Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (5 page)

1. . “Abuse” refers to ongoing violation over significant periods of time.
   

2. .“Molestation” refers to a single instance or several individual instances of violation.
   

violence; others told of crushed hopes and broken hearts.
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This pertinent information is incorporated into the case descriptions in the next three chapters.

Recruitment provided ready evidence of the silence about, and silencing of, girls’ sexual desire that feminist analyses have revealed in society at large. In phone conversations several suburban moth- ers expressed concern about how tapes of their daughters speaking about sexual desire might incriminate them or ruin their chances of success in the future; one mother consented, contingent upon my agreement to destroy the tape at the end of the study. One urban girl’s father, a girl whom I later discovered from some of the participants had wanted to be involved, not only refused to provide consent but berated me for wanting to speak with his daughter about her sexuality and accused me of being immoral.

Cultural factors also surfaced in the recruitment process. I spoke to several Asian girls on the phone who said in hushed tones that they were too busy to be in the study or that they simply did not want to participate. A Chinese colleague I consulted about this phenomenon expressed little surprise, explaining that since it is anathema for Asian girls to recognize or acknowledge their own sexuality, the idea of speaking to anyone, never mind a white woman in school, was out of the question. One Indian mother kept assuring me pleasantly that the permission form was in the mail; it took a few weeks for me to figure out that this was her polite way of asking me to leave her and her daughter alone.

The girls themselves knew how dangerous it could be even to consider saying what they knew about desire: Any awareness or acknowledgment of their own sexual desire could be associated with being thought of as “bad.” In one phone call a mother told me her daughter not only did not want to participate but had actually found the letter from me addressed to her mother and hidden it.

When the mother discovered what had happened, she asked her daughter why she had taken mail not addressed to her. The girl told her mother in unusually vociferous tones that she did not want to participate. At first, I accepted this refusal, but something about the strength of this girl’s response bothered me. I called again, and she happened to answer the phone. She asked me why she had been chosen; she wanted to know how I “knew about” her, that is, how I had gotten wind of her bad reputation. I explained that she was selected randomly and that I knew nothing about her at all. She agreed to participate, and my interview with her was one of the most lively and complex in the study. Several girls mentioned in interviews that they would not want their teachers knowing what they were telling me about themselves, because they feared they might be thought less of by these adult women in their lives. Given the girls’ vigilance about protecting themselves and their fears of judgment, I was aware that they could not easily volunteer the information I was asking them to share and had to acknowl- edge to them that my enterprise was not only unusual but in most cases taboo. These recruitment experiences heightened my aware- ness that I needed to provide evidence to these girls that I was not judging them, as well as opportunities for them to evaluate my trustworthiness.

how i asked
Prior to the interviews, I met with the girls in each school in a group, to explain my research and, I hoped, to begin a conversation with them about their own sexual pleasure and sexual desire in an

explicitly public forum. Thinking that they might not feel com- fortable asking or telling me things in a one-on-one interview, I figured that as a group they might feel more empowered to chal- lenge me or ask me questions. I was especially conscious that the

girls in the urban school had been the subjects of studies in which white women and men asked them about their sexual behavior— do you have sexual intercourse? how often? with whom? under what conditions?—and I wanted to let them know that this study was going to be different. Ironically, it was in the suburban school that this group approach succeeded. Almost all of the suburban participants attended. After discussing confidentiality, a concept they were familiar with from their family-life education classes and took seriously, they asked me what I meant by desire, why I was doing this study, why they in particular had been selected, what I planned to do with the information they gave me.

In contrast, the group meeting at the urban school was a com- plete flop. Most of the girls who agreed to be in the study said they would come to the group, but fewer than half actually came, and no one wanted to ask any questions. The girls scattered around an empty classroom, a few sitting together. It was an extremely uncomfortable situation for all. I explained what I was doing, why I was asking these questions, and how they were selected; I assured them of confidentiality and my willingness to answer any ques- tions they wanted to ask. Two of the girls affirmed my suggestion that desire may be a part of girls’ experience that is not talked about with knowing looks and bubbling laughter. After several attempts to engage them in a discussion, it was obvious that it wasn’t going to happen. They all agreed to set up times for individ- ual interviews and vanished as soon as it was reasonable to leave.

I was puzzled about this partial and silent group. Why hadn’t the others shown up? Why hadn’t the ones who did said anything? I decided to ask them about it in the individual interviews. One after another, the girls explained that they did not show up or that they did not speak, because they did not want to reveal themselves in front of one another. By contrast, with varying levels of comfort they revealed themselves to me in the privacy of the individual

interview, what Trisha called a “one-on-one type of conversation.” They did not trust their words, their experiences, even their ques- tions about a study of girls’ desire
in front of the other girls,
so fear- ful were they of saying something about themselves that could be used against them. Trisha distinguished safe from unsafe spaces for girls to speak about their sexuality:

I don’t feel comfortable saying it in front of them, because I just, I always have the feeling, you know, they’re gonna, oh, guess what she said in there, you know, just kinda makes you feel uneasy. If I don’t know the person, I don’t talk to them, I won’t say any- thing... if they were with their friends, they would have no problem talking about it, it was because we were all in the same room. We know each other, but it’s just not something that they want everybody else to know about. Like I said before, they wanna keep it within their friends and nobody else is to know.

With the urban girls, the girls whom I had most wanted to “em- power” by giving them a chance to outnumber me and thus tip the balance of power in their favor, I learned that speaking to one another outside the safety of intimate friendships seemed to be far more treacherous than speaking to an unknown adult. They be- lieved confidentiality would be maintained by the interviewer but not by their peers. I had underestimated how dangerous talking and knowing about desire in the presence of other girls could be.

