Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (11 page)

The complexity of this simple story is startling. It is about desire for connection. It is about how there is no such thing as an inno- cent kiss, since any and all kissing is fraught and ultimately over- shadowed by its position as a floodgate for all of the “things that could happen.” It is about the vulnerability of being a wanting girl: running the risk of becoming “a forward type person,” of pro- voking an embarrassing rejection or aversion. Ellen underscores the possibility that she, as well as the boy, “might like it.” In letting

her psychological guard down for just a moment, imagining that she does not dampen her desire, her mind goes immediately to the danger of her liking it, for if they both like it, then who will stop it? Ellen takes responsibility for her own protection by never tak- ing the risk that she “might like it,” since she knows that she must be the one to keep sex, the inevitable outcome of a kiss, from happening.

The logic of her promise not to have relationships that involve sexuality and of her story of aborted desire becomes clear when she switches gears. Ellen interrupts her own desire narrative with another story, about how her friend wanted to have sex, got preg- nant, was abandoned by the baby’s father, and had an abortion. She acknowledges to me, “see, I’m afraid of sex.” Ellen has closely observed the dangerous outcomes of desire and decided to avoid them, explaining that she “didn’t want that happening to me, just because of a boy.” And it is not just boys’ desire that scares her. She has seen evidence that girls’ desire can be powerful and can inter- twine sexual desire and desire for a child. Her younger sister “wanted to experience [sex], she met a boy and she did, she started liking it and so she started doing it often, and she got pregnant because she wanted to have a baby.” She says simply, “I don’t want to be in that situation.”

I am not surprised to hear that Ellen’s strategies are effective and generally keep embodied sexual desire at bay. While much of what Ellen says matches Janine’s descriptions, the significant difference is that Ellen does indeed know what embodied sexual desire feels like and thus must engage in practices to stifle it, even though it is not an experience she has frequently. In fact, Ellen’s description draws attention to the relationship between mind and body in the production of desire: “I don’t feel very much in my body, it’s like very few is physical. It’s kind of strange, though. I don’t feel it phys-

ically, but you know mentally I do. Maybe it might change.” One example of the “few” times she has had “physical” feelings is when one particular boy is so persistent in his wish to be with her that it makes her want to break her promise; it is her “feelings” that threaten her resolve. This experience causes Ellen distress. She says:

Ellen is “afraid” that “something will happen” unless she extin- guishes the tiniest flicker of her desire, because her response to her desire, if she were to allow herself to feel it, “might [be to] act upon it.” Thoughts about sexuality and physical “needs” or “wants” do surface, however. As she explains, “it could happen anywhere, well, if I don’t have anything else to think about, sometimes it just pops in my head, and I’m like, ohhhkay . . . and I just try to figure out why I’m thinking about it or how did I come to think about it.” Ellen considers her own desire a serious threat to her education. It

makes it hard for her to keep her promise and puts her future in jeopardy. Paradoxically, she also says that girls should learn about their own desire and pleasure “because it’s important that they do know... to understand themselves more by that.” Ellen is able to distinguish between feeling and acting on her own desire. And after we have finished talking, she plans to give her own desire, though not her promise, “deep[er]” consideration.

Rochelle: Distance Makes the Body Grow Fonder
A small, sweet voice and shy smile emerge tentatively from Rochelle, in stark contrast to her tall, full-figured body. Rochelle’s narratives highlight how girls’ sexual desire connects to other forms of desire—desire for a boyfriend, desire to complete an edu- cation, desire to be treated with respect and kindness—and to the myriad dangers it brings. Her descriptions of the different sexual experiences she has had underscore the extent to which the cir- cumstances in which sexual feelings occur determine how girls make sense of and respond to them. Her stories about times when she did not feel desire serve as counterpoint and context for the times when she says she does have powerful sexual feelings, con- veying the contradictory and quixotic quality of desire in her life. She speaks evocatively of both the pleasures and the dangers that she associates with her own sexual feelings. While evidence of her dissociation from her sexual feelings abounds, Rochelle can describe intense embodied experiences of sexual desire as well.

When I ask her about her experiences of sexual pleasure and sexual desire, the dual nature of her sexuality is immediately apparent. On the one hand, Rochelle says not only that she does “not like sex” as a general rule, but that she “hate[s] sex.” Yet her understanding of desire emerges through her talk about hating sexual intercourse. For instance, she says that she likes “to be touched more than anything.” Having had sexual experiences with

and without her desire, she has learned about how, when, and why she might feel sexual desire:

There are certain times when I really, really, really enjoy it, but then, that’s like, not a majority of the times, it’s only sometimes, once in a while... if I was to have sex once a month, then I would enjoy it... if I like go a long period of time without havin’ it, then it’s really good to me, ’cause it’s like I haven’t had something for a long time and I miss it. It’s like, say I don’t eat cake a lot, but say, like every two months, I had some cake, then it would be real good to me, so that’s like the same thing... if you have sex moderately, then you have more desire.

