Dirty Little Secrets (6 page)

A girl doesn’t need to feel sad or lost or hurt to become a loose girl. She simply needs to want freedom, to want the wingspan that will let her live her desires. This, I suspect, is why plenty of girls I interviewed suffered through so many of the same feelings but didn’t have loveless childhoods. At the core, loose girls are a cultural problem. Yes, difficulty at home can exacerbate looseness. Yes, abuse and molestation make the problem much, much worse. But the bottom line is that girls get attached to boys and male attention because our culture allows boys the sorts of freedoms girls want.

Fourteen-year-old Lourdes met her last boyfriend at an underage club. He was twenty-four, hanging out there with a few of his friends who seemed younger than him. She said there was no question that he was leering at all the teenage girls, but rather than being turned off, she found this provocative. She saw it as daring on his part. He danced with her and then offered to drive her home. After that she saw him every day, but she had to hide it from her parents because of his age. He picked her up from school and would take her back to his apartment that he shared with a few other guys, and they’d have sex. At home, Lourdes’s father drank and went into rages. Lourdes and her younger sister had to hide in their room with a chair against the doorknob until he had passed out. She’d made the mistake of getting in the way of his rages before, and she wound up whipped by his belt. Her mother, who was a devout Catholic (or, as Lourdes called her, “a religious freak”), never did anything to intervene. Instead, during her father’s rages, Lourdes’s mother cried in the kitchen and spoke to God in Spanish. “You know,” Lourdes said, “helpful shit like that.” Lourdes just wanted out of her house, but she also felt guilty because she didn’t want to leave her sister alone with her parents. She thought many times about getting pregnant. She knew for a fact that her father would have kicked her out (and her mother would have just cried and talked to God in Spanish).

Eventually, she and her boyfriend broke up. He moved on to some other young girl without even telling her. She was pretty upset, but she went right back to the club, hoping that some other guy would come along. She says that she has her sights set on someone saving her from her life, and who better to do that than an older guy?

Two-thirds of girls younger than age 18 choose sex partners who are close to their age, and a mere 7 percent choose partners who are six or more years older.
³
But men older than high school age account for 77 percent of births among girls age 16–18 and for 51 percent of births among girls age 15 and younger. Men older than age 25 father twice as many births with teenage girls than do boys younger than 18.
⁴
So, while teenage girls partnering with older men is not a significant trend, when it does happen, it seems that girls wind up with older men as the fathers of their children.

Why do some girls want older men? A few of the girls I interviewed told me they felt that teenage boys were immature and that they liked how the older men treated them, referring to dinners and gifts. One noted, “It doesn’t hurt that they have cars, too.” It does seem that girls who like older men gravitate to their money, but research also suggests that girls who choose men so far out of their age ranges also tend toward low self-esteem and depression.
⁵
Many of these girls are looking to replace their abusive or difficult families with new ones. They often perceive the men as white knights who will save them from whatever pain they’re suffering at home.

Regardless of the girls’ claims, men who choose teenage girls tend to be immature and insecure, with egos matching those of teenage boys.
⁶
Many have criminal histories, so they are not the safe havens girls make them out to be. Of course, partnering with a teenage girl under the age of consent is statutory rape, not to be taken lightly.

Grown men who choose adolescents as sex partners tend to have these immaturities, but they also simply learned about girls from our culture. They, like all boys, learn from media that girls aren’t worth more than their looks and their accessibility for sex; they absorb this message as completely as girls do. Boys erroneously learn, just as girls do, that boys are horny and girls aren’t, and that it is up to the girls to protect their morality by fending off boys’ advances. They learn that boys choose girls, not the other way around. And they learn that the more girls a boy can score, the more manly he is.

It is easy to see how these messages can lead boys to behave badly, to try to get girls in bed and dump them just as quickly, to not feel any sort of responsibility for their sexual behavior in the world. It is also easy to see how we don’t vilify or shame boys for their sexual behavior the way we do with girls. That double standard is still entirely alive and well. Although it might seem that boys get away with murder in this respect, the truth is that—just like girls—they get pigeonholed away from real intimacy. Our culture’s expectations regarding sex harm boys, too. Boys learn that they should want sex, pursue it, and be good at it. They don’t, however, learn about the emotional potentials that come along with their desire, and they don’t learn that most boys share a similar awkwardness and curiosity, along with the excitement and awe, when it comes to sex. In
Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood
, William Pollack argues that boys’ ravenous sexual appetites are more often than not a cover for their fear of sexual humiliation.
⁷

Imagine, if you will, boys and girls exploring sexually and safely in a loving, kind way. Imagine they could learn about how to have relationships, could communicate about their needs, without cultural and parental shaming. Sad how much this vision seems like an impossible dream. Before we can look more closely at ways to rectify this, let’s examine the role of the girl more closely. After all, as boys are boxed into being owners of their sexual identity, girls are given very few options about who they can be when it comes to sex.

Chapter 3

THE UNHOLY TRINITY

The Virgin, the Slut, and the Empowered Girl

I am still desperate for male attention, and I feel unwanted, ugly, and needy. Sometimes, I don’t like aspects of my personality. Why am I so selfish? So loud? So unfocused?

THE VIRGIN

Winnie told me she was
never
“that girl” in high school. She was a virgin. She promised herself she would wait until she fell in love because, she knows now, her culture had promised her that this would get her what she wanted. She’d be loved. She’d be valued. She’d be good.

When she got to college, though, she decided one night she didn’t want to wait anymore. She wanted finally to be “put on a pedestal,” something she had ironically been promised she would get if she stayed a virgin. But what she really got as a virgin was invisibility. The girls around her who were putting out were the ones getting talked about and pursued. All this time had passed, and she had hung on to her virginity and still didn’t feel loved, or valued, or even necessarily good. What she felt was empty.

