Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (22 page)

1. In the balance of pleasure and danger, the suburban girls talked more about the pleasurable aspects of their sexual desire. They were more likely to be open to and open with their sexuality than the urban girls were; absent from their narratives was the constant feeling of impending disaster. The girls who felt entitled to their desire were more likely to be those from the suburban school; even in the group that associated sexual desire with danger, the subur- ban girls tended to accept an ambivalent truce rather than cut desire off entirely, as the urban girls were prone to do. With race and class privileges seems to come more opportunity for safe
   

   spaces, though for some girls, like Kim and Jenny, these were still hard to come by. Vigilant with themselves in a different way than the urban girls, the suburban girls struggled to hold the contradic- tions that seem more evident in their social landscape rather than attempting to erase them by ridding themselves of desire. While the streets of this suburban community felt relatively safe, life in the suburbs harbored dangers around sexuality that are in fact present but less a part of the girls’ everyday lives and stories. The dangers of desire seemed less evident than in the urban commu- nity. Or they just were not discussed. For instance, Kim said that a girl in her school had gotten pregnant and had the baby, and was distressed that no one ever said anything about it. No other girl in the study mentioned this event.
   

   Conversely, the urban girls less frequently referred to the more psychological dimensions of their experiences of desire and their sexual curiosity. The presence of the master narrative of ruination seems to eclipse these real features of female adolescent sexuality. So completely aware of the physical and material dangers embed- ded in their experiences of desire, the urban girls as a group had a harder time carving out psychic or relational space for the possibil- ity of pleasure. In some sense, the stakes simply are different for these two groups of girls.
   

   Further analysis of the differences between the stories about desire told by the suburban and the urban girls yielded new insights into the geographies of desire. Coding all of the girls’ nar- ratives for whether they were primarily about pleasure, primarily about vulnerability, or about both pleasure and danger, Laura Sza- lacha and I (1999) found a statistical difference in the narratives told by the urban and the suburban girls. Where the urban girls told over three times more desire narratives about their vulner- ability than about their pleasure, the suburban girls told equal numbers of pleasure and vulnerability desire narratives.
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   The
   

   suburban girls told significantly more narratives about pleasure than the urban girls did.
   

   sexual violation and geography
   Pregnancy and disease are not the only forms of physical danger to which sexuality makes girls vulnerable. In this study, nine of the thirty-one girls told me they had experienced some form of sexual molestation, abuse, or violence in childhood or in adolescence,
   

   when I asked them if there had been anything bad that had hap- pened to them regarding sex or relationships; one other girl was not sure she had been raped, and two others had escaped attacks. Both the urban and the suburban girls reported such incidents. The girls who did speak of sexual violation were distributed across the groupings of ways girls spoke about desire. Statistics indicate that sexual violence is prevalent in the lives of all female adoles- cents (Silverman et al., 2001). When we evaluated whether these reports were associated with how the girls talked about their sexual desire, Laura Szalacha and I (1999) discovered that having reported a history of sexual abuse, attack, molestation, or violence in a romantic relationship had an impact on the likelihood of telling narratives about sexual pleasure for the suburban girls but not for the urban girls;
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   that is, the suburban girls who did not report sexual violence told significantly more pleasure stories about their own desire, compared to any of the other girls in the study. The other three groups—the suburban subgroup that had reported violation and both of the urban groups—told many more narratives of desire being associated with vulnerability than of desire being associated with pleasure or of pleasure and vulnerabil- ity figuring equally. For instance, suburban girls who had not reported sexual violence were almost six times more likely to tell a narrative about their own desire with a central theme of pleasure than were urban girls who had not reported sexual violence.
   

   How do we make sense of this differential impact? We concluded that, in contrast to the suburban girls, the urban girls encountered constant and pervasive violence in their lives.
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   Shootings in a nearby subway station, neighborhood violence connected to drugs, domestic violence that was audible through thin walls of apart- ment buildings, a metal detector at school—violence was in the air they breathed, not sequestered in the realm of their sexuality. These differences highlight the conundrum of sexuality for all girls and women in this society: to be sexually empowered—that is, to feel entitled to act on one’s own sexual desire responsibly—is at the same time to be in danger in a society that resists women’s empow- erment. But it is such empowerment that is required to identify and fuel the social change necessary to diminish and dismantle these dangers.
   

   There were also nuanced and important differences in how the girls from each of these groups talked about their experience of desire. In particular, the suburban girls who had not reported sex- ual violation described desire as an interplay between their minds and their bodies. The narratives told by these girls offer a way to understand how sexual desire is not only a matter of physical feel- ings or sensations but also a conjunction of embodied feelings and thoughts and emotions. Sophie, for example, was able to explain that desire happens “both mentally and physically. Because your mind knows that you want that, but what triggered that was like the feeling in your body.” Amber’s description resonates with Sophie’s: “It evolves from the head, definitely, it’s kind of like head to vagina, it’s like a little direct signal, but [pause] I think that the heart’s involved too, depending on how much you like this per- son.” The other suburban girls, and most of the urban girls, spoke of a disconnect between these two aspects of the self.
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   Recall Inez’s mind fighting for control over her body. Alexandra observed that “when you’re in a situation and your body’s saying one thing, you
   

   don’t really consult your mind all the time.” For Nikki, desire was “all in my head... my body has nothing to do with it... pretty much it’s in what you think about.”
   

