Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (4 page)

Inez’s story illustrates how, by disallowing female sexual desire, we manufacture danger and risk by throwing a roadblock in the pathway of girls’ psychosocial development, psychological health, and ability to form authentic relationships. We create an impos- sible situation for girls: Healthy sexuality means having sexual desire, but there is little if any safe space—physically, socially, psy- chologically—for these forbidden and dangerous feelings. Girls who embrace or even resist the stories we offer about female and male sexuality inevitably face dilemmas when they feel sexual desire: Do they feel and act on their desire and risk the negative, even punitive, possibly disastrous consequences, or do they deny, discount, or distract others from their desire and suffer a profound disconnection from themselves?

I am aware that considering the importance of sexual desire in girls’ lives and in their psychological development is for many people not only counterintuitive but also suspect. So I want to emphasize that I am not advocating that adolescent girls engage in sexual intercourse or suggesting that early sexual intercourse or sexual activity of any sort is inevitable or good. Rather, I am advocating a shift in the whole way we think and talk about girls’ sexuality, and in how we talk to and support adolescent girls— regardless of whether or not girls are having sexual intercourse. I am not offering an evaluation or judgment of girls’ sexual behav- ior, and I am not outlining a timetable for when adolescents, girls

or boys, should have sexual intercourse or any other sexual experi- ence.
I am suggesting a different conversation altogether.
By equating and confounding sexuality with sexual intercourse, we limit how all adolescents learn to conceptualize their romantic relationships and themselves as sexual beings. We also undermine our efforts to educate them and to learn more ourselves about adolescent sexual- ity through research. Sexual desire is not the same as sexual inter- course or even desire for sexual intercourse. Intercourse is one of an array of behaviors with which a person can respond to such feelings. By focusing on sexual intercourse, which is an act or a behavior, we have left out and glossed over another key aspect of sexuality and sexual development:
sexual feelings.

With this distinction in mind, rather than designing yet another study to investigate girls’ sexual activity, behavior, or attitudes, I organized my research around a new line of inquiry: When asked in a straightforward and safe way about their own sexual desire, what do adolescent girls say? In this book, I report the findings from an in-depth study of two ordinary groups of teenage girls, one from an urban public school and one from a suburban public school. I listened to Inez and twenty-nine other girls answer direct questions about their experiences of sexual desire as a means of researching not the
prevalence
of sexual desire among adolescent girls but the
phenomenology
of their sexual desire. That is, this study is not about how many girls feel how much sexual desire; it is about how two groups of girls describe their experiences of their sexual feelings. The point is not to represent all girls or provide a comprehensive or definitive taxonomy of female adolescent sexual desire. The idea of this kind of a study is to develop an understand- ing of some of the ways girls describe experiencing and dealing with their sexual feelings. It is an attempt to let girls tell other sto- ries about their sexuality besides “it just happened.” These girls are the first to describe their experiences of sexual desire, what it is like

for them, what it means to them, and how they negotiate their own feelings. These girls did something quite courageous; their willing- ness to speak about a part of their lives that is, essentially, unspeak- able made it possible to crack open a closed window into adolescent girls’ sexuality and take note of the initial breeze that wafted in.

Although this book focuses on the experiences of girls,
9
you will hear a range of stories,
from girls’ perspectives,
about adolescent boys and their struggles with their sexuality and desire for inti- macy or their sense that they are entitled to satisfy their own sexual wishes, even if it means taking psychological or physical advantage of girls. You will also hear girls speak about their wishes and fears regarding adolescent boys. I do not attempt to compare boys’ and girls’ experiences of sexuality or intend to condemn boys’ sexual behavior, but inevitably (given our complementary beliefs about boys’ and girls’ sexuality) girls’ stories about desire are also stories about gender relations. It is likely that what girls tell us about desire may raise new questions for boys about their experiences of their own sexuality.

Ultimately, the stories these girls tell must be understood as larger than their individual biographies; taken together, they con- stitute a narration of how a patriarchal society tries to keep girls and women at bay by forcing, or attempting to force, a wedge between their psyches and their bodies and how girls deal with these forces. As part of a larger tale, their stories make visible the permeability of any distinction between private experiences and public realities regarding their sexuality.

VOICES OF DESIRE

In order to perpetuate itself, every oppres- sion must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant sup- pression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.

