Dirty Little Secrets (13 page)

This fascination has at times made me hesitant to commit the loose-girl syndrome to an addiction model. It is important to determine what really is addiction and what is shame with respect to behavior that is simply culturally unacceptable. As with everything surrounding teenage girls and sex, the lines are blurry. Our society is so firmly opposed to any teenage sexual behavior, particularly from girls, that it would be easy to say that all sexual behavior is negative and should be treated as addiction. But teenage promiscuity isn’t always the result of severe pain or low self-esteem. Statistically, that is more often the case, but as with any statistics, it is important to acknowledge that there is a percentage of girls who develop low self-esteem because of how society judges and punishes them for wanting and having sex.

That said, addiction is often a very real part of loose-girl behavior. The feelings and bad behaviors have lots in common with other process addictions, such as sex and love addictions, but they are distinctly their own thing. We can define the loose-girl affliction as needing male attention to feel worthwhile. Sex addicts are obsessed with sex. They think about it constantly, need more and more sex to reach the same high, and are dysfunctional in their lives because of it. Love and relationship addicts are obsessed with getting love, with having relationships, and they spend a great deal of time ritualizing how to get them and how to keep them. If a relationship is threatened, they focus obsessively and act compulsively to keep the relationship or get it back, and they experience unbelievable despair when a relationship ends. All these addictions include being trapped in a cycle of pursuit and pain. All of them have a great deal of fantasy tied to them, and those fantasies get in the way of being able to have any kind of real intimacy with another person.

Pseudorelationship addictions are also about power and control. Kelly McDaniel, a love, sex, and relationship addict therapist, writes, “Women who become addicted to relationships and sex are escaping not only painful feelings, but the painful cultural inheritance that places them in an inferior position to men. Sexual power can turn the tables.”
¹⁰
Young women learn to use sex to try to control their relationships, to try to make men like them. Sexual attention is easy to get when you’re a girl, so girls often use it to try to make things go where they want, to try to maintain the good feeling that comes from being wanted. One can see how easily that can slip toward sex again and again—how gratifying it feels to a girl to have a boy’s attention on her and no one else—even if the addiction is not to the sex. Taken further, one can see how the girl who winds up having sex again and again with random boys feels awful and used.

Perhaps some of this sounds familiar to you. Perhaps you, too, try to heal something inside with a relationship or with a man. Throughout the book, I’ve noted that it is almost impossible to be a girl in our culture and not feel that way. Everywhere we look, we’re told that everything we could ever want, every wish we want fulfilled, will come with a man’s love. If we follow this, then almost everyone has the potential to become a love addict. Or perhaps, too, you think about sex constantly, or you use sex to get something else. Since girls aren’t permitted in our culture to have sex without wanting love, and since girls want sex just as much as boys do, perhaps you might potentially fit the bill for sex addiction.

My story in
Loose Girl
has been called the story of a sex addict and love addict. When
Marie Claire
published an interview with me, they titled the piece “Confessions of a Sex Addict,” which was followed by that
Jezebel
blogger who wrote that I wasn’t a sex addict; I was just a typical girl. I absolutely agree. I wouldn’t define myself as a sex addict, and I would categorize myself as a typical girl. And if we follow the definition for sex and love addiction, almost every woman has behavior that has at times crossed into love addiction or sex addiction. It is how we try to have control in a world where girls are not allowed control over their sexual identities, their desires. It is how we have power—false as it is—in a world where girls aren’t given much power.

For this reason, focusing on the label “addict” doesn’t always make sense, nor does unpacking which addiction you have—especially since so many of them overlap. Most love addicts are also loose girls. Most sex addicts are also love addicts. Most loose girls are also relationship addicts. It’s not terribly useful to try to narrow down which ones you are. More useful is to examine the addict aspect of your condition, to see yourself as a person with an addictive personality, and to simply note how easily you keep those addictions alive (see the appendix for addiction criteria).

Of course, it might be useful to get diagnoses for some conditions, especially those for which there are empirically tested treatments. If we have well-researched solutions, by all means, let’s use them. But it is also my opinion, after counseling many girls with relationship issues, that most process addictions—including the loose-girl condition—should be treated not as disorders but as culturally cued issues, as should the addictions we developed as a result, which we must wrestle with as we aim for more fulfillment in our lives. We must work with them personally, and we must work with them culturally, meaning that we must work on ourselves, and we must do what we can to transform the culture that sets us all up to be addicts.

LOOSE GIRLS AND SEXUAL ABUSE

Sex abuse and molestation are commonly associated with promiscuity. The assumption is that when children’s formative experiences with sex are some sort of violation, they will be unable to have a normal relationship to sex in the future. This makes perfect sense until we address the question of what makes for a “normal” relationship to sex, particularly when we’re discussing teenage girls. Is the fact that they are having any type of sex somehow abnormal? I can’t help but notice, for instance, as I read through various studies about adolescent boys, that sexual activity is almost never listed as a “problem.”

In a meta-analysis (a study of studies) performed in 2001, researchers found a significant correlation between sexual promiscuity and childhood sexual abuse.
¹¹
But when we look more closely at the data, we see again that
promiscuity
is undefined. What does this mean to the various authors of the studies? Does it mean simply sexual activity, which tells us nothing at all? Or does it mean sexual activity that makes the subjects feel like garbage? And do they feel like garbage because of the sexual abuse they suffered?

