Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [48]
The law defines rape as forcible sexual relations with a person against that person’s will. Seems simple enough. But nothing about sex—and particularly sex among minors—is simple. Thirty-three percent of sexually active teens aged 15–17 report that sexual activity moved too fast in their relationships. Twenty-four percent have engaged in sexual activity that they didn’t really want to do.6 And in a study published in the Journal of Sex Research, of all the times committed couples aged 18–24 had sex, only one in five of those times did the coupling include desire.7 In other words, women had consensual sex much more often than they actually desired the sex. In an essay titled “The Not-Rape Epidemic,” Latoya Peterson notes all the ways she and her friends have been “not raped” in their lives and how that has harmed them. For example, how many times do girls walk down the street and get catcalled by grown men? How many times do girls have sex because they want to be liked, or approved of, or loved? How many times do girls lie about their ages to men and then wind up having sex with them?8 As we begin to think more deeply about the complications regarding teenage sexual behavior, the language of rape clearly becomes inadequate.
I certainly experienced this ambiguity myself. I wanted to have sex, sort of. But the desire I had for sex was so completely submerged beneath my desire for attention and love that I couldn’t be sure if that were true. Every time I had sex, I had no sexual agency, no sense of my own sexual desire. Instead, my neediness controlled my sexual choices. In this way, I had no sexual self, no self that wanted to have sex for sex’s sake. If there was no clear sexual self, then how could I consent to anything? I had absolutely no connection, no consciousness or awareness about the part of me that might want in an unadulterated way to have sex.
In truth, few girls have access to that sexual self. The sexual self is buried deeply beneath all the ways we have worked culturally to keep girls from having a sexual consciousness. Lee Jacobs Riggs writes in an essay:
I let him touch me, never saying no, never saying yes, never probing too much into what his on-and-off girlfriend knew or thought about it. At the same time, I reclaimed the word “slut,” told my friends it was good, I wanted it. I excelled at giving blowjobs because I had wanted to excel at something.
Who knows what I wanted. I know that I had a need to assert myself as a sexual person to a world that had tried to erase that part of me that I felt so significantly. I know that I didn’t want him, but I did want something.9
I heard the same sentiment from many of the girls I interviewed. They too had acquaintance rape experiences—they thought. They too hadn’t necessarily wanted to have sex with most of the boys they had had sex with—they thought. The uncertainty I heard again and again is suggestive that many girls—all girls, not just loose girls—don’t have access to a part of themselves that might know what it wants regarding sex. If you don’t know what you want, how can you articulate clearly what it is?
The age-of-consent law, which is the state-by-state determined age by which point a girl is allowed to consent, was established to protect young girls, but it’s easy to see how it furthers the notion that until a girl reaches the age of consent—usually sixteen or seventeen—no consent is acknowledged. Before that age, she is the victim of statutory rape. So, for example, a girl who is fourteen may date a boy who is seventeen. Their relationship might include all the typical excitement and feelings of love and drama found in teenage relationships. But if they have sex, mutually consented