So one night she drank tequila and lost her virginity to a random guy. After that, as the weeks and months passed, she moved on to the next guy—and the next, and the next. Winnie says that she had underestimated the intensity of the high that she would get from the attention. She never had guessed how easily promiscuity would become a sort of addiction for her. Today, she says, she’s still a loose girl, and she’s so deep in it, she doesn’t have a clue how to get out: “I still haven’t been loved. I still give it away. I still feel empty when it’s over.”

While promoting
Loose Girl
, I was invited to appear on a morning show with three teens. They embodied the three sexual paths that girls can follow in our culture today: the virgin, the slut, and the empowered girl. In other words, girls can choose not to have sex; have sex but be shamed for it because it’s too much, or the wrong kind, or because it harms them; or have sex because they are trying to claim it as their own choice.

Believe it or not, the virgin was the girl who interested me most. The conviction behind her virginity drove her to tell fellow teen girls to retain their virginity. She was 100 percent sure that she was right. And she had proof! Most everyone in the audience lauded her. Her mother was so proud. Sex education—funded by abstinence-only programs—supported her. In fact those programs sent her to talk at other schools. The churches let her know she was doing the right thing. She was a good girl.

The virgin owns a mythic narrative that goes like this: She is more desirable to our culture in every way than the girl who has sex. She is lovable. She is girlfriend and wife material. She is prettier, cleaner, holier, and just all-around better than the girl who has sex. We say that virgins “respect their bodies.” (Although this is a concept that always has seemed misguided: Why does not sharing oneself intimately and physically with a partner mean respecting oneself? Why does respect equal denying one’s own physical pleasures?)

The virgin myth also assumes that girls have a much lower sex drive than boys, that they don’t want sex. It assumes, in fact, that girls are responsible for fending off boys’ out-of-control, aggressive libidos. (You can see how easily this notion leads to the deduction that girls can be responsible for their own rapes: “If you dress in sexy clothes, boys can’t control themselves,” or “If you let a boy kiss you or get sexually excited in any way, you shouldn’t be surprised when he can’t help himself, even as you say ‘no’”).

In this way, virgins are assigned a false strength. The virgin teen who was to be on television with me, as well as girls holding the title of Miss Teen America and other spokespeople for abstinence, often comment on how they believe they are stronger than those girls who “give in” to their sexual urges or need for attention. In other words, a girl’s strength comes from doing nothing, as opposed to from actually
doing
something in the world, such as being a powerful athlete or saying truths that are unpopular but necessary. This is especially troublesome because it also suggests that there is no possibility for healthy sexual exploration. In this scenario, all sexual activity equals giving away one’s power. There is no possibility that a girl can have sexual experiences and still be powerful. Having sexual experiences renders girls weak and helpless.

Most important, though, the virgin myth emphasizes the idea that a girl is only worth as much as she’s able to keep her legs closed. Forget compassion, honesty, integrity, or kindness. As Jessica Valenti notes in
The Purity Myth
, “For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer—the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you’ve never had sex, you’re a ‘good’ (i.e., ‘moral’) girl and therefore worthy of praise.”
¹
She notes that this view is just one more way that we value women most for their bodies and sexuality, and for what they do with those.

We even throw virgins parties. In the past decade, we’ve seen the growth of “purity balls.” At such events, begun as a Christian response to rising teen pregnancy and STD rates, adolescent girls pledge their virginities to their fathers until they will wed, and fathers vow to protect their daughters’ chastity. There is white cake, exchanged vows, and a first dance, just like at a real wedding. Regardless of the creepiness of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls having commitment ceremonies with their fathers, the key point is that the balls don’t work. Out of a study of twelve thousand girls, those who had participated in purity balls had the same rate of STDs as those who didn’t pledge their virginity, and 88 percent break their pledges and have premarital sex.
²

In so many ways, these sorts of ceremonies set girls up for failure. It might be easy for a twelve-year-old girl to say she won’t have sex before marriage, but three years later, she realizes how much she likes boys and sexual experiences. Or as her brain develops further, she begins to think,
Wait a minute. How come I can’t have pleasurable physical interactions and boys can?
(After all, where are the mother-son pledge balls? Good luck finding one.) Or, even more likely, she comes to know that her value as a girl is tied up with whether boys want to get with her, and to get boys’ attention, she will need to be sexy, and—well, combined with the fact that sex and attention feel good—you can see how easily those pledges become a distant, silly fantasy.

This is not to say that a girl choosing to stay a virgin isn’t a perfectly acceptable decision for a teen girl. But so is choosing to have sex. The girls are not to blame here. It’s the abstinence train, the coopting, once again, of a girl’s control over her own sexual choices.

That societal pressure to be abstinent has resulted in issues way more dangerous than a girl choosing to have sex: the pressure to exclude information about birth control in sex education and the refusal to supply condoms to sexually active teens. When girls don’t know enough about how to keep themselves safe, when they don’t have easy access to the very things that make them safe, then we’re complicit in the fact that they are unprotected from STDs and pregnancy. If we, the adults, are responsible for our teens’ physical safety, then we are failing them in this way.

Equally important, the abstinence train has denied us this discussion around teenage girls and sex, and it has indirectly contributed to why many girls—the loose girls—use sex as a means of self-harm. When we tell girls sex and sexual feelings are bad, when we tell them
they
are bad when they act sexually, they will believe us, and they will use it as a way to punish themselves on their own. If we make sex subversive, then we shouldn’t be surprised when girls use sex—something that should be, that
is
, perfectly natural—as though it were fraught with as many dangers as alcohol. And we shouldn’t be surprised when they wind up furious and hurt by the way our culture betrays girls in this way again and again.