Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [55]
PART TWO
GAINING POWER
Chapter 9
GROWN-UP GIRL
The Adult Loose Girl
The loose girl is still in there. Sometimes in my dreams. Sometimes in my fantasies. Sometimes in catching the eye of the hot guy in line at the grocery store. I’m fifty-one years old and have been a recovering loose girl since I was thirty-four.
Laurie has been married for eighteen years now. She is in her fifties, with two teenage boys. She and her husband make a good living. They have a beautiful house in a great neighborhood, two cars, and annual travel to other countries. She buys herself a new wardrobe every year, and on each anniversary, her husband buys her a new piece of jewelry. By anyone’s standards, she is living the good life. But if you look more closely, you will find a woman who feels like she’s still seventeen. She dresses every morning with the thought of getting male attention. She works out, not for her health, but so that a man might still find her attractive. She worries about getting older, about wrinkles and sagging. She goes to a doctor to get some things done here and there—a little tuck or plumping or whitening—all with the thought that she wants men to want her. Her husband doesn’t know this, but she’s always looking for men—when she is at the grocery store, at the bank, getting lunch when she’s at work. She’s always got her eyes open for the possibility of men.
There is, in fact, one man she works with. It was inevitable, she guesses. They flirt heavily, and she thinks about him as she puts on her clothes in the morning, wondering what he’ll think. They smile from across the room. Something is going to happen. She knows it will. More, she wants it to. She doesn’t know why. She loves her husband. They have no more problems than any other married couple. For the most part, their relationship is great. But this craving she has—she can’t control it. She wants something to happen with the man at work. It’s all she thinks about.
Laurie’s story is like that of many other women who come to me. While we are worrying about our teen girls and their desperation around boys and sex, the women who used to be those girls are still there, too—grown-up loose girls, carrying the same pain, looking to get men’s attention instead of boys’. One woman wrote me and asked, “What happens to old sluts?” It’s an important question, one I intend to explore in this chapter.
A common goal for most women—and men, but more so women—is to get married. The marriage aspiration is reflected throughout our culture. In plenty of popular songs, such as Beyoncé’s “All the Single Ladies” in which she sings, “If you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it,” pointing to her finger. Marriage is portrayed as what a girl deserves. If you want to be with me, in other words, you will need to marry me, because that’s what I deserve. Many Hollywood movies and television series end with the engagement ring. It is the finale, the greatest possible attainment, the thing every girl should want above all else. Marriage means that you are chosen and wanted by someone, which is a loose girl’s greatest desire.
I ended Loose Girl with my marriage, too, but I made a point of not closing the book that way. Instead, I showed a scene of myself in a bar, catching the eye of yet another boy. I didn’t do anything more than look that evening, but I wanted to make clear to my readers that just because I was married didn’t mean my struggle was over. I still spent too much time thinking about male attention. I still could easily let any situation where I felt wanted turn into another loose-girl event. The reaction to my ending was mixed. Bloggers wrote things like, “It seems to me she hasn’t changed at all.” Others liked the ambiguity. They felt this was more honest than suggesting I was all fixed by the end. Plenty interpreted the end to mean that they, too, could have real love some day, that they’d reach the “end” of something, which is a problem, I guess, with having to have an ending to the book. And