The Guide to Getting It On (89 page)

CHAPTER

42

The First Time—Not What You Think

R
esearchers Newlyn Moore and J. Kenneth Davidson questioned hundreds of young women about their sexual experiences and feelings of guilt. Shock of all shocks. Girls with the most negative attitudes about their sexuality are doing it younger, with more partners and in less committed relationships than girls who feel the most positive about their bodies and their sexuality.

Also, the guilt girls are the most likely to have their first intercourse with an “occasional dating partner” or with a “person just met,” a pattern they continue to repeat as they get older. They tend to have their first intercourse when drinking or stoned.

The girls who feel the best about their bodies tend to masturbate more. And the girls who masturbate the most and feel the best about sex actually wait the longest before having their first intercourse and they have it with more committed partners. Most importantly, when they do have sex, it’s part of a conscious decision. Not so with the girls who feel bad about sex and their bodies. More often than not, they just let sex happen to them, without thinking it through first.

So who are these high-guilt, more-promiscuous girls? High-guilt girls tend to grow up in families where the mother and father are less affectionate toward each other. They tend to regard their dads as being overly strict and they are from homes that are more religious, rather than less religious, than girls who don’t sleep around as much.

Perhaps the girls who have the least sexual acceptance at home go searching for it elsewhere. The trouble is, they go about it in such a destructive way that they end up reinforcing the bad feelings about themselves that they grew up with, and they end up with partners who are just as constricted as their dads.

Who knew that the daughters of the self-righteous would be more likely to sleep around and do it drunk than daughters of parents who have a more open, honest approach to sex and sexual feelings. It’s certainly not what the self-described moral majority would have us believe. Perhaps there’s more to waiting longer than the abstinence-only proponents want us to think.

Girls vs. Boys — Feelings about Sex

For a boy, puberty usually brings freedom. It also leaves a young man feeling more positive about his body, more independent and more masculine. Not so for girls. Menstruation itself often leaves a girl with a feeling that her body is out of control.

According to Karin Martin, who studied teens and puberty: “The girls whom I interviewed gave only negative descriptions of their menstruating bodies. Their bodies made them feel ‘yuck’ or ‘sick,’ or as if they had ‘shit their pants’.... While plenty of girls look forward to having their first period, a lot become ambivalent after the first couple of periods have come and gone.”

Teenage boys may struggle with wet dreams and unwanted erections, but not many would equate these with shitting in their pants. On the contrary, a boy’s growing body often makes him feel more grown-up and effective in the world, while a girl’s growing body brings parental warnings about the evil intentions of men and restrictions on everything from climbing trees to learning to sit like a lady. These warnings can make the world seem scary.

For a girl, her growing body represents loss as much as it represents gain. For instance, the mere fact that she suddenly has breasts causes changes in her relationship with her dad and every other man she meets. No longer will her dad be as physically affectionate, and no longer will she be as unconscious about her body. Ever hear that upbeat song from the early 1960s,
Sweet Sixteen?
It talks about a girl who was just a normal kid next door until suddenly she grows boobs and hips, and her former big-brother figure up the street has a hard-on and a hit song. Maybe the girl was happier before puberty when the universe didn’t revolve around what her body looked like.

Dr. Martin tells about asking teenage girls to describe themselves:

“When I asked girls, especially working-class girls, to describe themselves or asked, ‘Tell me about yourself,’ they described their bodies and had a difficult time describing any other aspects of who they were. ‘Can you describe an important goal you achieved?’ ‘I love my hair. My hair’s my accomplishment...’ ‘What kind of things make you feel good about yourself?’ ‘When someone like pays me a compliment on something, you know. Like says that I look nice or have on nice clothes or something.’”

It was totally different for most of the boys. The boys felt good about themselves because of things they had done or things they felt they could do in the world. Of course, if most of these boys were more in touch with the reality of their “effectiveness” rather than their fantasies of it, they might not feel so confident. But still, when boys want to have sex, it is often with confidence and good feelings about their bodies, while girls often feel the opposite. In terms of sexual economics, we’re talking the U.S. versus Peru.

So how does this reflect itself in the feelings that boys and girls have about sex?

“Boys thought sex would be pleasurable, and many said they looked forward to it or were curious about it.... No girl said that she looked forward to sex or that she expected it to be pleasurable.”

The majority of teenage girls whom Dr. Martin interviewed expected sex to hurt or to be painful or scary. If this is true, why did the girls have sex?