   Within the group of urban girls who had reported sexual viola- tion, however, there were exceptions to this pattern. Some of them sounded more like the suburban girls who had not reported sexual violence. Barbara talked about feeling desire “emotionally wise, because you can feel it in your emotions, as well, especially if you really care about that person, then it becomes emotional as well as physical.” All of these girls narrated a sense of entitlement to their sexual desire, and some of them described how, through their own efforts or through support from others, they had consciously developed the capacity for embodied sexual desire.
   

   gendered geography of desire: a word about sexual minority girls
   

   Although I cannot make comparisons between the few girls who identified themselves as lesbian or bisexual and the heterosexual girls, who constituted the majority in this sample, the experiences and perspectives of these lesbian and bisexual girls add insight. These girls were more conscious of their sexual desire than many of the other girls; it was not only a significant but also an especially defining feature of their adolescence. While it might seem as if girls who feel desire for girls or both girls and boys are somehow exempt from the institution of heterosexuality, in fact they stand in a very different and threatening relationship to it, by violating its most core principle: that we are, by nature, attracted to the opposite gender only. Like other women who do not enter into the socially sanctioned heterosexual relationship—women who are single, di- vorced, or widowed, or nuns—these girls have an “uncontained” sexuality that heightens social anxiety and thus instigates violent reactions (Weitz, 1984). While true in some sense for all adolescent
   

   girls, girls who desire girls instigate intense alarm. They commit a double violation: they feel sexual desire, and it is for girls.
   

   Overall, their stories sounded more like those told by the urban girls. They spoke of multiple dangers, fear of physical harm, and complete loss of relationships, rather than damage through disap- pointing others. They were highly aware that a lot was at stake for them because of their desire. Even though it was a shaping force in the experiences of all of the girls, unlike the other girls in the study, the sexual minority girls had a unique awareness and ability to articulate the power of compulsory heterosexuality. These girls spoke about being particularly isolated, noting how their isolation lessened the chance of diffusing their confusion about or discom- fort with their desire.
   

   Bisexual and lesbian girls have particularly potent, frightening, and complicated challenges in their relationships with their par- ents (Savin-Williams, 1998, 2001). For instance, Megan told me of her mother’s concern when she found out Megan was going to a support group for sexual minority youth, because, Megan reported, her mother “worried that they wouldn’t say I was straight, that these adolescents were unreliable.” Her mother’s fears contradicted Megan’s actual experience in the group, confusing her as well as upsetting her. While Megan understood her mother’s difficulty— “no one wants a gay daughter”—she did not disconnect from her desire and stayed in the youth group. Her mother grew to accept Megan’s bisexuality, even though “it was hard for her,” according to Megan. Like the urban girls, girls who think they may or do desire other girls face overt threats of violence, rejection, and punitive lashing out from the adults in their lives and their friends.
   

   A consideration of how the girls in this study, taken together as a group marked “girls,” responded to the dilemmas that their own desire produced shows the continuities and similarities between
   

   urban and suburban girls. At the same time, a search for differ- ences yields another dimension of the variability in adolescent girls’ experiences of sexual desire. The topologies of these two geographies of desire reflect the relative instability and danger of urban life and the relative conventionality and safety of life in the suburbs. These findings are somewhat surprising, upending the Urban Girl and the Perfect Girl, the stick figures that organize our thinking about female adolescent sexuality. The girls whom society has marked as sexually out of control were the girls whose experi- ences were suffused with worry and caution about material and physical consequences. The girls who have been categorized as not sexual were the girls who felt freer to explore their sexual curiosity. That is, none of them were overly sexual, and none of them, even the girls with silent bodies, were asexual. How could we have got- ten it so wrong, so backward? Breaking the silence about female adolescent sexuality not only reveals the impact of gendered sexu- ality in the lives of individual girls, it also reveals how readily we can make and impose assumptions about female sexuality when it has been silenced.
   

2. SPEAKING OF DESIRE
   

Your mama told you to be discreet and keep your freak to yourself

but your mama lied to you all this time she knows as well as you and I

you’ve got to express what is taboo in you...

and share your freak with the rest of us cause it’s a beautiful thing

this is my sexual revolution!

Macy Gray,“Sexual Revolution”

Misty, who identifies herself as a “riot grrl,” referring to the national group of girls who actively defy con- ventional, constrictive constructions of femininity, writes in a zine called
Suck My Dick,

In American society, wimmin are novelties. Objects. A body part. Something to use for convenience. Wimmin need to learn that power is not given, we have to take it. We need to realize that we don’t have to stand around and be treated like this. Don’t let any- one control you or dictate your life to you... We need to break free of our own stereotypes. No one can save you from your oppression except yourself. (Quoted in Carlip, 1995, p. 58)

Misty’s words resonate with the observations of Audre Lorde, who wrote that in this society, women have been systematically kept from the power of the erotic, because it makes women dangerous: Women so empowered will challenge an oppressive status quo

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(1984). Girls’ and women’s knowledge is dangerous because it threatens to reveal that power differentials and abuses are not sim- ply the way things should be.

At a time when we are told that there is a “war on boys” and that girls are just fine, the voices of the girls in this study sound a differ- ent note, reminding us that being a girl, living comfortably in a girl’s body, is neither easy nor especially safe. When asked directly about their experiences of sexual desire, the girls in this study talked about these powerful feelings as well and as clearly as any of us can. Inquiring from a perspective that acknowledged the ways that the institution of heterosexuality is organized to preempt, pre- vent, or punish their desire, I heard how girls respond to the per- sonal, relational, and social challenges they come to associate with their desire. These girls’ stories underscored how the institution of heterosexuality makes it hard for them to know and validate the complexity of their own sexual feelings; most of them struggled with whether or how to integrate these feelings into a sense of themselves and whether or how to bring these feelings to bear on their decisions about what to do—and not to do—in sexual situa- tions. They narrated ways to deal with the dilemmas that seemed to spring from their desire, which frequently kept them from being comfortable in their own bodies and from authentic relationships with other people in their lives (boyfriends, girlfriends, parents, peers).