Dirty Little Secrets (17 page)

“More degrading than the words?” I emailed.

“Yeah.” She emailed back from her phone.

I asked her what she thought about other girls sending photos. “If a girl wants to do it, that’s up to her,” she said.

Her signature from the phone quoted her favorite band, Escape the Fate. “My heart’s on an auction.”

When I asked her what that meant to her, she said, “It sums me up.”

PART TWO

GAINING POWER

Chapter 9

GROWN-UP GIRL

The Adult Loose Girl

The loose girl is still in there. Sometimes in my dreams. Sometimes in my fantasies. Sometimes in catching the eye of the hot guy in line at the grocery store. I’m fifty-one years old and have been a recovering loose girl since I was thirty-four.

L
aurie has been married for eighteen years now. She is in her fifties, with two teenage boys. She and her husband make a good living. They have a beautiful house in a great neighborhood, two cars, and annual travel to other countries. She buys herself a new wardrobe every year, and on each anniversary, her husband buys her a new piece of jewelry. By anyone’s standards, she is living the good life. But if you look more closely, you will find a woman who feels like she’s still seventeen. She dresses every morning with the thought of getting male attention. She works out, not for her health, but so that a man might still find her attractive. She worries about getting older, about wrinkles and sagging. She goes to a doctor to get some things done here and there—a little tuck or plumping or whitening—all with the thought that she wants men to want her. Her husband doesn’t know this, but she’s always looking for men—when she is at the grocery store, at the bank, getting lunch when she’s at work. She’s always got her eyes open for the possibility of men.

There is, in fact, one man she works with. It was inevitable, she guesses. They flirt heavily, and she thinks about him as she puts on her clothes in the morning, wondering what he’ll think. They smile from across the room. Something is going to happen. She knows it will. More, she wants it to. She doesn’t know why. She loves her husband. They have no more problems than any other married couple. For the most part, their relationship is great. But this craving she has—she can’t control it. She wants something to happen with the man at work. It’s all she thinks about.

Laurie’s story is like that of many other women who come to me. While we are worrying about our teen girls and their desperation around boys and sex, the women who used to be those girls are still there, too—grown-up loose girls, carrying the same pain, looking to get men’s attention instead of boys’. One woman wrote me and asked, “What happens to old sluts?” It’s an important question, one I intend to explore in this chapter.

A common goal for most women—and men, but more so women—is to get married. The marriage aspiration is reflected throughout our culture. In plenty of popular songs, such as Beyoncé’s “All the Single Ladies” in which she sings, “If you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it,” pointing to her finger. Marriage is portrayed as what a girl deserves. If you want to be with me, in other words, you will need to marry me, because that’s what I deserve. Many Hollywood movies and television series end with the engagement ring. It is the finale, the greatest possible attainment, the thing every girl should want above all else. Marriage means that you are chosen and wanted by someone, which is a loose girl’s greatest desire.

I ended
Loose Girl
with my marriage, too, but I made a point of not closing the book that way. Instead, I showed a scene of myself in a bar, catching the eye of yet another boy. I didn’t do anything more than look that evening, but I wanted to make clear to my readers that just because I was married didn’t mean my struggle was over. I still spent too much time thinking about male attention. I still could easily let any situation where I felt wanted turn into another loose-girl event. The reaction to my ending was mixed. Bloggers wrote things like, “It seems to me she hasn’t changed at all.” Others liked the ambiguity. They felt this was more honest than suggesting I was all fixed by the end. Plenty interpreted the end to mean that they, too, could have real love some day, that they’d reach the “end” of something, which is a problem, I guess, with having to have an ending to the book. And plenty were irritated by the fact that I ended with a marriage. They wanted to see me changed in a way that didn’t have anything to do with boys or men.

I stick to my intentions about ending that way because I wanted to emphasize that many loose girls marry like I did, and yet it doesn’t mean anything, not really, about how we change. In many ways, I married to simply take myself out of the market. It’s not that the man I’d met was magical, that he somehow knew how to love me in a way others couldn’t. He was a good man, but he was still human with all the imperfections and difficulties that come along with that. He did not save me from myself. He didn’t transform me into someone else. I was still me: the loose girl. The work of having intimacy had only just begun.

Being a loose girl is a lifelong process. I will always have to watch myself carefully, and I will surely always struggle. I will always make mistakes here and there. Whenever life gets hard, whenever something makes me feel insignificant or unloved, whenever I feel abandoned in any way, I tend toward my old behavior. I start thinking about a guy. I start considering how a man might save me. I start to slip. The main difference now is that those thoughts don’t have the same power over me. I don’t believe the fantasy. I’m too aware of its lie and how I’ve hurt myself with it.

But many women are not in the same place. They still struggle heavily with those feelings, still believe the pull, and still enjoy the high just a little too much.

Sandra has been having an affair for seven months now. She also sometimes sleeps with other men. Her husband probably knows, but he turns a blind eye. His anger comes out with passive aggression and occasional verbal abuse. He tells her that she does things wrong or that she’s too slow or too fast. He has pretty much stopped having sex with her, too. She knows her marriage needs to end, but she’s scared that when she’s on her own, her behavior will only get worse, that she’ll feel out of control and will harm herself further.

This out-of-control feeling is typical among adult loose girls. They are ashamed that, at this point in their lives, when they should be making mature choices, they still act in these ways. But it feels like they can’t stop. Often, as adults loose girls will fall into love and/or sex addiction. They tend toward unavailable men who will distance themselves as the women approach and pursue. Loose girls often demand too much too soon. They want to know if the men are going to commit to them pronto. They want to know how the men are going to make them feel loved. They expect men to fill their emptiness, and in adulthood, the loose girls feel angry that they don’t. They call or email or text men too much, no longer feeling they have the luxury to wait. The pressure from society to settle down and marry is so immense that if a woman is single she often feels she is undesirable.

