Secret Girls' Stuff (10 page)

I wrote back:

Let’s face it, some boys just want sex from a girl and nothing more.

Some girls just want sex from a boy and nothing more. But
most
girls are looking for affection and this thing called love. Love is a tricky concept. Like, you can love chocolate. You can love your puppy. You can love your mother and father. You can love friends. You can love boys like your brother and cousin. But what I’m talking about here is
romantic
love.

Now it gets even more complicated. You can have infatuation. And you can have romantic love. It’s
very hard to tell the two apart, because the symptoms of falling in love and falling in infatuation are very similar. Infatuation is when you’re madly in love with someone, but you don’t really know them well. Then if you
do
ever meet them or go out with them, sometimes you realise that this person is not the one for you. It’s not true love. But that’s okay because infatuation can be fun unless it turns into an obsession thing (like stalking).

Here are some symptoms of early love or infatuation.

1. When you see or think about the boy you are infatuated with, your heart does this sort of loop-the-loop and you feel breathless. You might even go red in the face and your hands might go clammy. If it’s sex-based as well, you might get this tingly, squiggly feeling down in the pit of your stomach and you might even produce slippery moisture in your vaginal area. (Whether it’s a fantasy dreamboy, a TV star, or the real living breathing article, no matter, the reaction can be the same.)
   
2. You often find yourself doodling his name on your pencil case, or drawing your name entwined with his, or you go round graffitiing ‘Liam 4 Bree’ or whatever on school bags and locker doors. (This could be love or infatuation.)
   
3. You hang around hoping to get a glimpse of him walking down a corridor or through the mall. Then you yell out, ‘Hi Liam,’ and when he turns around you get your girlfriend to take his photo. You get multiple copies made which you keep by your bed, under your pillow, in your diary, in your science textbook, and inside your locker door. If you’re in love with a TV/pop star you watch his TV program and buy up every magazine with his photo and plaster them on your walls, or buy every CD and play them over and over.
   
4. You just want to be with him, either physically holding hands, or gazing at him playing sport, or daydreaming about him. (This happens when you’re in love, too.)
   
5. Sometimes you even feel sick in the stomach
   and can’t eat (a bonus, because you lose weight). You can also get a sort of glow about you when you’re in love or in infatuation. The whole world seems to smile on you and you feel loved even if the person doesn’t know you exist, because he does, in your head.
   
6. You go all dreamy and you can’t concentrate.
   
7. You just think of your love constantly — you want to cook for him, sew for him, climb Mount Everest with him, and you
   hate
   cooking, sewing and climbing.
   

This is all normal. Even in today’s society where recognition of women’s rights is paramount for most girls, there is often this strong urge to mother/take care of/ nurture your guy. It might be socialisation, it might be hormones, it might be genetic, I don’t know.

And some feminists might want to argue about it, but this is how I think it is.

Women and girls in love can be very vulnerable. Men and boys can too. But it’s usually teenage girls who are looking for affection and romantic love more than teenage boys.

Now, guess what? Most boys don’t do a lot of this dreamy stuff. They can go a bit misty-headed in the first stages, they can gaze at a girl’s photo or stare at Pamela Anderson’s boobs for hours, but mostly they don’t react quite as dramatically. Okay, there are exceptions and some do go all romantic. They hang around the front door of your house and serenade you with mournful love songs they’ve made up on their guitars and send red roses, and phone you constantly, but these are the exceptions. If you actually get one of these types it can become very oppressive and almost suffocating in time.

Also jealousy can occur and that is one of the most negative emotions in a relationship, because it means one of you doesn’t trust the other. Girls often act too clingy and give in to the guy all the time because they’re scared he’ll go off with someone else if they don’t. Consuming jealousy (and clinginess) can wreck a relationship.

Jealousy is based on uncertainty about yourself. Am I too fat? Too demanding? Too much of a doormat? Will he get sick of me? Should I get a nose job? What if he finds someone else who looks
better than me? What if …? Low self-esteem feeds jealousy. This guy likes you for your qualities. He likes you for the way you look and act and are! There’s no need to be jealous. Of course if he’s a two-timer, jealousy is justified, but you don’t need that crap in your life, so give him the flick. My granny used to say, ‘Jealousy’s a curse, but a bellyache’s worse’. The problem is that severe jealousy gives you bellyache, heartache and stresses you out. You don’t need it.

Most boys like you to do what
they
want to do. Think about it. They like you to watch
their
favourite type of movie. They like you to watch
their
favourite type of sport. To get a boy, some girls (and women) will resort to telling lies.

