Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (7 page)

1. These remain reasonable fears,
   under current gender arrange- ments.
   Not being able to find a comfortable fit for desire in their sexual identities or their social and relational terrains made it hard or sometimes impossible for these girls to be aware of or feel, let alone accept or validate, their own sexual feelings. What came through all of their stories of desire was how their acute and astute
   

   awareness of the dangers associated with their sexuality, the deni- gration of their sexual feelings, and their expectations about boys’ sexuality led most of them to consider the source of danger to be
   their own sexuality.
   In effect, these girls described how social processes and meanings that clearly originate outside the body end up incorporated into its physiological demeanor and both uncon- scious and conscious behaviors (Grosz, cited in Fausto-Sterling, 2000, p. 23). As Lynn Philips (2000) has so succinctly put it, “we do not simply live inside our cultures. In many ways our cultures live inside of us” (p. 17).
   

   Embedded in the stories about desire that these girls told was a multitude of strategies, more and less conscious, for negotiating the tricky terrain of their own sexual feelings. It turned out that my question about desire was often a question the girls themselves had already been struggling with in some form, always in silence and isolation, outside any relationship with other girls or adult women, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. For some, this ques- tion was like a low-grade fever, making them a little bit uncomfort- able, but not really a major problem. For other girls, the question of their desire was crucial, an important clue to their identity that remained elusive for them (Raymond, 1994). As girls tried to sort out their feelings on their own, the question of their sexual desire remained both unspoken and unresolved until we began talking about it. Sometimes the question itself had never been articulated. Instead, they essentially lived the question.
   

   Among this group of girls, I discerned three distinct ways of talking about the dilemmas of desire.
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   In Chapter 3, we will listen to girls who reported not feeling desire or being unsure, having what I call “silent bodies” and “confused bodies.” Since this analysis assumes that having sexual feelings is to be expected, we will con- sider why they said that they did not feel desire. In Chapters 4 and 5, we will listen to girls in the study who did say they felt desire. We
   

   will track how they responded to or dealt with their sexual feelings, how they understood these feelings, and in what ways these feel- ings informed their sexual experiences and romantic relationships. We will be listening especially to the interplay between their psy- ches and their bodies.
   

   Girls who said they felt sexual desire deal with the dilemma of that desire in two ways. Chapter 4 elaborates strategies of resisting sexual desire. One such approach is for girls to shut down their feelings, to defuse and delimit their desire, that is, to disappear desire. Another approach is to be ambivalent about desire. Neither denying themselves desire nor embracing it unequivocally, these girls err on the side of danger, without completely sacrificing plea- sure, living in constant fear that they are crossing into territory that leaves them completely vulnerable and without any recourse to protection. Chapter 5 covers girls who describe a sense of entitle- ment to their sexual desire. Some of them describe openly engag- ing in a micropolitics of their own desire. Yet with rare exception, these girls also identify and deal with their desire as a personal dilemma; their solution is to create safe spaces for sexual desire within their social and relational circumstances.
   

   For over a hundred years, feminist scholars have offered extensive social analysis of the politics of women’s sexuality: the powerful and persistent tension between sexual danger and sexual pleasure that, while experienced differentially by individual women, is an involuntary aspect of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Ken Plummer (1995) tells us, “Sexual stories ooze through the political stream... power is not a simple attribute or a capacity, but a flow of negotiations and shifting outcomes...
   Sexual stories flow through this power. The power to tell a story, or indeed not to tell a story, under the conditions of one’s own choosing, is part of the politi- cal process
   ” (p. 26). Before moving on to the girls’ stories of desire, I
   

   want to emphasize that their personal stories serve to refract the larger societal denial of and ambivalence about female sexuality. Most girls were not conscious of this political dimension of their desire, but the ones who were embraced what they realized was their hard-won sexual subjectivity defiantly and fiercely. All of their stories reflect their difficult and, for the most part, isolated juggling of multiple and often contradictory mandates, deeply important relationships, and real and layered difficulties and wor- ries that are part of their experiences of sexuality.
   

SOUNDS OF SILENCE

It was heartbreaking to see, on [the girls’ return from having had their clitorises removed], how passive Tashi had become. No longer cheerful, or impish. Her move- ments, which had always been graceful, and quick with the liveliness of her personality, now became merely graceful. Slow. Studied. This was true even of her smile, which she never seemed to offer you without consid- ering it first. That her soul had been dealt a mortal blow was plain to anyone who dared look into her eyes.

—Alice Walker,
Possessing the Secret of Joy

Embodiment is the experiential sense of living in and through our bodies. It is premised on the ability to feel our bodily sensations, one of which is sexual desire. While the body is the site for the experience of, though not necessarily the incitement of, sexual desire, no one lives in a vacuum. Sexual desire may be in part a bodily process regulated by hormones, but being embodied—feeling and knowing the information that comes to us from the world in which we live through the sensations and reac- tions that occur in our bodies—is in part a social process that shapes our experience of sexual desire (Basson, 2000; Tolman, 2000; Heiman, 2001). In this sense, sexual desire is socially con- structed. As Gayle Rubin (1984) has so eloquently explained, “this does not mean the biological capacities are not prerequisites for

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human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not com- prehensible in purely biological terms” (p. 276).

