Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (10 page)

Throughout the interview, in response to my questions about desire, Kim raises the potential danger of rape, violation, and hurt. In talking about how she feels walking around the city, she explains:

I mean, you couldn’t really be raped if you’re just walking around the street, I mean you could, but like not so easily, because there’s so many people around. I guess that doesn’t really matter, but date rape I think is more scary, I mean, I’m not very scared when I’m walking down the street, but once I was scared actually, because it was over the summer and I was, I had just been out to dinner with a friend, and I was walking back and so when I was walking it was like 8:30, so it was dark, and this man started fol- lowing me, and so I crossed to the other side of the street and he crossed over too, and I crossed back, and he crossed on that side too. And that was really scary, because there weren’t too many people around, and so I was scared. I don’t remember how I got out of it, he just walked off.

Finely tuned to the various dangers embedded in sexuality, com- pletely on her own with these painful, frightening, contradictory, and confusing observations and experiences, Kim not surprisingly “solves” the dilemma of feeling desire and being safe by remaining unclear about whether or not she experiences sexual desire. Her extreme difficulty keeping track of her thoughts and her dissoci- ated states in the interview, coupled with her keen observations of the pervasive silences about female sexuality and the dangers asso- ciated with sexuality for women, provide ample insight into why Kim suffers from a lack of clarity about her own sexual desire.

In his earliest case studies, Freud inadvertently told his own story. As a young physician, without any theories but with a strong curiosity to understand and an intense desire to help, he started out by simply listening to ill young women. These women—who prior to their illness were, as Freud noted, unusually intelligent, outspoken, and honest—had been diagnosed with physical symp- toms that had no physiological explanation and had been deemed “hysterical.”
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Invariably, these symptoms involved the loss of feel- ing or movement in parts of their bodies. When these young women became conscious of and articulated their forbidden knowledge about sexuality, about abuse, and about their own desires—through the “talking cure”—the hysterical symptoms that had emerged in their bodies disappeared. The safe space that his office and this early form of therapeutic relationship afforded to these women enabled them to embody their desire rather than disembody themselves. For a time, Freud was able to ask and hear about these women’s experiences of desire and violation,
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and thereby appreciate that to deny women’s sexual desire was to impair their psychological health.

How can the stories of girls who do not feel sexual desire inform our understanding of female adolescent sexuality? The girls who

narrated silent and confused bodies did not experience their sex- ual desire as posing a dilemma; they lived it. They told of individ- ual, often unconscious solutions to social problems produced by gendered sexuality. The girls in this chapter harbored a poignant distress or unhappiness about them. They found it difficult to communicate their feelings to someone else, at least in part because they were not aware of or could not figure out exactly what their feelings were. And they found romantic relationships frightening, confusing, or something that they simply tried to avoid. Hence the question of whether or how to integrate their own sexuality into their identity or their relationships was moot for these girls; sexual desire, sexual pleasure, sexual subjectivity— none of these notions was in their lexicons or their lives. In essence, these girls illustrate a kind of unconscious preemptive action: They avoid having to address the dilemma of desire by not having desire.

Within current constructions of gendered sexuality, it is easy to question the wisdom of making adolescent girls aware of their own sexual desire. But as the stories in this chapter reveal, girls who are not able to sense the presence or absence of their own sexual desire risk becoming dissociated from their own experience and from reality, thereby impairing their psychological integrity and their understanding of what is happening in the world around them. Such dissociation makes it difficult for these girls to know and name sexual exploitation. Jenny’s silent body, for instance, kept her from being able to maintain the clarity of her “no” and insist that her word be respected. Fine and colleagues have observed that women who feel “entitled to their bodies and sexualities... ques- tion the ‘rights’ of male violence” and “refus[e] the passive position of sexual victim” (1996, p. 128). Jenny illuminates how difficult such questioning and refusal is without awareness of one’s own desire. Meanwhile Kim silences her body out of fear that she will be

responsible for being violated, and the constant dissociation she endures keeps her from saying what she sees and knows about a social world that makes her desire seem dangerous.

