Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [30]
Every once in a while, I hear positive stories, too. I know a fourteen-year-old girl named Nel who recently started dating, and one evening she came home with a hickey on her neck. Her mother saw it, let her daughter know she saw it, and told her that she was fine with that hickey. Her concern, she let Nel know, was that Nel was making choices she wanted to make. She only wanted to be sure that Nel felt comfortable with what was happening and that she wouldn’t do something she didn’t really want to do. At first Nel rolled her eyes and said, “I know, Mom!” But about an hour later, Nel came back to her mother and said that she did realize that sometimes boys wanted to do more than she felt ready for, and sometimes even she wanted to do more than she was sure she was ready for. Nel and her mother wound up having a long, open discussion about how boys are always considered the horny, sexual aggressors, but really there were things girls wanted to do, too. But girls are very aware that if they let boys know they want those things, they quickly get labeled “sluts.” Nel and her mother agreed that this was unfair, and together they discussed ways Nel could work her way around this double standard while still staying true to herself, such as by thinking through her sexual behavior before acting, and perhaps even talking to her mother about it first.
Sometimes the media gets it right also. One mother-daughter sex talk that received lots of attention for being honest, realistic, and all-around positive came from the NBC drama Friday Night Lights. On the show, the character Tami, Julie’s mother, treats Julie with respect, asking her open-ended questions about her feelings and experiences. She also shares her own honest feelings. Here is an excerpt:
Tami: “And you know, just ’cause you’re having sex this one time doesn’t mean that you have to all the time, and you know if it ever feels like he’s taking you for granted, or you’re not enjoying it you can stop anytime…and if you ever break up with Matt it’s not like you have sex with the next boy necessarily.” (She tears up.)
Julie: “Why are you crying?”
Tami: “Because I wanted you to wait…but that’s just because I want to protect you because I love you, and I want to make sure nothing bad ever happens to you. And I always want you to always be able to talk to me even if it’s about something so hard like this.”
Julie: “I didn’t want to disappoint you.” (Tami shakes her head and hugs Julie.)15
A conversation like this one, and like the one Nel and her mother had, is a great example of mothers encouraging and supporting open dialogue about sex while respecting their daughters’ thoughts and feelings. In both examples, too, the mothers take responsibilities for their feelings about their daughters’ sexual behavior rather than projecting those feelings on the girls. This is a big difference from the kinds of conversations I hear about too often—one in which a mother simply tells her daughter that she should not have sex until she is married, or alternatively, one in which the mother is trying to be her daughter’s best friend. When a mother shares too much of her own past experiences with sex, or when she encourages her daughter’s sexual feelings as a way of validating her own, she crosses a boundary, one that can feel violating to a girl.
So a balance such as the