Kerry Cohen: Dirty Little Secrets

You might be this girl, too. Maybe in some ways you have experienced such feelings even if you never acted on them the way some of us did. You have met eyes with a man and thought, Maybe he could save me. You have done your makeup and dressed provocatively to attract men at an event. You aren’t immune to the feeling that a man will make you feel something more than just love, more than just sexy—that he will make you feel valuable.

We aren’t sex addicts or love addicts—at least not at first. We aren’t diagnosable. We aren’t yet to the point where we let these feelings utterly destroy our lives, even if, in some ways, it seems they do. They consume us. We are obsessed with getting love, with using male attention to make ourselves worthwhile in the world. Like the girls Courtney L. Martin describes in her book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughter: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body , girls who don’t have eating disorders per se but obsess over the idea of needing to be thinner than they are, the girls I discuss in this book are on a continuum of promiscuity. {1} 1 1. Courtney L. Martin, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body (New York: Free Press, 2007). Sex and love addictions are simply more extreme versions of what many—maybe even most—girls face regarding sex and love.

What happened to us? How did we get to this point, where we use male attention like a drug, again and again, as unsatisfying to us as it is? Why do we keep going back, even though our behavior often becomes self-destructive? And, finally, how do we move from that behavior, those feelings, toward real intimacy?

After Loose Girl arrived on bookshelves, readers were eager to share their stories, to voice their feelings, to know that they weren’t alone. Many wanted answers, a formula, to get themselves to a new place, to stop harming themselves with their promiscuity. This book is my answer to their plea. It is a study of the cult of female, teenage promiscuity, and the silence that surrounds the topic; it is a sharing of numerous stories about the harm done and the movement toward real intimacy. It is also a genuine discussion about how we can make change for ourselves, our daughters, our clients, and our culture.

The bottom line is that we don’t like to talk about teenage girls and sex. Sure, we see it everywhere. Teenage girls in provocative clothing flood the media. They have sex on Gossip Girl and Degrassi and One Tree Hill. And they definitely have sex on reality shows like The Real World and 16 and Pregnant . But when we discuss adolescent girls and sex, it is only in one way: don’t have sex. This is easier than anything else. We tell teenage girls to stay away from sexual behavior and to practice abstinence. Don’t have sex, we say, because we don’t like to imagine them having sex. If they do, then we have to think of them as sexual creatures, and that makes us squirm.

In fact, much of the promiscuity among young women, both heterosexual and homosexual, is likely to go undetected because it makes therapists uncomfortable. When I appeared on Dr. Phil to discuss two teen girls whose parents were unhappy they were having sex, the tagline next to the girls’ names when they were on screen was “sexually active,” as though that was a disorder or a crime of some sort.

But while we refuse to discuss teenage sex, it is happening. According to the Guttmacher Institute, although teenage sexual activity has declined 16 percent in the past fifteen years, almost half (46 percent) of all 15- to 19-year-olds have had sex at least once, and 27 percent of 13- to 16-year-olds are sexually active. The larger proportion of these teenagers are black (67.3 percent) and Hispanic (51.4 percent) rather than white (41.8 percent). Much of the sexual behavior occurs in populations traditionally thought to have less experience in sexual activity, though, such as teenagers from affluent homes and preadolescents. {2} 2 2. “Facts on American Teens’ Sexual and Reproductive Health,” Guttmacher Institute, January 2011, www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-ATSRH.html.

Ultimately, the statistics for STDs and teenage pregnancy aren’t promising. We are experiencing a record high of teenage girls with sexual diseases. Of the 18.9 million new cases of STDs each year, 48 percent occur among 15- to 24-year-olds. One in four teenage girls aged 14–19 and one in every two black teenage girls has an STD. Each year, almost 750,000 teen pregnancies are reported for women aged 15–19, and 82 percent of those pregnancies are unplanned. {3} 3 3. Ibid. The MTV reality series Teen Mom , a spin-off of the wildly successful 16 and Pregnant , had the channel’s highest-rated premiere in more than a year—evidence, I’d say, of our fascination with teenage motherhood. What happens behind these statistics, the feelings and motivations behind promiscuous behavior, and the direct results of it, is less clear. These are the dirty little secrets that girls carry. These are the stories they have—we have—but don’t tell.

There is some research that casual sex among teenagers can be more harmful than we’ve thought. The adolescent brain’s prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for judgment—develops at an explosive rate. There are in fact only two times during development that the brain is overrun with synapses (neural connections) in this way: right before birth and right before puberty. At this critical time in preadolescence, the brain manufactures far more synapses than necessary. The synapses that are used become stronger. The ones that aren’t used weaken and die. As a result, certain experiences become sealed in that teen’s growth, in the strong synapses. If they handle intimacy—and sex—in ways that don’t get them what they really want, again and again, they are likely to wind up with a potentially harmful approach to intimacy. {4} 4 4. Joe S. McIlhaney Jr. and Freda McKissic Bush, Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex Is Affecting Our Children (Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 2008).

What’s more, the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until the mid-twenties, and there is some evidence that bonding through sex and then breaking up again and again damages the ability to establish meaningful connection through intimacy. In other words, when teens bond and break, bond and break, before the cortex is fully developed, as most teens do, they potentially set themselves up for trouble with real intimacy later on. (This research, however, is based on findings concerning oxytocin, and many have argued that we don’t know enough about oxytocin to make such claims. See the “References and Notes” section at the end of the book for more information.) {5} 5 5. For a detailed evaluation of the studies on oxytocin and attachment, see Heather Corinna’s article, “Pump Up The Vole-Ume: Talking Oxytocin,” Scarleteen.com, August 4, 2010, www.scarleteen.com/blog/heather_corinna/2010/08/04/pump_up_the_voleume_talking_oxytocin .

At the same time, though, we know that a girl’s ability to express her sexual desires is a necessary step toward developing healthy sexual intimacy, and it is essential if she is to protect herself against unwanted or unsafe sexual activities. In fact, in one study, researchers found that the fewer sexual partners a girl had, the more likely she was to not assert her beliefs and feelings during sexual activity, thereby potentially setting herself up for negative sexual experiences. {6} 6 6. Beth A. Auslander, Michelle M. Perfect, Paul A. Succop, and Susan L. Rosenthal, “Perceptions of Sexual Assertiveness among Adolescent Girls: Initiation, Refusal, and Use of Protective Behaviors,” Journal of Pediatric Adolescent Gynecology 20, no. 3 (2007): 157–162.