Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [46]
The problem was the way she was treated the next week in school. Everyone knew. She was called a “whore” and a “slut.” Friends started excluding her. At first, she became depressed. She drank more. She had more sex, just trying to feel better. One morning, a friend who hadn’t deserted her said, “Jess, you’ve got to stop drinking. It makes you do stuff with boys, and that’s why everyone’s being so mean to you.” Her statement was like a lightbulb for Jessica: “It was the alcohol. She could say it was the alcohol.”
And sure enough, the next time someone made a mean comment about her being a slut, she laughed and said, “I’ve got to stop drinking! I have no idea what I’m doing when I do. Cuervo is making me a slut.” The girl, who had once been her friend, laughed too, and over time they were friends again. Jessica learned the powerful lesson that it is OK to be sexually active with boys if you’re too drunk to have chosen to do so.
Sometimes, too, girls find ways to dissociate without alcohol. A young woman told me about her first time with a stranger twice her age, a man she met on the Internet. “He came over one night and he popped my cherry. I was so scared, but big girls, mature girls can’t be scared, so I blacked out. I completely blacked out.” Another said, “I can’t even remember the things I do with boys. It’s like the time disappears. Is that weird?”
Maybe girls want to have sex. Maybe they want to lose their virginities. Maybe they even just want to be sexual beings. But without a culturally acceptable avenue to act in such a way, they often feel they have to be blank—not there—in the process.
Drunk, they can avoid the emotions that come along with the cultural weight of having sex for the first time, and they only have to feel bad about it the next day, when it is too late and the deed is done. Girls rarely feel in charge of their own desire when it comes to sex, and certainly this starts with their first time. It’s easy to see why girls might revert to choices they later regret, and it’s easy to see why they often don’t know what it would even mean to feel “ready.”
Some may wonder, then, whether I think there is an age or developmental passage at which point I think a girl is officially “ready.” But the answer to whether a girl is ready to have sex is entirely individual. Judith Levine, in Harmful to Minors, shares one of my favorite stories: a thirteen-year-old girl asks her mother how she would know when she was ready. Her mother replied, “When you want it so much that you feel you can’t not have it.” She went on to note that sex changes the way you feel about the other person, and that once you do it with that person, you can’t undo it or unfeel what you felt.5 This mother honored her daughter as a sexual being. She told her to listen to her own desire but also to recognize that there are emotional consequences to sex. If only all teenage girls could receive the same advice about losing their virginities, my guess is that a lot more girls would feel in control of their sexual lives.
NO—THE MANY FACES OF VIOLATION
Jennae was raped during Hurricane Katrina. While the rest of the country was terrified about the children and the dogs and the levees and the homes and all the people lost, Jennae experienced her own, very personal devastation. It was easy, sure, because no one was looking. It was easy because everyone’s eyes were glued to the television, or making plans to get out, or gathering in the Superdome. It was easy because Jennae just lay there, unsure what else to do. No one was around. She didn’t think anyone would care. She had already