Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality

D E BO R A H L . T O L M A N

D I L E M M A S

of
D E S
I
R E

Te e n a g e G i r i s T
a l
k a
b
o
u 1

Sex u a l i t y

•

DILEMMAS
of
DESIRE

DILEMMAS
of
DESIRE

Teenage Girls Talk about

Sexualit y

Debor ah L. Tolman

Ha r v a r d U n i v ersit y

P r ess Cambr idge,

M assachusetts

London, Eng land

Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tolman, Deborah L.

Dilemmas of desire : teenage girls talk about sexuality / Deborah L. Tolman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00895-2 (cloth)

ISBN 0-674-01856-7 (pbk.)

1. Teenage girls—Sexual behavior. 2. Teenage girls—Attitudes. 3. Interpersonal relations in adolescence. I. Title.

HQ27.5 .T65 2002

306.7'0835—dc21 2002024134

For my parents, E. Laurie and Sylvia Tolman, for raising me to ask the question

For my husband, Luis Ubinas,

for sustaining me as I answered it

In a recently rediscovered photograph taken right after I graduated from college, I am standing with one of my roommates; we are laughing at a road sign that reads “Hidden Drives.” We are laugh- ing because I had just announced that “when I grow up” I will write a book with this title. Well, it’s not exactly that title but it is fairly close. And so this book has been a very long time in the making. First and foremost, I am grateful for the trust and enthusiasm of the staff in the two anonymous schools involved in this study, who opened the necessary doors to make this project happen. I am equally grateful to the girls who shared their thoughts, feelings, and experiences with me in the service of “this little research thing,” as one of them called it. I also want to thank another group of adolescent girls, who participated in a subsequent two-year dis- cussion group about adolescent sexuality and girls’ sexual desire, for deepening my insights into the complexities of growing up female these days. My gratitude goes to Angela von der Lippe, for- mer acquisitions editor at Harvard University Press, to Elizabeth Knoll for shepherding the manuscript through the Press, and to Elizabeth Hurwit for marvelous editing.

Over the years, I have benefited from the love and support of my growing family, the faith and care of loyal friends, and the in- tellectual stimulation and challenge of an expanding community

ix

countless ideas that appear in this book and elsewhere, her insis- tence that I not “laminate” desire, her perfect solutions for struc- tural roadblocks, and her frank calls for consistency, social justice, and real-world implications have been instrumental in shaping this book. I thank them both and continue to marvel at how lucky a girl can be.

I have been very fortunate to have had the support—emotional and otherwise—and freedom for pursuing my passions for the past seven years at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College. Susan Bailey, Nan Stein, Nancy Marshall, Laura Palmer Edwards, and Pam Baker Webber have each in their own way con- tributed to this work. My colleagues at the Gender and Sexuality Project have been my sustenance, especially Michelle Porche, Renee Spencer, and Myra Rosen-Reynoso. Their intellect, humor, and care are an endless source of energy for me. I am most espe- cially grateful to Mary Harris, Kate Collins, and Lynn Sorsoli (who also came to the rescue to care for my children on a regular basis), as well as to Kathleen Ford from afar, for their hard work in track- ing down references, dealing with formatting crises, and seeing to all the details beyond the actual writing. New directions in my ongoing research program on adolescent sexuality have influenced this book. Grants from the Ford Foundation, the Spencer Founda- tion, the Henry A. Murray Center at Radcliffe College, and the

acknowledgments
xi

National Institute of Child Health and Development supported various such projects. In particular, I want to thank Susan New- comer at the National Institute of Child Health and Development and Sarah Costa at the Ford Foundation for their counsel and encouragement, and for really getting it.

My colleagues and friends seem to work as a collective to keep me in line while urging me to cross boundaries. I am especially grateful to Margaret Keiley, Tracy Higgins, Laura Szalacha, Eliza- beth Debold, Jean Rhodes, Lisa Diamond, Alice Stone and Gary Stoloff, Connie Bauman, Janie Ward, Joanne Zaiac, Thania and Tony St. John, Helene Sanghvi York, Bambi Schieffelin, and Vita Rabinowitz. I was fortunate to be part of the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, a formative experi- ence in my intellectual development. In particular, Lyn Mikel Brown always generously shared her extraordinary and transfor- mative ideas with me. J. D. Kleinke reappeared just in time to offer the advice, succor, and true friendship I needed at a crucial time. And I owe an enormous debt to my dear, dear friend Kathy Good- man, whose sharp eyes and mind went right to the heart so many times, and whose passion is reflected in the pages of this book. I am deeply grateful to Syssa Felisberto for the understanding and care that she provided in keeping my household going so that I could finish.

