What You Really Really Want (6 page)

I'll say that again because it bears repeating: As long as you're not hurting anyone (including yourself), then there is
no wrong way
to express or experience your sexuality.

The problem is, that's a complex statement. What does it mean to hurt someone else, or yourself, with your sexuality? How can you tell if you're hurting someone or yourself? And if there's no wrong way, that leaves open a dizzying variety of options that can feel overwhelming and hard to navigate. Helping you sort it all out is one of the main purposes of this book. But this book might not even be necessary if, instead of spending all that time telling you that “giving it away” too soon was the worst decision you could make with your life, schools spent time actually helping you figure out what kinds of sexual expression and experience were right for you. What if they'd taught you how to make your own informed, healthy decisions about sex? And what if you could assume that nearly everyone else you might want to interact with sexually had had the same lessons?

School is also a place where many of us experience physical violations in “small” ways—think bra snapping, butt grabbing, and the like—and school is far too often a place where we learn
that, even if we complain, boys are given blanket permission to violate our boundaries in these ways. This “boys will be boys” mentality leads to what I call the “boiling frog” problem of women's sexual boundaries. I call it that because of the legend that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out, but if you put a frog into a pot of room-temperature water and slowly heat it to a boil, the frog will acclimate as the water heats up and never jump out, eventually boiling to death. Similarly, when we learn as young girls to tolerate “low-level” boundary violations like the ones we often are forced to suffer in silence at school, it makes it harder for us to notice when even greater boundaries are being violated, eventually leading to the reality that many women who are pressured into having sex against their will don't even recognize it as a form of violence (though that lack of naming hardly spares them the trauma of the experience). On the other hand, schools that teach, through actions as well as policy, that everyone has a right to their own boundaries and no one has the right to touch you in ways that you don't like are teaching girls to recognize and name it if they ever find themselves in really hot water.

If you were raised in any kind of religious tradition, odds are, you were taught some very particular sexual values (that is, a set of beliefs about what's right and wrong when it comes to sex) in conjunction with that faith. And depending on how you feel about the rest of your religion, you may put more or less stock in those dictates about sexuality.

I'm not going to waste your time summarizing the way different religions think about sex—it would be almost as foolish as trying to list all the different ways families think about sex. Even within any given religion, there are subgroups that vary widely on their approach to the matter. Besides, all that really counts is what your religion has taught you. And you know that better than I do.

Honestly, the religion-family analogy is pretty strong when it comes to sex, the main difference being what's at stake. If you go against your family's values when it comes to sex, you might be grounded or otherwise punished by your family. In extreme cases, your family may be violent to you, or kick you out of the house, or disown you. That's all pretty awful. But religion has bigger weapons still, depending on what faith you belong to. Your religion may tell you that if you stray from its sexual principles, you'll suffer for all eternity. Some fundamentalist religions believe that women who violate their sexual norms should be publicly shamed, or even killed. The fear these threats instill can make it difficult to even question what your religion has taught you about women and sex. But you're not alone, and you're obviously up to the challenge, or you wouldn't be reading this paragraph.

The other things to think about when it comes to sex and your religion are these questions: Why does my religion teach me these things about sex? What is my religion's attitude toward women's equality in general? Some—though certainly not all—religions believe that men should be dominant over women, and they use their sexual teachings to keep women afraid and compliant with a system that doesn't have their best interests at heart. If you can think about your religion's sexual teachings as part of its values about women in general, it may help you see what drives those teachings, and whether or not you want to learn from them.

Because doctors, nurses, and therapists are the people we turn to when we need expert advice about our bodies and minds, they can have an incredible influence on how we understand our sexuality. But for better and for worse, our medical professionals are also influenced by all of the factors we've been discussing in this chapter, so they can promote harmful stereotypes just as easily as they can provide helpful information.

Prerna, twenty-three, shares her experience with this. “As a sex-positive teen, I went to my first gynecologist appointment with lots of questions about safety and health. But I never asked any of them, because one of the first things the doctor asked me was if I was having intercourse, and when I told her I wasn't, she looked at me like I was lying and asked me again. It went well beyond ‘you can trust me and should be honest' and was definitely more of ‘we all know you're a slut, so just admit it.' It freaked me out because I really wasn't expecting virgin shame from my doctor, of all people.”

Shana, twenty-eight, had a similar experience. “I stopped anwering their questions truthfully when at a more recent visit they asked me how many sex partners I had in the last year, and when I answered honestly, they gave me a twenty-minute safe-sex talk. They never even asked me if I was having safe sex, or if I knew how to. I'm known amongst my friends for always, always having condoms with me and handing them out to unprepared friends.”

And it's not just in terms of the virgin/slut dichotomy that medical professionals can fail. Some therapists have been known to blame victims for their sexual assault, and doctors
may make false and silencing assumptions about the gender of your sexual partners. Pharmacists have denied birth control
¹
(and even, in a 2011 case, lifesaving antibleeding medication
²
) to women because they disapproved of those women's sexual choices, and doctors all over regularly deny women the information they need to get an abortion, which is a safe and legal procedure in the United States. The list goes on.

On the other hand, some medical professionals can be lifesavers, giving you information and access to sexual health care that your family or community may make difficult to get, and otherwise supporting your healthy pursuit of what you really really want. My current doctor, for example, supports my efforts to love and accept my body by practicing medicine from a Health at Every Size perspective. That means she may tell me I should eat healthier and exercise more because my cholesterol is too high, but she'll never tell me I need to lose weight, because she knows that the scale tells you nothing about a person's health.
³
And my therapist supports my sexual decisions as long as they seem to be coming from a healthy and centered place—even when those decisions find me having casual, safe sex with strangers.

The psychological and practical power medical professionals can have on our sexuality is profound indeed, which is why it's really important to examine what we've already learned from medical experts we've encountered—and also to find providers in the present tense whose values support our own.

This can be a challenge, depending on where you live and how much money or medical insurance you have access to. But there are resources for finding truly helpful medical care. One
of them is Scarleteen's Find-a-Doc service, where you can recommend healthcare providers you've had positive experiences with, and get recommendations from others if you need to find someone better or new. Find-a-Doc covers not only doctors, but also counselors, LGBTQ centers, doulas, shelters, and other in-person sexual/reproductive health, sexuality, and/or crisis care. Share your tips or find ones from others at
www.wyrrw.com/scarleteenfindadoc
.

If you've already been sexually active with a partner, or even if you've just experienced strong desire for a particular person, you know just how much that person can influence how you feel about your sexuality.

The tricky part here is that it's hard to control who you want, and yet wanting someone sexually makes their opinion of you seem important. That can be wonderful: There are few better feelings than having your desires reciprocated. It can make you feel all kinds of good things: desired, loved, beautiful,
strong. And being sexually open with someone can strengthen the bonds of intimacy in many ways, leaving us feeling safe and understood and supported.

But sexual partners can also have the opposite effect. They can leave us feeling inadequate or like freaks. They can pressure us to want things we don't want, and do things we don't want to do. Or they can make us feel bad about the desires we do have, or the sexual interactions we've already experienced. They can abuse us physically or mentally, and they can use our desire for them to control us, leaving us feeling that our very desire is dangerous to us.