My method of data collection was a one-on-one, semiclinical individual interview. Rather than a strict protocol that ensures that each girl is asked exactly the same questions in the same way, this method utilizes clinical principles of asking a question, listening to the answer, and then asking the next question in response to what the girl is saying within a set protocol of key questions. A tradi- tional survey would not have provided the opportunity to col- lect the rich, nuanced, complex information that the interview

relationship makes possible in order to understand a phenomenon of human experience (Reinharz, 1992).
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In addition, survey instru- ments have been shown to be an ineffective means for collecting written female narratives of sexual experience (Brodkey & Fine, 1998).

Primarily, I asked girls to offer descriptions of and to tell stories, or narratives, about specific experiences they had had with their own sexuality, including their own sexual desire, pleasure, and fan- tasies. I asked specifically how their bodies figured in these experi- ences and also if they had had “bad” experiences. I chose to avoid asking the “usual” questions that girls, especially girls in the urban school, had come to expect. I was aware that when asked to speak about sexual desire, some girls would disclose experiences of sex- ual abuse or violence to me. Some girls who chose to tell me about childhood sexual abuse had never spoken about it before, or had spoken and found their words essentially ignored by the women in their lives. At the outset, I made arrangements to refer these girls to therapists. I made these referrals on several occasions.

Some of the most important, even “interruptive,” questions I asked the girls were about their bodies; since I could not expect them to volunteer this information, I asked them to develop the story line of how their bodies were and were not involved in their experiences with their sexuality. It was clear that acknowledging their bodies was new and different for most of them, interesting and helpful for some, confusing or strange for others, and impos- sible or simply irrelevant for still others. Every girl I interviewed said that no adult woman had ever talked to her before about sex- ual desire and pleasure “like this,” that is, so overtly, specifically, or in such depth. More than half of them said they had never spoken about their sexual desire and pleasure with anyone. I was aware that if I was going to ask girls to break the silence about their desire, to talk about aspects of their experience that, as they

reported, no other adult had been or perhaps seemed willing to hear, I had to be prepared to respond to whatever feelings the inter- view raised for them—distress, joy, curiosity, fear. I had to be pre- pared for how the connection between me and an individual girl would shape what she did and, in a few cases, did not say to me and what I did (and did not) ask her. I wish I had been more prepared for how their words and silences would affect me.

how they did (not) answer
Given that there was an element of self-selection in the process (not all girls who were approached agreed to participate), I was surprised by the range of reactions I encountered in the individual

interviews with these girls. Some girls reacted as I expected: enthused, even relieved, to have an opportunity to speak, puzzle about, and explore this aspect of their experience with an inter- ested adult. A number of girls in both schools talked with me for almost two hours. One girl came to find me a few days after her interview, to thank me and tell me that “everything had changed and it was 100 percent better” with her boyfriend because of the insights she had gained into herself through our interview; I heard that he had tried to find me to thank me, too.

Yet a few of the girls expressed excitement or real interest on the phone or in a brief personal contact and then remained reticent or even silent in the interview. The threat of silence looms large in any interview. Although race and class may have been important fac- tors (Ward & Taylor, 1992), in the sense that some of the girls of color or poor girls may have said what they believed I as a white, middle-class adult wanted to hear (Taylor, Gilligan, & Sullivan, 1995), many of the girls in the urban school enthusiastically en- gaged in the interview, despite or perhaps because of these differ- ences between us (Way, 1998). Similarly, a number of girls in the suburban school may have resisted my inquiry because of the

similarities between us. Some of the suburban girls refused to answer most of my questions while claiming they wanted to remain in the study; others smiled and answered politely while not really saying much. I am sure that religion and other cultural fac- tors powerfully shaped the narratives these and other girls chose to tell or not tell me.

I encountered different forms of silence. Angela wanted to par- ticipate, yet found it difficult to do so. She said she “never really talk[s] about” sexuality and feels it is a “touchy subject.” She told me enough about her experience for me to know that she did not feel desire—“I don’t know about ever, but for right now”—and did not wish to discuss it. I felt it would have been cruel to continue the interview and ask her to tell me a narrative about sexual desire, as if I had not heard what she had just said. She did confide in me that she had been sexually abused on several occasions but did not want to talk about it. Throughout the book, I explore the possible impact that a girl’s history of sexual abuse may have had on her experiences with sexuality and on her participation in the study.

One girl who said little had had few experiences with romantic relationships or sexuality. Jordan, an athletic white girl in the sub- urban school, described having fun with a friend while watching boys drive by her stoop in cars, but her sexuality did not appear to be an active part of her current life. A few girls were clearly offended by my questions and became angry; they resisted what they obviously experienced as my intrusion into their experience or “business.” Amy, a white girl in the suburban school who sat stiffly and did not look me in the eye, offered one-word answers; Honore, a black girl from the Caribbean in the urban school, thought I “must be a pervert” to want to know the answers to such questions. Interestingly, despite my suggestion that we stop the interview, Honore did offer answers, though relatively brief ones,

to my questions. Another girl was obviously ambivalent: Beverly, a slim and sharp black girl in the urban school, did talk to me, but her responses were extraordinarily sparse. In answering my ques- tions she never told elaborate stories, though she was quite frank and asked me a lot of questions about sexuality. I was sure that she experienced sexual desire. Given what I now know about the dan- gers girls perceive in acknowledging their desire to an adult, it is likely that these girls did not trust me. It is possible that sexual desire is not a part of their lived experience. It is possible that these girls were shy, not “big talkers” in general. It is possible that talking about their sexuality was such a new experience that the words were simply hard to find.