Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (19 page)

In a similar vein, Paulina chooses not to read romance novels, because she finds them

too fake, the guy usually ends up with the girl, and they end up with each other and everything. It’s not real. And they never had any serious problems, I mean, there’d usually be something that happens or something, but they would get solved, and the prob- lem would be over. I just switched to horror ...I don’t know, they just talk about the feelings a person goes through in life,

because romance books, they don’t say how she felt, what she really thought about.

Paulina knows that relationships usually entail “problems” that need to be “solved”; that endings are not always happy or pre- dictable; and that girls have thoughts and feelings that do not appear in any “real” way in romances.

Like Eugenia, Paulina tells of a time when she resorted to pre- tending to have desire as a way to avoid offending her boyfriend or making him think she “didn’t care” about him. But she also tells of a subsequent time when she told her boyfriend that she did not want to have sex when he did, which did upset him, just as she believed it would when she pretended:

He’s just like, you don’t want to. I said, no, I don’t want to do any- thing, so I’d rather not. He just stopped and did not do anything. And he got mad, and he wouldn’t talk to me. He just felt that I didn’t like him, or maybe I was with somebody else. But, later on, I just explained that I just, it just didn’t feel right, it just was a time when I didn’t want to. He was upset, though ...I just felt that...I didn’t [want to] hide anything from him. I just felt, uh, I don’t want to go through that again. Might as well tell him, whatever way he takes it. If he loves me, he obviously, he’d be able to deal with it, if he doesn’t, then . . .

Her experience of being inauthentic in a sexual situation went against the grain of her commitment to herself and to having an honest relationship. Her fears about how her boyfriend would respond if she did act on her feelings were in fact realized; he “got mad,” “wouldn’t talk to [her],” thought she “didn’t like him,” and suspected that she was cheating on him. What Paulina learned from her earlier faking experience, however, is that she would rather have no relationship than not be able to “tell him anything.”

She also links her sense of entitlement to act on her desire, and not act in its absence, to her refusal to allow her boyfriend to “have any power” over her or to “control her.” She demands equality in this relationship and is willing to walk away if he will not agree to these terms.

This sense of entitlement to her sexual desire provides a kind of protection against making sexual choices driven by a wish to fit in or to please others. Paulina has had a “bad” sexual experience with a boy whom she had thought of as a friend. In the interview, she describes a time when this male friend tried to force her to have sex with him:

There was one experience, the guy wanted to have sexual inter- course and I didn’t ...I didn’t have sex with him. He, he like pulled me over to the couch, and I just kept on fighting...I was just like begging him to like not to do anything, and like I really did not have like much choice. Because I had my hands behind me. And he just like kept on touching me, and I was just like, “just get off me.” He goes, “you know that you want to,” and I said, “no, I don’t. Get off me, I hate you.”

When the phone rang, he let her answer and, in her native language, she asked her friend to come over. Unwilling or unable to continue to coerce her when her friend arrived, the boy finally left. Paulina’s assailant attacked her both physically and psychologically. Lucky to have eluded actual violence, Paulina was able to resist his attempts to coerce her because she was so familiar with her own desire and thus fully aware that she did not in fact “want to.”

Paulina reports that she gets called “pushy” and “bossy,” but she claims, “I don’t really care what people say.” Yet I am struck by how Paulina maintains a kind of active program of not caring, how hard won her entitlement to her desire actually is. Even as she nar- rates her defiant sexual subjectivity, her story is often interwoven

with a certain defensiveness. When describing her experience of having an orgasm, she interrupts her own story to assert: “I liked it, and there’s nothing wrong with it. I mean, if guys can feel it, why shouldn’t girls?” While Paulina does not directly experience her own desire as a dilemma, the social dilemma that girls’ desire is set up to pose suffuses her personal experience of repudiating gen- dered sexuality.

