Reviving Ophelia (32 page)

SEX AND VIOLENCE

During our shifts at the homeless shelter, Christy and I talked about her life. Her mom was a state worker and her father an engineer. They were strict but loving, child-centered parents. They were also devout Catholics who taught Christy that sex was for marriage. They lived in a ritzy neighborhood, and Christy was a member of an elite track club. As a child, she’d won many races. She was in the gifted program and attended summer camps for gifted kids. Because she was ahead of her classmates, she skipped third grade. But this meant that when she hit junior high she was immature socially and physically.

“I was nervous about school,” Christy said. “I wanted to prove I was as cool as the other kids. I wanted a boyfriend to take me to the parties that the popular girls got invited to. I knocked myself out to get into that crowd.”

I asked how she did that.

“I realized right away that being smart was trouble. I felt like I was ‘severely gifted.’ I got teased a lot, called a brain and a nerd. I learned to hide the books I was reading and pretend to watch television. This one guy in my math class threatened to beat me up if I kept breaking the curve. I made Bs and Cs. My parents were mad at me, but I ignored them. I knew what I needed to do to get by.”

Christy joined her school’s cross-country team. Some of the boys in the elite group invited her to parties. She had a gang of friends who were the jocks and the preps at the school. By the end of seventh grade, she even had a boyfriend.

“He was great, really sweet. We kissed and held hands but nothing else. We talked on the phone about twenty hours a week. Our parents wouldn’t let us go out.”

Her first boyfriend moved after the seventh grade. But soon many other boys were asking her out. She liked Adam, who was older and more experienced than her first boyfriend. She said, “I remember this one party. We were drinking margaritas and playing this question game. Someone asked about sex. Have you ever gone all the way, or had sex in a car, or had oral sex, or sex with two people at once—stuff like that. If the answer was yes, we had to drink our margaritas.”

“I was the only one who never took a drink and I felt so embarrassed.” Christy paused.

Christy explained that she liked Adam and wanted to make out, maybe “go to second base,” but stop before they had intercourse. She was curious about sex and eager to try things, but she didn’t want to lose her reputation or break her parents’ rules. She said that making out worked for a while, but then she and Adam started fighting all the time because he wanted to have sex and she didn’t. Finally she broke it off.

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 adventurer. She was a social worker who counseled rape victims daily. He wanted sex to be frequent, experimental and recreational. After her long days as a therapist, she couldn’t tolerate many of his ideas about sex.

Our culture is deeply split about sexuality. We raise our daughters to value themselves as whole people, and the media reduces them to bodies. We are taught by movies and television that sophisticated people are free and spontaneous while we are being warned that casual sex can kill us. We’re trapped by double binds and impossible expectations.

A recent study of teenagers in Rhode Island documents the confusion. Teens were asked to respond to questions about circumstances under which a man “has the right to have sexual intercourse with a woman without her consent.” Eighty percent said the man had the right to use force if the couple were married, and 70 percent if the couple planned to marry. Sixty-one percent said that force was justified if the couple had had prior sexual relations. More than half felt that force was justified if the woman had led the man on. Thirty percent said it was justified if he knew that she had had sex with other men, or if he was so sexually stimulated he couldn’t control himself, or if the woman was drunk. More than half the students thought that “if a woman dresses seductively and walks alone at night, she is asking to be raped.” Clearly at least 80 percent of these teenagers didn’t know that a man never has a right to force sex.

Our cultural models for ideal female sexuality reflect our ambivalence about women and sex. Men are encouraged to be sexy and sexual all the time. Women are to be angels sometimes, sexual animals others, ladies by day and whores by night. Marilyn Monroe understood and exploited this split. She was an innocent waif and a wildcat, a child and a sultry sexpot. Understandably, girls are confused about exactly how and when they are to be sexy.

Girls receive two kinds of sex education in their schools: one in the classroom and the other in the halls. Classroom education tends to be about anatomy, procreation and birth. Students watch films on sperm and eggs or the miracle of life. (Even these classes are controversial, with some parents thinking that all sex education should come from parents.) Some schools offer information about sex, birth control and STDs, but most schools’ efforts are woefully inadequate. Most do not help students with what they need most—a sense of meaning regarding their sexuality, ways to make sense of all the messages, and guidelines on decent behavior in sexual relationships.

In the halls of junior highs, girls are pressured to be sexual regardless of the quality of relationships. Losing virginity is considered a rite of passage into maturity. Girls may be encouraged to have sex with boys they hardly know. Many girls desperate for approval succumb to this pressure. But unfortunately the double standard still exists. The same girls who are pressured to have sex on Saturday night are called sluts on Monday morning. The boys who coaxed them into sex at the parties avoid them in the halls at school.

At the Red and Black Cafe, where local teens dance to grunge bands, the graffiti on the walls of the rest room speaks to the confusion. One line reads: “Everyone should make love to everyone.” Just beside that line another girl had written: “That’s how you die of AIDS.”

Adolescent girls approach their first sexual experience with a complicated set of feelings. Sex seems confusing, dangerous, exciting, embarrassing and full of promise. Girls are aware of their own sexual urges and are eager to explore them. They are interested in the opposite sex and eager to be liked by boys. Sex is associated with freedom, adulthood and sophistication. The movies make sexual encounters look exciting and fun.

But girls are scared of many things. They are worried that they will be judged harshly for their bodies and lack of experience. They are worried about getting caught by their parents or going to hell. They fear pregnancy and STDs. They worry about getting a bad reputation, rejection and pleasing their partners. They have seen sex associated with female degradation and humiliation, and they have heard ugly words describing sex, words that have more to do with aggression than love. So they are fearful of being emotionally and physically hurt. For the most part, girls keep their anxiety to themselves. It’s not sophisticated to be fearful.

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.