Kerry Cohen - Dirty Little Secrets

For decades, the push has been along the same lines as what Jo’s parents told her. And the results have been consistent: nothing has changed. The large majority of those who pledge abstinence at thirteen lose their virginities by sixteen and are just as likely to engage in oral and anal sex as those who didn’t pledge, according to a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. {121} 121 1. M. M. Bersamin, S. Walker, E. D. Waiters, D. A. Fisher, and J. W. Grube, “Promising to Wait: Virginity Pledges and Adolescent Sexual Behavior,” Journal of Adolescent Health 36, no. 5 (2005): 428–436. With limited guidance and plenty of shame about contraception, they wind up with STDs and pregnancies. They get married too young, to the wrong person, because they just want to have sex already and not be judged as bad. Many become what we can now define as loose girls, young women who use sex and male attention to fill emptiness and need, who wind up disappointed and ashamed, unsure how to change their behavior, and terribly judged.

Jocelyn M. Elders, in her foreword to Judith Levine’s book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex , wrote:

We lead the Western world in virtually every sexual problem: teenage pregnancy, abortion, rape, incest, child abuse, sexually transmitted disease, HIV/AIDS, and many more. Yet when the Surgeon General issues a call to action on sexual health urging comprehensive sex education, abstinence, and other measures to promote responsible sexual behavior, and advocates that we break our “conspiracy of silence about sexuality,” we want to fire the Surgeon General. {122} 122 2. Jocelyn M. Elders, foreword to Levine, Harmful to Minors , ix.

We are caught in an odd rigidity on this issue, one that is burdened with false, fear-inducing dangers about what it is to be a girl, when meanwhile the biggest danger of being a girl is how impossible it is to wade through the fear-inducing propaganda to find the truth.

When the child psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term adolescence , sexuality came to be seen as more of a test than a natural progression. It became a danger to traverse, a danger that adolescents must not allow to take over their lives to avoid future problems, such as impulsivity. Like Freud’s theories about sexual stages, this was simply another theory, certainly not evidenced by research. This isn’t to say Hall’s notion of adolescence hasn’t been immensely useful. Obviously, it has. My comment is only to point out that our panic about girls having sex is based on a man-made philosophy, not empirically supported research, and is therefore worthy of questioning.

It is important to note these odd biases, because they are so hugely in the way of us making any headway on the very real cultural issues attached to girls and sexuality. We must begin to change our minds about how to transform the culture when it comes to teen girls and sex.

Jacquie went to school in the Midwest, among cornfields and wheat. Her experience of sex education involved anatomical drawings of the reproductive sex organs (but not the clitoris, she told me when I asked) and a whole lot of information about how to protect herself from boys. The boys were in another classroom, getting their own education. When I asked what the boys learned about, she said that she didn’t know but suspected they weren’t being taught to protect themselves from girls. She’s right. Most sex education for boys is limited to anatomy, birth-control options, and wet dreams.

While she was being taught how to say no, she regularly wondered how to say yes. Was that even possible for a girl? She was itching to experiment. For one, she was horny, like any healthy adolescent girl. For another, she was curious. Incidentally, she told me, she gained nothing from her sex-ed curriculum and wound up pregnant at sixteen. She had an abortion, and her born-again Christian mother kicked her out of the house. She has been unable to have a healthy relationship with almost anyone since. She told me, “Sometimes I think I’m not cut out to love and be loved. Is that possible, that some people are just too fucked up to get loved?”

Jacquie is a strong—and awfully sad—example of how sex education fails girls. It sets up the same lie girls are sold everywhere: boys are horny; you are not. Boys get what they want; you get to be there for their purposes. So be careful. And always the underlying message is there for girls: don’t act on your sexual urges or you will be immoral and unworthy. In essence, we set our kids up for failure when it comes to sex.

Clearly, the just-say-no approach doesn’t work. When we continue to take this approach, we bang our heads against the wall of increasing teen pregnancy, STDs, and exceeding confusion and desperation about what sex means. Abstinence education fails girls. The statistics bear this fact out. There is no difference statistically between those who pledge abstinence and those who don’t. In the 1990s, there was a slight drop in teen pregnancies and STDs, which, not surprisingly, abstinence advocates jumped all over as evidence that abstinence works. But both the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined through closer research that the drop was due to increased contraceptive use and increased engagement in sex other than vaginal intercourse. {123} 123 3. Patricia Donovan, “Falling Teen Pregnancy, Birthrates: What’s Behind the Declines?” The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy , vol. 1, October 1998; Steven Reinberg, “U.S. Teen Birth Rate Hit Record Low in 2009: CDC,” December 21, 2009, health.msn.com/health-topics/sexual-health/birth-control/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100268351 . Unprotected vaginal intercourse had declined, not intercourse and sex itself.

Judith Levine writes, “Abstinence education is not practical. It is ideological.” {124} 124 4. Levine, Harmful to Minors , 94. And still, we cling to it. This is likely because conservatives see teenagers having any sexual relations as the problem. But as we’ve explored in this book, the harm is not in the sex but in the circumstances in which sex can happen, such as girls having sex solely because they want to feel cared for, or girls having sex without protection because they want to please the boy more than they want to protect themselves.

Good sex—when a girl wants to have the sex, both physically and emotionally, and when she does what she needs to protect herself physically—cannot be a bad thing, and certainly not any worse than it is for a boy. We all know that teen boys and girls are sexually desirous creatures. They want sex! And they will have it. Holding fast to the idea that sex is bad for teens has no useful purpose except to harm teenagers by shaming them—particularly girls—when they do have sex.

In 2000, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy took a poll and found that almost three-quarters of girls who had had sex regretted it, where about half the boys did. {125} 125 5. “Not Just Another Thing to Do: Teens Talk about Sex, Regret, and the Influence of Their Parents,” The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, June 30, 2000, www.thenationalcampaign.org/resources/pdf/pubs/NotJust_FINAL.pdf . It shouldn’t surprise us to learn that a spokesperson for the campaign said that the results showed that teens were taking a more cautious attitude toward sex. But if we look at the numbers through a different lens, we can see that the statistics translate more into shame than caution—and of course girls carry the larger burden of that shame. A handful of young women approached me after reading Loose Girl to say that they related because they had premarital sex and wished they hadn’t, evidence that in too many girls’ minds, any sex before marriage makes them disgraceful. I’ve asked a few of those girls why they thought that made them disgraceful, and they all answered that they shouldn’t even have wanted to have had sex.