Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [111]
Today more adolescent girls are sexually active earlier and with more partners. More than half of all young women ages fifteen to nineteen have had sex, nearly double the rates of 1970. Five times as many fifteen-year-olds are sexually active in 1990 as in 1970. Twice as many sexually active girls had multiple partners in 1990.
My own belief is that junior-high girls are not ready for sexual experiences beyond kissing and hand holding. Girls this age are too young to understand and handle all the implications of what they are doing. Their planning and processing skills are not adequate to allow them to make decisions about intercourse. They are too vulnerable to peer pressure. They tend to have love, sex and popularity all mixed up. And when they are sexual, they tend to get into trouble quite rapidly. They aren’t emotionally or intellectually ready to handle the responsibilities that arise. The decision to have sex should be a North Star decision, that is, one that’s in keeping with a sense of oneself, one’s values and long-term goals.
By high school, some girls may be mature enough to be sexually active, but my experience is that the more mature and healthy girls avoid sex. Because of my work, I see the unhappiness of early sexual intimacy—the sadness and anger at rejection, the pain over bad reputations, the pregnancies, the health problems and the cynicism of girls who have had every conceivable sexual experience except a good one. I’m prepared to acknowledge exceptions, but most early sexual activity in our culture tends to be harmful to girls.
I want to make a distinction here between intercourse and other sexual experiences. It’s healthy for girls to enjoy their own developing sexual responsiveness and to want to explore their sexuality. It’s possible to be sexual and be a virgin. But one of the difficulties that girls have in the 1990s is that there’s no established or easy way to stop a sexual encounter. Thus some girls avoid dating and touching because they do not know how or when to draw a line, to say stop. Ironically, the sexual license of the 1990s inhibits some girls from having the appropriate sexual experiences they want and need. They avoid intimacy because they have no control over what happens once they begin to explore.
As a graduate student in the 1970s, my first clinical work was to teach a sex-education class for delinquent teenage girls at a state institution. The girls were between thirteen and sixteen. All were sexually active. Two had been pregnant, one had been gang-raped, one had been involved in prostitution and another was known as the blow-job queen of the institution.
As we sat around the table for our first group, I was struck by how young these girls were, how unsophisticated and utterly ignorant they were about sex. They swore like longshoremen, but they knew little about their own bodies, contraception or pregnancy. One girl announced that “you can’t get pregnant without oral sex cuz that’s when the sperm goes into your belly.” Another girl, who had been pregnant, said earnestly, “I really never had sex.” Sex education had been the movies and television. Sex education had been their lessons on the streets.
The lack of physical information was bad enough. Worse was that these girls didn’t have any guidelines for making decisions about sex. They were barely aware of what they were doing and afterward often “forgot” that they had had sex. They didn’t know they had the right to make conscious decisions about sex. They didn’t know how to say no.
I developed a sexual decision-making course. We role-played seduction scenes. I role-played the seducer with lots of animated tips from them. They were