By omitting or penalizing girls’ desire, the notion that girls’ sex- ual subjectivity is suspect places them in a double bind. On the one hand, girls’ inability to look to their own desire as a guide to their actions leaves them vulnerable in the worst case to coercion or at the very least to feeling bad about themselves in the wake of an uncomfortable experience. On the other hand, as media coverage of teen sexuality illustrates, girls’ expression of desire also renders them vulnerable by undermining the credibility of their resistance to unwanted sex. Remember that the girls who were attracted to the members of the Spur Posse, who dated them and sought their physical attention, were labeled trash (Yoffe, Marszalek, and Selix, 1991). By expressing their desire and thus behaving like “bad” girls, they not only lost the approval and protection of their community but had to face the seeming justification of this injustice. Silent and confused bodies are one answer that leaves girls diminished but undoes or eludes the dilemma of desire. The girls who are aware of this bind and who do feel desire tell other stories.

DANGERS OF DESIRE

While too few safe spaces exist for adoles- cent women’s exploration of sexual subjec- tivities, there are all too many dangerous spots for their exploitation.

—Michelle Fine, “Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing

Discourse of Desire”

Although there continues to be tre- mendous debate over how to conceptualize and deal with the vari- ous forms that sexual desire takes for women,
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what remains clear is that women’s sexuality holds a fundamental contradiction under current gender arrangements: It involves both pleasure and dan- ger. As wide-ranging and variable as the dangers and harm that are associated with sexuality for girls and women are, so too are the potential pleasures and gain. When we frame sexuality only in terms of risk and avoidance, as is the case most often for female adolescent sexuality, not only are such pleasures obscured but con- sideration of the place of pleasure in sexual development seems hedonistic and irresponsible. Yet to leave pleasure out or to deny its importance is, quite simply, to misrepresent sexuality.

In adolescence, as girls begin to explore their sexuality, romantic relationships, and identities, they are immediately and necessarily confronted with this duality. Fine has suggested that “the adoles- cent woman herself assumes a dual consciousness, at once taken with the excitement of actual/anticipated sexuality and consumed with anxiety and worry” (1988, p. 35). She notes that girls’ views

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on sexuality cannot be separated from their perspectives on gender relations. Neither can these views be separated from girls’ perspec- tives on, and investment in, norms of femininity.

The template for gender relations under the institution of het- erosexuality is the master narrative of romance, which is premised on female passivity and male aggression and dominance, denoting appropriate feminine and masculine behavior in relation to the opposite sex. Romance provides a script not only for how males and females interact but also for expectations about female and male sexuality, including that resilient distinction between “good” and “bad” girls, as defined by the absence or presence, respectively, of sexual desire. Though it may seem somewhat outdated, research on adolescent sexuality consistently suggests that this romance narrative continues to be an important organizing principle in many adolescents’ sexual relationships (Thompson, 1995; Kirk- man, Rosenthal, & Smith, 1998; Tolman et al., 2002). Ultimately, the romance narrative provides girls with limited condoned pleas- ures buttressed by the constant threat of dangers. While a romantic relationship is held out as a safe space for girls to express their feel- ings, as Linda Christian-Smith notes, romance “discredits a girl’s feelings and right to control her body” (1990, p. 32). In return for being feminine and “good,” in this framework, girls are rewarded with the pleasures of male adoration, the chance to love, and the privilege of being protected.

In essence, the romance narrative entices and invites girls into trading in the full range of their real feelings, including sexual desire, taboo emotions, and knowledge of what is actually happen- ing in relationships and reality, for male commitment, care, and attention. In this organization of heterosexual romantic relation- ships, patriarchal constructions of femininity are key. Not only does romance position girls as the objects of boys’ sexual desire, but from the developmental perspective of adolescence, “the female

gaze is trained to abandon its claim to the sovereign status of seer. The ‘nice’ girl learns to avoid the bold and unfettered staring of the ‘loose’ woman, who looks at whatever and whomever she pleases” (Bartky, 1990, p. 68). Becoming feminine requires that girls them- selves learn to be “good” sexual objects, which precludes having desire of their own, and that process is deeply informed by the imperative not to become a “bad” girl, not only in the eyes of oth- ers but in the eyes of one’s own internalized male gaze.