Many advocates for sexual abuse survivors have argued that this assumption that victims inevitably become promiscuous is offensive. Sexual abuse is a situation in which a person’s autonomy is taken away from him or her, and when we make assumptions about the effects of this, we take away autonomy once again. Heather Corinna, owner of the blog
Scarleteen: Sex Ed for the Real World
, notes that she can’t imagine that there is any group of people
more
conscious of having sex when they want it versus when they don’t than sex abuse survivors. Think about it. When you’ve had an experience that was clearly unwanted, then you are more prepared to recognize it when it approaches again. She additionally writes:

Sometimes survivors do have sex that is compulsive or reactive. We also want to be sure to recognize that sometimes that’s about trying to relive the experience to process it or change the script or other unknown unconscious motivations which can be about processing and healing. In other words, even in some cases where it is or appears troubling to an outsider, it may just be where someone is at in their own process, and outsiders should carefully consider the judgments they may make about that, or any way they may pathologize behavior that may not be pathological. Hopefully, people can also start to garner an awareness that judging a rape survivor’s sexual behavior can put even more baggage on a person than it can to non-survivors
.
¹²

So, while statistics tell one story, beneath the statistics are the more personal stories, the ones that deserve our attention and that might be more accurate than studies. The point here is not that some of those who’ve experienced abuse don’t act out promiscuously; it’s that some do and some don’t, and we don’t always know what’s behind people’s reasons for having sex. Danger always lies in making quick assumptions about people’s sexual behavior, especially when those people are female.

HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE LOOSE GIRL

I realize it’s odd to segue into homosexuality here, since being gay is not a mental illness, a self-harming behavior, or a transgression. But in examining the various associations with promiscuity, we must take a look at homosexuality. For years, the gay community has been stereotyped as promiscuous. This association came about mainly in the 1980s, when HIV/AIDS swept through the political and social landscape. Gay men are the ones most associated with promiscuity, and then bisexuals and transgendered people. Many assume that gay women are quick to commit, thus downplaying promiscuity. But homosexual people are just as likely as heterosexuals to want monogamy, or to use sex to feel loved, or to feel shame about sexual desire. The statistics bear out this truth. According to a survey administered in San Francisco, 58 percent of gay men and 81 percent of lesbians are in long-term relationships.
¹³
Another survey of 156 male couples showed that the average length of relationship was 8.9 years.

Miriam, nineteen years old, has slept with five men and more than fifty women. She grew up as one of eight kids, a middle child, and felt lost in a sea of children at home, no more visible than any of her siblings. Eventually, she grew up and left home. She moved in with a girlfriend who brought people home as “gifts” for them to share. At first, Miriam said, she couldn’t believe her luck, but over time she started feeling bad about herself. She needed every woman who came through the house to want her more than they wanted Miriam’s girlfriend, which also made her feel bad. Eventually, she started an affair with one of the women. She knew she was hurting her girlfriend, but she didn’t know how to stop herself. The other woman made her feel so special, like there was no one like her, which was of course the opposite of how she’d felt growing up. When I asked Miriam if she considered herself a loose girl, she said she absolutely did. Just because she liked girls, she said, didn’t change that she had those same feelings, that craving to have someone make her matter.

LOOSE GIRLS IN CONTEXT: A CONCLUSION

Promiscuity is bred among all sorts of mental illness, substance use, histories of sexual abuse, and sexual orientations. It is listed as a symptom of various problems teens may run into. And yet almost no studies have isolated it to learn about how to treat it. Many girls and women who have approached me for help have noted that they’ve had plenty of therapy in their lives, often for depression, anxiety, or adjustment disorders—a term therapists use when a person comes to therapy for basic life-adjustment issues, such as divorce, empty nest, job loss, etc. But even with all that counseling, they have felt like no one could ever help them or even adequately address their loose-girl issues.

Some of the problem is due to the relationship between the client and therapist. Sexual behavior tends to be underreported because of the sense that talking about sexuality is taboo, particularly across generational differences. If clients bring up transgressive sexual behaviors at all, counselors often assume that the best approach is to get their clients to stop the behavior. Even more likely is that the promiscuity as a separate issue doesn’t get attended to: we assume that if we treat the more general issue—substance abuse, depression—then the promiscuity will resolve itself as well. But unfortunately, girls who learn to act out sexually tend to keep doing so until they address the core issues surrounding those actions; usually those issues include a tremendous amount of shame and neediness. And that point—that shame and neediness sit at the heart of loose-girl behavior—is probably the most important one a counselor to a loose girl can know.

Next we look at how losing one’s virginity ties in to loose-girl behavior and how loose girls experience continual violations throughout their sexual lives.

Chapter 7

SAYING YES, SAYING NO

Consensual Sex and Rape

I lost my virginity at age fourteen. Really, it was rape. After that I pretty much gave sex out to whoever asked.

YES—LOSING VIRGINITIES

Sandy, who is fourteen, told me she doesn’t plan to have intercourse until she is in love. “That’s really the only way to do it,” she said. “Right? Because otherwise you just feel bad about it.” I asked her what she meant by “feeling bad.”

“I mean, everyone will think you’re a slut and no one will want to be your boyfriend.”

“Doesn’t that seem a little extreme?” I asked. “Why would people react that way?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “It’s just the way it is.”

Every girl learns early “The First Time” narrative. There is only one acceptable way to lose your virginity. You fall in love, the two of you decide you want to share your love in a deeper way, you do it, and he loves you forever. Usually, too, this happens on your wedding night. You “save yourself” for him so you can be special and pure, so you can be clean and worthy of him. Girls are taught that their virginity is a gift, one that they should give only to the “right person.”

Of course, most girls don’t have this experience. As I noted in the introduction, the statistics tell us that half of adolescents and a quarter of early adolescents have had sex, and most have had experiences that are much more complicated.
¹
Many—two-thirds of adolescent girls, in fact—regret their first times. Many decide to just “get it over with.”
²
Many speak of their first time as “disappointing,” because the myth around losing one’s virginity, of how special and meaningful it’s supposed to be, rarely matches the reality. Many wind up date-raped or lose their inhibitions via alcohol.