Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [61]
That night was an important turning point for me as a loose girl. It was the beginning of my movement toward true intimacy—perhaps not intimacy as our culture defines it, where a man and a woman fall in love and ride off into the sunset and all is forever right with the world—but movement toward intimacy, which is the greatest achievement for a loose girl.
Perhaps you have a daughter who you want to protect. Perhaps she has already begun heading down this path. Perhaps you are a therapist who regularly hears stories just like these from your clients. Or maybe you are the girl you see in these pages. You are the one seeking change. This chapter is indeed about change. Readers write me daily: “Tell me what to do. Tell me how to change.” To talk about change for a loose girl, we must first talk about not changing, because the bottom line is that it remains highly unlikely that you will stop feeling that urge to seek male attention when you are feeling low. As noted in the previous chapter, and like with any addiction, the first step is acceptance. Here, we examine the idea of acceptance more closely.
LOVING YOURSELF
Most of the women who spoke to me have been told at one time or another that they must love themselves before someone else will love them. Friends tell them. Therapists tell them. Their parents tell them, too. For a loose girl, though, it isn’t that simple. For most of us, loving ourselves is too complicated. We’ve screwed up too many times. We’ve pushed too many people away with our addictions. We’ve gotten pregnant, had abortions, put ourselves in situations where we were mistreated again and again. We are too miserable when we’re alone. Other people can love themselves first, but not us. When I asked a few of the women what they thought of when they heard “love yourself,” they grew silent. Mandy said she’d never really thought about what that would even entail. Carla said she guessed she was supposed to take spa days, or lavender baths, or have a candlelit dinner for one. We laughed, hearing how ridiculous that was.
Loving yourself is a lifelong process of acceptance for who you are. It is a process of acknowledging the ways you’ve screwed up, harmed yourself, done irreparable damage to relationships, and still seeing that you are a worthwhile human being. You won’t get there by taking a bath. Loving yourself is part of an endless movement toward intimacy. The women I interviewed who felt they were more in control of their loose girl than in the past all said something similar about accepting themselves as they were.
“You have to learn to be happy with who you are and the way God created you.”
“I don’t think anyone ever recovers from this, only manages.”
“I consider myself in the process of heading towards recovery.”
“I still have a difficult time being vulnerable and intimate but at least I am aware of it.”
Before we can have intimacy with anyone else, we must find a way to accept ourselves. But girls who have sex are not treated kindly in American culture. You are a slut. You don’t care about yourself. You don’t care about having real love. Otherwise, you wouldn’t stand before the mirror before you go out, trying to determine which skirt best shows off your legs. Or, if you aren’t a slut, you are the empowered girl discussed in chapter 3; you have sex because, by God, you can do whatever you want to do. You can go out in the evening and collect boys like fireflies in a jar. You don’t have to want love.
All these assumptions made about you sink into your sense of self. It is nearly impossible to keep out the voices of a culture that will not let girls define their sexual identity. And then, too, there are parents and