Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (24 page)

One particular conversation struck me as a powerful example of how girls, if they bring their real questions about their own desires and pleasures into their relationships with one another, can dis- cover that they are indeed not alone in facing these problems and that these problems should not make them feel ashamed. Eugenia reported that she and Sophie, who are close friends, had “never ever talked about [masturbation], it was just one of those things that, you know?” After I introduced the topic in the interview, they began to talk about it: “after all those years it just popped up, you know?” commented Eugenia. “After all those years,” a taboo subject had been made possible to talk about in their relationship in a way

that Eugenia described as being new, different, and ultimately helpful to her.

I learned about such aftereffects in the follow-up group inter- view with the suburban girls. In contrast to the silence and suspi- cion that characterized the pre-interview meeting, the follow-up interview was marked by lively conversation. Some of the girls began to talk, to me and to one another, about the aftermath of their interviews. In particular, they discussed how they had begun to notice that their boyfriends attempted to name their own expe- riences: One girl related how she and her boyfriend had actually had a fight about whether or not
she
had had an orgasm (he said she did, she said she did not). It was clear that one result of the interviews was a new attention to their own bodies while having sexual experiences. Not all of the girls spoke, but those who did seemed to receive affirmation from the other girls in the room.

getting beyond dilemmas of desire
Speaking the unspeakable, naming the reality, and validating the normalcy of girls’ sexual desire are certainly crucial first steps in defusing girls’ dilemmas of desire. But to come away from this project with the simple agenda of just talking to girls or encourag- ing them to talk with one another would be naive and misguided. Simply talking about or declaring entitlement to sexual desire for girls may be fraught with the same limitations as telling girls they can do or be anything they want when, in a world that continues to objectify and degrade them, that is not in fact true. Difficulties abound when we challenge the status quo. Telling a daughter that she should be entitled to her sexual subjectivity, without identify- ing the societal forces that work against her doing so, is not enough. Recall that Rochelle’s mother encouraged her not to have sexual experiences unless Rochelle herself wanted them, but Rochelle got no actual guidance about how to determine what she

wanted and no assurances that her mother would support her if she ultimately chose to have sexual experiences. Girls need help developing resistance strategies and living with the consequences of violating sexual norms. It is crucial that neither we nor girls deny the reality that when girls and women resist oppressive insti- tutions and relationships, heels get dug in deeper. As women who were part of the second wave of feminism and those who were part of the early years of gay liberation can attest, the response can be unpleasant, frightening, dangerous, and even deadly.

To enable girls to speak about their sexuality and us to listen to them we must become conscious of the existence of hetero- sexuality as an institution, of the enduring power of patriarchy in organizing our lives. Sara Ruddick (1989) says that developing a feminist consciousness is essential to recognizing the existence and impact of conventional gender stereotypes. About mothers in par- ticular she writes,

They come to recognize that the stories they have been told and tell themselves about what it means “to be a woman” are mystify- ing and destructive ... In unraveling these... stories, mothers acquiring feminist consciousness may well be prompted to explore undefensively their ambitions and sexual desires... Hitherto silenced voices, edging toward lucid speech, are devel- oping voices, transformed by new experiences of seeing and say- ing. (pp. 21–23)

Ken Plummer writes in
Telling Sexual Stories
that sexual “stories become more and more likely to challenge authorities and eclipse one standard telling... Once stories become more self-conscious, recursive, and are told to distinctive audiences, then the stories given from on high are seen to be artefactual. The foundation col- lapses, and authoritarian stories are only one amongst many” (1995, pp. 137–138). In the foreword to
Adios, Barbie,
Rebecca

Walker observes “a crisis of imagination, a dearth of stories, the shocking lack of alternative narratives” to societal pressures and “the [resulting] hysteria to control and commodify an image of ideal beauty” for girls and women (Edut, 1998, p. xiv). This book of essays presents the resistant and resilient experiences of young women who, in “bar[ing] their insecurities and self-hatreds, as well as their determination to work through them to moments of self- awareness and bona fide self-acceptance” (p. xv), produce such competing stories about their relationships with their own bodies, grounded in what they know and feel, regardless of how they know they are supposed to feel about their bodies. This model is a useful one for the realm of female adolescent sexuality.

Even to acknowledge the dilemma of desire, we have to be aware both of our strong, embodied, and passionate sexual feelings and of the limited and oppressive ways these feelings are discussed or ignored in our own communities and cultures. It is crucial that girls understand that their desire
feels
like a dilemma as a direct result of social constructions of gendered sexuality. Many of the girls in this study identified the sexual double standard as unfair but had no idea why girls and not boys got called sluts. Not only do girls need a discourse of desire to support their embodied experi- ences and sense of entitlement in their relationships, they also need what Celia Kitzinger has called a“discourse of power” (1995, p. 194). They need to see how our conceptions of male and female sexuality are social constructions that produce privilege and oppression. The importance of developing this knowledge in the context of support- ive, trustworthy relationships cannot be underestimated.

