Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (20 page)

The differences in how the girls in this chapter experience and manage their entitlement to desire call attention to yet another view on how girls’ perspectives on gendered sexuality inform and are informed by their dilemmas of desire. The girls who premise their entitlement to their desire on operating within the restricted zone of one kind of relationship—long-term, monogamous, het- erosexual—illuminate both the importance and the limits of this potentially safe space. Eugenia’s experience exemplifies society’s partial accommodation of female adolescent sexuality within a mutual relationship. Her stories show how sexual subjectivity and sexual desire fuel emotional connection, a sense of safety, and responsible decisions. Yet this context does not defuse her dilemma of desire; it simply shifts it to the other arenas of Eugenia’s sexual- ity. Sophie’s stories of maneuvering her desire around relation- ships serve as counterpoint. The relationship haven does not accommodate her desire to explore her sexual feelings with differ- ent boys on her own terms. Since Sophie does not want to have sexual intercourse, entering a committed relationship may make her feel vulnerable to pressure to have sex. But because such a rela- tionship is a requirement rather than an option for being safe as a

desiring girl, Sophie is constantly monitoring her risk for being thought of as a “bad” girl.

Although the girls who take their desire under cover show a cer- tain ingenuity, the limitations and vulnerabilities of this strategy are readily apparent. This approach buys these girls some space for their sexual feelings by keeping them out of view; in the moment, they are able to protect themselves from the repercussions they fear. Yet this response requires sacrificing authenticity and real connections with others as Barbara’s regret signifies, and can lead to situations and choices that are risky, such as Trisha’s use of alco- hol to hide her desire. Melissa can hardly find breathing room for her doubly anathema desire; keeping her sexual feelings under cover is the best way she has found to lessen the isolation she feels. The only girls in the study for whom desire was not a dilemma was the small group that actively engaged in “desire politics.” Paulina and Amber described comfort with their desire, willing- ness to take the chance of losing or disrupting relationships in order not to overlook their feelings, and refusal to be intimidated by man-made threats. Their defiance of the dilemma of desire rests on their critique of gendered sexuality and their insistence on not

buying into the categorization of girls as good and bad.

The differences within this group of girls make clear that gen- dered sexuality alone does not function to keep girls in check. The variability in their stories points to the vital role the related prac- tice of categorizing girls plays in limiting adolescent girls’ experi- ences of sexual desire. Its power is most evident in the stories of the few girls who refused to participate. Amber and Paulina have fig- ured out that they have the power to refuse to care, and have cho- sen not to care,
because
they understand and reject the inequity of a system that gives desire and entitlement to boys and keeps it from girls. They make what is a risky choice to stand apart from the institution of heterosexuality. They use their knowledge and affir-

mation of their own bodies to defy categories that are meant to keep them out of relationship with themselves and with other girls. They will not enact this form of social control by regulating them- selves or policing other girls. Yet the stories of the girls in this chap- ter illustrate that, just like the girls who dissociate from or resist their sexual desire, these girls too are finding individual solutions to a problem not of their own making.

GEOGRAPHIES OF DESIRE

History has divided the empire of women against itself... Black and white women have not suffered equally under the spec- tacle of symbols, which construct sexuality and gender.

—Nancie Caraway,
Segregated Sisterhood

Growth spurts, learning to think com- plexly and abstractly, the emergence of breasts and pubic hair, and the onset of menarche are expected events in adolescent develop- ment, even a source of distress if they do not occur in a timely fash- ion. Yet, while just as inevitable, we find it extremely difficult to think about emerging adult sexuality as a “normal” part of ado- lescence for girls. When we think of female adolescent sexuality, our minds immediately categorize. Scanning the covers of news- magazines or the advertisements for the television equivalents, we see two recurring images. The first has been prevalent since 1976, when the Alan Guttmacher Institute (one-time research affil- iate of Planned Parenthood) announced that the United States was facing an “epidemic” of teenage pregnancy.
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It is the pregnant ado- lescent girl, black or Latina and thus assumed to be poor (Painter, 1992), or poor and white and thus deviant (Brown, 1999). These images serve to feed the racist fears and beliefs of society’s power- ful. These girls’ pregnancies are irrefutable evidence of their sexu- ality; the illnesses of their progeny (the only babies we are shown)

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are evidence of their drug use and HIV infection and thus confir- mation of their immorality. And they live in segregated places, most often in the “inner city,” where teenagers are, of course, out of control and, we are smugly if not always directly assured, getting what they deserve for being irresponsible and irrepressible.

