Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (9 page)

But Jenny’s own desire has never been available as a guide to her choices. Had Jenny felt entitled to her own sexual feelings and been accustomed to taking them into account in sexual situations, her

lack of sexual desire in
this
situation might have provided a clear signal to her, perhaps leaving her less vulnerable to her palpable confusion. Not having sexual feelings has contributed to her hav- ing sexual intercourse she did not “want,” which has made her feel sad, regretful, bad, guilty, afraid she was pregnant, and fearful of being ostracized by other girls and boys. Accustomed to being the object of someone else’s sexual desire and not considering that her own sexual desire might be relevant or significant, like so many other girls, Jenny pastes over the complexity of what did in fact happen with the usual cover story—“it just sort of like happened.” Although she can tell a story of outrage at the boy’s lie about using a condom when he had not, and a story of fear about the possibility of pregnancy, Jenny’s invocation of the cover story “it just sort of happened” keeps another story at bay, a story of a girl whose spoken wish was not heeded, of a girl who may have been coerced or taken advantage of. Was Jenny raped? It is Jenny herself who brings the word “rape” into her story: “I mean I could’ve said no, I guess, and I could’ve pushed him off or whatever ’cause he, I mean, he’s not the type of person who would like rape me, or whatever. I mean, well, I don’t think he’s that way at all.” She may indeed, at some level, associate this experience with rape. This word signifies something about how it felt for her, and what it sounded like to me: a time when what she said was not respected, taken into account, or perhaps even heard; a time of violation, when the practice of sexual passivity made her vulnerable to another person’s desires. Although she stopped saying no eventu- ally, this sexual experience, like all of her other sexual experiences, was not related to any feeling of “yes” on Jenny’s part—not in her mind and not in her body. For Jenny, a dilemma arises in the absence of her desire. Since rape is predicated on a woman not wanting a sexual experience, if Jenny never has feelings of want or

desire, how can she know if she has been raped?

confused bodies
Another group of girls describe “confused bodies” in that they are not clear about whether they have felt sexual desire. Two different examples of girls who have confused bodies follow. In the first, Laura is confused about how to interpret physical feelings that she can describe but cannot decide whether to call sexual. In the other, Kim simply does not know if she has felt sexual desire; her stories are a portrait of dissociation in action. Not only do these girls illu- minate how distressing a lack of clarity about one’s own feelings can be, their stories map how insidiously social constructions of male and female sexuality generate both the experience and the reality of sexual vulnerability, which leaves little room for girls’ sexual desire.

Laura: One Story of Sexual Abuse
Sitting with Laura, I sense her intelligence. Laura is a tall and un- assuming girl who attends the urban school. Neat, tight braids surround her alert brown eyes. She speaks with a measured and cautious voice, telling a complicated story about sexual desire, harm, betrayal, and confusion. For Laura, talk about sexuality is all about danger. Her grandmother and mother admonish her to “just think about school” and “[don’t] say much else.” In school, Laura observes that “there’s a lot of rumors about people goin’ around... No one knows if it’s true or not, only you know.” She says she “doesn’t really talk to anyone in school” in case “people go around talkin’ about you and sayin’ that you do all this other stuff. And you know you don’t or you know you do. It’s gonna, you know, make you feel bad either way.” For her to speak, she has to ascertain that she has found a safe space. From Laura’s descriptions of how she does and does not talk about sexuality, it seems that such safe spaces are few and far between. Thus, our interview offers

a potential and unusual opportunity to talk about her sexuality, which Laura seems to find difficult but also clearly wants to do.

Laura is trying to figure out if she experiences sexual desire. When I ask her if she has felt something she calls sexual desire, Laura pauses for a moment, watching me, perhaps wary or puzzled and says, “I don’t think I would know.” To clarify my understand- ing of her experience and to convey my genuine wish to listen to what she has to say, I ask her again if she has experienced such a feeling, and she hedges: “you could say that. I don’t know. I didn’t really know what it was at the time, so I wasn’t, you know, that sure. Since like no one really discussed these kinds of things, you know, I didn’t really know if it was or not.” Laura links her confusion about her feelings to never feeling able to talk with anyone about them. Like Jenny, Laura talks about sex that seems to leave her body out, that “sometimes... just happens. It’s not something that you really think about, when we was in the room together, it just happened, I don’t know why I did it, just, I did it. Well, I was touchin’ him, it was just somethin’ that happened. It’s not like I had thought about it ahead of time, like I wanna do this.” Women frequently use the passive voice to talk about things they have done that are not socially acceptable, so Laura’s use of it here may or may not tell me whether she had sexual feelings.

