Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [27]
“It was confusing,” Lydia said. “So ultimately I just did what I wanted.”
This sort of disconnect is reflected in the Seventeen and O survey, where 90 percent of mothers claimed that they’d spoken to their daughters about how to make the decision to have sex, but only 51 percent of the girls claimed to have had the same conversation.
A few things are at work in such numbers. One is that mothers are generally uncomfortable talking to their teens about sex. Following the dominant discourse about girls and sex, mothers talk about the issues involved—pregnancy, abortion, and STDs. Most adolescent girls claim that their mothers don’t talk to them about the aspects of sex that they deem more important—such as the emotions involved and the physical feelings. Generally, they feel like they’re receiving warnings and rules, and that the conversation is rarely much of a two-way street.4 One of the girls I interviewed told me that her mother would never even know all the things she wasn’t saying; the girl knows that there are certain topics her mother doesn’t want to hear about from her, and one of them is definitely her desire to be with boys sexually.
Mothers are uncomfortable partially because sex is such a taboo subject for teen girls. But they’ve also adopted the social standard that if you discuss sex and sexual desire with your daughter, she’ll fall down that slippery slope into promiscuity. As a result, many tell their daughters about abstinence. They let them know that sex before marriage is off-limits. Then they assume (or pray) that the girls will follow their advice.
Girls, too, often feel uncomfortable talking to their mothers about sex, particularly when they fear judgment, rigidity, or attempts to control. But even without those factors, talking about sex with any parent is burdened with embarrassment.
Certainly, this adds to the reasons that one of the more important topics missing from most conversations about sex is masturbation. Letting a girl know—from early on—that it is perfectly fine to touch herself in private is a great way to support her natural sexual feelings without needing a boy. Even the well-known sex therapist Laura Berman said in an O Magazine interview about talking to daughters about sex, “It’s important to talk to her about having a sense of control and pride over her body, and to let her know there are ways she can make herself feel good before she’s ready for sex, like self-stimulation.” The interviewer asked, “Seriously? Mothers should talk about masturbation?” Berman replied: “If you want to raise a sexually healthy daughter, yes. That may mean attending to your own sexual health. A lot of women grew up with the idea that masturbation is wrong or dirty.” Indeed.5
It’s not just the conservatives and abstinence advocates who wince at such a conversation. “That is private business,” one mother said to me. This head-in-the-sand approach, though, puts a wall up between teen girls and adults. As long as mothers don’t talk to their girls about sex, they are setting up a greater likelihood that their girls will use sex to self-harm.
Masturbation is a major taboo, and a long standing one at that. Some of the myths are familiar—you can go blind, you’ll grow hair on your palms, or your reproductive organs will fail. Others contain that common double standard—boys masturbate, but girls don’t, or girls who do masturbate are hypersexualized, exposed to images or experiences they shouldn’t have been.
But the real truth about masturbation is that it’s as natural and normal as it can get when it comes to sexual exploration. The larger percentage of the population masturbates, and they do so through old age.6 In fact, one study suggests that 20 percent of all senior citizens masturbate at least once a week.7 The joke goes that 98 percent of the population masturbates, and the other 2 percent are lying. Although statistics suggest that men masturbate more than women, I think we can all agree that this is due to both the stigma put on women for having desires and the