Rochelle conveys a careful knowledge of her body’s hunger, her need for tension as an aspect of her sexual pleasure, but the pre- dominance of her dislike of sex suggests that she does not feel she has much say over when and how she engages in sexual activity.

She speaks about her sexuality with a detailed knowledge of how it is shaped, silenced, denigrated, and still possible in relationships with young men. Rochelle’s stories about her sexual experiences are also stories about her intimate relationships; her narratives illuminate the complex interplay between gendered sexuality and heterosexual relationships. Though such relationships have rarely been a safe haven for her, she reveals how, as a sophomore in high school, she had felt compelled to “get a boyfriend to make [her] life complete.” In this early relationship, Rochelle complied with the mandates of romance, despite evidence that the promise of protec- tion and adoration was undone by male dominance and arbitrary action. She says her boyfriend “treated [her] like [she] was noth- ing” and was “real, real mean” to her. She narrates how the tem- plates and scripts for relationships and sexual encounters offered by romance disable her by cutting off her own feelings and en- couraging her sexual passivity. Having sex for the first time “just

happens”; she did not “really” want to do it but did so to try to “please [her boyfriend].” When she is operating within this frame- work, her desire is not considered a factor by him or by her.

However, Rochelle has begun to discover what she does and does not want in relationships and in her sexual experiences. Rely- ing on what she has learned from her own relationships with boys, both bad and good, she carves out the possibility of her entitle- ment to her own desire and pleasure. Her own algorithm is more complex than what romance has to offer, weaving female sexual subjectivity into the more conventional condition of having sex in a relationship that has lasted an unspecified “long, long time,” for the unspecified but generally agreed-upon rationale that this “next step” may be necessary to keep a teenage boyfriend: “it depends on like if you enjoyed yourself when you did it or not, you know, it depends on how you feel, if you just do it with somebody you met at a party, then I consider that bad for you. But like, if you’ve been with somebody for like a long, long time, then that’s special and okay.”

Although she has a strong sense of the possibilities of pleasure, and its role in a genuinely intimate relationship, more often than not the dangers loom too large and have been too potently present in her own experiences for her to take a chance on pleasure. She often finds her own sexual feelings quite frightening, and with good reason. Rochelle’s stories cover the entire gamut of dangers associated with female sexuality. In every account she articulates how and why she is motivated to not be a desiring girl. The physi- cal vulnerabilities to which acting on her desire expose her are at the top. When she and her boyfriend are watching TV, she “see[s] AIDS and... always think[s], what if like ten or twenty years from now, I’d be diagnosed with AIDS and like I just think about it.” While she “always” uses a condom, she knows that condoms can break. Once, in a committed relationship, she believed that she had

the symptoms of a sexually transmitted disease. Since she had been faithful to her boyfriend, having such a disease would have meant having to admit to herself that her boyfriend had cheated on her and would also have made her vulnerable to false accusations of promiscuity from him.

Of the physical threats, the most recurrent danger Rochelle talks about is her fear of pregnancy. She explains that “for a teenager, babies is like the biggest issue.” She tries to avoid sex, she says, because “I’m too young to be tied down with a baby.” She realizes that she is not prepared to care for a child: “I don’t really like hav- ing it, ’cause it’s like, I’m going to college and stuff and I’m still a baby myself, I couldn’t handle a baby.” She also realizes pregnancy would threaten her education because she would have to sacrifice going to college. Rochelle relates the goal of education—at least high school, she hopes college—explicitly to security through financial independence from men; she wants to “have something of my own before I get a husband, you know, so if he ever tries leavin’ me, I have my own money.”

Social consequences weigh on her as well. She is afraid of being talked about and getting a reputation—“I was always scared that if I [had sexual intercourse], I would be portrayed as, you know, something bad.” Whereas for some girls having sex within the con- text of a committed relationship provides a kind of safety zone from social ostracism, for Rochelle there is no such security. She astutely notes the precariousness of this protection—the capri- cious behavior of the boy involved—observing that she still “could’ve had a bad reputation, but luckily he wasn’t like that.” She offers her analysis of being a sexual object for someone else’s desires rather than being treated as a person with her own feel- ings: “I don’t know, ’cause like, I think when you have sex and the guy just, you know, has sex with you and doesn’t like hold you and touch you, I feel like he’s just using me...I always feel so bad

if he did that to me, ’cause I was like, you know, it wasn’t nothin’ to him.”