The second image is newer or newly revived. It is the white, middle-class girl who lives in the suburbs, the supposedly safe haven from the fallibilities to which urban girls are prone, the pro- tected place where the daughters of society’s powerful live. Evi- dence of her sexuality leaks out, and we are stunned and horrified. Recently, in a well-off, white suburban community, a notable num- ber of syphilis cases led to the discovery that young adolescent girls were engaging not only in sexual intercourse but in a range of sex- ual activities (fellatio, girls having sex with multiple male partners simultaneously). This incontestable evidence of their sexuality was considered so strange and unnerving that
Frontline
made a docu- mentary, “The Lost Children of Rockland County,” to determine how these events could have possibly happened. It was assumed that some heinous problem within the community had produced an aberrant group of teenage girls. To emphasize their deviancy and thus salve white, middle-class parents about the sexuality of their teenage girls, the girls involved in the scandal were pigeon- holed as “bad,” “defective,” or “victims” of mothers in the work- force instead of at home. From the perspective of the dominant white, middle-class society, whereas the poor, pregnant urban girls of color were never even eligible for the category of “good” or “normal,” these white girls lost their privilege to occupy it.

These stereotypes of urban girls as sexually out-of-control and of suburban girls as sexually innocent populate the public imagi- nation, though of course they are recognized as the projections of anxiety and fantasy they truly are by many people. Thus far, I have

focused on what the girls in this study share: a set of adolescent female souls and bodies that are coming of age within the institu- tion of heterosexuality. That is, I have focused my analysis on their shared gender. Weaving together their stories into a larger narra- tive about how girls’ sexual desire is socially positioned and per- sonally experienced as a dilemma for virtually all of them, I have underscored and highlighted how gendered constructions of sexu- ality work against female adolescent embodied sexual desire and sexual subjectivity, and identified several ways that these girls as a group manage the dilemma. This approach might suggest that there is a single, monolithic story to tell about female adolescent sexual desire. Of course, there is not; the girls’ bodies and souls are not interchangeable. Indeed, while profiling one aspect of female adolescent experience, I left other, relevant, shaping forces out: their unique circumstances; their family structures; the cultural constructions of sexuality specific to their communities, ethnici- ties, religious affiliations, and acculturation status; and the com- plex interplay of all of these features of growing up sexual and female.

In this chapter, I turn to another aspect of the multifaceted con- text that informs the meaning and experience of female adolescent sexuality. Like twisting a kaleidoscope so that the pieces fall into another pattern, I will analyze the narratives told by these girls from an angle that reveals how the geographies of their lives shape and embed their experiences of desire. Because where girls live is such a prominent organizing principle in how we as a society con- ceptualize female adolescent sexuality and ultimately how we think about, treat, and limit our support for girls,
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it is another logical building block in constructing the phenomenology of female ado- lescent sexual desire. It is important to note, however, that these girls are also negotiating constructions of their sexuality within and from outside their cultural communities.
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The black and

Latina girls in the urban group have to deal with a battery of spe- cific racial and ethnic stereotypes in the dominant culture that form the backdrop (or the foreground) of the development of their sexuality, as does each of the poor and working-class white girls. Each of the girls in the suburban group must work within and against the racial and ethnic stereotypes that characterize her—what is believed about the sexuality of Jewish women, Mediterranean women, women who descended from the Puritans. Before listening for differences in how the urban and suburban girls experience sexual desire, I will flesh out the diametrically opposed societal conceptions of urban and suburban girls’ sexual- ity and how they have served the institution of heterosexuality.

stick figure a: the urban girl
Fantasies and fallacies about the sexuality of urban women—poor, working class, and white, African American, Latina, or Asian— developed in response to the shifting social hierarchies produced by rapid demographic change in cities at the end of the Civil War and significant influxes of immigrants into urban environments at the beginning of the twentieth century (Walkowitz, 1980; Peiss, 1983; Odem, 1997). These views continue to be sustained and ex- ploited by selective and skewed media portrayals of urban life. Our current notions about the lives of girls who live in poor, urban areas are anchored in this history. As a society, we hold certain neg- ative beliefs and assumptions about urban girls that emphasize their sexuality. The stereotypical Urban Girl is assumed to be poor, of color, “out of control... at risk and at fault. She embodies the problem of teenage pregnancy... she
is
female adolescent sexual- ity” (Tolman, 1996, p. 255).