My husband, Luis Ubinas, has, quite simply, made it possible for me to write this book. His patience, amazing mind, perspective, and unending desire to provide whatever I need are there between each line. The last twenty years together make me thirsty for more, an ongoing reminder of the importance of desire in a woman’s life. My parents, E. Laurie and Sylvia Tolman, as always, inculcated and continue to believe in my persistent refusal to be a good girl. My two little boys, Maximilian and Benjamin Ubinas, give me so much

xii
acknowledgments

every day, and gave up too much for this project. It was with them in mind that I wrote every word.

Parts of this book appeared in earlier versions in the following books and journals. I gratefully acknowledge the publishers for permission to reuse the materials. “Doing Desire: Adolescent Girls’ Struggles for/with Sexuality,”
Gender and Society,
8(3) (1994): 324–342, Sage Publications; “How Being a Good Girl Can Be Bad for Girls,” written with T. Higgins, in N. B. Maglin and D. Perry, eds.,
Bad Girls/Good Girls: Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties,
pp. 205–225, Rutgers University Press, 1996; “Adolescent Girls’ Sexuality: Debunking the Myth of the Urban Girl,” in B. Lead- beater and N. Way, eds.,
Urban Girls: Resisting Stereotypes, Creating Identities,
pp. 255–271, New York University Press, 1996; “Dimen- sions of Desire: Bridging Qualitative and Quantitative Methods,” written with L. Szalacha,
Psychology of Women Quarterly,
24(4) (1999): 365–376, originally Cambridge University Press, with per- mission of Blackwell Publishers.

1. GETTING BEYOND “IT JUST HAPPENED”
   

   

   Once more there is a question which gives me no peace: “Is it right? Is it right that I should have yielded so soon, that I am so ardent, just as ardent and eager as Peter himself? May I, a girl, let myself go to this extent?”
   

   —Anne Frank,
   The Diary of
   

   Anne Frank: The Critical Edition
   

   On a May morning when the warmth of the sun seemed to be finally winning out over the last chilly breeze of a New England winter, I met Inez, a seventeen-year-old Latina junior in a public high school, who agreed to participate in my study of adolescent girls’ sexual desire. Sitting in an out-of-the- way, sun-filled corner of a seldom-used corridor, I listen to Inez’s voice as she speaks about her experiences of her sexuality. Our heads bend down around the quiet whirling of my tape recorder, shielding us both from intrusions and from being overheard. In the hour and a half that we talk, Inez seems to find it easy to respond to my questions. Her stories are detailed, punctuated with reflections on what she thought and how she felt. One of the first stories she chooses to tell me is about the first time she had sexual intercourse, with a boy with whom she was “in love”:
   

   The first time I ever had sex, it was something that I least ex- pected it. I didn’t actually go to his house and expect something to happen, because it, he was kissing me, and I felt like I wasn’t
   

   1
   

   there, it was like my body just went limp. It was like, I had went out with him for a year, and I was like, I was like wow, and um, he was just kissing me, and I was like, and then all of a sudden like, just, like my body just went limp, and then everything just hap- pened. To me, I feel like I didn’t notice anything.
   

   There are several ways to hear Inez’s story. Developmental psy- chologists might explain it as evidence of her immaturity, because it demonstrates that she has not yet constructed a sexual self. Since Inez never says directly that she wanted to have sex, some might think that this story reflects an experience of victimization and coercion. Yet Inez offers this experience as one of sexual pleasure, which to her means the pleasure of “being wanted” and “show- [ing] him that I loved him more, in a physical way.” And so another way to think about Inez’s story is as a condoned version: The main theme, that sex “just happened,” is an explanation girls frequently offer for how they come to have sex. Having sex “just happen” is one of the few acceptable ways available to adolescent girls for making sense of and describing their sexual experiences; and, given the power of such stories to shape our experiences of our bodies, it may tell us what their sexual experiences actually are like. In a world where “good,” nice, and normal girls do not have sexual feelings of their own, it is one of the few decent stories that a girl can tell. That is, “it just happened” is a story about desire (Plum- mer, 1995).
   