When we begin to speak about the experiences of “girls” and “women,” the race and class contours of the challenges and con- straints on different girls’ opportunities and challenges speed to the surface. While the suburban girls were challenging the belief that they did not have sexuality, the girls at the urban school had to

deal daily with a barrage of messages implying they embodied female adolescent sexuality, which constantly threatened to become unbridled. The specific instantiation of institutionalized heterosexuality and how women and girls deal with it will likely have different contours depending on how each racial and ethnic group constructs, constrains, or enables female sexuality. Cultural conceptions of gendered relationships will thus affect what women can or should do with girls to enable them to stay embodied and also stay safe.

The complexities for women in speaking to girls about their sex- ual desire should not be overlooked. By the time we are adults, most women have made compromises in relation to our own bod- ies and desires (Haag, 1999). Carol Gilligan writes that when lis- tening to girls, “women may encounter their own reluctance to know what they know and come to realize that such knowledge is contained in their body” (1990, p. 531). To “be there” for girls, we have to be willing to consider our own experiences with sexual feelings. That is, we have to be prepared to delve into our own psy- chological remedies for living in our female bodies, textured by race, class, religion, and ability, within a patriarchal society.

In looking back over my own adolescence, the impetus of this work, I believed that desire had not been a dilemma for me. I never experienced or thought about my own sexual feelings as bad, abnormal, or unacceptable. In fact, I nurtured my own desire and savored these powerful sexual feelings. My memory of desire enabled me to resist the psychological literature that suggests there is something amiss about girls who feel desire. However, in listen- ing to these girls speak both unconsciously and frankly about the interplay of desire with danger, I have learned not only about ado- lescent girls’ experiences of sexual desire but also about my own. Frightening memories of sexual assault and disappointment punc- tuated my idealization of my adolescent sexuality as purely about

pleasure, power, and connection. Thus, I could no longer look back (longingly) on my adolescent experiences of sexuality as entirely positive and instead was forced to see the connection between the complexities of sexuality for girls and the contradictory experi- ences of desire I have had as an adult.
1

finding new ways to think about sexual desire

As Amber Hollibaugh has said, “it is always dangerous to refuse the knowledge of your own acts and wishes, to create a sexual amnesia, to deny how and who you desire, allowing others the power to name it, be its engine or its brake. As long as I lived afraid of what I would discover about my own sexuality and my fantasies, I had always to wait for another person to discover and give me the material of my own desires” (1984, p. 406).

The notion that the institution of heterosexuality can be dis- mantled is met with disillusionment from many feminist quarters. While the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s dismantled some of the barriers to female sexual subjectivity, what remained in place is the notion that boys and men cannot control themselves and that girls and women are responsible for controlling male sex- uality, an absurd expectation when power differences remain so potent in heterosexual relationships (Amaro, 1995). Although sex- ual violence is now more recognized, it is still tolerated and blamed on men’s inability to control their sexuality. In some places, limits on girls’ and women’s entitlement to sexual pleasure have been at best muted but not removed. Girls and women continue to take heat for sexual encounters that occur outside the condoned space of one particular form of relationship (as do homosexual and bisexual men). Ros Gill and Rebecca Walker spoke to the power of heterosexuality in their lives as feminists when they articulated the contradictions between their beliefs about their sexuality and what

they actually feel and desire: “we live [our] desires through the dis- course of patriarchal romances, not feminism. And the irony is
that we know it,
but that does not make the desires go away” (1993,

1. 69). The dilemma of desire is not going to be easily eliminated.
   

   What is required is that we make our schools, neighborhoods, and other public and private spaces safer for girls and women. As a society, we need to commit to eradicating sexual violence and its roots in the oppression of girls and women, as well as dismantling sexual hierarchies among girls and women and creating equitable access to reliable methods of contraception and disease protection. Although adolescents would like to have honest conversations with their parents about sexuality, few feel able to (Satcher, 2001). As Sophie intimated, they end up feeling they are supposed to learn this information through osmosis rather than direct talk. Whether out of fear for their children or their own discomfort with sexuality, the ways in which adults do speak to adolescents about sexuality are impoverished. School is an institution in which most adolescents spend a lot of time. As Michelle Fine (1988) observed, underlying sex education in school is the assumption that girls have to learn to protect themselves from boys, to say no. Girls are taught to talk about sexuality only in terms of learning how to say no to sexual behavior rather than in terms of communi- cating about what both partners do and do not want as part of
   

   their relationship.
   

