Female Chauvinist Pigs (15 page)

It’s interesting (in a nauseating kind of way) to watch educators struggle to make this message coherent. In 2001, I went to the New Jersey Coalition for Abstinence Education’s conference in Plainsboro, which was attended by teachers from the Northeast who needed to fulfill a minimum requirement of one hundred hours of continuing education. Hundreds of teachers, mostly women, were gathered in a huge auditorium inside a massive conference center in the middle of nowhere, sitting through hours of speeches while photographs of garish herpes lesions and magnified roving hordes of crabs were projected on a screen over the stage. (That night, I dreamt I got a rare form of lethal mouth cancer from a particularly passionate French kiss. I woke up anxious and aroused.)

My favorite presentation focused on the misadventures of one Miss Tape. An extremely tall speaker named Mike Worley introduced himself to us by listing his basketball credentials and then bragging that he was a twenty-eight-year-old virgin. (He hadn’t yet met
the one,
so there had been no
big day,
so why would he have had sex?) He told us there were certain rules he imposed on his dating life in order to maintain his purity: A movie with friends was always better than a movie alone, a movie at the theater was always preferable to a movie on the VCR, and if a young lady managed to make it back to his bachelor pad, the blinds had to be open, his halogen light had to be on the highest setting of brightness, and of course under no circumstances could she go into his bedroom. People, teenagers, could tinker with the specifics when they set their own guidelines, he said, but the most important thing was to never, ever take off your pants.

To illustrate his not terribly complex point, Worley called a stocky young man from the audience onto the stage and then pulled out a length of clear packing tape. “This is Miss Tape. She looks pretty good, right? She’s tall, right? She’s…what else is she?” Worley raised his eyebrows at us encouragingly.

“Thin!” someone shouted out.

“Right! She’s thin,” he said, and wiggled the piece of tape so it undulated in the air. “And she has nice curves!” Worley winked.

“So they have sex.” To illustrate the act of coitus, Worley wrapped the piece of tape around the volunteer’s arm. After a few more minutes of make believe, we came to the inevitable bump in the road when Worley said the volunteer had decided to move on to other chicks. Worley ripped the piece of tape off his arm.

“Ouch,” said the volunteer.

“How does she look now?” Worley asked, holding the crumpled Miss Tape up for inspection.

I fought back the urge to yell, “like a dirty whore?”

If I, as an adult, find this kind of educational exercise unconvincing, shame-inducing, and lame, imagine how well it works to influence the impulse control of the average teenager, who (I like to think) is less rational, less self-aware, and more hormonal. In addition to being laced with misogyny (do you want to be defiled like Miss Tape or do you want to be a nice, clean, thin virgin?), the abstinence-only approach has the disadvantage of being unrealistic. Planned Parenthood has repeatedly pointed out that relying on abstinence is ahistorical; teenagers have been experimenting with sex since the beginning of time. Even if we all agreed that teenagers shouldn’t be sexually active under any circumstances—and therefore didn’t need to know anything about contraception or disease prevention—they are. The majority of high school students graduate without their virginity, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Eighty percent of Americans become sexually active while they’re still in their teens. (If history is any indication, that number will continue to rise: As recently as 1982, that number was only 64 percent. In 1968, the year of the summer of love, it was 42 percent.)

Though sexual activity among teenagers barely varies across the developed world, the rate of teen pregnancy in the United States is extremely high compared to the numbers in other wealthy countries. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), a nonprofit organization that conducts research and policy analysis on worldwide reproductive health (and is quoted and respected by both liberal and conservative groups), Japan and most western European countries have adolescent pregnancy rates of less than 40 per 1,000. (Uber-progressive Holland shines with only 12 pregnancies per 1,000.) The numbers go up in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, where there are between 40 and 69 teen pregnancies out of every 1,000. But in the United States, we have more than 80 teen pregnancies per 1,000. Rather than being on par with other nations of comparable privilege, our teen pregnancy rates match those of Belarus, Bulgaria, and Romania. On their Web site, AGI offers a succinct explanation for this fairly pathetic state of affairs: “The primary reasons why U.S. teenagers have the highest rates of pregnancy, child-bearing and abortion among developed countries is less overall contraceptive use and less use of the pill or other long-acting reversible hormonal methods, which have the highest use-effectiveness rates. Factors in cross-country differences in teenagers’ contraceptive use include negative societal attitudes toward teenage sexual relationships, restricted access to and high cost of reproductive health services, [and] ambivalence toward contraceptive methods.” AGI also
points out that “though teenagers in the United States have levels of sexual activity similar to their Canadian, English, French and Swedish peers, they are more likely to have shorter and more sporadic sexual relationships.”

By any measure, the way we educate young people about sexuality is not working. We expect them to dismiss their instinctive desires and curiosities even as we bombard them with images that imply that lust is the most important appetite and hotness the most impressive virtue. Somehow, we expect people who are by definition immature to make sense of this contradictory mishmash. Our national approach to the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy is predicated on the assumption that teenagers will want so badly to maintain their purity for marriage—despite the fact that half of their parents’ marriages end in divorce—that they will ignore their own hormones, ignore the porn stars on MTV and all the blogs and blow jobs on the Internet, and do as their teachers tell them. Unsurprisingly, teenagers are not cooperating with this plan.

R
ather than only telling teens why they shouldn’t have sex, perhaps we also ought to be teaching them why they should. We are doing little to help them differentiate their sexual desires from their desire for attention. Many of the girls I spoke to said sex for them was “an ego thing” rather than a lust thing. Anne said of her first time, “I guess I didn’t really want to, but I told him I did.” And hers is not an uncommon experience; about a quarter of girls between ages fifteen and nineteen describe their first time as “voluntary but unwanted,” according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The only message that seems to be successfully transmitted to girls about sex and sexiness is that it is something they need to embody to be cool. What’s saddening is not that they will end up used goods like Miss Tape or unfit to wear white dresses to their fantasy weddings, but that from the very beginning of their experiences as sexual beings they are conceiving of sex as a performance you give for attention, rather than as something thrilling and interesting you engage in because you
want
to.

