Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (21 page)

For the urban girls the vulnerabilities associated with desire are immediate and ubiquitous, lit upon regularly in their classrooms, visible in the lives of their friends, recurrent on the evening news. Like the urban girls in Michelle Fine’s ethnography (1988), these girls talked about receiving constant and solely negative messages about their sexuality. There was rarely anything mixed about the messages they received from adults; they told of adults painting rigid, one-dimensional tales of woe that rarely acknowledged the complex development of relationships and identities manifest in the girls’ stories. However they dealt with the dilemma of desire, they were looking over their shoulders and operating under the assumption that, if they did not take preemptive action, some- thing dire would happen. Even Paulina, who so overtly rejected gendered sexuality and proclaimed her right to desire, was watch- ful. Yet these girls were not passive; agency in the service of self- protection was a theme throughout their stories of desire (Tolman, 1994a).

Although sexuality poses certain physical dangers to all girls and women—the possibility of pregnancy, the vulnerability to disease, the reality of sexual violence—the varied dangers associated with female sexuality are in fact not equally distributed. As a group, the urban girls made constant references to vigilance and caution, sug- gesting how present and real the entire range of dangers was for them. On the whole, their stories held and reflected the reality that they had few degrees of freedom in this part of their lives. They

tended to talk about multiple threats to their well-being; Rochelle’s litany of fears is the most intense example of this pattern. But their own sexual feelings were, for the majority of them, a part of their experience of adolescence. Most of them characterized their expe- rience of desire itself as strong and pleasurable, a positive part of their lives, while only a few of the urban girls found the experience of desire itself frightening or unpleasant. The urban girls who described their experiences as attempts to balance danger and pleasure revealed a kind of resilience and resourcefulness that stood out; the safe spaces they found or chiseled out were often tiny and hard-won but notably creative.

Whatever their approach to dealing with their own desire, the urban girls made explicit and frequent connections between their sexual desire and physical danger. More of the girls who silenced their bodies, experienced the feelings in their bodies as confus- ing, or cut off their desire as a way to stay clear of danger were from the urban school. All of them spontaneously mentioned their wor- ries about pregnancy, and a number of them spoke directly about how their fear of contracting HIV made them uncomfortable about relationships and any form of sexual expression. The poten- tial of male violence and aggression was central to their under- standing of the vulnerability to which their sexuality could expose them. Yet for the most part, they were having romantic relation- ships that included their sexuality, though not necessarily inter- course. For some girls, like Ellen, these risks felt too potent, as if opening the door to intimacy a crack would set her on an inevitable path to danger and doom. Those urban girls like Trisha and Paulina, who engaged in various forms of resistance to the denial or denigration of their desire, talked about their use of con- doms and contraception, as well as getting to know or befriend a young man, like Barbara did, prior to sexual experiences that could invite such risks.

Much has been made of the centrality of the master narrative of romance for girls in organizing their sexuality and romantic rela- tionships, but for the urban girls, there seemed to be another fun- damental organizing cultural story at play. A master narrative of sexuality as the road to ruination always figured in the stories their mothers, sisters, teachers, and others told them about where their sexuality would lead them and thus was always present in their ex- periences and choices. Some girls, like Janine, were ruled by this narrative of ruination; others, like Rochelle, tried to figure out how to hold the tension between romance and ruination. Still others, like Inez, seemed to recognize the potential for ruination but not espouse it as the central tenet of their experiences with relation- ships and sexuality.

In all cases the wish to be thought of, and to think of themselves, as “good” and not “aggressive” sexually, to comply with norms of femininity regulating their bodies and their behavior, was evident. Most of them talked about their fear of getting a bad reputation, whether they were engaged in sexual activity in any context or not. For the urban girls, this anxiety was very personal; they themselves felt at constant risk of being labeled a slut, though many of them realized that they could not control this outcome, as Inez demon- strated with her perfectly pitched rendition of how rumors get started. For some, labeling was a barrier to sexuality, while for oth- ers it was a pitfall to be skillfully avoided. What this peer policing did lead to, though, for all of the urban girls, was an especially intense fear of talking to anybody about anything having to do with sexuality.