   “It just happened,” then, can also be understood as a cover story. It is a story about the necessity for girls to cover their desire. It is also a story that covers over active choice, agency, and responsibil- ity, which serves to “disappear” desire, in the telling and in the liv- ing. But “it just happened” is much more than a story told by yet another girl to describe her individual experience. Focusing on Inez’s individually unfolding sexual development leaves out the
   

   fact that girls’ sexuality does not develop in a vacuum. It leaves out the ways in which girls are under systematic pressure not to feel, know, or act on their sexual desire. It covers up both our consistent refusal to offer girls any guidance for acknowledging, negotiating, and integrating their own sexual desire and the consequences of our refusal: sexual intercourse—most often unprotected, that “just happens” to girls. “It just happened” is undoubtedly one of a multi- tude of stories that a girl can tell about any single experience. Its veracity is not on the line; the wisdom of telling and living this story about female adolescent sexuality is. I suggest that “it just happened” is an unsafe and unhealthy story for girls.
   

   How do we define healthy sexuality and healthy adolescent development? The classic
   Handbook of Adolescent Development
   states that “within the context of other developmental goals, one is supposed to become a self-motivated sexual actor” (Miller & Simon, 1980, p. 383). We so rarely think of sexuality in positive or healthy terms that doing so requires a shift in mindset. In 2001 the
   

   U.S. surgeon general, David Satcher, urged just such a shift when he released
   A Call to Action to Promote Sexual Health and Respon- sible Sexual Behavior.
   In his introductory letter, Satcher wrote, “it is necessary to appreciate what sexual health is, that it is connected with both physical and mental health, and that it is important throughout the entire life span, not just the reproductive years.” This position echoes the statement released several years before by the National Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health, endorsed by thirty-seven professional associations, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association. The Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing, a network of over two thousand religious leaders from over twenty- five denominations, in its 2001 declaration recognizes “sexuality as central to our humanity and as integral to our spirituality.” Sex- uality is so often thought of only in negative terms, so frequently
   

   clustered with problem behaviors such as smoking and drinking, in our minds as well as in research, that it is easy to forget that while we are not supposed to become smokers or drinkers in ado- lescence, we are supposed to develop a mature sense of ourselves as sexual beings by the time we have reached adulthood. Without a clear or sanctioned path, developing this sense is even harder for girls, as a closer look at the words of Inez and the other girls I inter- viewed reveals.
   

   victims and victors: two roads to sexual maturity
   

   How far our conceptions of male and female adolescent sexuality diverge came into startling focus one night at a dinner party I attended with some friends who have teenage children. A man I had not met before began bragging about how his teenage son showed every sign of being a “ladies’ man.” He beamed with pride as he described his son’s ability to elude the “grasp” of any single girl, how his boy was so successful at “playing the field.” The father winked at another man at the table, hinting that, by the age of six- teen, his son had “gotten” plenty of sexual experience, showing all the signs of having the “raging hormones” that he appeared to believe was normal for his son. His pleasure that his son was a heartbreaker was evident.
   

   Later in the evening, this same man spoke about his fifteen-year- old daughter. A different picture of the terrain of adolescent sexu- ality came to the fore. On the one hand, he was clearly proud that his daughter was considered an attractive and desirable date by her male peers; on the other, he was uncomfortable when she actually went out with them. While he understood that she wanted to have a boyfriend, which he ascribed to her desire to be like her friends, he preferred that she bring boys home rather than be out with them. He worried that “things might happen to her” that she
   

   would “regret.” His fear that she would be sexually victimized or “taken advantage of ” by boys was palpable.
   

   Several things struck me about this conversation. It was clear this man had two entirely different ideas about appropriate and normal sexuality for male and female adolescents. It was also clear he did not see how they were connected. His belief that boys are sexual predators and his encouragement and approval of this behavior in his own son fueled his conviction that girls, including his daughter, need to be protected
   from
   boys while also being attractive
   for
   boys. Unstated but eminently implicit in his formula- tion was the assumption that girls are the objects of boys’ sexual desire and have no desires of their own. This man’s perspectives on his son and his daughter illustrate the ways in which our beliefs about sexuality are gendered.
   