To write
Dilemmas of Desire,
Deborah Tolman interviewed two sets of teenage girls, one at an urban public school and one at a wealthier suburban public school, asking them specifically about their experience of wanting, as opposed to their experience of “sex,” which so often becomes a conversation about being wanted. She was struck by “how confusing it is to develop a sexual identity that leaves their sexuality out,” which was what she heard most of her subjects attempting. Whether or not they had had sex, the girls had remarkably difficult times experiencing or expressing sexual desire. Tolman describes girls who seemed to have “silent bodies,” who found a way to ignore or muffle any arousal because they were afraid really feeling it would lead them into the treacherous territory of pregnancy and disease. They could not allow themselves to experience “embodied sexual desire,” as Tolman calls it, and, unsurprisingly, they experienced a great deal of confusion and anxiety instead.

Tolman compares these girls to Freud’s earliest patients—intelligent, articulate women who suffered “hysterical” symptoms such as the loss of feeling or movement in parts of their bodies because they were so detached from their sexual needs. After (primitive) therapy, their bodies came back to life. Once these women had the opportunity to acknowledge their own sexuality, they could “embody their desire rather than disembody themselves,” Tolman writes. Since we are talking about teenagers here, it’s important to note that Freud’s women didn’t have to
have
sex to feel better, they first and foremost had to be allowed to have sexual
feelings.

Tolman also observed girls with “confused bodies,” who couldn’t determine if the emotional wanting and physical excitement they experienced was sexual. One girl described being “all hyper and stuff…I guess you could say it was a sexual feeling.” But it also could have been a feeling of anxiety, or fear, or antsiness. And how was she to know which was which? Sexual feeling was new to her, as it is to all teenagers.

Though these girls didn’t experience or had trouble recognizing sexual desire, some of them
had
experienced sex—it was something that “just happened” to many of them. Like Anne, some didn’t really want to, but told their partners they did. Others had silent mouths to match their silent bodies and said nothing. Tolman points out that “
not
feeling sexual desire may put girls in danger and ‘at risk.’ When a girl does not know what her own feelings are, when she disconnects the apprehending psychic part of herself from what is happening in her own body, she then becomes especially vulnerable to the power of others’ feelings.” Simply put, you have to know what you want in order to know what you don’t want.

Tolman isn’t suggesting we should encourage teen girls to run out and have sex, she is saying that we should stop focusing all of our attention on sexual intercourse at the expense of educating our children about sexuality as a larger, more complex, more fundamental part of being human. Importuning them to be virgins isn’t working; what do we have to lose?

There is another side to this debate, of course, and to try and understand why so many people are resistant to broader sexual education I called Peggy Cowan. I had first met her at the abstinence-only conference in New Jersey which she helped organize in 2001, and when we spoke again in 2004 she had become the president of the New Jersey Physicians Advisory Group. She explained her conviction that adolescents shouldn’t be taught about contraception like so: “We don’t tell our kids, ‘Don’t drink and drive but if you do, wear a seat belt.’ ” Because this is true, and because Cowan is an earnest, polite person, at this point in our conversation I hoped I would be able to respect her perspective and learn from her. “People say ‘scare tactics’ as if we have an agenda, but my agenda is medical,” she said. “One out of four teens has an STD! I had three teenage daughters and I was scared to death…looking around, seeing all the pitfalls out there. I had single sex ed and I wish they had that now because it protects modesty; now kids are too comfortable talking about things they shouldn’t talk about. I heard of one woman teacher who tells kids how to masturbate. Explaining it! About fantasizing when you shower!”

I asked Cowan if she was against teenagers masturbating.

“I can’t say that a young person, when they become sexually aroused, can stop just short of sex.”

“Not mutual masturbation,” I said. “Just masturbation. Kids shouldn’t hear about that? Wouldn’t it help them to resist sex?” Is it not, actually, exactly the kind of thing we should encourage teens to do with their very real, entirely natural, impulses and curiosities at a time in their lives when they may well be too young to deal with the ramifications of sex?

“I think that’s intimate personal stuff,” Cowan said. “I don’t know that I have a position on that. No one’s ever asked me that question before.”

Well, everything to do with sexuality is intimate and personal. But if we are bold enough to cross that boundary to tell young people not to have intercourse, surely, while we’re at it, it is appropriate—it is our obligation—to talk to them about how to understand and cope with and enjoy their sexuality. Sex is different from drugs; we can’t tell them to just say no and leave it at that. Sexuality isn’t something they can opt out of.

Cowan was right that one in four people under twenty-five has a sexually transmitted disease. But, like all abstinence-only advocates, she was puzzlingly unwilling to confront the fact that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the promotion of abstinence at the expense of comprehensive education helps to remedy this situation. On the contrary; every single peer-reviewed clinical study on these issues has concluded that the more people are educated, the less they spread and contract STDs.

Clearly, part of the problem is that sex ed in this country has been commandeered by the far right—as has the White House and with it the funding that fuels abstinence-only programs. But if conservatives are averse to any discussion of sex outside of marriage, liberals often seem allergic to the idea of imposing sexual boundaries or limits…and simply telling kids sex is fine isn’t necessarily any more helpful than telling them sex is bad. Both of these approaches can ultimately have the same result: a silence about the complexities of desire, feminine desire in particular.