One of the ways the girls talked about their fears of getting a bad reputation was in terms of respect. Demanding respect from oth- ers seemed to ensure that they would not get branded “bad,” as Inez explained. Niobe Way has observed that what girls call self- respect has become a key dynamic in how racially and ethnically

diverse (including white) poor urban girls negotiate their hetero- sexual relationships (Way, 1994), a dynamic also audible in some of these girls’ narratives. It is of note that, without the message that girls are entitled to sexual desire, self-respect usually translates into a girl’s resistance to giving in to a boy’s desire; the self in question should not by definition have her own desire. And boys who respect a girl do not engage her on sexual terms.

Struggling with poverty and racism, getting few opportunities for second chances, having little access to quality education, bear- ing the burden of governmental surveillance and interference, and encountering high levels of overt violence, the urban girls had little room in which to develop a sexual identity. What was missing from most of their stories and likely from most of their lives was a cri- tique of how their own desire gets set up as the “straw man” when there are other such systemic factors at play. These girls have to deal with the impact of racism and poverty on the lives of others around them as well as on their own, including the pressures on men of color to construct masculinities with few resources, higher rates of HIV and AIDS in their communities, and others’ expecta- tions that they will become teen mothers. Carrying these burdens, the urban girls may find entitlement to pleasure especially hard to come by.

Many of the suburban girls were surprised that I wanted to talk to them about their sexuality; it was as if, despite comprehensive sex education in their health classes and pamphlets about contracep- tion readily available outside the office in which we were talking, no one had taken this part of their lives seriously. Although these girls did mention in passing the physical dangers associated with sexual activity, usually in the course of telling me how they pro- tected themselves from these outcomes, they did not, as a group, emanate an intense fear of the potential bad outcomes associated

with their sexual desire.
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Some of these girls had had personal experiences with sexual violence; but even those who had showed no sign they were worried about being harmed by a partner. Some girls, however, told stories like Sophie’s, revealing an unconscious awareness of the potential for male violence. And the phenomenon of becoming tongue-tied was more pervasive among the suburban girls who had silent bodies, confused bodies, or bodies cut off from their desire than it had been among the comparable urban girls, suggesting that the suburban girls were dealing with the complexi- ties of sexual desire at a more unconscious level.

None of the suburban girls associated their sexual desire with material threats; none of them felt they had to “trade in” their sex- uality to ensure their education. Reflecting their access to a mate- rial safety net, they did not feel their well-being was at stake. There was no master narrative of ruination underlying these girls’ stories about sexuality. Instead of hearing relentless tales of sexuality’s woes, the suburban girls told of receiving mixed messages about sexuality from adults and peers. Some, like Emily, said that their mothers or another adult in their life had talked in a positive way about female sexuality; yet they had also picked up and internal- ized negative constructs of desiring girls. She struggled consciously with this contradiction. The narratives of some of these girls sug- gested that being told they are entitled to their sexual desire did not mesh with the ways girls and their sexuality are pictured in the larger landscape of television and teen magazines, or with the experiences they observed or heard in their friends’ lives. It is hard to hold on to the contrary notions that girls’ sexuality is normal but that girls who step over an invisible and unstable line get tar- nished with a bad reputation. Missing was an analysis of how this categorization of girls functions to keep all girls in a state of sexual anxiety. The tension exclusive to the suburban girls, between the new idea that “girls can do anything” and the enduring ways they

were expected to limit their sexuality, was as unspoken as it was pervasive.

