Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [12]
Valenti also identifies the “desirable virgin,” the feminine ideal of our culture, who is both sexy and not sexual (we’ll explore more about the virgin myth in chapter 3).14 As most of us know, living up to such expectations is all but impossible, but it is particularly tricky for the adolescent girl who is dealing with new sexual curiosity and developmental challenges. On the one hand is abstinence-only education and on the other hand is the push to make themselves desirable: girls learn quickly that there is no happy medium.
The images and pressures are indeed so tremendous that it is sometimes hard to remember that beneath all of it there is a girl who has genuine sexual curiosity and desire, a girl who suddenly is receiving massive amounts of attention not for her intelligence or sense of humor, but for her body.
In Loose Girl, I wrote about how, at the age of eleven, walking on the sidewalk into the next town as I had every day that summer, an older man in a semitruck honked his horn and smiled at me, and I understood for the first time that I could get attention without having to do anything. And I understood that this was what it meant to be a girl; this is where we had power and meaning in the world.
Stephanie has a similar story. When she was seven, in the first grade, she had a boyfriend. Most all the girls and boys in her class had boyfriends and girlfriends. It was just something they said. It’s not like any of them did anything other than hold hands or kiss on the cheek. But for Stephanie, having a boyfriend felt intensely important. She explained to me that she knew even then that if a boy wanted to be with her, it meant something was important about her. Like in all the Disney movies she’d seen, the most handsome, valiant males choose the girl characters, and the girls’ destinies are fulfilled through this process. When her boyfriend decided he wanted to be another girl’s boyfriend instead, Stephanie was devastated. Her main focus became getting another boy to like her, and somehow she knew that to be liked—even at seven—she had to be physically attractive, maybe even sexy. Stephanie told me she feels like she never had a chance, that her narrative about boys making her worthwhile began so young that she has no idea who she might have been otherwise.
It is easy to see how genuine sexual desire gets submerged within each girl, even lost. In conversations with adolescent girls, researchers have found that girls will not speak spontaneously about their own desire; rather, they will only speak of their own desire in terms of relationships. In the educational psychologist Deborah Tolman’s research, she found that even when asked directly, many girls don’t quite know how to answer.15 They note that it isn’t something they discuss. They get angry. They giggle. They say they don’t have those kinds of feelings or that they don’t want them. Or some of the young women note that girls just don’t feel desire in that way, unable to claim an “I” voice on the subject. Those who will finally speak about their desire only do so when they feel safe enough to do so, when they can trust that their words will not be manipulated.
Sexual desire for anyone doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Indeed, desire is very much a socially constructed experience, and our society is not keen to include teenage girls in a discourse about sexual desire. We quickly divert such conversations into discussions of virginity and abstinence-only education, the perils of teenage pregnancy, or girls as sexual victims. Certainly all of these topics are valid, but