Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (30 page)

What stands out is the randomness of social derogation.
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Being called a slut for having sex with multiple partners is a sure thing, says Dorothy, but even girls in long-term relationships or those without sexual experi- ence are at risk, since if friends of a girl’s boyfriend don’t like her, “it will get spread around everywhere that she is a slut.” Isaac has “friends who have really cared about someone and had sex with them because they love them and then people called them a slut and that’s been very upsetting.” Caroline has seen girls “call other girls with big breasts sluts, for no ap- parent reason, just because they have a bigger cup size.” Katy was called “a little whore” by an angry boyfriend who “started like spreading rumors around the school.” The rumors had quite an impact: “I was pretty much the talk of the school. Everybody was pretty much looking at me and whis- pering as soon as I would look over.”

One reason the category of the slut remains so salient is that Ameri- can peer and popular cultures remain profoundly ambivalent about girls’ sexual desire and pleasure, alternatively denying girls’ desires and viewing them, akin to boys’ desires, as indiscriminate. Melissa says, “not very many girls want to have sex” and just go along for the boys’ sake. Others suggest that girls use sex, often to their own detriment, as a weapon in the battle between the sexes. Patrick portrays a typical tug of war: “Girls are thinking, ‘How can I hold on longer to this guy because I really like him?’ And the guy is like, ‘How can I get further?’” At the same time, American teenagers are grappling with a competing observation—that it is possible for girls to desire sex or, as Paula puts it, “There are horny women too.” Adam has ob-

served girls at school who “joke about [sex] all the time. . . . Guys are just supposed to be more into [sex] than girls are and that is not necessarily the case anymore.” Isaac also sees girls being more overtly sexual: “There are a whole lot of girls who would do it anytime, any place, and they don’t care.” Yet, dramatizing girls’ desires in terms traditionally reserved for boys’ desires is not the same as viewing girls’ sexual exploration as a normal and legitimate part of their lives. Katy has observed that some girls “are really into like having sex and stuff,” but she also believes that “you are either really into going for [sex] or you are not, there is no real in the middle.” Caroline has observed that “[you’ve got] the easy girls or else the girls who are prudes and don’t do anything with guys at all [or] the girls who have been in relationships for a long time.” The same girl can even go from one extreme to another. Margaret has seen girls get “slutty” after drinking at parties. First, they are “real shy and then all of a sudden they start drinking and they’re all on everyone and like they just get with someone. . . . The next day it’s like nothing happened.” And Laurie went from being “really

shy” to making out “with tons of guys,” and being called a slut.

A girl Laurie knows claimed the slut label as a badge of honor because “she likes having sex and does it a lot.” But for Laurie, the social stigma against girls’ sexual experimentation seems to have hampered the sense of entitlement to enjoy sex and communicate her wishes to her partners. She has done “hand jobs” (though not “blow jobs,” she says), but, mirror- ing research on the highly gendered “orgasm gap” in college “hook-ups,” Laurie’s sexual encounters do not seem to have included reciprocation of pleasure.
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Having borrowed books from the library, Laurie discovered that “for girls, actual insertion does not do anything unless you know where the G spot is.” But she has felt uncomfortable sharing this knowledge with her sexual partners:

I’ve had a guy finger bang me and it did nothing and this guy thinks this is happening. I don’t know how to tell him that nothing is happening. I’ve told a couple of guys that they don’t have to do that because I don’t think you could and it’s demeaning. But for girls, most of the time, if the girls want to get anything out of it, you do it on your own. When making out, it’s mostly for the guys.

If one reason for the enduring power of “the slut” in American peer cul- ture is a continued ambivalence about girls’ desires, another reason is skep- ticism about whether teenagers can attain the feelings and relationships that legitimate sex. Kimberley disagrees when people say, “You’re young.

