Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (17 page)

Trisha says she has one-night stands “to see what the person’s like,” and because she has met “a guy that [she] want[s].” She does not say that she wants to or will have sexual intercourse with him, but she does want to explore her sexual feelings and, in so doing, learn something about herself and how she feels about this other person. If a boy were to explain his decision to act on his desire

under these circumstances, it is unlikely that either Trisha or any- one else would think ill of him. But Trisha is aware that, for a girl, this choice is a risk. She then articulates why it is worth the risk and how she manages it. She acts on her feelings in a public situation, a party, which offers both protection (her friends are nearby) and vulnerability. But she takes her desire under cover by choosing to hide behind alcohol.

Trisha sees and uses getting herself “trashed” as a form of pro- tection from getting what she would judge to be a deserved reputa- tion for acting on her sexual desire. When she is drunk, Trisha becomes a desiring girl whom she “can just deny and say I never did anything,” because being drunk obfuscates her own desire and provides her with a way to claim that she did not know what she was doing. Blaming “it” on the alcohol muddies the question of responsibility and thus excuses her from culpability, for others and for herself. Trisha explains that she is careful to drink enough but not too much, not to “the point where I’m, I don’t remember any- thing.” She drinks as both a public performance and a private salve that screens her sexual desire in unprotected, unsanctioned cir- cumstances. By working within the framework that some girls are sluts and all girls are vulnerable to being thought of (or thinking of themselves as) sluts, Trisha limits the degrees of freedom for her desire. Not willing to give up her desire yet seeing no alternative but to think of desiring girls, including herself, in these terms, the best solution she can contrive is to keep her desire under the cover of alcohol.

Barbara: (Not) Feeling Like a Fool
Barbara works hard at balancing what is said about girls’ sexuality with what she knows about her sexuality from her own experience. She articulates first an awareness and then a critique of how girls’ sexuality is controlled by the threat of social repercussions. She

observes that girls but not boys are socially chastened for express- ing their sexual feelings, which for her does not make sense and is not fair: “the fact is that a girl, if she sleeps with a hundred different guys, she’s considered a slut, but if a guy sleeps with a hundred dif- ferent girls, he’s the guy, you know, he’s macho... if a girl wants to have sex, she has every right just like a guy. It takes two to do this, so neither one is any wronger than the other one, is how I view it [laughs].” Unlike Trisha, Barbara refuses to put girls into either cat- egory. When boys, or girls, call another girl a slut, she won’t “listen anymore, it’s like, you know, you guys don’t have a right to label her, you can’t judge her for what she’s done. You’ve done the same thing.” Yet she also notes that opting out of this system is not com- pletely within her control. With resignation, she explains, “I just, I have to live with it, but I kind of work around it.”

Barbara’s rich and insightful descriptions of her sexual feel- ings illuminate her success in “work[ing] around it.” She offers a multidimensional analysis of the factors involved in her sexual response: “[girls’] bodies are very sensitive and when you get into having, you know, you’re making out one night, your whole body can feel good depending on what they’re doing, but it’s kind of, it just depends on the mood.” She links her sexual feelings to her partner’s ability to communicate, her level of comfort and ability to concentrate, and her and her partner’s knowledge about her body:

It can be pleasurable, but if it goes on for too long, then it can be, it can get overwhelming, so they, that’s when you have to really kinda be able to communicate to one another saying, look this is enough, I can’t take any more of this [laughs] and at the time, that’s when, ’cause he was always very open with me, and I tried to be very open with him, and so, not so much the first time, but this time, the second time that we had done this, I was able to

communicate more, and I said, okay, enough [laughs], it’s begin- ning to be too much here.

Barbara has a highly sophisticated understanding of the embodied and relational processes involved in her sexual desire and pleasure. She offers a realistic rather than a romanticized description of hav- ing an orgasm, which she says “was wild... oh wow, it blew my mind basically.” Her sexual subjectivity comes through in her explanation of how she has chosen not to have more than one “so far.” Noting that “it’s not easy... to have one” and “there’s a lot of work involved in it,” she emphasizes that it is her own lack of patience rather than her boyfriend’s (“he can sit there all the ding dong day”) at the heart of her choice.