—Audre Lorde,
Sister Outsider

In recent years, mainstream research- ers have called for more experiential studies of girls’ sexuality and acknowledged that girls’ sexual desire is not only a legitimate but a necessary area for study (Brooks-Gunn & Furstenberg, 1989; Petersen, Leffert, & Graham, 1995). Feminist researchers have extended how we study female adolescent sexuality by asking ado- lescent girls about their perspectives on and experiences with romantic relationships and sexuality. Interestingly, these studies demonstrate that when girls do speak about their sexuality, they do not talk spontaneously about their own desire. That is, when girls do tell sexual stories, their own desire is left out. For instance, Karin Martin (1996) notes that in her study of adolescents’ experi- ences of puberty, girls talked about relationships and not about sexual pleasure or desire when asked to speak about their sexual experiences. Lisa Dodson (1998) used a variety of methods— structured interviews, more casual conversations, and group dis- cussions led by girls—to study the experiences of black and white

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poor adolescent girls, who spoke of the dangers of love, sexual pre- dation by boys, and pervasive sexual abuse. She noted that these girls did not seem to be aware that what they were describing was male dominance or how rarely they spoke of sexual desire or plea- sure. Do these findings mean that girls are not having experiences of desire, or that their desire is not important in their sexual expe- riences or heterosexual relationships? The “missing discourse of desire” in these studies suggests that it is unlikely that girls them- selves will raise the taboo topic of sexual desire
unless specifically asked.

I did specifically ask and found that their own sexual feelings posed great dilemmas for the girls I interviewed. In the first part of this chapter, I explain the methods of my study: the sample, the procedures for collecting and analyzing the data, and the research principles and theory that guided these choices. In the second part, I report how these girls speak, when asked, about their sexual desire and the kinds of dilemmas they identify as endemic to their own sexual feelings.

whom i asked
When I began this research the first and most obvious question was whom to ask about the experience of female sexual desire in adolescence. Michelle Fine and colleagues have pondered the ram- ifications of collecting stories only from “victims” of racism and poverty, noting that such narratives can be used to shore up stereo- types and political agendas that are harmful to individuals while convenient for society (Fine et al., 2000). Social science literature and research on adolescent sexuality is a case in point. The un- stated assumption that certain girls—poor girls, girls of color, urban girls—are more sexual and thus are at higher risk of nega- tive outcomes is reproduced by the intensive study and surveillance to which these girls are subjected. The girls whose sexuality—

voices of desire
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whose sexual behavior and contraceptive practices—are studied are the girls whose sexuality results in
visible
problems: adolescent pregnancies and births, school dropout, the “cycle” of poverty. This stance is then justified by the knowledge that we thus produce. I had several options for dealing with this conundrum. One was to collect narratives to illustrate the complexity of girls’ experiences from those whose sexuality is scrutinized and, in effect, demon- ized. This option could have been seen as benevolent, righting an injustice done to urban girls. Although the narratives told by the urban girls did in fact provide a window into this anticipated com- plexity, limiting the group under study to only these girls might have indeed invited misuse of their stories. To dismantle the deep- seated popular notion that urban girls embody female adolescent sexuality and the complementary implication that suburban girls are not sexual, I made a conscious and purposeful choice to in- clude both groups of girls in this study. Including girls from differ- ent locations allowed me to find out if girls’ descriptions of their sexuality cohere within their group and also how their experiences compare with the myths and stereotypes about both urban and suburban girls’ sexuality.

I was particularly interested in how girls who are or are becom- ing sexually active describe and experience their sexual desire, since one might expect or hope that their own sexual feelings would be a part of those experiences. Reflecting the average age of initiation of sexual intercourse (16.2 years, according to the data then available), most of the participants were juniors in high school, ranging in age from 15 to 18, with an average age of ap- proximately 16.5.
1
The girls who participated in this study were selected at random from a complete roster of girls in the junior classes of each school—not, as one girl in the suburban school feared, because I knew something about their sexual or relation- ship histories. I sought to avoid hearing the stories only of girls

who volunteered and to include girls who might not have made such an active choice to participate.
2
In the urban school, I made an effort to include girls who represented the diversity of the stu- dent body; in the suburban school, I made an effort to include some of the few girls of color.
3
Both the girls and their parents received a written invitation to participate and a description of the study;
4
all the girls under the age of 18 had to supply written parental consent to be part of the study. I made follow-up phone calls to the homes of girls from whom I did not hear back. About half of the girls I approached to be in the study agreed to partici- pate. While it is possible that there is something idiosyncratic about this group of girls, as compared to those who did not partic- ipate, the teachers and administrators with whom I worked did not identify any girl from the list of participants as particularly differ- ent from any other girl in their school.

Because there had been no previous study of this question, my goal was to generate a heterogeneous group of girls from whom to cull an initial understanding of girls’ experiences of desire.
5
The thirty girls who participated represent a range of races and ethnic- ities, religions, sexual abuse histories, and sexual experiences.
6
The table labeled “Who the Girls Are” presents salient demographic and personal history information for each girl. It is important to point out that a multitude of factors are relevant to their experi- ences of desire. They had a range of sexual experiences and of experiences with romantic relationships. They came from a variety of family structures: those with two parents at home, one parent at home and one on the road, divorced parents, older or younger siblings, no siblings, step families, single mothers, single fathers, sisters as primary caretakers. They were Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish; some were religious, some were not. Almost a third of these girls, when asked about something bad happening to them regarding sex, told of some experience with sexual abuse or sexual