It was a relatively small proportion of the girls in this study who said that they had never recognized sexual feelings in themselves. If we start with the assumption that embodied sexual desire is a nor- mative and anticipated part of adolescent development, that we live in bodies that are and need to be sentient, then an explanation is required for the absence of these feelings in girls’ descriptions of their romantic and sexual relationships and experiences. Why would a girl report that she does
not
feel sexual desire, or that she may be unsure about it? Although it is possible that girls might be reluctant to relay such sensitive, even forbidden, thoughts to a stranger, an adult woman who is different from or similar to them, the complexity of the stories these girls tell strongly suggests their veracity. They truly have not felt or consciously ever recognized or acknowledged feelings in their bodies that they associate with or call sexual desire. They are dissociated from their desire.

disembodiment and disconnection:

hallmarks of femininity

Dissociation—the psychoanalytic concept of a loss of knowledge, memory, or physical or emotional feelings—is an outcome, as well as a psychological red flag, of trauma (Herman, 1992). One form of dissociation is disembodiment, a disconnection or splitting off of the body and its feelings from the apprehension of the psyche. In describing how victims of sexual abuse become disembodied, Leslie Young (1992) considered how disembodiment may serve as a form of protection: “Whether by choice or blind necessity, the survivor [of sexual violation] can forget or wall off memories of traumatic events by consigning them to the body, and excluding all bodily sensations and intense affects from consciousness. But such

a solution entails an enormous sacrifice, since it also makes prob- lematic experiencing the everyday pleasures, sensations, and com- forts of human embodiment” (p. 93). I would add knowledge or information to Young’s litany of the sacrifices inherent in disem- bodiment: knowledge about relationships and the sociopolitical landscape in which one is living (Tolman & Debold, 1993). What traumatic experiences might the girls who have silent or confused bodies have experienced that could result in this kind of disem- bodiment or lack of clarity about their sexual feelings? Sexual abuse? While one of the girls in this group described explicit sexual abuse, the others did not; in addition, not all of the girls in the study who described sexual abuse or violation have silent or con- fused bodies. It is possible that the others did not recall or chose not to tell me about such experiences.
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Another possible frame- work for understanding these girls’ stories can be found in feminist theories about sexual violence, female adolescent development, and femininity, which are embedded in and produced by the insti- tution of heterosexuality.

Sexual violence is now a well-documented feature of girls’ and women’s lives, and it can severely affect their sexuality and their relationship with their own bodies (Kaplan, 1991; Herman, 1992; Young, 1992). It is not only the experience but the constant
threat
and not always conscious
fear
of various forms of sexual violation, including sexual harassment, rape, and unwanted sexual attention, that constitute a constant, low-grade trauma for girls and women.
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Such experiences are so frequent that they are, in some sense, everyday violations (Tolman, 2000). I was reminded recently of this ever-present sense of being vulnerable that women experience when I was showering and changing in a locker room after the gym I was in had officially closed. The entire time I was aware of the man who was cleaning the foyer (who had always been kind and polite to me), planning how I would avoid being attacked or raped

and how I would defend myself if I were. My pulse rate was up, my body was tense, and I was afraid, though I had no explicit reason for being so.
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Other fears associated with the dangers and vulnerabilities of female sexuality under patriarchy may also be experienced in this way. For instance, the terror some girls feel about the possibility of pregnancy or the risk of contracting HIV, and the ensuing perceived and often truly ruinous consequences, could constitute such an incessant source of trauma, as could the profound worry that one’s education and material existence could be in jeopardy (Fordham, 1993). These threats may affect girls in different ways, depending on their social, familial, and community circumstances. Not having access to or accurate information about reproductive choices or protection may be more of a problem for girls who live in poor communities than for girls in middle-class homes (Fine, 1988). Historically, black women have been more vulnerable to rape (Wyatt, 1997) and have had to deal with the complexities of checkered justice in their communities in its aftermath (Fine, 1984). There are cultural twists and turns in the social control of female sexuality that may intensify or highlight particular dangers and subsequent fears for individual girls (Asch & Fine, 1992; Hur- tado, 1996, 1998; Espin, 1999).