You can’t fall in love.” But Margaret thinks “a lot of teenagers who have sex don’t love each other. They may care about each other, but they’re not in love.” Teenagers “think anything is love,” believes Dorothy, but it “just may be infatuation.” Fiona says that “usually [sex] is with somebody that they didn’t know or something that they did at a party.” Even girls who are in long-term sexual relationships often describe themselves as exceptional. Caroline, for instance, thinks “there are not many kids who actually have relationships.” Most “are just . . . pretty easy.” Michelle says she has a good relationship, but she believes that for most teenagers sex “has nothing to do with love.” Paula also sees herself as exceptional. For most people she knows “sex is just a frivolous thing,” while for herself and her friends, sex is “a very sacred thing.”

Many American girls are in romantic relationships, yet they tend to view falling in love as the exception rather than the rule. One reason may be that falling in love remains associated in the cultural imaginary with making a lifetime commitment, a capacity which few teenagers have. Melissa wants to wait to have sex until she knows “that’s the person I’ll probably want to be with forever.” But she has “no clue” how she would know she felt such love. When girls do have sex assuming their boyfriend is the one they are “going to be with forever,” as have several girls that Katy knows, they are “devastated” by a breakup.
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That being in love continues to be measured against the ability to commit in marriage may explain why Alexandra is not sure she is in love with a boyfriend she cares about, and why Lisa is quick to add, “I don’t know if it’s [like] the love when you get married” after say- ing she is in love.
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It may also explain why sex before being “eighteen or married” felt like such a big mistake to Stephanie.

Within the more liberal Corona context, peer culture provides a space— the relationship—within which girls are somewhat safeguarded from the risk of social derogation for having sex. And several Corona girls, who have established relationships in which they feel connected and empow- ered, describe pleasurable, self-directed experiences of sex.
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Kimberley, for instance, describes her sexual evolution positively: “Just as we progress in our relationship, it’s like, you want to touch this interesting person, and you want to see what they’re like.” Like Kimberley, Paula had sex with a steady boyfriend, a decision she never regretted. She describes being ready as “more of an issue of self, not somebody else. It’s what you want to do, not because you want to give yourself away or because you feel you owe it to the person.” Cultural ambivalences about girls’ sexual agency and plea- sure and their capacity to fall in love notwithstanding, some American girls describe having sex as a positive and enriching choice.

American girls and boys both complain about what one might call a culture of “soulless sex.” They tend to blame this soulless sex on popular culture and peer group dynamics which have reduced sex to a fad, a consumer item, and something with which to be “cool.” Katy believes teenagers have sex “just to try out what it’s like, to see what the big [deal is], because it’s like all over television and in the movies and everybody’s like ‘oh, that is so cool.’” Dorothy says that the media have made sex seem as if “it’s not such a big thing, you know, it’s just, it’s like, going to the mall, it’s frequent, you know, it’s all around you.” When Isaac was younger, the norm was “no sex before marriage.” Now eighteen, all his friends have sex, which he at- tributes to the fact that “the world preaches sex.” Especially, “MTV is a big thing,” he explains. “And they preach sex. Everything is sex in America. If you’re not having sex, you’re not cool. . . . Everybody talks about it. . . . You see it in movies and on TV and in songs.”

But although American girls and boys both bemoan the loss of sex’s meaning, it is the American boys who rail most passionately against the soullessness that results, maybe because they confront most acutely a cul- tural concept of themselves as driven by “raging hormones.” In same-sex peer groups at school, in sports, and at work, they are confronted with the notion that they are supposed to single-mindedly and emotionlessly pursue sex.
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Andy explains that “in the locker room guys will talk about sex and in the halls you will hear certain guys talking about having sex or whatever, their conquest from the weekend.” Adam hears the guys he works with “bragging of something [sexual].” He thinks “guys are really into [sex] because . . . it feels like power, like they’ve conquered something you know. They are supposed to be like the aggressor.” Dean sees guys “pretend as though they don’t really care about the girl [they are with]. When they’re alone, they’ll care about them but when they’re around [other guys, they pretend otherwise]. . . . I don’t know if they’re just all talk or if that’s really the way they feel. But it’s common.”