   Sex education is an obvious arena where changes can and should be made. The surgeon general recommended comprehensive sexu- ality education that is both developmentally and culturally appro- priate (Satcher, 2001). Yet little of what teachers are able to say or do is grounded in research, and policy about sex education is fueled by politics and polemic rather than what the science tells us about girls’ or boys’ sexual health (Darroch, Landry, & Singh, 2000). The current federal regulations demanding the teaching of
   

   “abstinence only” or “abstinence only until marriage” are a case in point. Sexuality education does not “cause” adolescents to have sexual intercourse, and abstinence-only “education” does not pre- vent it. For those who do have sexual intercourse, comprehensive sexuality education is associated with an increased use of contra- ception and condoms, whereas students who have had abstinence education, many of whom subsequently have sex after the short- term effect of the abstinence-only message wanes, are much less likely to take these precautions (Kirby, 1997, 2001). A recent study found that in any given community where virginity pledges were made by either very few or by a majority of adolescents, there were no associated delays in initiating sexual intercourse (Bearman & Bruckner, 2001). Noting that pledging is embedded in an adoles- cent identity, the researchers observed that it is somewhat effective only when it is relatively non-normative; moreover, it is fragile. Disturbingly, promise breakers are less likely to use contraception when they do have intercourse for the first time.
   

   Consider how “abstinence” is a truly insidious cover story that puts girls at risk. Abstinence implies an absence of (girls’) sexuality, which denies the fact that we are all sexual beings. To deny adoles- cents their sexuality and information about it, rather than to edu- cate them about the intricacies and complexities and nuances of their feelings, choices, and behaviors, is to deny them a part of their humanity. What “choice” do girls have when their own sexual feel- ings are not supposed to exist? This study underscores the impor- tance of comprehensive sexuality education that actually informs adolescents about their
   sexuality.
   As Sophie suggests, “the way that you can help girls is if you let them know that everything they feel and think is normal.”
   

   A web site for adolescent girls called “Pink Slip” recently pub- lished an article suggesting that “what we should really be talking about here, when people say abstinence, is celibacy, which is the
   

   choice not to have a sexual partner for any period of time” (Corinna, 2000). The author notes that not telling adolescents “what to do” may lead to risky sexual behavior. In a society where the surgeon general was fired for mentioning masturbation (meaning, in fact, girls’ masturbation, since it is assumed in most quarters that virtu- ally all adolescent boys masturbate) and was as recently as April 2001 called “nuts” by the Reverend Jerry Falwell on national televi- sion (CNN, 2001), the political constraints on such straight talk are profound. If we really care about adolescents’ sexual safety and health, then adults—parents, teachers, social workers, physicians, youth workers, therapists—need to speak to adolescents about the realities of sexuality: that girls as well as boys have sexual desire, which should be acknowledged and respected by both partners; that boys can be responsible for their sexual behavior; that sexual intercourse is not the only “adult” form of sexual expression; that sex is not a commodity or thing to get but a way to express one’s feelings for another person; that masturbation and phone sex are safe sex.
   

   Encouraging girls to “just say no” is what yields the cover story of “it just happened.” As Megan astutely asked, why is it the girl who has to say no? And to what and whom is she saying no? This mantra does not help girls figure out what they do and do not wish to do, nor the conditions under which some choices are acceptable to them and others are not. Until girls can say yes and not be pun- ished or suffer negative consequences, until girls have access to alternatives to the romance narrative—which offers them one line only, “no”—girls will continue to have their “no” mistaken for “token resistance” (Tolman & Higgins, 1996; Muehlenhard & Rodgers, 1998). Sharon Thompson (1990) offers the slogan “Just Say Not until I Know I Want To” as a much needed corrective to the kinds of advice we give girls. Michelle Fine has explained that “a genuine discourse of desire would invite adolescents to explore
   

   what feels good and bad, desirable and undesirable, grounded in experience, needs, and limits... would enable an analysis of the dialectics of victimization and pleasure, and would pose female adolescents as subjects of sexuality” (1988, p. 33).
   

