Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (12 page)

virginity, and then he was gonna leave me, and I was gonna get pregnant, and I was gonna have a baby with no father and that I wasn’t gonna have a job and I was gonna drop out of school.” While talking about her sexuality constantly, the adults in Inez’s life dwell on the dangers of pregnancy, sinning, and boys’ bad behavior; no one says anything to her about her sexual feelings.

Recall that in telling a story about having sex for the first time, Inez does not name her own desire. She says that “everything just happened.” Having sexual intercourse for the first time was not actually Inez’s first sexual experience. In other stories she tells, she offers descriptions of her desire that convey her knowledge of its power, her experience of sexual pleasure, and how she has, on her own, come to make sense of and deal with these feelings. Her keen awareness of both the pleasure and the danger that come with desire filters through a story about a time when she had such a “conflict” between her body and her mind:

Yesterday I was talking to my ex-boyfriend, and I was having a little conflict in my mind, ’cause he was kissing me and he was making me feel desire and, but he wasn’t touching me, you know, he was just, he was just kissing me, kissing me on the back of my neck. And he knows where my weak spot is. That’s my weak [laughs, points to her neck], that’s my weak spot. And he was touching me on the back of my neck and I just felt a lot of desire . . . [and] my mind was saying yes no yes no!...I was like, come on, let’s take a walk and it was real fresh air, it’s like, I was like [takes deep breath in, out], oh God, Inez, I kept telling myself, calm down, please! Just calm down.

Inez calls a part of her body that, when touched or kissed, gener- ates powerful feelings of desire her “weak spot.” With full knowl- edge of the pleasure of desire, even of how it makes her feel connected with someone she cares about, Inez understands her

own desire as a source of tremendous vulnerability. She takes me through the mind-body conflict that arises when she is in a “plea- sure mood”:

My body does not control my mind. My mind controls my body, and if my body gets into the pleasure mood, my mind is gonna tell him no... because I said so, because I control you, and my mind is lookin’ towards my body.

Inez describes a watchfulness that her “mind,” reservoir of social norms and rules and compendium of consequences, exerts over her body. Not only does she describe her mind as chastising her body, almost as if it were a recalcitrant child, but her mind is also “lookin’ towards”—protecting—her body, a body she experiences as in danger and as a source of danger. She is very knowledgeable about the physical dangers associated explicitly with her own desire that make her vulnerable:

Let’s say you don’t have no kind of contraceptives like a condom, and he has AIDS and you don’t know that, you can get AIDS just by having sex with him, because your body said yes, your mind said no, but your body said yes.

As a result, Inez vigilantly controls her own sexual feelings. She knows about and uses contraception, though it is unclear how accessible reliable methods are for her. She knows also about using condoms to protect herself from exposure to disease, though she voices concerns about condoms breaking. And she alludes to other forms of sexual expression, though she rejects some of them as “nasty.”

Inez protects herself from her own desire by keeping herself out of risky situations—situations in which her desire might be inflamed, situations in which she might know the joys of pleasure

and a feeling of connection with another person, situations in which her desire might “win” and inevitably lead to danger—and minimizing the moments when she will have to cope with this mind-body conflict. She deepens her knowledge with observations of other girls:

Desire? Yes, because she’s [a girl] probably in one of those, like let’s say she’s just drunk and she doesn’t know what she’s doin’, and she’s dancing with this guy, you know how they dance reg- gae, ever seen somebody dance reggae? How they rubbin’ on each other? Well that gets a guy real, I’ll say, hard. And it gets a girl very horny. And they could just be dancin’ together for like five minutes, and all of a sudden [snaps fingers], they just, they, something just snaps in ’em and they say, “oh, let’s go to the bed- room.” And, it’ll just happen, just because they were dancing. That’s why I don’t dance reggae with guys.

Inez does not frame the danger of dancing reggae as the lure of romance or the promise of a romantic relationship; this kind of dancing is sexually arousing for the girl as well as for the boy—the boy gets “hard,” the girl gets “very horny.” In this interview, Inez has told me that she enjoys dancing and describes herself as a very good dancer, which is something about herself that makes her feel proud. However, to avoid getting “very horny,” Inez does not dance reggae. To keep her body safe, she keeps her body still.