Nor is it only other
boys
who put pressure on them to behave like “real boys.” Several American boys have been propositioned by girls who wanted to have sex but not relationships. Patrick relates a situation in which a girl asked him to have sex. “Some girl came up to me and I was like, ‘Ah, no!’ I couldn’t do it. . . . She said I was hella cute and everything.” Dean has come to the conclusion that “a lot of girls are out there just to get the pleasure like guys are, and they really don’t care very much if the guy has feelings for them or if they have feelings for the guy. It’s a matter of physical attraction

and instinct, I guess.” Isaac had a girlfriend who wanted sex but not an ex- clusive relationship.
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In interpreting that situation, he first uses the tradi- tional “battle-of-the-sexes” language: her offer might seem “perfect from a hormonal point of view,” because “girls get the whole emotional thing go- ing.” But he quickly shifts gears to a different story. He says he “cared about her a lot.” So he did not have sex and broke up with her instead.

With the assumption that most boys are just vessels for what Jesse calls “sexual drive or whatever” and that many girls have stopped being the traditional bearers of meaning and relational connection, many Ameri- can boys believe sex has lost its enchantment and has been reduced to an individualistic, bodily activity devoid of soul and connection. Andy says teenagers generally have sex “at a party atmosphere” or “not really when they care about each other.” Adam does not see teenagers around him with meaningful relationships: “It’s like strictly physical attraction.” He poi- gnantly illustrates a dark worldview in which biology and a ruthless com- mercial and interpersonal peer culture combine forces to drive teenagers to pursue physical pleasure blindly without exercising any individual agency or constructing any interpersonal meaning: “You see it on TV and you hear it in songs the way people portray it. . . . No one thinks it’s like that special a thing. . . . It’s like animals do it . . . to . . . increase their population and people . . . like the first two people, they just did it, just programmed to breed.”

But what stands out in the interviews with American boys is how much they do not want to be those soulless automatons that have been “just pro- grammed to breed.” Several boys make a point of stating, cultural expecta- tions of boyhood to the contrary, that they
do
have control over their sexual impulses. To underscore their capacity for self-control, they relate stories of having had the opportunity to have sex and having decided against it. Adam explains, “I have total control over what I’m going to do. . . . I mean, I’ve been to an all-night guys and girls sleepover party and nothing hap- pened, so I know I can control myself.” For other boys, Dean says, sex is “a matter of physical attraction and instinct.” He is different: “Just this week- end, when my dad was out of town, I had a girl in bed with me. . . . We probably could have done anything we wanted to but I didn’t feel the need to show that I felt good about being with her, more than just holding her and falling asleep with her in my arms, that was good enough for me.”

Not only do boys resist the notion that they cannot control their im- pulses; many also contest the common perception that boys do not value relationships and love. Michael may want “more than one girl,” and Patrick may recall his first sex with a friend as a nice birthday present. But Ameri-

can boys typically describe themselves much as Jesse does: as romantic reb- els, aspiring to love and swimming against the tide of hormonally crazed boys.
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“If you ask some guys, they’ll say it’s mainly just for the sex or what- ever, but with me,” says Randy, “you have to have a relationship with the person before you have sex with her. . . . I’d say I’m exceptional.” Jeff wants to care about a girl before having sex: “Maybe even love them, know them for a long time, definitely, because most people don’t really cherish it as anything. They don’t respect it.” There are guys whose “whole reason they want to go and find a girlfriend is because they want to have sex,” says Phil- lip. He says he is different: “I want to really fall in love with somebody.”

In an effort to distance themselves from the motivations of other teen- age boys and to highlight the depth of their own romantic aspirations, some boys also draw distinctions between emotionality and physicality, identifying themselves with the former but not the latter. In doing so, they seem to distance themselves not only from other boys but also from sexual desire and pleasure. Jesse has just said that the most important thing to him is his love for his girlfriend, unlike most guys who just want sex. Asked why he believes guys are like that, Jesse responds, “I don’t know. I can’t understand. . . . I guess it is just sexual drive or whatever, but I can’t relate to that.” In a similar manner, Patrick believes he is different from most boys—although, just like Jesse Lawton, he used to have sex without being in love with his partners. Whereas most guys are wondering “how can I get further,” he says, “after you think about it . . . if you really care about some- one, you don’t really care if you have sex or not.”