Dirty Little Secrets (2 page)

When these girls grow up, they find that in this way, they are still girls. They carry their pasts with boys into their futures. They remain needy, desperate, anxious for someone to prove their worth. The boys, though, become men.

For much of my life, I was that girl. When I became a therapist, I learned that there were many others like me. And when I wrote my memoir,
Loose Girl
, about my experiences, I heard from many, many more girls like me. They assumed that they were the only ones, that they alone suffered this peculiarity. How could this be? How do we get so far into our lives and into these experiences without sharing them—and our feelings—with our friends, our parents, or a caring adult? Because we feel so alone—because we carry immense shame about our behavior and, more so, our desperation. Some came from divorce, like I did. Others had lived through severe abuse. Still others had untarnished childhoods, intact families, and the feeling that they had been loved. Some had sex with only three men; others with fifty. The number of men isn’t important. It is the
feelings
these young women experienced—that if they got a man’s attention it would mean they were worth something in the world.

You might be this girl, too. Maybe in some ways you have experienced such feelings even if you never acted on them the way some of us did. You have met eyes with a man and thought,
Maybe he could save me.
You have done your makeup and dressed provocatively to attract men at an event. You aren’t immune to the feeling that a man will make you feel something more than just love, more than just sexy—that he will make you feel valuable.

We aren’t sex addicts or love addicts—at least not at first. We aren’t diagnosable. We aren’t yet to the point where we let these feelings utterly destroy our lives, even if, in some ways, it seems they do. They consume us. We are obsessed with getting love, with using male attention to make ourselves worthwhile in the world. Like the girls Courtney L. Martin describes in her book
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughter: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body
, girls who don’t have eating disorders per se but obsess over the idea of needing to be thinner than they are, the girls I discuss in this book are on a continuum of promiscuity.
¹
Sex and love addictions are simply more extreme versions of what many—maybe even most—girls face regarding sex and love.

What happened to us? How did we get to this point, where we use male attention like a drug, again and again, as unsatisfying to us as it is? Why do we keep going back, even though our behavior often becomes self-destructive? And, finally, how do we move from that behavior, those feelings, toward real intimacy?

After
Loose Girl
arrived on bookshelves, readers were eager to share their stories, to voice their feelings, to know that they weren’t alone. Many wanted answers, a formula, to get themselves to a new place, to stop harming themselves with their promiscuity. This book is my answer to their plea. It is a study of the cult of female, teenage promiscuity, and the silence that surrounds the topic; it is a sharing of numerous stories about the harm done and the movement toward real intimacy. It is also a genuine discussion about how we can make change for ourselves, our daughters, our clients, and our culture.

The bottom line is that we don’t like to talk about teenage girls and sex. Sure, we see it everywhere. Teenage girls in provocative clothing flood the media. They have sex on
Gossip Girl
and
Degrassi
and
One Tree Hill.
And they definitely have sex on reality shows like
The Real World
and
16 and Pregnant
. But when we discuss adolescent girls and sex, it is only in one way: don’t have sex. This is easier than anything else. We tell teenage girls to stay away from sexual behavior and to practice abstinence. Don’t have sex, we say, because we don’t like to imagine them having sex. If they do, then we have to think of them as sexual creatures, and that makes us squirm.

In fact, much of the promiscuity among young women, both heterosexual and homosexual, is likely to go undetected because it makes therapists uncomfortable. When I appeared on
Dr. Phil
to discuss two teen girls whose parents were unhappy they were having sex, the tagline next to the girls’ names when they were on screen was “sexually active,” as though that was a disorder or a crime of some sort.

But while we refuse to discuss teenage sex, it is happening. According to the Guttmacher Institute, although teenage sexual activity has declined 16 percent in the past fifteen years, almost half (46 percent) of all 15- to 19-year-olds have had sex at least once, and 27 percent of 13- to 16-year-olds are sexually active. The larger proportion of these teenagers are black (67.3 percent) and Hispanic (51.4 percent) rather than white (41.8 percent). Much of the sexual behavior occurs in populations traditionally thought to have less experience in sexual activity, though, such as teenagers from affluent homes and preadolescents.
²

Ultimately, the statistics for STDs and teenage pregnancy aren’t promising. We are experiencing a record high of teenage girls with sexual diseases. Of the 18.9 million new cases of STDs each year, 48 percent occur among 15- to 24-year-olds. One in four teenage girls aged 14–19 and one in every two black teenage girls has an STD. Each year, almost 750,000 teen pregnancies are reported for women aged 15–19, and 82 percent of those pregnancies are unplanned.
³
The MTV reality series
Teen Mom
, a spin-off of the wildly successful
16 and Pregnant
, had the channel’s highest-rated premiere in more than a year—evidence, I’d say, of our fascination with teenage motherhood. What happens behind these statistics, the feelings and motivations behind promiscuous behavior, and the direct results of it, is less clear. These are the dirty little secrets that girls carry. These are the stories they have—we have—but don’t tell.

There is some research that casual sex among teenagers can be more harmful than we’ve thought. The adolescent brain’s prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for judgment—develops at an explosive rate. There are in fact only two times during development that the brain is overrun with synapses (neural connections) in this way: right before birth and right before puberty. At this critical time in preadolescence, the brain manufactures far more synapses than necessary. The synapses that are used become stronger. The ones that aren’t used weaken and die. As a result, certain experiences become sealed in that teen’s growth, in the strong synapses. If they handle intimacy—and sex—in ways that don’t get them what they really want, again and again, they are likely to wind up with a potentially harmful approach to intimacy.
⁴

What’s more, the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until the mid-twenties, and there is some evidence that bonding through sex and then breaking up again and again damages the ability to establish meaningful connection through intimacy. In other words, when teens bond and break, bond and break, before the cortex is fully developed, as most teens do, they potentially set themselves up for trouble with real intimacy later on. (This research, however, is based on findings concerning oxytocin, and many have argued that we don’t know enough about oxytocin to make such claims. See the “References and Notes” section at the end of the book for more information.)
⁵

At the same time, though, we know that a girl’s ability to express her sexual desires is a necessary step toward developing healthy sexual intimacy, and it is essential if she is to protect herself against unwanted or unsafe sexual activities. In fact, in one study, researchers found that the fewer sexual partners a girl had, the more likely she was to not assert her beliefs and feelings during sexual activity, thereby potentially setting herself up for negative sexual experiences.
⁶

Not all teenage sexual behavior derives from self-harm. Ideally, in fact, none of it would. Sexual curiosity and experimentation is a perfectly natural part of growing up. Girls have just as much sexual desire and curiosity as boys. They are curious about their genitals and others’ as children. They masturbate. The hormones that race through a teenage girls’ body create just as much sexual feeling as boys’ hormones do.

Psychological discussions about why girls might engage in sexual activity, however, do not include any information about girls’ sexual desire. Michelle Fine refers to this as “the missing discourse of desire” in her article of the same name.
⁷
She notes that we talk about victimization, violence, and morality, but we almost never examine the fact that girls, too, have desire. In fact, sexual desire is seen as an aberration for girls, which means that we almost always assume that girls act sexually only to fulfill their hopes for a relationship. This can certainly be the case, but it’s potentially dangerous—as we make policy, as we aim to help girls, as we aim to help ourselves—not to account for the fact that they also experience sexual arousal.

We don’t generally like to say these things about adolescent girls. We don’t acknowledge that they have desire. We live in a culture that provides little space for any sort of female teenage sexual behavior, including what many would consider normal curiosity and exploration, because it makes us so uncomfortable.

How did this odd untruth about female desire arise? Ancient and medieval understandings of puberty emphasized vitality and social benefit, and they made little distinction between male and female desire. The rising influence of Christianity, though, established the beliefs that youthful sexuality was dangerous, immoral, and threatening to social order. With the Enlightenment, boys regained some freedom over their right to sexual expression, but girls’ sexual desire remained deviant. Over the following centuries, while puberty for boys took on its association with manly desire, for girls it grew more and more removed from any notion of desire and instead focused entirely on preparation for reproduction and motherhood.
⁸
In conjunction with this, girls’ experience with puberty was associated only with the need to protect their purity so they would be ready for their fate as mothers. Our notions today about girls and female desire are built on outdated patriarchal, religious notions.

Today, the cultural narrative is as follows: boys are horny, but girls are not, and so girls must do what they can to keep boys and their out-of-control hormones at bay. We like this narrative, outdated and unscientific as it is. It keeps us safe from the notion that girls might want to be sexual as much as boys do.
But
, you might be thinking,
what is the problem with keeping girls safe?
As I explore in this book, the problem is that when you deny a group of people an essential part of who they are, a part they have full right to, they often wind up using it in a self-destructive manner rather than as a natural part of their development. In other words, if teenagers getting STDs and becoming pregnant and acting out sexually is a cultural problem, then stigmatizing teenage sex only makes it worse—much worse.

The distinction between acting on natural sexual feelings and using male attention and sex to fill emptiness is an important one. In this book, I carry the underlying assumption that teenage girls have natural sexual feelings, just like boys, and that perhaps we need to find an outlet for girls to express themselves sexually, an outlet that the girls control themselves, not the cultural expectations about who they should be as sexual creatures. I also try to demarcate what it might look like when a girl has stepped beyond cultural boundaries and has begun using male attention and sex to try to feel worthwhile. And there
is
a difference: some girls manage to cope with our culture’s lack of space for girls to have sexual feelings, but others struggle and tend to use sexual attention and behavior to harm themselves emotionally. So for the purposes of this book, I refer to self-destructive sexual behavior as promiscuity and to the girls who pursue such self-destructive attention as loose girls.

Without discussion, without creating the space for girls to talk about their sexual experiences, we are left with assumptions that are almost invariably wrong. If we are not virgins, we are called sluts. We get what we deserve and what we wanted. Or—and this emerging view is not as positive as it seems—we are empowered by our sexuality; we are waving our flags of sexual freedom. After all, in this day and age, to suggest that a girl having sex is anything other than empowered and strong is antifeminist.

Meanwhile, the media continues to propagate the double-edged sword, the messages that girls have always received. You must be sexy, but you may not have sex. You must make men want you, but you may not use that to fill your own desires. The women’s studies professor Hugo Schwyzer calls this the Paris paradox, based on Paris Hilton’s comment that she was “sexy but not sexual.”
⁹
He notes that young women raised with Paris Hilton in the limelight were promised sexual freedom but wound up with more obligation than abandon. In other words, girls’ requirement to be sexy greatly outweighs any attention to what might be a natural, authentic sense of their sexual identity.

This is not a book telling teenage girls not to have sex. On the flip side, it’s also not a book that encourages promiscuity. It’s a book about how we can all work together to find a way to let teenage girls stop harming themselves with their sexual behavior. It’s a book—at its core—about girls’ rights and sexual freedom.

The true experience of being a teenage girl these days is so lost inside all this noise, all the assumptions and messages coming from everyone but the girl herself, that we couldn’t possibly know what emotions are behind promiscuous behavior. That’s why I went straight to the source—finally—and asked to hear from the girls and women themselves.