Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [68]
Beyond the loose girl, beyond the shame, the behavior, the question of right or wrong, beyond all the dirty little secrets, is the culture that created this dilemma for girls. In so many ways, Jo is right. Her daughter doesn’t have a fighting chance against the cultural wave explored in chapter 1.
Parents ask me often, “How can I protect my girls?” Colleagues in psychology and education wonder, “Is it even possible to prevent what happens to girls regarding sex?” This chapter explores this idea of prevention, how we can work to overhaul the culture to do so.
When I asked Jo what she is doing, she said she’s doing the opposite of what her parents did. Her parents told Jo not to have sex. That was it. Just don’t do it. Jo recognizes that telling her daughter to stay away from boys, or to not have sex, would be useless. She said, “I don’t want to do that to her. She should have sex! Oh God, I’m sure parents all over the world would judge me for that one. I think she should be able to have sex. I just don’t want it to become her whole life, like it did for me.”
For decades, the push has been along the same lines as what Jo’s parents told her. And the results have been consistent: nothing has changed. The large majority of those who pledge abstinence at thirteen lose their virginities by sixteen and are just as likely to engage in oral and anal sex as those who didn’t pledge, according to a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.1 With limited guidance and plenty of shame about contraception, they wind up with STDs and pregnancies. They get married too young, to the wrong person, because they just want to have sex already and not be judged as bad. Many become what we can now define as loose girls, young women who use sex and male attention to fill emptiness and need, who wind up disappointed and ashamed, unsure how to change their behavior, and terribly judged.
Jocelyn M. Elders, in her foreword to Judith Levine’s book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, wrote:
We lead the Western world in virtually every sexual problem: teenage pregnancy, abortion, rape, incest, child abuse, sexually transmitted disease, HIV/AIDS, and many more. Yet when the Surgeon General issues a call to action on sexual health urging comprehensive sex education, abstinence, and other measures to promote responsible sexual behavior, and advocates that we break our “conspiracy of silence about sexuality,” we want to fire the Surgeon General.2
We are caught in an odd rigidity on this issue, one that is burdened with false, fear-inducing dangers about what it is to be a girl, when meanwhile the biggest danger of being a girl is how impossible it is to wade through the fear-inducing propaganda to find the truth.
When the child psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term adolescence, sexuality came to be seen as more of a test than a natural progression. It became a danger to traverse, a danger that adolescents must not allow to take over their lives to avoid future problems, such as impulsivity. Like Freud’s theories about sexual stages, this was simply another theory, certainly not evidenced by research. This isn’t to say Hall’s notion of adolescence hasn’t been immensely useful. Obviously, it has. My comment is only to point out that our panic about girls having sex is based on a man-made philosophy, not empirically supported research, and is therefore worthy of questioning.
It is important to note these odd biases, because they are so hugely in the way of