out of control” to folks who haven't.

Girls who get labeled “prudes” aren't that different, actually. Maybe people call you a prude because you choose not to get drunk, or like to be sexual only with people you're in a committed relationship with. Sometimes it's just about your personal sense of style, or about someone else's cluelessness or mean agenda.

Twenty-three-year-old Prerna has felt this firsthand. “When I was upset with myself for sleeping with someone I didn't care about, my friend told me that I'm young and I ‘should' be sleeping around without feeling bad about it,” she recalls. “She thought she was releasing me from slut shame, but really she made me feel terrible about the fact that I want to be more selective with my sexual partners.”

Don't let the fear of “getting a reputation” of any kind hold you back from exploring your sexuality on your own terms, even if that means you're not ready to explore it yet. Trust that you'll know when it's time.

At its core, the whole idea of the “slut” is based on an archaic double standard. Guys who sleep around gain status, but girls who do the same are seen as somehow damaged and suffering from low self-esteem. On the flip side, girls are often called “prudes” because they don't let peer pressure dictate how they experience sexuality. Guys who do the same thing are idolized as heroic. How you interact sexually is nobody's business but yours and your partner's, and as long as you're both having fun, being safe, and being respectful, it has no bearing on your value as a person.

The fear of not being wanted is both powerful and seldom discussed. Many women are afraid to feel our own desire because we're afraid if we try to pursue it, we'll be rejected. And not just rejected by one particular person (after all, if you think you're pretty appealing, then one person's rejection won't matter that much). No, this fear is pervasive and personal, and there are any number of reasons why it might embed itself in your brain. For thirty-two-year-old Heidi, it went something like this: “Society has told me, day in and day out, that my body is too fat/too lumpy/too ugly/too unacceptable. That my body is too
much
. And I believed it because I didn't think I had any other option. According to this world, my body is wrong . . . and it's hard to imagine that anyone could possibly overlook that.”

Maybe, like her, people have told you that you're undesirable, maybe even over and over. Maybe your body doesn't fit our narrow cultural beauty standard in one or more of an
almost infinite number of ways. (We'll talk more about some of those ways in chapter 3.) Whatever the reason, there's only one thing you have to know: It's a lie.

No, I don't know you. I've never met you, never even seen a picture of you. But I can still promise you, right now, that you are desirable to someone. Probably lots of people.

Why? Because people are different and unpredictable. That's one of the awesome things about getting to know someone new: that moment when you find out she knows how to sword-fight, or he's an überfan of some obscure band you've never heard of before, but now that you're hearing them, you actually kind of love them—that crazy, quirky weirdness that makes us human also means that no two people have the exact same definition of “hot.”

There are people in the world who will find the very qualities you hate about yourself—your skin, your butt, your laugh, whatever they are—completely irresistible. There are people in the world who will be incredibly turned on by other parts of your appearance you may not value as much as you should—like your strong shoulders, or the shape of your nose. And there are people in the world who just don't care very much about appearance, period. They're going to be attracted to you because of who you are and how you act.

The flip side of this is the fear of being wanted for the “wrong reasons,” which goes a little like this: The only people who want me don't want me at all, but want something that I symbolize to them. This can be a pretty painful experience for lots of women, including women of color, fat women, trans or genderqueer women, etc., who are often treated as fetish objects
instead of as whole people. (We'll get further into navigating “wrong reasons” land mines in chapter 6.)

Ultimately, living in fear of rejection can make it much harder to discover and articulate what you really really want. As Phoebe, forty-four, puts it, “I know my vulnerability is around not feeling attractive. But what that fear leads me to is a bigger one: that I'll lose the ability to even know what I want in a sexual situation, because I'll be trying to read what the other person wants. And that fear is paralyzing to me.”

Put another way: The energy you spend denying your desires for fear of rejection is energy spent sabotaging the chance you'll see those desires fulfilled. On the other hand, the more energy you spend making friends with what you want, the better your chances of getting the opportunity to fulfill those desires.

There are all kinds of desires that can feel “wrong.” Depending on your background, it can feel “wrong” to want to be sexual with women or transgender people. It can feel wrong to want to act on certain fantasies. It can feel wrong to want to be sexual at all. If you're feeling confused about what's wrong and what isn't, the best person to ask is
you:
Go reread your sexual mission statement.

But sometimes we want things that may actually be wrong. Maybe we want someone who's in a monogamous partnership with someone else. Maybe we want someone who doesn't want us, and we want to force them to be sexual with us. Maybe we want someone who is off-limits because the power differential is too dangerous: a boss or a student or a friend's parent.

It's important to know that we all want “wrong” things at one point or another. Our culture's standard of what's acceptable sexual behavior for women is so narrow it's impossible to live up to. So if you find yourself fearing your own desires because you think they're “wrong,” the best thing to do is take the time to figure out which kind of “wrong” they are. Specifically, you want to ask yourself: If I acted on this desire, would anyone get hurt? If so, who and why?

Sometimes this feeling of “wrong” stems from a desire we just can't let ourselves articulate to ourselves. In her book
Dilemmas of Desire,
researcher Deborah Tolman talked with many teenage girls who'd experienced this phenomenon. One girl in particular, fifteen-year-old Megan, told Tolman about her struggles acknowledging her same-sex attractions:

Later, Megan tells Tolman more explicitly: “You know it's like scary . . . it's society . . . you never would think of, you know, it's natural to kiss a girl.”