Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [53]
Mariah has regularly had cybersex since she was in the eighth grade. When she discovered sexting, she started doing that regularly, too. Like the majority of females who report having sexted, she initially felt pressured to do so by the boys with whom she was texting. Over time, though, she grew to like the easy attention. Sexting and cybersex have pretty straightforward scripts, too, which only made it easier for her.
In real life, Mariah is still a virgin. She says she doesn’t act the same way in person as she does via text and Internet, so boys don’t realize the things she knows about sex. I asked Mariah what she felt she knew about sex, and she said, “Just that boys like it when girls act like sluts.” Mariah doesn’t connect her sexting and cybersex behavior with her own sexual arousal: the two hold completely different purposes. One is to get male attention, and the other is something private and personal, unrelated to how she might act under a boy’s watch.
The danger here is not necessarily that girls are victims of predatory males. It’s that they are victims of very narrow definitions of sexual desirability, and in many ways, sexting is one more way girls wind up viewing sexual behavior as completely removed from their own desires. Girls believe that a girl’s desirability comes not from her personality or her coolness or how fun she is. It comes from her ability to fit into a male-defined stereotype of a sexually willing girl.
A recent national survey by the Girl Scouts Research Institute found that girls age 14–17 tend to describe themselves on social media sites as “fun,” “funny,” and “social,” and they downplay the idea that they might be smart or ambitious, or otherwise less appealing to boys and popular cliques.10
Pornography sets a similar standard. Readers may be surprised to hear that lots of adolescent girls watch porn. There are no reliable statistics for this, of course, because girls are hard-pressed to admit it, but anecdotally, in my work and interviews with women and girls, about half have admitted to watching porn, some of them even watching regularly, as teens.
As with sexting and cybersex, there is no solid scientific evidence that exposure to pornography leads to widespread or predictable negative psychological effects, so again, we need to be careful where we put our energy regarding concerns about such exposure. In my experience working with teenage girls, they watched pornography partially because it turned them on and was an exciting avenue for masturbation, and partially because they wanted to know how to have sex.
The problem here is that girls think they are learning about sex, but really they’re learning what men want. Shaved vaginas, asses in the air, facials—these are all male fantasies, not sex defined by females. Like Mariah noted, boys like girls who act like sluts. Porn just reinforces that. As Judith Levine writes, “In my opinion, the problem with sexual information on the Net is not that there is too much of it but that too little of it is any good”—and she wrote that in 2002.11
Almost a decade later, we can say that’s changed some. There are a number of excellent websites intended to provide real information about real sex to teenagers (see the appendix for a list of these), sites that give teenagers answers to real concerns, and that don’t exist for titillation.
And, then, there are the social sites—Facebook being the most influential. This is where hundreds of thousands of girls post pictures of themselves in bikinis or underwear to get attention from men. One guy wrote on the website Facebook Horror Stories, “Dear cute girls of Facebook, thank you for posting almost naked pictures of yourselves. I no longer need to look at porn since