Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [38]
Behaviors can compound these conditions. In middle adolescence, we see the highest levels of coexisting behaviors with promiscuity, such as substance use, alcohol use, and arrests.2 We know, too, that those adolescents engaged in more promiscuity also tend toward more risky sexual behaviors, such as not using condoms.3 Likewise, with other types of risky behavior, we are likely to find negative behaviors around sex.
Teens fourteen and older are twice as likely to have sex under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Older teens who drink alcohol are seven times more likely to have sexual intercourse and are twice as likely to have four or more partners. Drug-using older teens are five times as likely to have sex and three times as likely to have four or more partners.4 A Washington University School of Medicine study found that alcohol dependence and conduct disorder contribute to having a higher number of sex partners among older teens.5 And a relatively notorious study that came out of a U.K. university noted that women who drank were 40 percent likelier to have abortions—notorious because pro-choice parties were dismayed by the researchers’ choice to point to abortions rather than something less politically charged, such as sexual activity.6 The other criticism leveled at this and the previous study was the lack of attention to the stigmas applied to drunkenness among women and how that relates to abortions or sexual intercourse. There is a long history of the alcoholic woman as an acceptable target of sexual aggression, with more than one court proceeding leading to the “blame the victim” status given to women who drink and then become victims of rape.7
Eighteen-year-old Niesha told me she only has sex when she’s drunk or high. For her, all the activities together are what she’s after. She likes the whole experience, the sense that she can get pulled out of her life, which currently has very little direction. Her parents made her move out the day she turned eighteen, and so she lives with a couple of friends in a tiny apartment. They all work in chain restaurants during the day, and at night they party. They invite some of the guys they work with, who bring fifths of liquor, cocaine, and pharmaceuticals, and they party until four or five in the morning. Invariably, one of the guys winds up in Niesha’s bed. It’s been a rotating cycle; she sleeps with whichever one gets there first. The next day she is always late for work, with a pit in her stomach about what happened the night before.
When I talked to her, she asked me whether I thought she had a drug and alcohol problem. I told her it sounded as though she were using a number of substances and situations to try to soothe something inside.
Of course, adolescence is a time of risk taking. Most adolescents use these years to experiment with their own boundaries, with what they can handle, and with identity. Promiscuity is, in many ways, a perfectly normal part of that experimentation. But as with substance use, because sexual behavior is stigmatized, many teens turn it into self-destructive behavior. When we see other types of self-harming behaviors in teenagers, we tend to also see sex used in negative ways. This is important, because it describes the difference between normative sex—normal sexual exploration—and sex used to harm oneself.8
In almost every email I receive from readers, girls ask me why they can know their behavior hurts them, and yet can’t seem to stop. They know they are having sex for the wrong reasons. They know they need something from it that they won’t actually get, that they are setting themselves up to feel even worse. There are many answers to why loose girls have trouble stopping the behavior, but an important one to