Most of the girls in this study did report feeling sexual desire. They described several ways of negotiating the dilemma of desire, premised on their experiences with and perceptions of the physi- cal, relational, social, and psychological pleasures and dangers of desire. The majority of girls in the study, then, provide illustrations for the ways that mind and body interact in the realm of desire, in the various contexts of their lives. For the girls in this chapter, the dangers of desire loom so large relative to the range of possible pleasures that the girls resist their embodied desire, literally doing battle with themselves, as a way to stay safe, maintain relationships, and know themselves as “good.”

disappearing desire
Some girls resist their sexual feelings by making them go away. The girls who thus “disappear” desire may or may not be conscious they are engaging in this process. Some, like Ellen, juggle various kinds of desire—the desire to achieve, the desire not to get preg- nant, the desire to protect relationships—and seem unaware they are describing the disappearance of their sexual desire. Others, like Rochelle, narrate a semiconscious resistance to their own sexual feelings, with awareness of the power and importance of desire but not of the multiple dimensions of the trade-offs they are making. And some, like Inez, talk about a conscious decision to stifle their desire; aware of the power, pleasure, and danger associated with

their desire, they choose safety above all else, with an understand- ing of the costs involved in this choice.

Ellen: Contradictory Desires
Like Janine, Ellen is soft-spoken; her intelligent eyes look bashfully at me, from behind her thick glasses. She too has a sweet smile and a quiet, shy way about her. Her mother “doesn’t talk about that... everything that I learned about sexuality, I learned on my own, you know, you know, I had to find out on my own.” She tells me she has “all kinds of questions” about girls’ sexuality, “and then I ask, you know, how am I going to answer them, when I don’t know the answer. Then finally I forget about it after a while.” The way Ellen talks about her questions parallels how she describes her experi- ences with her embodied sexual desire: She has sexual feelings, she is confused by them and overwhelmed by the dangers she as- sociates with them, and then she makes herself forget about them. Although she says she never talks to anyone about sexuality, because “I’m afraid of what other people might think, what they would say,” by the end of our hour-long conversation, which she characterizes as “strange, because I never thought about it before,” she concludes that “it’s pretty interesting, because it made me want to think about it more, how I feel about it, you know, more deeply.” This ultimate wish to consider “more deeply” how she feels about her own sexuality after having a chance to evaluate her experiences and choices in the open air of our brief encounter is in consider- able contrast to what she has to say about her sexual desire along the way.

Ellen is evasive and tight-lipped during the first part of the interview. Clearly wary of me and my questions, Ellen has not eas- ily accepted the offer of a chance to talk and ask questions about sexuality with an adult. When I ask if sexual desire is a feeling she has experienced, she responds, “Ummmm, no.” Her hesitation

makes me think that maybe she doesn’t understand what I’m asking, so I try another approach—“A feeling of wanting?” She replies, “Yes.” I observe the contradiction, “No, yeah?” and we both laugh. I hope that questions about specific experiences will shed some light on this contradictory beginning.

At first, when I ask Ellen if she can tell me about a time when she experienced sexual desire, she tersely describes a time when she started “thinking about [a boy]... having sex, kissing him.” When I ask her if she can tell me more, she answers, “Umm, I can’t, I just forgot about it, I really didn’t.” Ellen’s story, a short story that ends abruptly because she “just forgot about it,” repeats and reflects what sexual desire may be like for her. In “thinking” about “having sex” and “kissing,” she begins a process in her mind that could lead to sexual desire in her body. Ellen tells me later that she does not “feel very much” in her body, yet she has experienced some embodied sexual feelings. She tells me that kissing someone she liked was pleasurable “all over my body.” She talks about a dream in which a boy kissed her; in her dream she says it was “half and half, yes and no” pleasurable: “I didn’t want it to happen, because my mother was in the next room and you know, ’cause I did want it to happen.” Ellen tells me that she tried to figure out what the dream meant but couldn’t, perhaps sensing a connection between the proximity of her mother and her ambivalence about her dreamed-of desire. Because she does know a little about embodied pleasure, she prevents her thoughts about sex from moving into her body by “forgetting” it.

In contrast to Janine and Jenny, she is curious about sexual pleasure; she wants to know “everything about it, you know, what happens, what do you do, you know, the reactions.” She says she’d “probably” like to do “everything” when it comes to expressing her sexuality. What keeps her from this unfettered sexuality is that she has made a promise; a deeply religious girl, at age eleven, she made

a promise to God not to have relationships, “particularly that kind of relationship,” until she graduates from high school. Ellen’s sex- ual feelings and her desire to know more about her sexuality con- stantly threaten to jump out of the lockbox she has put them in. She does not go out with boys because of her promise, but Ellen can articulate the interplay between physical and other kinds of attraction she has noticed in her experience: “most of the time it’s physical, you know, the way they look, it’s like half of the time, you know it’s like the way the person thinks, you know, their reactions, certain things.”

Ellen has a story about desire close at hand; she tells me about a time when she really wanted to kiss someone: