Dirty Little Secrets (9 page)

“It was confusing,” Lydia said. “So ultimately I just did what I wanted.”

This sort of disconnect is reflected in the
Seventeen
and
O
survey, where 90 percent of mothers claimed that they’d spoken to their daughters about how to make the decision to have sex, but only 51 percent of the girls claimed to have had the same conversation.

A few things are at work in such numbers. One is that mothers are generally uncomfortable talking to their teens about sex. Following the dominant discourse about girls and sex, mothers talk about the issues involved—pregnancy, abortion, and STDs. Most adolescent girls claim that their mothers don’t talk to them about the aspects of sex that they deem more important—such as the emotions involved and the physical feelings. Generally, they feel like they’re receiving warnings and rules, and that the conversation is rarely much of a two-way street.
⁴
One of the girls I interviewed told me that her mother would never even know all the things she wasn’t saying; the girl knows that there are certain topics her mother doesn’t want to hear about from her, and one of them is definitely her desire to be with boys sexually.

Mothers are uncomfortable partially because sex is such a taboo subject for teen girls. But they’ve also adopted the social standard that if you discuss sex and sexual desire with your daughter, she’ll fall down that slippery slope into promiscuity. As a result, many tell their daughters about abstinence. They let them know that sex before marriage is off-limits. Then they assume (or pray) that the girls will follow their advice.

Girls, too, often feel uncomfortable talking to their mothers about sex, particularly when they fear judgment, rigidity, or attempts to control. But even without those factors, talking about sex with any parent is burdened with embarrassment.

Certainly, this adds to the reasons that one of the more important topics missing from most conversations about sex is masturbation. Letting a girl know—from early on—that it is perfectly fine to touch herself in private is a great way to support her natural sexual feelings without needing a boy. Even the well-known sex therapist Laura Berman said in an
O Magazine
interview about talking to daughters about sex, “It’s important to talk to her about having a sense of control and pride over her body, and to let her know there are ways she can make herself feel good before she’s ready for sex, like self-stimulation.” The interviewer asked, “Seriously? Mothers should talk about masturbation?” Berman replied: “If you want to raise a sexually healthy daughter, yes. That may mean attending to your own sexual health. A lot of women grew up with the idea that masturbation is wrong or dirty.” Indeed.
⁵

It’s not just the conservatives and abstinence advocates who wince at such a conversation. “That is private business,” one mother said to me. This head-in-the-sand approach, though, puts a wall up between teen girls and adults. As long as mothers don’t talk to their girls about sex, they are setting up a greater likelihood that their girls will use sex to self-harm.

Masturbation is a major taboo, and a long standing one at that. Some of the myths are familiar—you can go blind, you’ll grow hair on your palms, or your reproductive organs will fail. Others contain that common double standard—boys masturbate, but girls don’t, or girls who do masturbate are hypersexualized, exposed to images or experiences they shouldn’t have been.

But the real truth about masturbation is that it’s as natural and normal as it can get when it comes to sexual exploration. The larger percentage of the population masturbates, and they do so through old age.
⁶
In fact, one study suggests that 20 percent of all senior citizens masturbate at least once a week.
⁷
The joke goes that 98 percent of the population masturbates, and the other 2 percent are lying. Although statistics suggest that men masturbate more than women, I think we can all agree that this is due to both the stigma put on women for having desires and the likelihood of girls’ and women’s lower honesty in reporting masturbation occurrences, as women are traditionally not accepted for their sexual desires. If girls and women are expected be in love to have sex, then certainly admitting their solo sexual desire is too risky.

The Boy Scouts of America, the Christian Coalition, and the Roman Catholic Church are all vocally opposed to masturbation. Christine O’Donnell, who ran for the Delaware Senate in 2010 (and lost), spoke on MTV in the 1990s about how masturbation was a sin because it was equivalent to committing adultery.
⁸
In 1994, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the U.S. surgeon general, was forced to resign from her position because she suggested that masturbation should be a part of sex education. Conservatives and moderates were outraged to the point that Elders left her post.

Meanwhile, when we look beyond opinion and stigma, research suggests that masturbation is an essential part of sexual development, and girls’ hesitations about masturbation are correlated with having uneasiness about intercourse.
⁹
The sex educator Sharon Thompson notes that one of the things masturbation teaches is that all those things we feel happen inside our own bodies.
¹⁰
So many girls make all that sexual excitement about the other person. In reality, those feelings are their own creation and they could have those feelings without needing a boy around to feel them. Assuming that girls will develop more confidence about their sexual feelings if they do masturbate, they might also be more self-directed about their sexual behavior. They will likely know better what they want and what they don’t. And what better way for girls to acknowledge and attend to their sexual desires without putting themselves in the way of STDs and pregnancy?

So how should mothers address sexual behavior with their girls? Lynn Ponton, author of
The Sex Lives of Teenagers
, created a comprehensive list of considerations, including starting early, before adolescence; being conscious of talking to your children about sex and sexual feeling without mentioning your own; continuing the conversation and communication long beyond a singular talk; and recognizing that your work as a parent is to guide and suggest but not to direct.
¹¹

If daughters are going to have sex, and we know from the statistics that many will, then mothers should make condoms available to their daughters. We know that adolescents use condoms more than adults do, which means they are
willing
to use condoms.
¹²
Therefore, parents have a responsibility to keep their children as safe as they can by providing condoms in case their teenagers are choosing to have sex. And parents need to talk with them about condoms early. A study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that mothers who discussed condom use with their teenage daughters before first intercourse had daughters who were three times more likely to use condoms than those whose mothers discussed condom use with them after first intercourse.
¹³

Another very important issue arises when it comes to mothers and daughters regarding sexual behavior. Many mothers are still dealing with unresolved feelings surrounding their own promiscuity. They either continue to act in loose-girl ways, or they feel anger or pain or resentment about those feelings themselves (see chapter 9 for more about the grown-up loose girl). We know that modeling is one of the primary ways children learn. It doesn’t matter what mothers say to their daughters if they don’t walk their talk.

Children—perhaps especially teenagers—are hyperaware of hypocrisy. Communication to teens about sex—from media, from parents, from educational institutions—is loaded with mixed messages. Teenagers look perhaps most critically at their parents for hypocrisy and will quickly dismiss a mother’s admonishments if she isn’t following the same advice. And if a mom is acting out sexually, needing too much attention from men, or even focusing too much on romance, girls pick up those messages more than anything else that might be said.

This is not to say that all loose girls have loose-girl mothers, but having a loose-girl mother generally means that the mother is somewhat oblivious, which won’t help her daughter’s emotional health when it comes to sex. Research shows that parents who are insecurely attached—meaning that important bonds were disrupted when they were children—tend to parent in ways that pass on that insecurity to their daughters.
¹⁴

Janet and Shawna are a mother and daughter who have lived on their own since Janet and her ex-husband Greg divorced. Janet always told Shawna that she didn’t want her to give herself away to just any boy, but when Janet began to date, Shawna felt like she was seeing her mother in a different light. She dressed in sexy outfits. She changed her hairstyle. Once Shawna saw her mother French kissing a date in the kitchen. His hand was squeezing her behind. Shawna felt sick but also slightly aroused. She was happy for her mother, but it also frightened her. She felt like she didn’t know her mother at all.

Janet and Shawna’s situation is a common one for many teenage girls. Janet isn’t necessarily doing anything wrong, but without any discussion, Shawna sees her mother’s behavior as hypocritical. There are layers to every story, too, that are harder to see. In that brief anecdote, for instance, you don’t see that Janet also had a history of needing men’s attention. When she married, that need went into a sort of remission, but suddenly free she found herself craving attention again. In this cycle, Janet will find it hard to be there fully for Shawna. But if Janet can build awareness about her own behavior, she can discuss her tendencies with Shawna. They can talk about how women are made to feel in their culture and how hard it is to fight the current. She can promise Shawna that she will work on this issue in her own life and that Shawna can come to her with any feelings about the process, even unpleasant ones. In other words, Janet doesn’t have to be perfect. No parent can be. But she
can
take responsibility for herself and be honest, the two most important things a parent can do.

Hannah has a very different story. Her parents divorced when Hannah was ten, and a few years later, her mother met Chris at a singles’ dance. Hannah’s mother immediately began to transform, and not in a positive way. Whatever Chris liked, her mother did. For instance, Chris liked high heels, so Hannah’s mother went out and bought a few pairs and she wore them all the time. Hannah didn’t like Chris one bit. He insulted her father, whom he’d never met. And he insulted Hannah, too. When Hannah would say something back to him—something like, “Excuse me?”—her mother told her to stop it, to not act fresh with Chris.

Every day, Hannah felt like she had to hold herself still, not talk, not express any of her feelings. If she did try to talk to her mother, Chris would show up and give her mother a why-do-you-let-herget-away-with-it expression. Soon after, her mother would warn her to knock it off. It got so bad, in fact, that Hannah started having occasional panic attacks. Her mother found Hannah shaking uncontrollably in the bathroom one time, and she still did nothing. One time, Hannah said point-blank to her mother, “You choose him over me,” and her mother didn’t deny it. Now, Hannah says, she tries not to think about it too much. Instead, she fantasizes about having a boyfriend. She told me, “I think of having a boyfriend’s arms to wrap me up tight, kiss my hair, hold my hand, and cuddle with. I find myself now looking at any guy, imagining that. I don’t find many guys at my school attractive, and the ones that are have personalities that ruin it, or they’re into smoking pot, or I just have no way of approaching them. Now whenever I think I like a guy, I don’t know if it’s just because I’m desperate like my mom or if my crush is genuine. I just want to feel good and have someone there to love me like that. And it doesn’t help the way my mom is acting, and what she says makes me think I can’t be happy if I don’t have a man.”

Hannah’s mother has tons of work of her own to do before she can be a positive influence on Hannah when it comes to romance. Like Janet, she needs to examine her own issues with men and the ways she has turned to men to fill something in her that she can’t fill on her own. Clearly, Hannah’s mother has put her own desperation for love above her care for her daughter, something I too commonly hear from teenagers. Unless Hannah’s mother puts her daughter’s feelings first, Hannah will continue to feel confused about her own impulses when it comes to romance. Hannah has difficulty separating her identity from her mother’s, which is typical of a mother-daughter relationship, but particularly one where the mother has no boundaries around her behavior.

Every once in a while, I hear positive stories, too. I know a fourteen-year-old girl named Nel who recently started dating, and one evening she came home with a hickey on her neck. Her mother saw it, let her daughter know she saw it, and told her that she was fine with that hickey. Her concern, she let Nel know, was that Nel was making choices she wanted to make. She only wanted to be sure that Nel felt comfortable with what was happening and that she wouldn’t do something she didn’t really want to do. At first Nel rolled her eyes and said, “I know, Mom!” But about an hour later, Nel came back to her mother and said that she did realize that sometimes boys wanted to do more than she felt ready for, and sometimes even she wanted to do more than she was sure she was ready for. Nel and her mother wound up having a long, open discussion about how boys are always considered the horny, sexual aggressors, but really there were things girls wanted to do, too. But girls are very aware that if they let boys know they want those things, they quickly get labeled “sluts.” Nel and her mother agreed that this was unfair, and together they discussed ways Nel could work her way around this double standard while still staying true to herself, such as by thinking through her sexual behavior before acting, and perhaps even talking to her mother about it first.