Especially tuned in to social risks associated with acting on her desire, the danger of losing her reputation and of not being “respected,” she is also fearful of doing or saying anything that might reveal her true wishes, thereby risking humiliation and a loss of dignity. She identifies talking about her sexual desire as a way to make trouble and reveals her intricate knowledge of how a confi- dence about sexuality can become “dangerous”:

Let’s say I trust my best friend, I trust her with all my might and I would say, oh yeah, I just had sex with my boyfriend yesterday, and I had oral sex. And [I] say, yeah, I been with him six months and it was the first time we did something and we had oral sex. And she says, wow, that’s good, you know, and somebody else is listening in and they’re saying goodness! They was like, that girl, she’s havin’ oral sex!... and she goes and tells her friends, oh yeah, you know, Inez has a boyfriend, she’s been going out with him for six months and she’s had oral sex. And then she’ll go to somebody else and they say, yeah, you know that Inez has had three boyfriends in the past six months and she had oral sex? And they say, oh yeah, you know, and then they go to the next person and it goes on and on and everyone’s like, yeah, you know that Inez did it with two [guys in a gang] and she had oral sex, it just like goes from one person to another, and let’s say the first one when they hear it, they hear it exactly the way it came out, and they go to someone else and they say, yeah she has five boyfriends and she’s had oral sex with three, and it can be the first time. But nobody knows that except for you.

Inez’s description brings to life this nightmare scenario that she imagines will follow a careful story about exploring a new sexual experience told to a close friend, in confidence. Even though in this example Inez stipulates that she was talking about a committed relationship, an ostensible “safe space” for such experiences, she is keenly aware of how it can be spun into a tale of sexual prom- iscuity that has nothing to do with reality. As in a game of tele- phone, she has no control over what the final version will sound like. Once talked about in this way, a girl will have a hard time get- ting her version of the story accepted and reclaiming her status as a “good,” nice, and “respectable” girl.

Having had a boyfriend who told his friends that he had had sex

with her when he had not, she goes to extreme lengths to make sure that no one besides her two best friends knows anything about her sexual experiences. Her response to having been hurt and humiliated is to not trust boys easily or often (although she also describes girls as culprits in giving other girls a bad name). She also tries to exert ever more control over herself, even though in this instance she had not in fact had sex with the boy (although she confesses that “it was something I really wanted”). Inez can control only herself and not what others choose to say about her, so keep- ing her desire dampened does not keep her safe.

One thing she can do is be adamant that boys give her respect. To earn her trust, she says, boys “gotta respect me from the begin- ning, they gotta trust me with guys, they gotta respect me, not to touch me if I don’t wanna be touched, not to kiss me on a first date, ’cause I don’t kiss guys on a first date. Not to try to touch me any- where that I feel uncomfortable or tell me stuff that’s gonna make me feel uncomfortable... like trying to give me a hint like, yeah, let’s have sex, I don’t like when guys do that.” She does not worry about getting a “bad name” because of her vigilance about getting respect. The logic of Inez’s strategy—to get respect, she needs to keep boys, and their desire for her, at bay—requires that she forbid kissing on the first date. But what if she wants to kiss a boy on the first date? Inez has learned to circumscribe her desire as a way to keep herself safe but in so doing puts her ability to feel and to rely on her desire, to know if and how she wants to express her sexual feelings, in jeopardy. She wears the mantle of full responsibility for sexual episodes, not questioning why she should have to be put in this position in the first place nor seeing how unfair it is that she must be solely accountable or vulnerable to social sanctions in such situations. Her response to the anticipation of male sexual aggression is to protect herself from it; the question of how boys do or should handle their own desire is never formulated.