Or they remove themselves from men altogether. Gerri, who has been divorced for many years, told me that she hadn’t been with a man in two years. She’s been with more than a hundred men, and she just wants it to stop. She assumes she can’t have a normal relationship with a man, so she won’t go near any. She’d rather be alone than feel that out-of-control feeling that comes with her engagement with men.

The shame for grown-up loose girls is as bad as it is for teenagers, but it happens for an entirely different reason. Women should be married and monogamous (and heterosexual, for that matter). They should be concerned with their children, not with their own needs. They can have sex, unlike teenage girls, but they can’t want it. And they certainly can’t want it as much as or more than their partners. The stereotype of the married woman is that she is always warding off her husband’s advances. There is that old caricature of the wife who says, “Not tonight, dear. I have a headache,” and the underlying assumption that this is just an excuse for not wanting sex at all. There is that stereotype, too, of women sitting around together, complaining about their husbands’ wanting sex. The notion is found on sitcoms, where the horny husband is always trying to get his wife to have more sex. Women fulfill their “wifely duty” by having sex, as though it is just one more thing they have to do, along with filling the dishwasher and cleaning the toilets.

Because of this stereotype, women often opt to not be sexual. It is much easier to be a married woman who doesn’t desire sex. So, when you do desire sex, the shame and sense of being different, false as it is, can be a part of what keeps you in that loose-girl cycle, where you act out, feel ashamed, and then act out to try to feel better again.

Vivian, who is in her late thirties and has never married, fears her loose-girl behavior will keep her from ever finding a real relationship. She doesn’t think she wants children, but she does feel like a relationship would make her feel worthwhile. She looks around and feels as though everyone else knows how to have this, that there must be something terribly wrong with her, and—her greatest fear—that she is in fact unlovable. She has had a number of long-term relationships where the man she is with eventually distances himself from her because, she claims, she gets too needy. When I asked her what she meant by “needy,” she said she always wants more from him than he can give. She’s so desperate for any man to choose her, to prove to her that she’s worth loving, that she has no sense of wanting anything more specific from a man. In other words, she feels like she has no standards. Her only standard is that a man could love her and not leave. Tied up with this feeling is that she feels like she will sleep with anyone who will take her, in the hope that he will wind up loving her. I asked her if she actually wanted the sex itself. It took a while for her to answer: “I do want the sex,” she said. “But it’s not a straight answer, because I don’t even know how to feel sexual desire without also needing something more. So, yes, I want the sex. But it’s just because I want to feel close to a man.” I asked her what happened in most cases. “In most cases, they don’t stick around because I’m too needy. No one wants a needy girl.”

Vivian’s experience of sexual desire is similar to many teen girls’ experience. She can’t quite name her desire as pure sexual need. It’s too interwoven with other needs, and as a result, the shame she feels is not just for wanting sex but for wanting anything. Her want becomes “neediness,” because a wanting woman is unattractive. And Vivian notes that no one wants a “needy girl,” reinforcing the idea that neediness belongs to girls, not women. The grown-up loose girl is so much like the teenage version that it is nearly impossible to tell them apart.

As discussed in chapter 3, slut pride can also get in the way for loose girls. Strong women should be able to sleep around, but for so many women, the sense that they aren’t really strong, that they are in fact too needy, too ugly, too undesirable or unlovable, can get in the way. The slut-pride attitude gives women an avenue to act out their loose-girl behavior, which only makes them feel worse.

Many of them agree with the men who say they don’t want to get serious; they just want to have sex and nothing more. But they’re not telling the truth. When they reveal that they want more, and the men pull away, their neediness rises up, leading them to a further sense of shame (remember that a loose girl’s greatest shame is not the fact that she has a lot of sex; it’s that she feels as though her neediness makes her unlovable.) Grown-up loose girls struggle with the option of casual sex. They may want such a thing. They may, for instance, want sex but not a boyfriend after a marriage dissolves, but their constant need for male attention to translate into proof that they’re lovable and worthwhile gets in the way. In this way, loose girls wind up damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Most loose girls claim that they want a close, intimate relationship with a man, but they feel incapable of having one, either because they can’t get one or because once they do, they screw it up by needing too much and/or cheating. This is a big irony that loose girls face: many claim that all they want is a relationship, one in which they are truly loved by a man. But many times loose girls grow restless after they’ve gotten that, and they wind up looking outside the committed relationship for something new. When their emptiness, their sense of being worthless, isn’t healed through the relationship, they head back out there, certain that it means they just didn’t find the right one yet. Many women who come to me note that they don’t understand why they do this, that they feel out of control, as though controlled by puppet strings, held by someone else. Indeed, they are being controlled by the addiction, by the pursuit of that high that comes when they feel like maybe this time they will get what they need to seal that void inside.

One of the biggest challenges grown-up loose girls face is recognizing that they have not lived in a vacuum. Like any other human, they have made mistakes. They learned negative patterns. They got themselves entangled in situations that they will never be free of. They have kids with the wrong people. They mess up their careers. The longer we live, after all, the more opportunities we have to love and lose. This is just a fact of life.

The media sets us all up to believe that somehow everyone else has perfect lives, everyone else gets their needs met all the time, but not us. Certainly, loose girls are guilty of this feeling. They assume that they are the only ones who can’t get loved. They are the only ones obsessed with men. They are the only ones who mess up all their relationships. In truth, of course, most of us are like that. Life is suffering. Happiness is fleeting. So, the key to being a grown-up loose girl is acceptance. We will always struggle with these feelings. We will always think first of which guy can make us feel better. And we will always wrestle with neediness when the person we love goes away. The next chapter explores this idea of acceptance in much greater detail.