Kerry Cohen: Dirty Little Secrets

Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne write in their book Sexy So Soon : “[S]ex in commercial culture has far more to do with trivializing and objectifying sex than with promoting it, more to do with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that sex as portrayed in the media is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical.” {22} 22 12. Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne, So Sexy, So Soon (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009), 9. In other words, our media shows sex as something artificial, unnatural, maybe even porn influenced. Think about some of today’s female singers, such as Ke$ha, Rihanna, and Beyoncé, who have expressed their sexuality by accentuating cleavage, wearing stripper heels, and pouting at the camera. How does that have anything to do with real sex or intimacy? Girls learn that male attention—and potentially then romance and love—comes from appearing artificially sexy.

And yet these singers, like most of those in the media outlets that exploit sexuality, are not trying to do anything other than appeal to our demands. Girls want direction for attracting men, and this is how to do it: girls need only learn how to appeal to boys’ sexual desire. Girls take notes on how to make themselves desirable, on how to move, dress, pout, and wear makeup. For the purpose of selling things, learning how to court the male desire for real companionship or intimacy isn’t nearly as provocative.

But while the media images encourage sexiness, institutions such as the National Abstinence Education Association, Focus Adolescent Services, and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy pressure girls to not be sexual at all. In fact, the institutions seem as obsessed with trying to control girls’ sexuality as the media does. Parents and schools often exert this antisexual pressure as well.

In today’s culture, abstinence and virginity connote morality for girls in a way that’s different from that for boys. That is, although we reference honor and strength and basic moral ideals when we teach boys about being good, we mostly reference virginity for girls. As Jessica Valenti notes in The Purity Myth , “While boys are taught that the things that make them men—good men—are universally accepted ethical ideals, women are led to believe that our moral compass lies somewhere between our legs.” {23} 23 13. Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2009), 13. Virginity is not just a sexual choice; it’s the most prominent way to frame who you are as a person.

Valenti also identifies the “desirable virgin,” the feminine ideal of our culture, who is both sexy and not sexual (we’ll explore more about the virgin myth in chapter 3). {24} 24 14. Ibid., 30. As most of us know, living up to such expectations is all but impossible, but it is particularly tricky for the adolescent girl who is dealing with new sexual curiosity and developmental challenges. On the one hand is abstinence-only education and on the other hand is the push to make themselves desirable: girls learn quickly that there is no happy medium.

The images and pressures are indeed so tremendous that it is sometimes hard to remember that beneath all of it there is a girl who has genuine sexual curiosity and desire, a girl who suddenly is receiving massive amounts of attention not for her intelligence or sense of humor, but for her body.

In Loose Girl , I wrote about how, at the age of eleven, walking on the sidewalk into the next town as I had every day that summer, an older man in a semitruck honked his horn and smiled at me, and I understood for the first time that I could get attention without having to do anything. And I understood that this was what it meant to be a girl; this is where we had power and meaning in the world.

Stephanie has a similar story. When she was seven, in the first grade, she had a boyfriend. Most all the girls and boys in her class had boyfriends and girlfriends. It was just something they said. It’s not like any of them did anything other than hold hands or kiss on the cheek. But for Stephanie, having a boyfriend felt intensely important. She explained to me that she knew even then that if a boy wanted to be with her, it meant something was important about her. Like in all the Disney movies she’d seen, the most handsome, valiant males choose the girl characters, and the girls’ destinies are fulfilled through this process. When her boyfriend decided he wanted to be another girl’s boyfriend instead, Stephanie was devastated. Her main focus became getting another boy to like her, and somehow she knew that to be liked—even at seven—she had to be physically attractive, maybe even sexy. Stephanie told me she feels like she never had a chance, that her narrative about boys making her worthwhile began so young that she has no idea who she might have been otherwise.

It is easy to see how genuine sexual desire gets submerged within each girl, even lost. In conversations with adolescent girls, researchers have found that girls will not speak spontaneously about their own desire; rather, they will only speak of their own desire in terms of relationships. In the educational psychologist Deborah Tolman’s research, she found that even when asked directly, many girls don’t quite know how to answer. {25} 25 15. Deborah L. Tolman, Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). They note that it isn’t something they discuss. They get angry. They giggle. They say they don’t have those kinds of feelings or that they don’t want them. Or some of the young women note that girls just don’t feel desire in that way, unable to claim an “I” voice on the subject. Those who will finally speak about their desire only do so when they feel safe enough to do so, when they can trust that their words will not be manipulated.

Sexual desire for anyone doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Indeed, desire is very much a socially constructed experience, and our society is not keen to include teenage girls in a discourse about sexual desire. We quickly divert such conversations into discussions of virginity and abstinence-only education, the perils of teenage pregnancy, or girls as sexual victims. Certainly all of these topics are valid, but nowhere do we have a means for girls to direct the narrative of their own sexual desire.

I can’t help but imagine a society in which girls are allowed this sort of direction. What would it mean for girls to look inward to their talents and strengths and uniqueness, rather than at billboards and television shows and magazines, to find out who they are sexually? What would it mean for girls if they could define their passion through internal avenues of desire? Imagine a girl able to express herself sexually with a boy, unconcerned about how her body looks or whether he thinks she’s sexy. Imagine a girl who trusts that when she does express herself in that way, boys will respect her as an equal partner and the rest of her community will celebrate her strength and passion rather than judge her as a whore.

If we are to break down all the reasons we aren’t there yet culturally, we must first look at why girls aren’t permitted to have this freedom. For a girl, sexual feeling itself becomes tied to being looked at. Without any cultural guidance about sexual desire, we can only ascertain that we must look a certain way to even have sexual feelings. Well-known feminist author Naomi Wolf notes: “Men take this core for granted in themselves: We see that, sanctioned by the culture, men’s sexuality simply is . They do not have to earn it with their appearance. We see that men’s desire precedes contact with women.” {26} 26 16. Wolf, Beauty Myth , 156.