If Inez succeeds in fending off her own desire, she is still vulner- able to the desires of others and must continue to protect herself from being harmed, used, or taken advantage of. Without her own desire, Inez is reduced to being a sexual object, the object of another’s desire. So while her strategy of silencing her body’s “yes” may lower her risks in some ways, rather than create a safe space for her, it just keeps danger out. Whether or not she feels sexual desire and sexual pleasure, she remains at constant risk of being hurt, getting a “bad name,” and never being able to make positive choices about her sexuality. Inez’s sacrifice of her own desire and pleasure represents a logical yet ineffective attempt to protect herself.

ambivalent desires
The girls who “disappear” their desire sacrifice their sexuality for the sake of safety in a realm of their lives that feels suffused with danger. None of them questions this approach; the notion that it is unsafe for girls to have sexual feelings, premised on an assumption of male entitlement to unbridled sexuality, is deeply embedded in their response to their own desire. The other group of girls who resist their own sexual desire do not sound as decisive, nor do they sacrifice their desire in the same fashion. Both Emily and Megan have some awareness that they should be entitled to their sexual desire and so do not cut themselves off as a solution. However, they describe an uneasy balance between the power of desire and the threat of consequences. As they feel desire, apprehend how it con- nects them with themselves, and appreciate a mutual connec- tion with another person, they worry about the price they will have to pay. In the circumscribed space they have allotted to their sexual subjectivity, vulnerability to being objectified and ostra- cized looms large. These girls also evidence a glimmer of a critical perspective on the institution of heterosexuality, which unfairly

punishes desiring girls, yet they do not go so far as to push “good” girls off their pedestals or to elevate “sluts.” Emily, who has a vague sense of her right to sexual feelings, is especially fearful of social consequences, while Megan, whose critique of the double standard is more evolved yet still falls short of rejection, has more comfort with her desire for boys. For Megan, the recent acceptance of her sexual feelings for girls is the front line of her struggle.

Emily: The Fear of “Being Used”
There is no question that Emily is ready, willing, and able to talk to me about her experiences with sexual desire. Woven through her vibrant, insightful, and at times brutally honest descriptions and stories are hints about the duality that characterizes desire in her life. I am especially taken with how engaged she is in our conversa- tion and with this topic; it is clearly a key issue for her. Echoing other girls in the study, Emily does not tell a completely monolithic story of desire. Her ambivalence about her sexual desire is not immediately evident; it takes shape as she talks about the various ways that she has experienced it in specific contexts. Like a natural- ist, Emily has made careful, specific observations about how her body works and what she feels like, both physically and emotion- ally, in various situations. She can talk about what does and does not give her pleasure, what piques her sexual desire and what dampens it. Her sexual desire plays a principal role in the stories she tells about her sexual experiences with her boyfriend of the last year, whom she “loves a lot,” and weaves in and out of other stories she tells about her experiences with boys, relationships, and sexuality.

The first thing she tells me flies in the face of societal beliefs about adolescent sexuality. In describing how her current relation- ship evolved, she reflects: “I think I wanted to sleep with him more than he wanted to sleep with me at the beginning. He’s not that

type... And he wasn’t really sure that he was ready, and so we ended up waiting like two more months.” Her comments and questions about her desire have a sophisticated flair, as she describes being frustrated when she doesn’t find some sexual expe- riences satisfying, curious about what an orgasm feels like and how to have one, puzzled and a bit miffed by the ease with which her boyfriend seems to experience “more intense” sexual pleasure than she does, experimenting with how to increase the power of her own feelings. It is also clear that this relationship is a safe space not only for her sexual desire but also for exploring how sexuality and intimacy work together in a heterosexual relationship in which the gendered power differentials are minimized. The way she has char- acterized her current relationship, and herself in that relational context, stands in stark contrast to the more familiar landscape of gendered sexuality that girls tend to describe and that she herself does in other stories she tells about her own desire. Emily has the good fortune of having a boyfriend with a genuine interest in an egalitarian relationship, who respects her feelings and her entitle- ment to safety and pleasure. But not all of her sexual experiences have been with boys who evidence such disinterest in the kinds of power that the institution of heterosexuality confers. And Emily herself finds reaching for equality and entitlement challenging.