But she can talk about having such feelings, if vaguely, when asked to do so explicitly. Laura tells me about a time that she had feelings for a boy in her school: “There was this guy I used to like, well I still kinda like him. I liked him a lot, you know.” In his pres- ence, she says, she has “felt like I wanted to do somethin,’ ” though she does not say what it is she might want to do. She adds, “I knew that was somethin’ I would have wanted to do if it, you know, came down to that situation with him, you know... So I guess you could say that was a desire or need or whatever.” Her vague description, her unconvincing “guess” about the feeling being a

“desire” or “need” (or “whatever”), knowing that she “would have wanted to do it” in “that situation,” leaves me confused. What is “that situation”? What is the “somethin’” she “would have wanted to do”? Is it reaching out to hold his hand or touch his shoulder? Is it kissing? Is it sexual intercourse? Perhaps she does not have the words to describe desire. Perhaps keeping it all vague absolves her from feeling responsible or culpable. Or perhaps Laura is testing me, making sure I am listening but not judging, trying to decide if I can be trusted. As a black girl, she may be suspicious of a white woman asking her such questions.

As the interview progresses, she talks more, and more openly, about her feelings, and contours of genuine confusion emerge. We try to piece together what her feelings have been, puzzling over what she has and has not felt in her body, and what the feelings she can identify might be about. A helpful starting place is to compare her feelings for this boy with how she feels around other boys. It seems easier for her to talk about how she responds to boys for whom she knows distinctly she does not have any special feelings: “it wasn’t like, you know, like the other guys I was like yeah... it was just like, I acted around them like I acted around anybody else...I would act the usual way ...I blew them off.”

She says that her body feels “different” around this boy. She attributes this feeling in her body as evidence that she “likes” this boy, and she interprets an ebb and flow of the feeling as an indica- tor of whether she likes him; it disappeared when she “stopped lik- ing him. But sometimes, I see him, and then the feeling comes back, so I know I like him still, even if it’s only a little bit.” This embodied feeling provides Laura with information about her emotional feelings. The question of whether or not this feeling is sexual desire is still unclear. To try to diagnose it together, I ask her to describe it in detail:

In answering questions about how her body feels, Laura gets a little more specific: She feels “hyper,” “jumpy,” like she “was takin’ drugs or something.” She “guess[es]” that this feeling was sexual. While she is describing some kind of arousal, there is no indication that it has a sexual quality. It is just as possible that she is describing an experience of anxiety. When I ask whether Laura’s “jumpy” feel- ings feel good to her, she describes them as “strange.” Her body is sending her signals that are confusing—she is physically aroused in the presence of this boy, and this bodily feeling occurs in con- junction with a sense of “want” in relation to him. But this ex- perience has an unpleasant quality about it. Later she calls the feeling “an unwanted visitor.”

What is at stake for Laura in having clarity about her desire? Laura’s confusion about whether or not these feelings are sexual

desire stands in counterpoint to, and may be explained by, having been sexually abused as a child. Her story is not only about sexual violation but also about women not hearing her or responding to her—a story about betrayed relationships. Laura tells me that when she was seven years old, a neighborhood teenage boy “did unspeakable things to me.” She says that, despite threats from him, she “eventually did tell someone, but nothin’ ever happened to him, I mean, he went on with his life like nothin’ happened. I don’t think that’s right.” When I asked her if she’d ever talked to a coun- selor about it, she said that the “therapy I had didn’t really help. She just wanted to know what happened, and I was supposed to see another therapist, but my mother never took me, I don’t know why.” In fact, her mother acted as if this violation had never happened:

She talks to me about him like I care, you know, because it was her friend’s son, it was her best friend’s son, that’s what made it even worse, so it’s like, I don’t know, it’s like they can’t accept the fact . . . she doesn’t talk about it anymore, she clammed up about it. And we went to visit her [friend] in [another state], and like my mother acted like nothin’ happened, I mean, it’s not like he ever apologized for anything or nothin’ like that, so why does he get to walk off free?

As Laura tells me what happened, she gets increasingly angry. Not only does Laura’s mother not talk to her about sexuality, she “acted like nothin’ happened” when something “horrible” did happen, and she did not respond to Laura’s need to talk about a frightening violation or have it resolved by either adult woman confronting the boy. Laura understands that this boy was not held responsible for his actions; she is angry not only at his lack of apology or acknowl- edgment that he had done something that required his apology, but also at his “getting to walk off free.” Laura’s adolescent sexual-

ity may be tainted by the possibility that she experienced pleasure in this exploitative situation; therefore pleasure may be confusing or painful, a difficult experience she may wish to avoid, from which she may dissociate (Kaplan, 1991; Young, 1992). A connection between pleasure and violation may also limit Laura’s psychic motivation to clarify the messages that her body is sending her.

