Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [25]
Truths like this one are terribly difficult to find. They are lost inside the noise of our culture that determines who girls are allowed to be. They sit in silence while we struggle to make sense of what we feel. The biggest problem is not that we are silent about teenage girls and sex. Rather, the problem is, as the cultural historian Michel Foucault noted, that we police people—perhaps girls especially—with endless rules about what they can talk about and about what they can claim from their sexuality.15
Josie, who is sixteen, identifies herself as a loose girl. When she was little, almost everyone she loved abandoned her. She can’t remember a time when she didn’t believe that if a guy touched her or wanted to have sex with her, she would be happy and fixed. In the past two years, since she lost her virginity, she has slept with so many guys that she’s lost count of how many. She doesn’t remember the names of half of them, and probably never knew most of them. Some were friends. She only actually dated one or two of them. Josie says: “I am lonely. There is something missing. Having sex and being in the heat of the moment is a high. And when I’m there and doing it, I don’t feel alone anymore.”
Guinevere slept with more than one hundred guys before she turned twenty-five. She had the looks and body to attract plenty of men, but, in her words, “I lacked the brains and confidence to use those things to get what I wanted.” What she wanted was to be found truly appealing, beyond just her looks. She wanted men to want to spend time with her. She says, “All those years I never realized that given a choice most men or boys will take what they can get whenever they want. I made it incredibly easy for them to get it.” She went on to explain the many ways she gave herself away. She didn’t make the connection, she told me, between how easily she gave herself away and how lonely and desperate she felt. She was nice to guys, good to them, gave them whatever they wanted. They laughed together; they seemed to like her. But after they had sex, the boys were gone. She constantly wondered what she did wrong. Was she not good enough in bed? Was she too loud? Not loud enough? Was there something wrong with her?
Guinevere’s confusion about what boys want is an extremely common feeling among loose girls. They get the clear message from media and peers that boys like sex, that boys like girls who are sexy. But then, again and again, the boys leave after sex. Loose girls almost always assume it’s about them—they are simply not lovable enough. There is something horribly wrong with them. They also know the other message that bears down through the schools and Christian organizations: boys don’t like girls who put out. So, loose girls shame themselves. The fact that they can’t help their neediness, their desperation to be loved, they believe, is surely why boys leave.
Many of the girls I spoke with who identified as loose girls shared with me the ways they acted out in their neediness. They called boys too much. They texted and emailed them constantly. They pushed them away with their desperation. When they tell me these stories, I can see their eyes move to the floor. I can hear their voices drop. They hesitate. The shame they feel about their neediness is much worse than any shame they might feel about their sexual behavior.
Cynthia told me that after the last guy had sex with her and never called again, she texted him five times before he finally wrote back, “Don’t contact me again, freak.” She spent the rest of the day in bed, unable to move. His words had confirmed for her exactly what she feared was true about her: there was something different about her, something different from every other girl, who seemed to be able to take or leave a guy, whereas once she got a boy’s attention, she could think of nothing else but how to make him love her.
Cynthia’s dirty little secret is not sex. Like that of all loose girls, her dirtiest secret is her need.
Loose girls come from every walk of life imaginable. They are black, white, Hispanic,