Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [109]
Several other guys asked her out right away. She accepted a few offers, but all the dates ended as wrestling matches. Some of her friends became sexually active during this time and they encouraged her to follow their example. But she said, “They want me to have sex so they won’t feel guilty. I won’t help them out that way.”
“I wanted to date but not have sex,” Christy said. “It’s hard to be popular without a boyfriend, but I didn’t care. I wanted to wait at least until I got my braces off. Maybe it was all that Catholic guilt.”
She said, “Now mostly I go on group dates. I always make sure I pay my own way so I don’t owe a guy anything. I’m careful not to get too close. I hide my looks and my intelligence. I’ve learned that being too smart or too pretty can get me in trouble. I want to be ordinary, to fit in.”
After class one day a group of coeds stood around my desk. I’d just given a lecture on sexuality in the 1990s and they had observations to share. Ginger said, “Your ideas about healthy sexuality are interesting, but they won’t work in the real world. No one talks about sex like you suggest. It would be too embarrassing.”
Jane added, “Everyone is so mixed up that they just get drunk and do it. They try not to think about it the next day.”
“I’m scared to go on dates,” Suzanne said. “I’m afraid of getting raped, of getting AIDS.”
Marianne said, “I’m lucky that I have a steady boyfriend. We’ve been together since our freshman year. He’s not perfect, but it’s better than dating.”
In unison they all said, “Anything’s better than dating.”
Girls face two major sexual issues in America in the 1990s: One is an old issue of coming to terms with their own sexuality, defining a sexual self, making sexual choices and learning to enjoy sex. The other issue concerns the dangers girls face of being sexually assaulted. By late adolescence, most girls today either have been traumatized or know girls who have. They are fearful of males even as they are trying to develop intimate relations with them. Of course, these two issues connect at some level and make the development of healthy female sexuality extraordinarily complicated in the 1990s. The first section of this chapter will deal with the old issues of emerging sexuality, and the second section will discuss sexual trauma and its effects on young girls.
America doesn’t have clearly defined and universally accepted rules about sexuality. We live in a pluralistic culture with contradictory sexual paradigms. We hear diverse messages from our families, our churches, our schools and the media, and each of us must integrate these messages and arrive at some value system that makes sense to us.
Paradigms collide within each of us as we make decisions about our own sexuality. For example, Louise, a dignified widow, came in to discuss how she should behave sexually. She enjoyed dating, but her friends had warned her that men liked sex by the third date. Louise had been dating one man for several months and felt like a prude for refusing to have sex. She was afraid she’d lose him, and yet her values were that sex comes with marriage.
Paradigms collide between people. There are no clear agreements about the right ways to be sexual, so each couple must negotiate an agreement for themselves. At best, communication in this area tends to be awkward and fragmented. At worst, no one even tries. The real crash-and-burn misunderstandings come when people with radically different ideas date without discussing their paradigms. For example, two people go on a date and one of them believes sex is recreation while the other believes sex is the expression of a loving relationship. The next morning they awake with rather different expectations about their future together.
Or, a couple in therapy reported that their sex life had stopped. He was a consumer of pornography and a sexual