Kerry Cohen: Dirty Little Secrets

All of the girls and women I interviewed have been given pseudonyms to protect their privacy. In an ideal world, they would be able to claim their stories without needing confidentiality. But unfortunately, girls who talk about their sexual experiences often get bullied and ostracized. In my mind, this is more evidence of our need for these conversations, more evidence of how badly we need to normalize sexual desire and behavior among adolescent girls.

This book has two purposes. First, I want to simply open a discussion that aims to identify girls’ sexual experiences in our culture, how they develop as sexual creatures inside a culture that largely holds the reins on what that means. I aim to help readers understand how girls head into adolescence as loose girls, how they often wind up using male attention and promiscuity as a way to feel worthwhile, and how that experience gets reinforced once it is under way. Second, I hope to provide some suggestions for helping girls find their way out of this negative experience with promiscuity and for protecting girls from using sex in this way in the first place.

With that intention, the book is split into two parts—identifying the loose girl experience and helping girls gain power over their sexual lives. At the beginning of each chapter, I include a quote from the girls and women who have contacted me about their own sexual experiences.

In chapter 1, I examine girlhood, from puberty on, from a sexual perspective. Here girls discuss how their identities are tied up with how teenage boys view them and how they think of themselves in relation to other people. This includes the notion that girls must measure up to a certain physical standard to be worthwhile, how they can assess that measure on the basis of male attention, and how impossible it is for a girl to ever feel that she is good enough as she is. Chapter 1 also examines the ways in which female adolescent development is perfectly poised for those sorts of belief. It briefly discusses the ways this belief has remained relatively constant throughout much of our history, and is, in this way, interwoven with the female identity, even as so many other strides have been made for women over time.

Then we’ll delve into boys and discuss just what it is about them that makes them so beautiful, so free, and always so unattainable. Chapter 2 explores the fantasy that our culture builds about boys and how that gets tangled up with girls’ beliefs about them. We’ll look at how those fantasies get wound up with the idea that boys will free us from that particularly female belief that we aren’t good enough as we are.

In chapter 3, we’ll dive into that minefield that is teenage girls and sex. It is one of our long-standing taboos. And yet, teenage girls have sex. They have sexual desires and curiosity. They experiment. They have fantasies. Usually when we discuss teenage girls and sex, though, we do so in prescribed, limited ways. Girls are virgins, sluts, or empowered. In this chapter, I explore—with the help of the girls I interview and existing literature—how girls see themselves in relation to these archetypes. Together we find that they don’t often fit these constrictions, and yet because of these archetypes, they feel voiceless, shamed, and alone.

Much of the research out there suggests that, for girls to have a healthy relationship to sex, they must have a healthy relationship with their mothers. Through interviews with girls and the current literature, chapter 4 examines the ways in which severed intimacy with mothers both does and doesn’t contribute to promiscuous behavior. We’ll also discuss the issue of mothers modeling attention-needing behavior from men, and how that influences girls’ behavior as well.

Most people assume that a girl’s relationship with her father determines her future with boys and men. In chapter 5, we will examine whether, and in what capacity, this has been true for girls. This examination includes fathers’ behavior with women, their direct and/or indirect sexualizing of girls, and their ability to show appropriate attention to their daughters.

In chapter 6, we discuss other ways girls harm themselves in conjunction with promiscuity, such as alcohol, drugs, cutting, and eating disorders. How do these behaviors interact with promiscuity, and in what ways are they part and parcel of the same thing? We also look at the prevalence of depression and other mood disorders with promiscuous behavior.

Sex, rape, and losing virginity is chapter 7’s focus. As we’ve discussed, teenage girls do have sexual desire and curiosity. Is it possible to build a society in which we can allow them to experiment sexually, to make their own choices regarding sex, without being tunneled into the archetypes available to them?

One of the challenges tied up with that question is rape. We tend to think of rape as a black-and-white issue—you either are or aren’t the victim of rape. You either say yes or no. But the concept can become blurry when a girl acts out promiscuously because of low self-esteem or because she so often feels violated even when she consents. Rape is legally and clearly defined, of course, but the sense of violation many loose girls experience can have long-lasting emotional effects that are similar to the consequences of rape.

Another challenge is the fantasy world we apply to sex, particularly for adolescent girls. To lose her virginity, a girl must be in love. It will be the most magical, eventful night of her life. Much too often girls get drunk to lose their virginity so that they will have an excuse later, so they won’t have to take on the aura of a girl who chooses sex. Through interviews with girls, I examine these various issues and how, with them, we might build new avenues for girls’ sexual choices.

In chapter 8, we’ll look at the brave new world of dating. It was the 1980s and 1990s when I was living out the scenes that I would later share in Loose Girl. Computers were just beginning to enter our culture. No one I knew used a cellular phone. And yet I managed to get myself into trouble with boys again and again. We’ll examine how things are different now and what those differences mean in terms of promiscuous behavior. We’ll also explore the dangers that may come up when a girl pursues male attention, and the newer, more complex venues for this danger to play out today.

In part 2, we’ll look at a few ways that girls can gain power. Too often we assume that younger girls act out sexually but learn to control their impulses and ultimately find intimacy when they mature into women. The more common truth is that girls carry these struggles into adulthood. In chapter 9, we’ll hear stories from women who still feel addicted to that attention from men.

In chapter 10, we’ll explore various ways girls have come to new and better places with promiscuity and with their need for male attention, and how we can help them make those changes. We’ll also look at those who haven’t been able to change and the dangers involved in that inability to change, and we’ll consider the possibility that change is only partially possible and depends on the particular situation of the person trying to make that change.

Ultimately, if we are to make true change for girls, we also need to transform our culture away from one that positions girls as sexual objects and only allows particular archetypal figures for girls engaging in sexual activity. Chapter 11 explores how girls might take the lead on that change, including through transformation of our sex education programs.

My hope is that women young and old, parents, therapists, and school administrators, will see this book as an opening, a break in the silence surrounding teenage girls and sex.