Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [132]
The plot for romance movies is different. In the fifties people met, argued, fell in love, then kissed. By the seventies, people met, argued, fell in love and then had sex. In the nineties people meet, have sex, argue and then, maybe, fall in love. Hollywood lovers don’t discuss birth control, past sexual encounters or how a sexual experience will affect the involved parties; they just do it. The Hollywood model of sexual behavior couldn’t be more harmful and misleading if it were trying to be.
Cassie has seen Playboys and Penthouses on the racks at local drugstores and Quick Stops. Our city has adult XXX-rated movie theaters and adult bookstores. She’s watched the adult channels in hotel rooms while bouncing on “magic fingers” beds. Advertisements that disturb me with their sexual content don’t bother her. When I told her that I first heard the word “orgasm” when I was twenty, she looked at me with disbelief.
Cassie’s world is more tolerant and open about sex. Her friends produced a campy play entitled Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. For a joke she displays Kiss of Mint condoms in her room. She’s a member of her school’s branch of Flag—Friends of Lesbians and Gays—which she joined after one of her male friends “came out” to her. She’s nonjudgmental about sexual orientation and outspoken in her defense of gay rights. Her world is a kinder, gentler place for girls who have babies. One-fifth of all babies today are born to single mothers. Some of her schoolmates bring their babies to school.
In some ways Cassie is more informed about sex than I was. She’s read books on puberty and sexuality and watched films at school. She’s seen explicit movies and listened to hours of explicit music. But Cassie still hasn’t heard answers to the questions she’s most interested in. She hasn’t had much help sorting out when to have sex, how to say no or what a good sexual experience would entail.
Cassie is as tongue-tied with boys she likes as I was, and she is even more confused about proper behavior. The values she learned at home and at church are at odds with the values broadcast by the media. She’s been raised to love and value herself in a society where an enormous pornography industry reduces women to body parts. She’s been taught by movies and television that sophisticated people are sexually free and spontaneous, and at the same time she’s been warned that casual sex can kill. And she’s been raped.
Cassie knows girls who had sex with boys they hardly knew. She knows a girl whose reason for having sex was “to get it over with.” Another classmate had sex because her two best girlfriends had had sex and she didn’t want to feel left out. More touching and sexual harassment happens in the halls of her school than did in the halls of mine. Girls are referred to as bitches, whores and sluts.
Cassie has been desensitized to violence. She’s watched television specials on incest and sexual assaults and seen thousands of murders on the screen. She’s seen Fatal Attraction and Halloween II. Since Jeffrey Dahmer, she knows what necrophilia is. She wasn’t traumatized by The Diary of Anne Frank.
Cassie can’t walk alone after dark. Her family locks doors and bicycles. She carries Mace in her purse and a whistle on her car keys. She doesn’t speak to men she doesn’t know. When she is late, her parents are immediately alarmed. Of course there were girls who were traumatized in the fifties, and there are girls who lead protected lives in the 1990s, but the proportions have changed significantly. We feel it in our bones.
I am not claiming that our childhoods are representative of the childhoods of all other females in America. In some ways Cassie and I have both had unusual childhoods. I grew up in a rural, isolated area with much less exposure to television than the average child of the times. My mother was a doctor instead of a homemaker. Compared to other girls, Cassie lives in a city that is safer than most and has a family with more money. Even with the rape, Cassie’s situation is by no means a worst-case scenario. She lives in a middle-class environment,