The Urban Girl seems to be a container for the most egregious sexualization of marginalized groups of women, an unrealistic stick figure in the social psyche of dominant white society. De-

meaning conceptions of black female sexuality are found in the hyperbolic controlling images of the castrating matriarch, the overly sexual young Jezebel, and the welfare queen or cheat, or in the utterly desexualized image of the black mammy.
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Some of these images present sexually out-of-control instigators and temptresses, “bad” girls and women who therefore can never be sexually vulnerable or protected (Caraway, 1991; Painter, 1992; Wyatt, 1997). Latinas are often eroticized as exotic, sexually allur- ing, and thus available; stereotypes of sexual promiscuity and fan- tasies of proficiency in appeasing male desires are projected onto them.
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By deconstructing this Urban Girl, we can see the ways that racial and class differences have been used to produce different forms of oppression against all women in general, and by white, economically privileged women against poor women and women of color in particular.

stick figure b: the perfect girl
The mirror image or flip side of the Urban Girl is an equally insid- ious though far less visible assumption about female adolescent sexuality. The icon of white, middle-class or monied womanhood has been described by Lyn Brown as a “perfect girl,” who is the

embodiment of “nice and polite” (1991, p. 79). It is this girl who holds another conflation of race and class and is expected to appear on the sidewalks and schools of the suburbs, segregated from the Urban Girl. Subtly coerced and invisibly invited to take up dominant society’s norms of femininity, which press girls to discount their own thoughts and feelings for the sake of avoiding conflict and maintaining relationships, this Perfect Girl is not sur- prisingly disembodied and ascribed no sexuality in the public imagination.
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As Brown (1999) has noted, it is both race and class that anchor these conceptions of what is and is not proper femininity.

The Perfect Girl has a history as well, in what were known as the purity campaigns of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revo- lution produced a middle class that separated the spheres of public life, occupied by men, and private life, supervised by women, creat- ing the newly minted “angel in the house” (Smith-Rosenberg, 1985). This white, middle-class woman took up the position of morally superior savior both to men who could not control their base desires and to women who had turned to prostitution—usu- ally out of economic necessity due to the dearth of ways women could support themselves outside heterosexual marriage (Degler, 1974; Walkowitz, 1980). She was entitled to this privileged position because of her “passionlessness.”
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From the perspective of domi- nant society, it is only this Perfect Girl who is even eligible for the category of “good” girl (Tolman & Higgins, 1996). She is also thus at constant risk of falling off, or getting knocked off, this precari- ous pedestal and being branded a “bad” girl.

Because our society is so stratified and segregated by race and class, it is easy to be seduced by what we see, or are shown, about life in urban communities,
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and what we know, or do not know, about suburban life—and thereby to find credible these beliefs that categorize girls. This stratification of women is instrumental not only in the production of the Urban Girl but also in the pro- duction of stereotypes about middle-class white girls’ sexuality (Collins, 1990; Caraway, 1991). As I have noted elsewhere, “[i]n a misogynist culture that offers dubious rewards to virtuous women and unequivocally punishes even the presumably errant, a (white) woman knows her ‘goodness’ by knowing she is not the Other . . . This complex interplay of oppressions depends on keeping women divided into good vs. bad, normal vs. out-of-control categories, coded by race and class” (1996, p. 256). The asexual “good” (white, middle-class) girl cannot exist without the hypersexual “bad” (poor, of color) girl to prop her up.

flesh and blood girls
When I consider the differences between how the urban girls and the suburban girls frame their sexuality, another pattern of girls’ experiences with the dilemma of desire falls into place. Both the urban and suburban girls in this study narrated their own sexual desire as a dilemma, because both groups of girls acknowledged

feeling sexual desire, were conscious of dangers associated with sexuality in general and their own desire in particular, and knew of the physical, emotional, and relational pleasures that their desire can usher in. They all talked about the caution with which they negotiate this dilemma and the precautions they take, both uncon- scious and conscious, to protect themselves from the things they fear could or would happen in the wake of acting on or in some cases simply feeling their desire.

Virtually all of the girls held themselves responsible for what occurs in heterosexual relationships, especially sexual events; with the exception of Paulina, few in either group held boys or men accountable for their sexual aggression. Controlling their own desire constituted the finger in the dam that kept male sexuality at bay and adolescent sexuality from running amuck. Moreover, all of the girls in the study voiced concern about the consequences of their desire for their relationships, with mothers, fathers, boy- friends, girlfriends, peers and friends, teachers, and other adults in their lives.

Despite these similarities, there are discernible differences in
how
urban and suburban girls spoke about their experiences that are vital for building the necessarily complex picture of adolescent girls’ sexuality.
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The landscape of adolescent sexuality is not an equal opportunity zone for all girls; geography, among other social markers of difference, positions these girls differentially, particu- larly with regard to sexuality. Differences in the implications of

their desire, and thus in the meanings of their desire, are striking. While girls from both the urban and suburban schools spoke about the range of consequences they associated with their own sexuality, some repercussions were more salient in one group than in the other. The way in which some negative consequences were perceived to function as social controls differed as well.