Dissociation from sexual desire echoes patterns of female psycho- social development theorized and researched by feminist psychol- ogists. This work has tracked how, at the threshold of adolescence, girls face demands to conform to norms of femininity,
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essentially becoming socialized into their proper place as women in a patriar- chal system. Taking up these norms—not being disruptive, not inciting or engaging in conflict, meeting the needs of others at the expense of their own—often creates a disparity between what girls are supposed to think, feel, and know (that girls can be anything they want; that Daddy hurt Mommy by accident) and what girls

actually experience and observe (there has been no female presi- dent; when Daddy was angry, he hit Mommy so hard she got a black eye). At this moment, girls experience what Carol Gilligan and Lyn Brown called a “doubling of voice and vision” (Gilligan, 1990, p. 506; Brown, 1991). Girls are forced to make a tragic choice: to capitulate to norms of femininity and dissociate from their true thoughts and feelings or to resist this framing of who they are and the “reality” in which they live. The fear that if they continue to “know what they know,” they will be inviting conflict into their relationships with peers and with those who have the authority to say what reality is (including their teachers, their mothers, and other adults in their lives) can lead girls to solve this painful dis- crepancy by dissociating from their authentic thoughts and feel- ings. To resist openly is to risk punitive social, psychological, or even physically violent repercussions for disrupting the smooth waters of relationships as they are organized within patriarchal constructions of reality.

Other feminists have considered how absolutely central the social constructions of femininity and masculinity are to our expe- riences of our bodies. Sandra Bartky and Susan Bordo both theo- rize that girls and women produce and at the same time experience femininity as a form of embodiment, making the point that girls and women “become” feminine not only in their behavior but also in their bodies, in response to particular expectations about what is appropriate, normal, and acceptable female comportment, appearance, and sexuality. Bordo claims that “the discipline and normalization of the female body, perhaps the only gender oppres- sion that exercises itself, although to different degrees and in differ- ent forms, across age, race, class, and sexual orientation, has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible strategy of social control” (1993b, p. 91). Because the absence of active em- bodied sexual desire is a hallmark of femininity, one specific devel-

opmental dilemma for girls in adolescence is the dilemma of desire. Psychologically, socialization into and internalization of norms of femininity associated with the female body create pres- sure for girls and women to “disconnect” from their bodies (Miller, 1976; Tolman, 1991; Tolman & Debold, 1993; Debold, 1996).

silent bodies
A few of the girls in this study describe “silent bodies.” Even in talk- ing about explicitly sexual events, they show no sign of embodied sexual desire and convey no traceable erotic voice. Some of them speak specifically about an absence of embodied sexual feelings.

The two narratives that follow exemplify the difference in both style and content in stories about having a silent body. Janine tells extraordinarily sparse narratives, pointing to crevices in her life into which desire threatened to find its way, while Jenny tells elabo- rate stories about romantic relationships and sexual experiences in which the absence of her desire is striking. The stories of these girls stand in stark contrast to the chorus of descriptions of sexual desire offered by most of the girls in this study. What Janine and Jenny do say, however, provides clues about how they have come to be dissociated from their sexual desire and what impact having a silent body has on them.

Janine: Disembodying Desires
Janine and I sit in an empty classroom. She is an extremely quiet girl who holds herself as if to appear small, with arms across her chest, so as not to be noticed. Sitting with her, I feel her fragility. Janine lives with her sisters and her father; her mother is currently living in Haiti, where Janine was born, though Janine has lived in the United States since childhood. She tells me about adolescent girls’ lives in her Haitian community: “they hold you tight, you know. You never go out. You never do anything.” When I ask her if

she talks to her parents about sexuality, Janine tells me that her parents are “old-fashioned,” meaning “they just don’t want you to know... what could be happening to you when you’re growing up. You just have to find out by yourself.” In Haiti, she says, “they don’t talk about this stuff.” Despite or perhaps because of her silent body, Janine holds a critical perspective on this adult silence about girls’ sexuality: Adults, she explains, “don’t want you to get more educated, they just don’t want you to know what is going on ... if their parents don’t tell them, I think that’s why there’s things hap- pening to them. My opinion is, I don’t think it’s fair for the kids.” Rather than preventing girls from developing sexually, the absence of talk about romantic relationships and sexuality sets them up for trouble, Janine thinks. She has picked up a lot of information about the potential dangers and devastating consequences of girls’ sexual activity, by listening to what she is told by her elders and by witnessing these outcomes herself among her peers.

In a soft-spoken voice, Janine explains that she “never” feels sex- ual desire: “I don’t have sexual feelings to know...I don’t know anything about sexuality ... I’m not curious. This is the problem, I’m not curious.” Janine links desire with being “curious” and con- fides in me that not having curiosity about her sexuality is a “prob- lem.” In what she does say about her relationships, observations, and thoughts, explanations for why she might feel neither curiosity nor desire come to light. She feels pressure from her sisters to do well in school, which she has internalized. She is a very good stu- dent, earning mostly As and some Bs, and this identity is impor- tant to her. At the end of the interview, Janine and I have a lengthy conversation about going to college. Her sisters have warned Janine about the pitfalls awaiting her as she struggles to succeed; they tell her, “you have to protect yourself. You know, because there’s a lot of dangers outside ... to just be careful because there’s a lot of violence outside, just watch out.” Janine is a careful

observer of her environment and can see for herself that her sisters’ cautions have merit; she also values her sisters and does not want to upset them by disobeying them. To get a decent education and make something of herself, Janine puts her energies into being a “good” girl. For a young female Haitian immigrant living in poverty, that means avoiding the interpersonal and educational risks of exploring her sexuality.