Kerry Cohen - Dirty Little Secrets

Part of how we help girls battle the waves and own their identities is by having them do something other than sitting in front of the mirror, by encouraging them to be subjects instead of objects. Sports are an excellent way to encourage a girl to use her body in such a way that she understands it has more purpose in the world than just to be looked at. Girls in sports often focus on making their bodies strong rather than thin, because they can see that strength has more purpose for their goals—to succeed as an athlete—than being skinny. On teams they work together, as a unified group, for a goal that doesn’t involve boys. Of course, some girl-heavy sports, such as cheerleading, can be more about what a girl looks like than how she feels. There is nothing wrong, of course, with wanting to look good, and parents should not try to encourage their daughters away from an interest in their looks or clothes. The key is to support their sense of selves, whatever that may be.

Sports work well to protect a girl’s body image, but really, anything that can keep a girl’s attention that isn’t a boy, anything that can build a sense of self-efficacy, of confidence, is prohibitive of a girl focusing every thought on boys. This might include the arts, or music, or academics. When a girl has something that makes her feel worthwhile in the world—something other than a boy’s attention—she has the opportunity to defy the cultural pressure to think only about how to make herself attractive to boys.

This is what happened to me. My interest in writing grew, I got some encouragement, and I came to have a sense of myself as a writer, not just a potential girlfriend.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Remember the strength of those waves. They are powerful, withstanding. Feminism and human rights work have barely touched them. The waves have even grown bigger. They’ve taken on more ways—the Internet, the cell phone—to pound girls with their messages. It is so very necessary to be continually aware of that tidal-wave culture.

One of the activities I like to do with girls is to have them find at least five images in their daily lives that give them a message about their sexual identities. The girls come back to me with many more than five images. They have magazines and phrases scribbled down from bathroom stalls. They have television shows and older men checking them out from their cars. They’ve got billboards and bus boards and posters. One had porn magazines she found in her brother’s closet. They come back angry. Some come back nonplussed, perhaps desensitized to our hypersexualized culture. Then we discuss what the messages mean and who the girls want to be in the world. They tell me their truths about the boys they like and what they’ve done and how it made them feel—the good stuff and the bad. And I listen, which is all they want.

If parents could do this for their girls, if they support their girls as they question the culture they live in, they will help them to be a little stronger against those waves. My hope is that with this kind of support, mothers like Jo, who we met at the beginning of this chapter, will have daughters who are much more powerful in the world than their mothers felt they were as teens.

Recently, I received an email from a woman who didn’t want me to know her name. She described her years of loose-girl behavior and how no one knows. She wrote, “I’ve spent my whole life hiding from the world, from myself. At this point I don’t know who I am or what I want. I’m lost…I wish we could talk honestly about ourselves, but loose girls can’t do that. The shame is eating me alive.” This brave woman’s pain is not that she had sex. Her pain comes from feeling silenced, from living an unnecessarily unspeakable life.

My hope is that this book begins some movement toward cracking that silence, toward the conversations we need to have with one another, and toward the transformation we need in our culture to change the direction teen girls have been herded into for so long. We must have these conversations. We must speak honestly. We must be louder.

Mostly, we have to tell our stories, because in our stories lie salvation for other girls and women. It seems so cliché—stories save lives. But that’s true. It was a story that laid the foundation for my own healing. I was a senior in high school, seventeen years old, and I took an elective English class called Minority Voices. We read stories about teenage girls who felt lonely, exiled, confused about who they were, and my whole world broke open: I wasn’t alone. There were others out there who felt what I felt. There were others expressing what I couldn’t yet express. This changed everything for me. Not yet, not in a tangible way. I was still going to hurt myself again and again. I was still going to let every crush I had, every boy who looked my way, consume my brain. I was still going to choose boys over self-enhancement. But those stories were there, in the back of my mind. They lingered. They made me want to write. And eventually, I found a way to write my own story, hoping a girl would one day read it and see herself, would keep my story in the back of her mind, and would one day tell her story, too—all these stories in a round, all these stories breaking the silence.

What sorts of things do you think students learn about sex at school? In particular, what do girls learn?

How are sex-related issues currently addressed in your school? What needs to be addressed in a more effective way, and what needs addressing at all?

If abstinence is in your school’s sex education curriculum, is it aimed primarily at girls? What is the message connected to abstinence at your school?

Are cultural messages and cultural expectations exposed inside your school’s sex-education curriculum?

Are school counselors trained in how to deal with sex and relationship issues among the students?

Students should find examples of expectations for girls in their culture. They will likely find them in commercials, ads, magazine articles, and other media.

Next, students write up sentences: According to [the ad, the article], I need to be ______________ to get/have ______________.

Have students work in groups to design their own ad campaign to support girls’ self-esteem. Point to some of the ad campaigns already in existence—one example is Nike, or the Dove Real Beauty Campaign.

Have students design hypothetical organizations that they feel girls could use, such as ones that encourage girls in sports or science.

Students then should start over but go through the exact same process for boys.

Students write questions for a teen sex-advice column. They can be real questions they have or questions they would expect to see in such a column. Put the questions into a hat and have them each choose one. Then, they work in twos to answer each question as though they were Ms. X. Finally, discuss their Ms. X answers as a class, encouraging them to pay attention to the question, What about girls’ desire?

Discuss what counselors see from girls versus boys regarding sex and relationships.

Explore examples of what girls versus boys are taught via the prevailing culture (use magazine ads, round-ups of television shows, and so on).

Discuss in small groups adults’ own assumptions about teenage girls’ sexual desires and desires about relationships. Open this up to the larger group to share discoveries.