Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [13]
I can’t help but imagine a society in which girls are allowed this sort of direction. What would it mean for girls to look inward to their talents and strengths and uniqueness, rather than at billboards and television shows and magazines, to find out who they are sexually? What would it mean for girls if they could define their passion through internal avenues of desire? Imagine a girl able to express herself sexually with a boy, unconcerned about how her body looks or whether he thinks she’s sexy. Imagine a girl who trusts that when she does express herself in that way, boys will respect her as an equal partner and the rest of her community will celebrate her strength and passion rather than judge her as a whore.
If we are to break down all the reasons we aren’t there yet culturally, we must first look at why girls aren’t permitted to have this freedom. For a girl, sexual feeling itself becomes tied to being looked at. Without any cultural guidance about sexual desire, we can only ascertain that we must look a certain way to even have sexual feelings. Well-known feminist author Naomi Wolf notes: “Men take this core for granted in themselves: We see that, sanctioned by the culture, men’s sexuality simply is. They do not have to earn it with their appearance. We see that men’s desire precedes contact with women.”16
Women’s desire does not always come before that of a man’s desire for her. We know, in fact, that women’s sexual desire is often dependent on being desired. In a New York Times Magazine article about female desire, the psychologist Marta Meana determined that “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic. It is dominated by the yearnings of ‘self-love,’ by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.”17
In other words, a women’s physical arousal is in direct relation to how much she is wanted—gazed at, one might say—by another. It is difficult to imagine how such desire is not at least somewhat culturally created, how it is at least partially, as Wolf suggests in her quote, tied up with a sense of permission—it is safe to be a desiring woman now that someone else has suggested I am acceptable.
Charlene is a good example of this. She grew up in a tough neighborhood. She watched her single mother scramble to pay the bills. Her father was long gone. She had one sister who was four years younger, so she didn’t feel like she had anyone she could relate to. The first time she felt a boy look at her with longing in his eyes, she knew it was something to pay attention to. She spent the greater part of her teens “boy hunting,” she said. She wanted to feel that she was desired, because at home she felt so completely undesired. When she felt sexual desire, she told me, it was entirely about that fantasy. If some hot guy with status wanted her, she got turned on and couldn’t help herself from having sex with him. The feeling, she said, was intoxicating, because those were the only times her body felt alive with desire, which made her feel alive, period.
These false beliefs—“I’m not good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, quiet enough…”—are one of the defining features of girlhood. For loose girls, sex and sexual attention become the answer to these beliefs. They possess the potential to make us good enough, pretty enough, lovable enough. This is why promiscuous behavior for a loose girl doesn’t end in adolescence. It often grows into an addiction of sorts. We try and try again to make the sex mean something about us. But ultimately it only harms us further.
Often, too, teenage girls’ experience of desire is subverted and redirected into narratives about male attention. This might be partially due to hormones, but certainly it’s also a result of cultural expectation. Genuine sexual desire is lost inside the power of getting that attention. The influence of this, the heady control of getting a boy or man to look our way, to desire us, is perhaps the easiest way for girls to feel any kind of influence when