   As a society, we parcel sexuality out, assuming that normal boys but not girls have “raging hormones”—and that normal girls but not boys long for emotional connection and relationships. We assume that adolescent boys are burgeoning sexual beings. We believe that they are obsessed with their sexuality and expect them not only to feel sexual desire but to be compelled to act on it, or at the very least to make the attempt. In many circles, if a boy reaches mid-adolescence without having shown any perceptible sexual interest in girls, those around him may become concerned about his masculinity and sexual orientation. In contrast, when it comes to girls, what we still expect, and in many ways continue to en- courage, is their yearning for love, relationships, and romance. Acknowledgment of their sexual longings as an anticipated part of their adolescence is virtually nonexistent. We have effectively desexualized girls’ sexuality, substituting the desire for relationship and emotional connection for sexual feelings in their bodies.
   

   These constructions of girls’ sexuality leave out their sexual subjectivity. By sexual subjectivity I mean a person’s experience of
   

   herself as a sexual being, who feels entitled to sexual pleasure and sexual safety, who makes active sexual choices, and who has an identity as a sexual being. Sexual desire is at the heart of sexual subjectivity. Karin Martin (1996) argues that “sexual subjectivity is a necessary component of agency and thus of self esteem. That is, one’s sexuality affects her/his ability to act in the world, and to feel like she/he can will things and make them happen” (p. 10). Sexual subjectivity can and should therefore be at the heart of responsibil- ity in sexual decision making—whether deciding not to have sex- ual intercourse or to have protected sexual intercourse, to have sexual experiences that have nothing to do with sexual intercourse or not to act on those feelings at all. From this perspective, it is not only unfair to deny female adolescent sexual desire but ultimately unsafe and unhealthy.
   

   Despite the sexual revolution, this picture of the condoned social order of adolescence has not improved. Even as we enter the twenty-first century, the possibility that girls might be interested in sexuality in their own right rather than as objects of boys’ desire is met with resistance and discomfort. To wit, in 1998, a film entitled
   Coming Soon,
   about white, middle-class, heterosexual adolescent girls who seek to have sexual experiences on their own terms, was shown only at film festivals (where “teenage girls came back for a second screening”), because no distributor would pick it up. The filmmaker, Colette Burson, fully aware of the subversive quality of her film, commented, “When I showed the script to male directors, they’d say, ‘I love it, but let’s make it less about the girl-sex thing.. .’ Meanwhile, every teen movie you see is all about boys’ getting lucky” (Schillinger, 1999, p. 15). As early as middle school (Tolman et al., 2002) or even the waning moments of elementary school (Thorne, 1993), girls and boys are relentlessly exposed to a set of rules, principles, and roles that are mapped out for the pro- duction of “normal” heterosexual adolescent relationships and
   

   sexual behavior, in which gender is the most salient factor. Teenage girls continue to be denied entitlement to their own sexuality, and girls who do defy the irrepressible double standard continue to do so at their own risk.
   

   Despite the incessant flow of sexual images and relationship advice, girls do not get many positive messages about their sexual- ity. They are barraged with an ever more confusing and contradic- tory set of guidelines for how they should manage their developing sexuality: don’t be a prude but don’t be a slut; have (or fake) orgasms to ensure that your boyfriend is not made to feel inade- quate, if you want to keep him. Ultimately, though subtly, the media continue to represent the belief that adolescent girls should be sexy for boys and not have their
   own
   sexual desires. Although Monica Lewinsky’s sexual assertiveness may not have been as shocking to her peers (Kamen, 2000) as it was to adults (Fineman et al., 1998), their reaction to it was similar: to label her “an unre- pentant little slut” (as at smileandactnice.com) and to criticize and satirize her appearance (as on
   Saturday Night Live
   regularly). As one young woman writing on missclick, a popular web site for adolescent girls, observed: “She could win the Nobel Peace Prize, and they’d make cigar jokes as she accepted her award.”
   

   Teen magazines, movies, and television contribute to the perva- sive paradox: They offer advice on how to provide pleasure to boys juxtaposed with stories of sexual violation and harassment (Brum- berg, 1997; Ussher, 1997; Carpenter, 1998). Madonna powerfully models female sexual freedom; yet, despite their admiration and even awe at her willingness to defy social norms, few teenage girls feel that they themselves—ordinary girls, not gorgeous celebri- ties—could “get away with it” without a besmirched reputation (Kitzinger, 1995, p. 193). Music directed at adolescent girls contin- ues to mix the message. At the same time Christina Aguilera sings about “what a girl wants, what a girl needs,” she presents herself as