I tell her I notice it still bothers her a lot and ask her if it affects the rest of her life now; she replies, “I don’t know. Like if I wanna do something, like with that guy, you know, it might stop me. I don’t know.” Laura considers making an uncertain connection between this sexual violation and her lack of clarity about her own sexual desire. The framing of girls’ sexuality into simplistic and dualistic good and bad categories, which suggests that the desire- less girl is normal and safe, does not give her any guidance for making sense of what happened to her when she was seven or of what does and does not happen in her body now. How can she feel unequivocal desire in a relational terrain that is full of possible pitfalls?

Kim: The Sorrows of Silence
Sitting with Kim, I find the room still and simultaneously thick with tension. Her interview is like a puzzle, cut into seemingly dis- crete and mismatched pieces that fit together in an unlikely way to tell a larger story about how it is that she is “not sure” if she has experienced sexual desire: “I probably wouldn’t be able to [tell you about a time I did]... No, I don’t think I’ll be able to remember. I don’t think I’ll be able to come up with something.” Not “be[ing] able to remember” may mean that she has never had such feelings and so has nothing to remember or, conversely, it could mean that she has and cannot remember them. In considering how she might know if she was feeling desire, Kim responds thoughtfully, halt- ingly—the average length of the pauses in her answer is eight

seconds (take a moment to feel how long an eight-second pause is!): “Um, I don’t know if I’d be able to, because I have, um [pause], well there’s um [pause], well I suppose your heart would beat faster, but that’s just another reaction. There’s um [pause], I’m not sure how it would feel.” While “not sure,” she does connect feeling desire to her body—“I suppose your heart would beat faster.” It is as if she has a hypothesis rather than a recollection of sexual feel- ings she has actually experienced.

Despite her hesitations, Kim provides a lot of information indi- rectly, in how she says some things and reacts to others. As the interview progresses and she responds consistently to my ques- tions about her experiences of sexual desire in the same way—“I don’t know,” “I’m not sure,” “maybe if you asked something more specific,” “can you ask the question again?”—despite her serene facial expression, her body becomes more and more agitated. Per- haps she is uncomfortable talking with an adult about sexuality. Nevertheless, she gives my questions a lot of thought. As we talk, Kim seems to be coming to a realization about what she does not know, and cannot say, about her own experience. She is visibly dis- tressed when she interprets her own answers: “well, I certainly don’t know what I’m thinking. I guess I don’t know what I really want.” When we sit together during her many long pauses, I can tell that Kim is struggling to bring her own thoughts and feelings into her conscious awareness and to tell me about them, trying to over- come a “blanking in [her] head,” to not “block it from [her] head or something.” She wants help, a second opinion, asking me several times, “What do you think?” when she finds she is not sure or can- not answer my question.

There are clues to her lack of clarity about her desire sprinkled throughout the interview. Kim’s tendency to dissociate from her thoughts and feelings becomes a pattern as the interview pro- gresses. It is evident in her difficulty “spitting out” the words, in

disjunctures between her comportment and her words or between her facial expressions and her body language. She explains that she has gone out with a few different boys; she says that she “hasn’t really enjoyed having boyfriends” and that “sometimes when kiss- ing or something, it seems like they’re not really, it doesn’t matter who they’d be kissing, just because, it’s more pleasure for them- selves, and it doesn’t really matter who it would be . . . and it kind of bothers me sometimes.” Whether as cause or effect, Kim links “not enjoying” sexual experiences with feeling that she is being treated as the object of someone else’s desire for the purpose of his own satisfaction, as if who she is does not matter.

Talking about another experience with a boy she was dating, she describes an absence of agency on her part that further suggests a dissociative state:

My first boyfriend, I was fourteen, and I really liked him an awful lot, and he was really nice, and I remember being upset after we were going out for awhile, after he was feeling up my shirt, and I was upset about that afterwards, because I just wasn’t ready for that, at the time he was eighteen, I was upset just because I didn’t want to feel hurt ...I guess I didn’t really mind that much at the time, but then afterwards, I just was upset that it had happened.