Along with being objectified comes vulnerability to violence (Tolman, 2000). Rochelle understands the connection between the absence of her own desire and male violence, because her first boyfriend “flattened [her] face” after she broke up with him when she found him with another girl. She is worried about other people, especially her mother, thinking she is immoral, a worry that discourages her from obtaining contraception: “When you get birth control pills, people automatically think you’re having sex every night and that’s not true.” Although her mother has told her that “sex is not bad and that as long as you do it with somebody who cares about you and who you care about, then it’s okay,” she believes her mother told her these things when she thought Rochelle was still a virgin. She projects her struggle to figure out her identity as a sexual person onto her mother, and it ricochets right back at her.

Rochelle describes a time when simply feeling desire while a boy kissed her made her “so scared that I started to cry.” It was not the kiss itself that scared her, but her own desire, the fact that she “wanted to have sex with him.” Despite this overdetermined knowledge of the dangers of desire, Rochelle also appreciates the importance of the pleasures of desire and is thus on the path toward developing a clearer sense of who she is and what she wants in this part of her life. She finds herself “scared” to voice her true desires in response to her boyfriend’s gentle inquiries into “what are some things [she] would want him to do”: “I am like, ‘Oh, nothing,’ but in my mind there’s something I wanna say but then I won’t dare say.” Though predictably and understandably “scared,” Rochelle says that she is “curious” about sexual experiences besides intercourse, such as cunnilingus. While “sexual pleasure is the last

thing on the list,” she still wants to know about it: “I always wonder how you can tell if you did [have an orgasm] or not?... Does that make it more pleasurable if you come?” Given her fear of and dis- like of sexual intercourse, discovering other forms of sexual expression may in fact be helpful to Rochelle as she moves through this time in her life.

With her dual consciousness of the pleasure of desire and the endless list of its dangers, Rochelle ends up, more often than not, unconsciously cutting herself off from her body. Yet she also has figured out how to jerry-rig safe spaces for desire once in a while. There is a hitch, though. She explains, “Most of the time, I’m by myself when I do.” In other words, one strategy is to feel desire when she is alone. She tells a story in breathless tones about an experience of her own sexual desire just the previous night:

Last night, I had this crank call ... At first I thought it was my boyfriend, ’cause he likes to play around, you know. But I was sit- ting there talking, you know, and thinking of him and then I found out it’s not him, it was so crazy weird, so I hang the phone up and he called back, he called back, and called back. And then I couldn’t sleep, I just had this feeling that I wanted to have sex so so bad. It was like three o’clock in the morning. And I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. And like, I called my boyfriend and I was tellin’ him, and he was like, what do you want me to do, Ro- chelle, I’m sleeping! [laughs]. I was like, okay, okay, well I’ll talk to you later, bye. And then, like, I don’t know, I just wanted to, and like, I kept tossin’ and turnin’. And I’m trying to think who it was, who was callin’ me, ’cause like, it’s always the same guy who always crank calls me, he says he knows me. It’s kinda scary ...I can’t sleep, I’m like, I just think about it, like, oh I wanna have sex so bad, you know, it’s like a fever, drugs, something like that. Like

last night, I don’t know, I think if I woulda had the car and stuff, I probably woulda left the house. And went over to his house, you know. But I couldn’t, ’cause I was baby-sitting.

This story exemplifies how the eroticization of danger can play out in women’s sexual desire. Rochelle is visibly pleased when I acknowledge that, while frightening, this experience has an excit- ing quality to it; as she says, “yeah, it’s sorta arousing!” There is a paradox in that she has these intense sexual feelings when she is alone and essentially assured of remaining alone owing to the late hour and her responsibilities. Alone, not subject to observation nor vulnerable to physical or social consequences, Rochelle finds freedom to experience the turbulent feelings that are awakened in her body. In this moment, Rochelle’s desire has not been obliter- ated by her fear; desire and fear coexist.

Inez: Telling Her Body “No”
Inez, the girl who told me sex “just happened” in the first chapter, says that the adults in her life talk to her a lot about sex. Inez’s description of what she hears about girls’ sexuality exemplifies the cacophony of voices that swirl in girls’ minds, illuminating how often adults warn them about sexuality and how rarely girls can speak honestly or ask genuine questions about their desire. Inez has been inundated with messages about the importance of her virginity—messages that ring in her ears even though she has already had sex—and about the hazards of pregnancy. While her mother still thinks Inez is a virgin, she tells Inez over and over again, “Be sure you don’t get pregnant.” In church she hears that a girl is “supposed to be a virgin when she gets married. If you don’t, you’re sinning.” In school she is told about contraception, con- doms, and avoiding pregnancy. Her father offers the most dire and negative cautions, warning that her boyfriend “was gonna take my