More of the suburban girls framed their sexual desire as some- thing to which they were simply entitled, as Amber did. These girls’ stories about their desire, and their struggles with their embodied feelings, signal that they were trying to explore the interplay be- tween emotional and sexual intimacy. As we saw in Eugenia’s struggles, the roadblocks for them derived more from within themselves than from the social world populated by female friends and male partners. In contrast to a lot of the urban girls, few of these girls spoke of much older boyfriends, suggesting that the gender inequities may be less pronounced when not amplified by age differentials. Several girls talked about the egalitarian nature of their relationships with sensitive boys, boys whose roads to success were already paved for them. Space for sexual curiosity seemed more readily available to these girls.

Almost all of the suburban girls talked about how girls perceived to be desiring girls are vulnerable to getting a reputation. Working within the framework of romance, though, these girls felt fully protected from being labeled a slut if they explored their sexuality in a long-term monogamous relationship. Within this safe space, the concern about getting a reputation was not an especially per- sonal one. The notable exception to this rule reveals the price that is exacted most pervasively from the suburban girls: If, like Sophie, they strayed from or rejected the strict boundary on their desire stipulated by this single option, then they were fair game for being deemed a slut. While these girls, like most of the urban girls, par- ticipated in this policing practice, they were less likely to frame girls whom they labeled in this way as malevolently bad; rather, they saw girls who put themselves into this situation, which virtu- ally none of them felt they had done or would do, as “pathetic” or having “low self-esteem.” They were often puzzled about why a girl

would expose herself in this way, volunteering possible explana- tions, such as that the girl wanted to fit in with her peers who had had sex or that she had a pathological need for attention; but none of them embraced these motivations as their own.

Here the romance narrative served them well; most of these girls framed sexual experiences, particularly intercourse, as expressions of love and caring, by themselves and their partners. The romance narrative was prevalent in how they talked about their sexual expe- riences and the resulting problems. For example, an interesting paradox was their frequent admission of faking sexual pleasure as a way to please their boyfriends. When I invited them to consider that it might be a bit curious to pretend to have pleasure to make someone else happy, some of them were able to see the paradox. But diminishing themselves for the sake of pleasing boys was more often than not seen as a normal act for these girls, a manifestation of the institution of heterosexuality they did not apprehend.

Perhaps because the physical dangers associated with their desire were less salient to them as a group, the suburban girls tended to consistently worry about maintaining their identities as “good,” appropriate, and normal girls, and they feared that important people in their lives, especially their mothers, might not regard them in this way. Jenny provided the most extreme example of this concern in her dissociation from her desire; all of her narratives indicated a virtually complete internalization of the Perfect Girl, the girl who wants to be popular and have friends (ergo has sex to fit in, like Jenny thinks she may have) but wants to be a “good” girl (thus feels uncomfortable, like Jenny does, at the thought of hav- ing been bad, disappointing her mother, and possibly sullying her reputation). There is no space within herself to recognize or accept her desire; it is not in the mold. Yet Jenny’s formulations and dis- embodiment were not the rule among the suburban girls. While they felt desire and many knew, at some level, that it was normal

for girls to have sexual feelings, these girls spoke of an internal con- flict, between their idea about who they felt they were supposed to be (not a desiring girl) and the problem of actually having such sexual feelings. This tension often surfaced when discussing masturbation. Most of the urban girls flat out rejected masturba- tion as inappropriate for girls, though a few believed girls (other than themselves) did indeed masturbate. The suburban girls took the opportunity afforded by talking about masturbation to articu- late the sense of discomfort they felt about having sexual feelings when not pleasing a boy in the context of heterosexual behavior.

A comparison of the urban and suburban girls’ descriptions of their dilemmas of desire reveals that what was present or most salient for one group of girls illuminated what was more muted in the other group. The suburban girls spoke less frequently than did the urban girls about their vulnerability to sexual violence. Being more consistently structured by the master narrative of romance that plays subtly with but does not distinctly define the connection between pleasure and danger, the suburban girls’ stories suggest that they know unconsciously but do not have conscious aware- ness of the real dangers they could encounter and, for a number of them, have encountered.