   Just as mothers cannot do this work alone, tinkering with sex education and conducting discussions with girls will not solve the problem. This is a social problem that demands change at a societal level, in how we think and talk as a society about adolescent sexual- ity, both girls’ and boys’. Boys also face limited social constructions of their sexuality. We need to know more about boys’ sexuality, in particular, how boys deal with our society’s conviction that their desire is monstrous and uncontrollable. We need to learn about boys’ wishes to be authentic with themselves and in relationships, given the pressures they are under to commodify sex, objectify girls and women, and not be vulnerable or out of control (Pollack, 1998; Tolman et al., 2002; Tolman et al., in press). We need to examine how different discourses about male sexuality that de- monize some boys (for instance, black boys, Latino boys, homo- sexual boys) may constrain them and enable others. We cannot underestimate the importance of offering and nurturing a critical perspective on how current gender arrangements and the institu- tion of heterosexuality are unfair and diminish the humanity of boys and girls. As bell hooks has said,“subversion of dominant cul- tural forms happens much more easily in the realm of ‘texts’ than in the world of human interaction . . . in which such moves chal- lenge, disrupt, threaten, where repression is real” (1990, p. 22).
   

   Sexuality is about emotions, intersubjectivity, and feeling close to another person, as well as feeling alive in your body. The girls who told me their stories included their embodied sexual feelings but also connected their powerful physical feelings to intense emo- tional feelings. In speaking about sexual desire, some of them told stories that revealed their urge to resist the split of intimacy and
   

   sexuality that pervades our society. The particulars of these girls’ narratives—Inez’s avoidance of the dancing that she loves, Rochelle’s brilliant but lonely solution of feeling desire only when by herself, Trisha’s use of alcohol to cover her desire, Melissa’s pre- tense that her physical expressions of affection are not sexual, Bar- bara’s sadness in denying her desire and also her insistence on having sexual pleasure in her life, Amber’s reworking of her sexual object status into a powerful position—provide compelling empir- ical evidence for why girls’ sexual desire matters and underscore girls’ ongoing need for the validation of their embodied experi- ences, as well as a critical perspective on how society constructs adolescent sexuality. Amber’s agency and confidence remind us that we have to engage in both overt and subversive transformative work to challenge, dismantle, and remake society’s notions of gen- dered sexuality to make it possible for all girls, no matter where they live, to get beyond “it just happened.” We have to demand, ensure, and protect girls’ right to feel and act upon their own sex- ual feelings without having to be encumbered by unfair and unnecessary dilemmas of desire.
   

   ON METHODOLOGY / NOTES / REFERENCES / INDEX
   

   

   ON METHODOLOGY
   

   

   The “standard practice” of the Listening Guide method typically involves proceeding four separate times through an interview, lis- tening for four distinct voices. This process enables the listener to develop multiple perspectives on a single narrative, producing a complex, multilayered interpretation, while retaining the structure of the narrative (Miller, 1991). Each time the researcher reads through the interview she underlines with a different color the parts of the narrative that express a particular voice. Then the rele- vant parts of the narrative are transferred onto worksheets, creat- ing a “trail of evidence” (Brown et al., 1989) for the interpretation of the narrative. Using worksheets that separate the words of the interviewee and the listener’s interpretation of those words, the lis- tener supports her interpretation with specific words from the text, providing a good or credible interpretation.
   

   The first time through the narrative the listener attends to the story told and to her own responses to this story. The second time through she attends to the interviewee as the narrator of the story. The purpose of this reading is to identify the “self story” in the nar- rative, the ways the person speaks about and knows herself in and through the narrative. This reading is done by underlining all statements that refer to the self: “I,” “my,” “me.” Listening for self
   

   209
   

   efficiently reveals where the narrator places herself in relation to her experience. Of particular interest to me was whether and how these girls experienced and knew themselves as agents in relation to their desire. The reading for self makes agency and absence of agency, as well as a girl’s experience of herself as an object, readily audible.
   

   In the standard practice of this method, the third and fourth readings draw the listener’s attention to relational voices, specifi- cally articulated in the original version of this method as the moral voices of care and justice. The relationship between self and these relational voices is then assessed. Given my focus, the relational voice I conceptualized was a voice of desire. But when I began lis- tening for such a voice, I discovered
   two
   desire voices in these nar- ratives, which I call for the purposes of this analysis (1) an erotic voice and (2) a response voice. While I have highlighted the erotic voice in this book, the portraits are developed as well from the girls’ response to their desire. In addition to these two voices of desire I was interested in a fifth voice in these narratives: a voice of the body. Because I wanted to know what girls did and did not say about their bodies, and in what relationship they placed their bod- ies to their experiences of themselves and their desire, I followed how they did and did not give voice to their bodies in these narra- tives. I found that a voice of the body is almost always subsumed in the erotic voice, and I concluded that it is virtually always an embodied voice, so I do not discuss the voice of the body sepa- rately in these portraits (for an exception, see Tolman, 2000).
   

   Although it was these voices of desire that I identified at this point in my analysis of the narratives, I strongly suspect that there are other voices or features of girls’ experiences of desire that are not captured by listening in these ways; that is, these voices are not necessarily the only way to understand girls’ experiences of desire. But they are one way into these desire narratives, and they high-