Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [57]
Because of this stereotype, women often opt to not be sexual. It is much easier to be a married woman who doesn’t desire sex. So, when you do desire sex, the shame and sense of being different, false as it is, can be a part of what keeps you in that loose-girl cycle, where you act out, feel ashamed, and then act out to try to feel better again.
Vivian, who is in her late thirties and has never married, fears her loose-girl behavior will keep her from ever finding a real relationship. She doesn’t think she wants children, but she does feel like a relationship would make her feel worthwhile. She looks around and feels as though everyone else knows how to have this, that there must be something terribly wrong with her, and—her greatest fear—that she is in fact unlovable. She has had a number of long-term relationships where the man she is with eventually distances himself from her because, she claims, she gets too needy. When I asked her what she meant by “needy,” she said she always wants more from him than he can give. She’s so desperate for any man to choose her, to prove to her that she’s worth loving, that she has no sense of wanting anything more specific from a man. In other words, she feels like she has no standards. Her only standard is that a man could love her and not leave. Tied up with this feeling is that she feels like she will sleep with anyone who will take her, in the hope that he will wind up loving her. I asked her if she actually wanted the sex itself. It took a while for her to answer: “I do want the sex,” she said. “But it’s not a straight answer, because I don’t even know how to feel sexual desire without also needing something more. So, yes, I want the sex. But it’s just because I want to feel close to a man.” I asked her what happened in most cases. “In most cases, they don’t stick around because I’m too needy. No one wants a needy girl.”
Vivian’s experience of sexual desire is similar to many teen girls’ experience. She can’t quite name her desire as pure sexual need. It’s too interwoven with other needs, and as a result, the shame she feels is not just for wanting sex but for wanting anything. Her want becomes “neediness,” because a wanting woman is unattractive. And Vivian notes that no one wants a “needy girl,” reinforcing the idea that neediness belongs to girls, not women. The grown-up loose girl is so much like the teenage version that it is nearly impossible to tell them apart.
As discussed in chapter 3, slut pride can also get in the way for loose girls. Strong women should be able to sleep around, but for so many women, the sense that they aren’t really strong, that they are in fact too needy, too ugly, too undesirable or unlovable, can get in the way. The slut-pride attitude gives women an avenue to act out their loose-girl behavior, which only makes them feel worse.
Many of them agree with the men who say they don’t want to get serious; they just want to have sex and nothing more. But they’re not telling the truth. When they reveal that they want more, and the men pull away, their neediness rises up, leading them to a further sense of shame (remember that a loose girl’s greatest shame is not the fact that she has a lot of sex; it’s that she feels as though her neediness makes her unlovable.) Grown-up loose girls struggle with the option of casual sex. They may want such a thing. They may, for instance, want sex but not a boyfriend after a marriage dissolves, but their constant need for male attention to translate into proof that they’re lovable and worthwhile gets in the way. In this way, loose girls wind up damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
Most loose girls claim that they want a close, intimate relationship with a man, but they feel incapable of having one, either because