Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [49]
The law puts forth that same denial about teenage girls having sexual desire. The problem with that, of course, is that teenagers have sex. You can tell them not to all you want, but they have the same biological urge you and I do, maybe stronger, and they don’t have the developmental perspective to control their impulses as well as we do. Then add to that the girl who believes that if she says no to her boyfriend, he’ll find someone else who will have sex with him, and add to that the girl who wants a boy’s attention and knows this is how to get it.
Consent laws have a solid purpose to protect girls when they are truly victims, but legally designating an entire group of people as unable to consent to sex is maybe not the best way to protect girls from having sex that adults don’t want them to have (I should note here that an example of a girl truly being a victim, in my opinion, would be when the male counterpart is twenty or older, and the female is fifteen or younger; in such a situation there is undoubtedly a power differential at play). The Netherlands has a great example of how to use such a law to protect rather than silence. There, sexual intercourse between people aged 12–16 is legal, but victims who were coerced or forced and need the law’s protection can opt to use the statutory consent age of sixteen to prove that a violation occurred. Also, parents can overrule the wishes of a sixteen-year-old, but only if they make a convincing argument to child protective services.10 An example of this might be if a fourteen-year-old girl were in a verbally abusive relationship with a seventeen–year-old boy, but she was too blinded by her feelings for the boy, or too scared, to see that. Her parents could then employ the consent age of sixteen to press charges against the boyfriend if they can prove the verbal abuse. This law views young people as capable, thinking, self-contained people who can reasonably make decisions for themselves. So, while teenage girls in the Netherlands start having intercourse much earlier, the country also sees some of the lowest teen pregnancy birth and abortion rates (approximately one in one thousand births) and STD rates in the Western world, which gives evidence of their increased levels of contraceptive use.
If we compare a girl from the Netherlands and the United States, we can see how this might happen. A fourteen-year-old girl from the Netherlands may make a mutual decision with her boyfriend to have sex using contraception. A fourteen-year-old girl from the United States may want to have sex with her boyfriend but knows she’s not allowed, so she sneaks it, too uninformed to use protection because no one taught her about sex, thinking her too young. She puts herself at risk of pregnancy, and she likely winds up feeling ashamed.
If we are going to teach girls to say no, we also need to teach them how to say yes. As Riggs writes, she never said no, but she also never said yes. As long as we don’t even give girls the option of saying yes, as long as we don’t believe we can trust them with their own sexual feelings, we are setting them up, to some extent, to be raped. Look at it this way: if a girl can’t separate sexual desire from desperation, if a girl wants attention from a boy because she’s told she should and then experiences that wanting as sexual desire because she has no other discourse for sexual desire, then she will not know what she wants. She will not be able to consent or not consent, because she wants something; it might be sex, if sex will get her the love she’s after or the attention she hopes for, but it might not be. So she goes ahead and has sex, but later she feels awful because she realizes she didn’t want sex or didn’t get what she wanted from the sex.
As we have discussed,