Amber: Doing Desire
Amber defies neat sociological categories. Both of her parents abused drugs, and neither is in her life at the time of our interview. She has lived in foster homes and currently stays with conservative family members. She has dark blonde hair, lively brown eyes, a quick smile, and a twinkle in her eye. She is loud and outspoken. Amber “gets” my project: “the first thing I said [to my guardian] when I got the letter was like, wow, you gotta do this. She’s like, what is it? I’m like, it’s an interview on sexuality and desire, and she’s like, on what? and I’m like, sexuality and desire, and she’s like, why would you want to do that? I said, because this is something that no one ever talks about, and it would be good to do this.” Amber is able to articulate her experience of sexual desire espe- cially well in her descriptions and stories. She describes sexual desire as “kind of like a fire that needs to be put out, [laughs] defi- nitely. Kind of like an itch that needs to be scratched.” While she has considered masturbating, she is not intimidated by any prohi- bition on it but chooses not to because “by touching myself or [using a device] I’d be achieving an orgasm, but I think my desire is more to be with someone than to have an orgasm.” Amber has had a number of boyfriends but has had protected sexual intercourse with only one, with whom she had a long and intimate relation- ship. Unlike in other relationships, when “I wasn’t sure if I had wanted to,” she says that “when I did, I was sure I wanted to, I mean,

I really liked the kid and I wanted to.” Her method of birth control is condoms—she emphasizes that she uses “one of those spermi- cidal lubricated condoms”—and she explains that she has chosen this particular method because “I’m not that sexually active.”

What stands out most in Amber’s stories about her sexual expe- riences is her agency, and the explicit link she makes between her agency and her own sexual feelings. She tells a story about a time when she felt desire for her now ex-boyfriend: “he looked really good and I just missed him so much and that just combined, I really really wanted him really bad, I actually did get him.” And then she proceeds to tell a story of seduction: her seduction of him. “I forgot what I was wearing, but I had like some kind of skimpy top underneath, and I took it off and I went over to him, and I started putting lotion on my legs...I just like was really close to him, and I was whispering into his ear, and he turns to me ’cause I kind of startled him, and I kissed him, and then it just went on from there.” In this story, Amber is an agent of her own desire. Rather than manipulate him into taking the lead, she takes it her- self: “I kissed him.” When I ask her what it was like for her to do that, Amber replies, “I think I became more confident, I mean, it definitely builds my confidence level, the part of me that makes me outgoing, like brave to face the world, to be able to say things to different people without worrying what they were going to say back, or how they are gonna react.” Amber experiences her sexual agency as building her overall confidence, linking her experience in this domain of her life to other relational situations in which she might take a chance by expressing her true feelings.

This story also exemplifies how Amber works around a system that positions her as a sexual object, by refusing to experience her- self in this way yet also using her object status to her own advan- tage. She has astutely observed that there is power available to her in this system: “I think that women have the power, I think that

men 5 percent of the time, I mean the men are really like weak in that sense, they can’t seem to turn down an offer from a girl, you know.” In the end this decision born of desire does not produce the desired or anticipated results for her. Reflecting on the event, she says, “I had wanted him back, and I felt that if we had sex that would bring us closer, but you know, it didn’t work, I’m like, oh my God, I don’t like it, I can’t believe I’m doing this, it’s actually very boring, I’m like, when is this over . . . there wasn’t anything mysti- cal about it or, you know.” This is not sex that “just happened.” At the beginning of the story, Amber is a desiring girl. However, as her desire evaporates, “I kissed him” becomes “when is this over.” With the loss of her desire, Amber becomes a “bored” object. Because Amber feels entitled to and expects her own desire, when the expe- rience becomes “boring” and not “mystical,” it is a signal to her that something is amiss. Amber is garnering information she did not have prior to having, and losing, her desire: that she did not really want to be with this boy after all. Refusing to wait passively for a boy to be the agent of desire differentiates Amber from other girls:

I’m always the one to say like, “Jimmy, I want you” ...I think maybe other girls aren’t really as forward with talking about sex, I mean I’ve seen a lot of that in girls, my sister is one, she says, “oh wow, I really wanted to do something, he won’t do anything, he doesn’t kiss that good.” I said, “well, Lizzy, why don’t you pull him aside and say, you know, if it were me and somebody didn’t kiss well, I’d be well, do this, do that, or I’d give them hinters and ’cause I mean I just wouldn’t sit there and wait for him to pick up on it, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, you know, maybe he’s not aware.”