“No matter how you look at a girl’s reasons for having sex, the vast majority break down to the same simple reason: they are afraid the boy will leave, they are afraid they will lose him, or afraid he won’t like them anymore.”

More than half of the working-class girls and a quarter of the middle-class girls in Dr. Martin’s study seemed to have an ideal or exaggerated love for the boys they were dating or wanted to date. Feelings like these will make a girl do anything to keep her man. The boys, on the other hand, did not report looking for romance or ideal love. They seemed to want a combination of friendship and sex in their relationships, although it is possible that the boys kept their romantic feelings to themselves. (For a teenage boy to tell an interviewer about feelings of romantic love might be admitting to less-than-manly aspirations. In a mind-numbing twist of logic, his friends might say, “Whadda you, a faggot or something?”)

When it comes to teenagers and sex, boys and girls often have different wants and expectations. Far more boys think that the sex will feel good, while far more girls believe it will hurt. More girls idealize their boyfriends and feel they can’t live without them, or they need the boyfriend as an affirmation that they are attractive and worthwhile. For this, they are willing to have sex.

As for masturbation, many teenage girls feel it is something that boys do, and do not associate it with femininity. Nor do they seem very interested in exploring their own bodies. As Dr. Martin comments, “Their boyfriends were allowed more access to their bodies than they allowed themselves.” And this study was done in the 1990s, not the 1950s.

Perhaps one of the most frightening findings of Dr. Martin’s research is that almost all of the teenage girls felt better about shaving their legs than they did about the sex they were having with their boyfriends. It seems that being able to shave their legs provided a happy identification with their mothers or older sisters. It made the girls feel grown-up in a good way.

Few and far between are the teenage girls who feel in control of their bodies and who have sex because they expect it to feel good. But those girls who did tended to have good relationships with their mothers which included lots of conversations about sex. They had good relationships with their dads, and they were also more involved in extracurricular activities like sports or 4-H. They seemed to place more value on the size of their IQs than on the size of their waists. They knew their own bodies better and felt more in control of their sexuality.

Counterpoint A female reader replies: “Sex for me was definitely not because I was afraid of losing the guy. I don’t even know if it was really about my feelings for the guy. Mostly it was my curiosity about how sex felt. Few of my friends were dating and none were having sex, so it wasn’t about fitting in.”

Recommended:
Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality
by Deborah Tolman, Harvard Universities Press (2006).

See also:
Chapter 41: “Bye Bye V-Card—Losing Your Virginity”

CHAPTER

43

Between Vanilla and Kink

I
n the world of sexual pleasure, “vanilla” is usually defined as masturbation, hand jobs, finger fucking, oral sex and vaginal intercourse. And then there’s kink.

Kink is harder to define. So let’s cut to the chase and call it anything that goes on in your local BDSM dungeon.

As for defining “between vanilla and kink,” it’s a little of each. It’s when someone who’s in the vanilla camp borrows from the kinky side to spice up his or her sex life. But definitions about sexual practices can be fickle; one person’s kink can be another person’s vanilla.

Rather than confusing you further,
The Guide
has turned to its readers to answer what’s between vanilla and kink. What follows are your answers to one question on our sex survey. Only about 50% of the people who have taken the survey provided an answer to this question. So if half of you have no desire to do anything that’s mentioned in this chapter, you’re in good company. If you are interested, you are in good company as well. And if you’ve got kinky aspirations but are afraid to tell your partner, you are in very good company!

Survey Question: Are there types of non-vanilla sex that you enjoy having? (“Non-vanilla sex” includes being spanked or spanking a partner, having rough sex, biting, restraining or being restrained, acting out a rape fantasy, fisting, peeing on a partner or being peed on, having her put fingers or anything else up your rear, etc.)

Yes or yes, yes, yes, yes or yes, no, no, no or no, no or no.
male age 18

Love some hand spanking and rough sex. Love when he holds my wrists tight.
female age 22

We’re pretty wild. We’re up for everything besides pain, peeing, or scat.
male age 27

I would really like to try out some bondage, but we haven’t yet. Maybe tonight.
female age 26

Biting is fun. Also giving orders or being fucked hard.
female age 18

I don’t do vanilla sex, haven’t in years. It’s one of the reasons I divorced my ex... he wasn’t interested in anything but vanilla. I’m eager to try anything short of urine/fecal involvement.
female age 25

I like rough sex occasionally (being held down and penetrated hard) and some light biting. I have done some role-playing which can be fun.
female age 28