Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [31]
This has been a long-standing stumbling block. My mother’s generation had mothers that tended toward silence. They simply didn’t speak about sex to their daughters. One day, the daughter’s period arrived, the mother took her to get Kotex, and that was it. They were told to not have sex before marriage. The end. Some of the mothers of my generation tried to do things differently, but many went too far the other way, offering too much about sex, breaking boundaries, wanting to share like friends. The mothers of today have still been mostly left out in the cold with this subject, mainly because mothers are women, which means no one has told them that their desire was normal when they were growing up, that it is a necessary part of the equation when it comes to sexual development. Mothers so often feel helpless in the face of this task of guiding their daughters safely through the wild, roaring rapids of adolescent sexuality. They try to tell their daughters what they need to know. They warn them. But such tactics don’t work with adolescents, who need to know that their knowledge and beliefs are respected. The most important thing a mother can do, really, is to just listen.
Fathers have their own set of challenges.
Chapter 5
DADDY ISSUES
How Fathers Matter
I’ve spent my life trying to replace my dad who had nothing to give me, who never even tried.
Sarah, now in her late twenties, has slept with seventeen or eighteen guys, all in about five years. Three-quarters of them were one-night stands, and she can’t remember all the names or what order they came in. One was a professor in the college she attended. Three or four of the guys were actual relationships that lasted a year or more. Sarah didn’t have sex until she was twenty-one which is later than the average for girls (which is seventeen). In high school she was into sports and schoolwork and not so much into boys. She did have a boyfriend her senior year—but she believes she messed that up when she started looking to her best friend, a girl, for emotional fulfillment instead of him. All of this sounds perfectly normal.
But then, Sarah’s best friend had sex with Sarah’s father. From then on, everything changed. She said, “I like to blame my father and my shitty genes for my promiscuity, but I know this is just an excuse.” True, but her father’s behavior was also a reason. Sarah has more recently been in therapy because, twelve years after the incident between her friend and father, she still finds that her depression is uncontrollable.
Breanna had a military dad, and his job required him to travel overseas for the majority of her childhood. When she was nine years old, he left again for a one-year tour of duty overseas. A friend’s father was known for taking the neighborhood children on camping trips, with and without their parents, and Breanna’s mother thought it was a nice gesture, especially since her father was gone. It was on that camping trip that she says she learned about her body and her friend’s father’s body when he molested her. Her father returned several months later only to tell her mother that he wanted a divorce. The two events, both terrible disappointments and betrayals for Breanna, led her down a desperate path to feel loved by a man.
Stories like Breanna’s, and to some extent Sarah’s, are the stories we expect when looking for narratives behind loose-girl behavior. We expect loose girls to have problems with their fathers. Why? Well, the assumption is that a girl who seeks attention in men has daddy issues.
A number of readers have asked me whether I’ve found that the majority of girls who contact me have absent fathers (I