Barbara keeps careful track of the vicissitudes of her sexual feel- ings. But this focus is quite recent. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse, which she reports “happened for quite a few years” prior to her current relationship, she explains that even after having “coun- seling” she “had a lot of problems with just being able to kiss [boys], it’s like, no, get away.” She had to make conscious efforts to, in essence, get her body back,

because I wanted it to be that way. I wanted to be able to feel pleasure. And, ’cause in the back of my mind, I knew that I couldn’t just go on being this way, ’cause if I got married, I was never going to enjoy it. And I wanted to be able to enjoy it. And so I worked upon it myself a lot, with one of my friends, and we worked around it. I began to open up to myself and look at, well, this was what was done in my childhood. This person did this to you, but that doesn’t mean everybody else is like this. And as I got, and as I began to try and open up to people, especially to guys, um, and let them try things, and I’ll try things, and got used to it, and began to trust them, I was able to get over that

particular barrier. Even though it’ll still come back now and then, but it’s like, it hasn’t for a long time.

Not only is Barbara able to feel and speak about her own sexual feelings, she has fought to have them, winning back her sexuality from the disembodiment that followed profound violation.

Despite this hard-won sense of entitlement, Barbara is not free from the dilemma of desire. While she has observed that a girl has a certain leeway for exploring her sexuality in the context of a rela- tionship, and rejects the social risks that dominate so many girls’ management of their sexuality, for Barbara it is the interpersonal and psychological risks associated with her own desire that loom large. Rather than worry that her peers will label her a slut, she fears that if she does not take care in negotiating her desire in her relationship, she might be shamed or lose her relationship if her desire is perceived as abnormal.
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She explains how she keeps her desire under cover, until she is sure that it is safe to let her feel- ings be known, as she did with her current boyfriend “before [they] had sex, ’cause [she] wasn’t sure how he looked at sex”:

There was this time, he was giving me a back rub, and all I could think about is what I wanted him to do besides have back rubs [laughs], and he has to rub my body, forget the back, just do the whole body . . . it was a very strong desire just to have him rub all over, and that was the one time I can think of I’ve really had it bad [laughs]... I’m laying there thinking this, and I didn’t want to tell him that, ’cause I didn’t know him that well at the time, and it’s like, noooo, no, we’ll just wait [laughs].

“Laying there” as her boyfriend rubs her back, having thoughts and feelings full of desire to be touched “all over,” Barbara enacts the kind of passivity that is expected of her, keeping her actual feelings

disguised. Like Inez, Barbara responds to her “very strong desire” by telling herself “noooo, no”; yet unlike Inez, rather than trying to make her desire disappear, she plans to “wait” until she has spe- cific evidence that there is a safe space for her sexual feelings in this relationship. Once she feels she is on safer ground, she expresses her desire slowly and carefully, taking the initiative only if she is shielded by “subtlety”:

I didn’t know him well enough. I subtly like to initiate, I don’t like to come outright and say, oh let’s go do this, I just like doing things very subtly, ’cause I’m not a very, when it comes to sex, the first few times with the person, I’m not very forthright about anything, until after I’ve gotten to know them, and I trust them a little bit more, and I know that they’re not going to look at me funny when I say I want to do something like this.

Barbara is concerned that the form her desire takes could be construed as indicating she is somehow not normal; she protects herself from the risk that this particular boy might “look at [her] funny” when she brings her desire out into the open. Barbara oper- ates as a kind of secret agent, avoiding being “forthright,” making sure she can cover the tracks of her desire by behaving in a way that is not readily identifiable as such. Although the pervasive threats to girls who are sexually assertive do not lead her to deny her desire, her personal experience of having once made her desires known prematurely keeps her cautious:

That was like with oral sex, I never thought I would meet a guy that didn’t like oral sex, and I met a guy. ’Cause I hadn’t had oral sex with this boyfriend, but the boyfriend before that I was want- ing to attempt that, and he would have no part in that. And so I was kind of, you feel really embarrassed after you’ve asked to do something, and it’s like, and then they’re, “oh no, no, no, get

away.” And so I came to this boyfriend I’m thinking, I was very [laughs] subtle about doing this ’cause I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself.

Barbara has learned that even in the supposed safe haven of a rela- tionship, making her sexual wishes known can be humiliating. Rather than finding the relationship automatically safe, Barbara needs to assess how a specific boyfriend will react to determine whether and how she will respond to her own sexual feelings, which persist even if she decides to hide them.