You might genuinely love all this stuff. That’s okay. But if you don’t, eventually if you tell lies like this
you’ll come unstuck. You’ll feel resentful because you’re always doing what
he
wants to do. Look around at some of the married people you know and you might see women with set expressions on their faces dragging along behind their guys going mountaineering, sailing, fishing, motorbike racing, etc. Of course many women love doing these things. Many women
learn
to love doing these things. Some of them hate it; they do it to keep the man happy and for ‘peace and quiet’.

What I’m saying is
you
need to be happy doing what you want to do, too. So don’t try and turn yourself into a compliant doormat to satisfy his every whim. Do you know what will happen? He’ll get – ho, hum – bored.

Okay. So you’re in love. You’ve been going out for a while. Now comes the question of sex. Or you might have already had sex and not loved the guy. Whatever.

There is no right age for having sex with a boy. In other words, if you turn sixteen and think, ‘Omigod, I’m still a virgin, I’d better rush out and grab the first guy I see and do it,’ it will be a disaster.

When I was a teenager we didn’t know anything
about sex. We didn’t learn about it at school. We learned about it from each other’s stories, and it was usually secret rumours from a few bold girls who’d either done it once or read some books. Secrets we believed:

There’s been masses of stuff written about sex. There’re videos showing you step by step how to do it. There’re porno flicks to get you excited. You learn about sex in school. You know all about ovaries and fallopian tubes and how not to get pregnant.

So how come I get letters and emails from girls who don’t know whether they should have sex with a boy or not, who don’t like sex because it hurts and they think they’re abnormal, who get pregnant, who get used sexually by boys and then dumped, who think they have to screw every boy in sight to be popular, who are unhappy about sex?

This was a difficult letter to write back, because it’s not really my business whether Rebecca and Josh have sex. I remember writing something like:

When I was working as a counsellor a woman contacted me about her daughter and asked if I could have a talk with her. Apparently she’d been playing Truth or Dare with this group of guys at
school and one had dared her to suck him off in a corner of the oval. And she did it! In front of a heap of other guys! I tried not to look shocked.

‘Why?’

She shrugged. ‘Dunno. I just … he dared me so I did it.’

‘How do you feel about it now?’

‘All these girls reckon I’m a slut. It was stupid. I don’t know why I did it. And now all these boys want me to do it with them.’ She burst into tears.

This was a nice girl. Confused, but basically with good values and commonsense. She’d liked this boy. The Truth or Dare game had become a sort of power struggle, and she wasn’t going to give in. But in doing what he wanted she’d demeaned herself and put him in the position of power. No boy (or person) on earth is worth this hassle.

When I was a teenager we didn’t have sex with our boyfriends because society at the time said it was taboo. The main reason was that we might get pregnant. Unlike today, getting pregnant was a terrible social disgrace. There was no pension, no government support, most parents would not help a pregnant daughter. There were no abortion
clinics, only dirty backyard operations usually run by untrained women wielding crochet hooks; it was illegal to have an abortion, and if a girl got pregnant she was quickly packed off to a Lady’s Home in the city, where she had the baby and immediately gave it up for adoption.

When I was at teachers college two girls got fat, disappeared for six months, then came back to finish their teaching course, and we didn’t dream that they’d gone off to have babies. (Later I learned that they’d both given their babies up for adoption.)

The other option was what was called a ‘Shotgun Wedding’ or the girl ‘had to get married’. She wasn’t supposed to wear white, although some did, and the baby would be born seven months later and they’d say it was premature. What a web of deceit and lies the old rules encouraged.

Yet there were big pluses. We didn’t have to worry about whether we’d do it or not; we just didn’t. It was easier in lots of ways. When I talk with girls nowadays they say, ‘We wish it was like that now. If we don’t sleep with the guys they’ll go out with someone else.’

Not all of them will. The ones who really love
you will wait till you’re ready. The others are just wanting to get their rocks off.

But there were still double standards. ‘Decent’ boys didn’t expect us to have sex with them; they had sex with ‘bad’ girls who did it, or waited till they got married! Come to think of it there were a lot of double standards. And there still are.

An extract from a letter from Amanda.

Who indeed! I see it like this. In animal nature the male seeks out the female to procreate, that is, have babies. In the human race we have sex for recreation because we enjoy it. Some people have sex to have babies. Most of the time couples aren’t wanting to have babies.

Only one of the sexes actually has the baby. The girl. The boy might feel he has rights. It’s his sperm. It’s his kid too. But the girl has to
have
the pregnancy. She has to put up with sore boobs, throwing up, feeling exhausted, getting heartburn, sleepless nights, cramps, swollen ankles, huge
belly, varicose veins and learning to walk like a duck. She has to have the baby and as granny always said, ‘It ain’t no picnic!’