Kerry Cohen: Dirty Little Secrets

As years went by sex became exactly what I wished to win, because it told me that I was valuable and beautiful, and those things were so important to me .

When Faith was eleven years old, she went with her family to the community swimming pool like she had each summer. Every summer prior, she had pushed through those gates, pulled off her outerwear, and jumped right into the deep end. She prided herself on her back dives and her handstands and the fact that she could swim underwater from one end of the pool to the other without once coming up for air. But this summer, something was different. Faith felt hesitant. She walked more slowly. She was hyperaware of her body, of the small breasts that had ached and pressed beneath her chest during the fall and spring, and of the fact that her inner thighs now touched.

There were boys at the pool. Boys! They had been there every summer, of course. How had she not noticed? The boys didn’t turn to look at her as she walked along the edge of the pool, which suddenly mattered in a terrible way. Was there something wrong with her? Was she ugly? Was she fat? Was she not sexy? Rather than jump right into the pool she lay on a lounge chair and considered how she appeared to the boys who might look at her. She lifted a leg so her thigh fat wouldn’t spread. She left her sunglasses on even though that might make funny tan lines on her face, because she thought she looked good with them on—glamorous, like a movie star. Faith’s mother, concerned, asked why she wasn’t going in the water, but Faith just shrugged. She wasn’t going to tell her mother the real reason—that she felt watched, desperate, both embarrassed that the boys would see her and terrified that they wouldn’t.

Lana, just a little older than Faith, was always an exceptionally pretty girl. Her father, especially, took tremendous pride in her round, blue eyes and blond curls. When she was little, he liked to bring her to the fire station where he worked and show her off to his coworkers. His friends told him he better be careful when she grew up, and he laughed and rolled his eyes, but Lana could tell that he liked that they thought this. She was quite aware of all of this, actually—her father’s admiration of and pride in her looks. And she was equally aware of her mother’s jealousy over the way he treated Lana. From a very young age, she did what she could to be extra pretty. She smiled sweetly. She spoke politely to her father’s friends, answering all their questions.

When she started puberty at ten years old, though, her father distanced himself. It was subtle, but it was clear: where once she had been her father’s daughter, now she was handed off to her mother. Lana continued to do everything she could to be pretty, and—following cultural guidelines—sexy. She wore shirts that showed off her young breasts. She wore skirts that exposed lots of leg. She wore makeup and nail polish and perfume. Her mother felt she was out of control. Her father became stricter and told her she needed to focus on her schoolwork, not boys, which only made Lana feel betrayed.

So, at the young age of twelve, Lana began to pursue boys. She let them touch her however they wanted. She gave blow jobs regularly. She worked her way through the boys at school. At the same time, she grew withdrawn and depressed. She fought with her parents. She started bringing in bad grades. One day her mother said to her, “Where did my Lana go? I don’t even know who you are anymore.” Lana didn’t know who she was anymore, either.

Before girls become women, they are whole, energized, excited. They take on the world without hesitation. They are their own directors, in charge of their lives. But then things almost always change. Mary Pipher famously described this seismic shift that comes about as girls enter puberty. She writes, “Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle.” {11} 11 1. Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 19. As girls enter adolescence, they also enter another culture, one in which how they appear to others becomes how they exist. “Girls stop being and start seeming,” Pipher notes, quoting Simone de Beauvoir. {12} 12 2. Ibid., 22.

Sally Mann, my favorite photographer, captures this transitional time in her collection At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women . In each photograph, girls are on the cusp of something. They are both children and too knowing. In some, it is obvious by the ways they hold themselves that they know too much. In others, you can see the light that has begun to fade. Ann Beattie writes in her introduction to the images, “Twelve-year-old girls know what brought them to the present moment, but that’s as far as they’ve gotten.” {13} 13 3. Anne Beattie, introduction to At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women , by Sally Mann (New York: Aperture, 2005), 8. In other words, they fully know themselves, even as they have begun this change, but they can’t see where they are headed.

Boys and girls enter adolescence—they become “tweens”—already amid challenges. They go through their greatest physical and emotional growth since infancy. Puberty—a well-known test for most—comes earlier these days. Although the average age of puberty onset is 10.5, with most girls entering puberty between the age of 8 and 13, there is evidence that this age is dropping. {14} 14 4. Shumei S. Sun, Christine M. Schubert, William Cameron Chumlea, Alex F. Roche, Howard E. Kulin, Peter A. Lee, John H. Himes, and Alan S. Ryan, “National Estimates of the Timing of Sexual Maturation and Racial Differences Among US Children,” Pediatrics 110, no. 5 (2002): 911–919. Note that the earlier onset of puberty does not include “precocious puberty,” which is when puberty occurs before the age of eight. In 1997, a landmark study of approximately seventeen thousand girls found that 15 percent of Caucasian girls and 50 percent of black girls already started to show signs of puberty by age 8. {15} 15 5. Marcia E. Herman-Giddens, Eric J. Slora, Richard C. Wasserman, Carlos J. Bourdony, Manju V. Bhapkar, Gary G. Koch, and Cynthia M. Hasemeie, “Secondary Sexual Characteristics and Menses in Young Girls Seen in Office Practice: A Study from the Pediatric Research in Office Settings Network,” Pediatrics 99, no. 4 (1997): 505–512. More recent research suggests an even further drop to age 7. A fifteen-year study out of Denmark published in 2009 determined that the average age of breast development for girls has dropped a full year—from 10.88 years to 9.86 years. {16} 16 6. Julian Isherwood, “Dramatic Drop in Female Puberty,” Politiken.dk , June 18, 2010, politiken.dk/newsinenglish/ECE998340/dramatic-drop-in-female-puberty .

Age of menarche, a girl’s first period, does not seem to be lowering, however. In other words, many girls’ secondary sex characteristics—breast development, pubic hair growth, and widening hips—are developing early, but first menstruation, which means ovulation and hence the ability to get pregnant, does not arrive with those secondary sex characteristics. (Researchers theorize that increasing amounts of obesity and estrogen in our environment (via Bisphenol A [BPA], pesticides, compounds in cigarettes, and phthalates) cause the earlier onset, but no studies have been conclusive.) {17} 17 7. Florence Williams, “Younger Girls, Bigger Breasts: Are Chemicals to Blame?” Slate , July 28 2009, www.doublex.com/section/health-science/younger-girls-bigger-breasts-arechemicals-blame . Caucasian girls’ average age of menstruation is 12.6, which is not significantly earlier than it was in the 1970s. We do know, though, that black and Mexican American girls’ median age of menarche has always been lower—12.06 for non-Hispanic Blacks and 12.25 for Mexican Americans. {18} 18 8. William Cameron Chumlea, Christine M. Schubert, Alex F. Roche, Howard E. Kulin, Peter A. Lee, John H. Himes, and Shumei S. Sun, “Age at Menarche and Racial Comparisons in U.S. Girls,” Pediatrics 111, no. 1 (2003): 110–113.