This constant monitoring, caution, and fear take its toll, a psy- chological cost for keeping her feelings under cover. Regarding her choice not to tell her boyfriend about her desire to be touched, Barbara reflects, “it’s kinda depressing in its own way afterwards, ’cause you’re like sitting there, well I, you know, I should have said something or, you know, actually left and gone home, you’re laying there, well, I should have said something [laughs briefly], ’cause later on it’s like, well, I didn’t fulfill it [moans, laughs].” She is filled with regret and frustration at having kept her real sexual feelings under wraps. Perhaps precisely because Barbara keeps her desire under cover rather than silence her body, she understands the costs of doing so.

Melissa: A Minefield of Desire
Dressed in a flowing gypsy skirt, her skin pale against the lively col- ors she wears, Melissa is clear about her sexual feelings for girls, claiming a lesbian identity. Unlike many gay and lesbian adoles- cents (Savin-Williams, 1998), Melissa has felt safe and free to be open about her sexuality with her family. Yet despite her comfort with her own sexual feelings, the dilemma that desire raises for Melissa is the lack of opportunity to explore or express it. Most often, Melissa associates feeling sexual desire with frustration; she

explains that she “find[s] it safer to just think about the person than what I wanna do, because if I think about that too much and I can’t do it, then that’ll just frustrate me.” Living in a world defined as heterosexual, Melissa finds that “little crushes” have to suffice: “I don’t know very many people my age that are even bisexual or les- bians... so I pretty much stick to that, like being hugely infatu- ated with straight people. Which can get a little touchy at times... realistically I can’t like get too ambitious, because that would just not be realistic.” She feels stuck and isolated, having little access to other lesbian adolescents and thus to sexual relationships or expe- riences. Having only straight friends to talk with, Melissa worries constantly about saying or doing too much.
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In speaking of her desire, Melissa names intense embodied feel- ings of “being excited” and “wanting.” Cognizant of pleasure, Melissa is just as aware that she is vulnerable to harm. Not only is the question of how to respond to her feelings difficult, Melissa realizes that even the existence of her sexual desire for girls can lead to anger or violence if others know about it: “Well, I’m really lucky that like nothing bad has happened or no one’s gotten mad at me so far, telling people about them hasn’t gotten me into more trouble than it has, I mean, little things but not like anything really awful. I think about that and I think it, sometimes, I mean, it could be more dangerous.” Melissa describes the various ways that she keeps her true feelings in a private and lonely but safeguarded place. Her stories about the tension between her desire and her need to mask it exemplify how keeping one’s authentic sexual feel- ings out of the ebb and flow of relationships can put a girl at risk of losing touch with how she really does feel, thereby sacrificing the chance for authentic relationships.

As intensely as she feels her desire, Melissa also knows that it could interfere with her friendships with other girls. Although she is “out to a lot of people,” it is not public knowledge in her school

that she is a lesbian. By keeping her sexuality secret from others, she explains, she is able to express her desire covertly by being physically affectionate with other girls, a behavior that is common and acceptable; she can “hang all over [girls] and stuff and they wouldn’t even think that I meant anything by it.” Yet Melissa describes herself as “hat[ing] having secrets from people and hid- ing things.” She tells a story to show how she sneaks her desire in where she knows it is not exactly welcome but where she has a chance to express some of her pent-up feelings:

But there’s especially this one girl that I used to have this huge infatuation with, and she... didn’t drink that much [at parties] but when she did she always drank, like, as much as possible... But she was [laughs] so cute, even when she was like that and I would just, sort of, follow her around, and especially maybe it was nice that she was like that ’cause she didn’t notice as much. And I mean I was sort of out to her so it wasn’t like she would have noticed, but I just remember just like following her around and just like making sure like I could just touch her and stuff, not a lot or in any special way. But, and I kept like, when I was leaving that party and, I’m like, I’m like kissing her on the cheek and try- ing really hard to just keep it [laughs] on the cheek, and, and like I love you, Mary! [laughs]. And she was like, I love you too! And I was like, and that made me so happy, and I mean of course she was like completely drunk, she didn’t even care about it at all, but it made me happy, but I really didn’t [laughs] wanna leave.