Like Laura, she gives the impression that she in essence blanked out during the experience and came only to discover she had had an experience for which she wasn’t “ready.” When I ask her if that wasn’t what she wanted to do at the time, she pauses. “I guess I didn’t really mind, I don’t know [long pause]; I have a bad sexual history.” When I ask her if anything bad has happened to her regarding sex or the sexual parts of her body, she replies, “I don’t think so.” It is possible that Kim has experienced some kind of sex- ual abuse she does not recall or does not want to disclose, but there

are indications of other kinds of “bad” encounters she has had that may also explain her confusion.

Just when I begin to think that Kim does not in fact experience sexual desire, she tells me that she masturbates. She is one of only three girls in this study who say they have ever masturbated. She realizes that “it’s not really discussed that much, at all.” She tells me that “it’s not fulfilling or anything.” As happens throughout our conversation, Kim’s ability to talk about her experience seems to unravel as she speaks:

It’s not that I would feel guilty, ’cause I know that’s not, I mean, everyone does, but I just feel that if that’s physically so, after- wards, it feels fine when I did it, but then afterwards [long pause] I don’t know, maybe it’s pleasurable during, but then afterwards it feels, I don’t know, I guess I just don’t feel good afterwards, not mentally, I wouldn’t that often, it’s kind of really uncomfortable for me to talk about that, but I’m not sure why it is...I mean it’s nothing new, and you’ve heard it all before, but the topic isn’t very accepted or whatever, you know? It’s just not very comfort- able, because, I mean people, it’s been considered like criticized, or whatever, oh but Ann Landers always says that everyone does it, but it’s still like considered to be dirty or whatever.

When I ask her what she thinks, she says, “I don’t think it’s like that, I don’t see why.” When I ask her what makes her want to mastur- bate, her answer keeps the possibility of her sexual desire in the shadows: “I don’t know, it’s probably just sexual arousal or some- thing, whatever, I don’t know.” When I ask if that is something she feels, she responds, “Probably.”

She is aware that there are different expectations and standards about male and female sexual desire; she disagrees with this state of affairs but cannot articulate why she feels this way: “well, you hear about men’s desires and I guess it used to be thought that women

didn’t have desires, and I’m sure that’s not, that people know that it’s not true, but it’s still not really admitted that much, I don’t think.” When I ask her why she thinks this inequity exists, Kim becomes completely discombobulated again: “I can’t think, I don’t know, usually this doesn’t happen, I can’t even formulate any thoughts, because these kinds of questions aren’t usually asked, and since I’ve never been asked before, I haven’t really thought about it that much, so.” In her mounting efforts to try to “remem- ber,” to “think,” not to “block,” I begin to sense frustration on her part. She asks and then answers her emerging questions: “Why don’t I know what I’m feeling? One reason is that people don’t really discuss it that much, people don’t discuss pleasure ... it’s not that I don’t want to answer you, I just don’t know, it’s just diffi- cult for me to answer.” While Kim links her confusion to silence about girls’ desire and pleasure, she also seems aware that it is not only what hasn’t been said that creates a stumbling block for her.

Reflecting the social ambivalence she has picked up on, Kim lives out the disconnect that comes from not talking about sexual- ity. She says her mother has “never talked to me, she hasn’t really mentioned the subject. She keeps telling me I should be dating right now, just, but I don’t know why.” When I ask her what she thinks about her mother not talking with her about sexuality, tears start rolling down Kim’s cheeks. Abruptly, she tells me that her father has had an affair. Voice steady yet very soft, as tears slip down her face, Kim continues to speak; she does not seem to be aware that she is crying. I ask her: “Do you feel sad?” She says: “Um...I don’t know.” From the silence that surrounds her father’s betrayal, Kim gets the message that knowing what she wants and needs can set her up for betrayal.

She tells me her father has “strong opinions” and “rape has been discussed.” She explains her father’s position: “he has always taken the side ... well, women have to take some kind of responsibility

for that too, and that it could be kind of their fault too.” When I ask her what she thinks about her father’s opinion, she says she does not agree with it. His point of view in fact raises a poignant question for her: “How do you know what situation you shouldn’t get into or not? I’ve heard some people say that women shouldn’t dress provocatively or something, but I don’t know, I don’t think it’s very fair to say that, because it shouldn’t provoke anything like that.” Kim does not agree that the way a woman dresses should make her responsible for getting raped. Yet it seems hard for her to feel sure; her father’s perspective makes the question of women’s culpability in their sexual violation more confusing for her. If a woman—or a girl—can be held responsible for being raped, on what grounds does she make decisions about her sexuality? How can girls feel desire and be safe if being raped “could be kind of their fault too?”