Yet she is also aware that being sexually assertive can get a negative response from boys: “I think it’s pretty good for, you know, some men feel like the lady is being overly aggressive when they [make

the first move], but I’ve been lucky enough not to have any of those men, but I mean I think it’s good for a woman.” Amber is aware of the dangers associated with her sexual agency, possible rejection— or maybe worse—by angry guys. She is also aware that she could get a bad reputation, although that does not stop her from “talk[ing] about sex a lot, but it doesn’t mean that necessarily I go through with things and talk about them, I mean I could have gone through with them, it doesn’t mean I go through with them con- tinuously, and no, I’m not worried at all.” Amber’s disregard for getting a reputation is, like Paulina’s, grounded in her sense of jus- tice. Because she realizes that no one else can really know what her talk about sex actually means, she knows that if she did “go through with them [sexual behaviors] continuously,” she could be vulnerable to this consequence. But for it to be an effective conse- quence, Amber would have to care about getting a bad reputation. Like Paulina, Amber has a critical perspective on the double standard, about which she is passionate and outspoken: “My [rela- tive] would talk about whores as if it was the lady’s fault and that the lady shouldn’t be thinking about sex, that the man is the one that should be thinking about it and they have a right to. I think that’s wrong [laughs]. I think that ladies should be more forward in the conversations about sex, and definitely do what they feel they would like to. I think it’s really up to the lady. You just don’t want to put up with that, I mean I know myself, if I were to talk about those things, my friends might turn and say, ‘Ssssh! don’t speak too loud, someone might hear you,’ and it shouldn’t be like that at all, I think it should be open to talk about it.” Amber has gone so far as to develop a transgressive identity for herself as the girl who says her “perverted” thoughts out loud. She sees herself as providing a service to her peers, “kind of like relieving the pressures of other people, because other people don’t like to talk about it, and they see me talking and they come and they join the

conversation.” At once the bad “perverted” girl and the helpful nice girl, Amber eschews these distinctions as she embodies and speaks as the girl who is a desiring subject.

She notes that when girls’ sexuality is discussed in church or school, the message is that “girls that have sex get in trouble, you know, get pregnant, have AIDS, chlamydia, but I mean usually it’s nothing positive.” Amber observes that female adolescent sexuality is considered entirely negative. Because her own experiences have been positive, she criticizes this perspective. She goes on to deplore the lack of information about abortion available to her; and she critiques our interview as keeping the conversation about desire private, demanding from me recognition of the need for public acknowledgment and talk about girls’ desire. Amber lays claim to her desire with aplomb. While she has a critical perspective on the double standard, as Amber has herself explained, she is an individ- ual, brave, and brazen girl, “unique” in her ease with her desire. Although Amber knows she is refusing to comply with a construc- tion of girls as not having desire of their own, or not acting on their own desire, unlike Paulina, she cannot answer the question of why girls’ desire is forbidden and maligned. Her stories cry out for an answer beyond simply turning into a guy. Even within the comfort of her own desire, Amber is aware that her social context considers her “perverted,” a construction she transforms by appropriating it as a fun identity.

The stories told by these desiring girls illustrate how feeling en- titled to their own sexual desire can enable them to make active choices in their relationships. Comfortable with their own embod- iment, they narrate sexual subjectivities that are compelling and enlightening. These girls’ stories clarify how sexual desire, like all other forms of desire, can be empowering, instrumental for girls’

confidence in themselves, and essential to their overall ability to act on their own terms. Sexual desire becomes a compass for making decisions about relationships and sexuality, and a road to knowl- edge about oneself and relationships, an empowering force in girls’ lives. The more entitled they feel to desire, the more they speak of balancing pleasure and danger. These girls exude a vitality and a psychological robustness not seen in many of the other girls in the study. With the exception of Melissa, whose distress is due to the quality of her feelings rather than to the existence of them, these girls are happy to be alive, connected to themselves and to others through their embodied feelings.