Dirty Little Secrets (22 page)

One of the activities I like to do with girls is to have them find at least five images in their daily lives that give them a message about their sexual identities. The girls come back to me with many more than five images. They have magazines and phrases scribbled down from bathroom stalls. They have television shows and older men checking them out from their cars. They’ve got billboards and bus boards and posters. One had porn magazines she found in her brother’s closet. They come back angry. Some come back nonplussed, perhaps desensitized to our hypersexualized culture. Then we discuss what the messages mean and who the girls want to be in the world. They tell me their truths about the boys they like and what they’ve done and how it made them feel—the good stuff and the bad. And I listen, which is all they want.

If parents could do this for their girls, if they support their girls as they question the culture they live in, they will help them to be a little stronger against those waves. My hope is that with this kind of support, mothers like Jo, who we met at the beginning of this chapter, will have daughters who are much more powerful in the world than their mothers felt they were as teens.

Recently, I received an email from a woman who didn’t want me to know her name. She described her years of loose-girl behavior and how no one knows. She wrote, “I’ve spent my whole life hiding from the world, from myself. At this point I don’t know who I am or what I want. I’m lost…I wish we could talk honestly about ourselves, but loose girls can’t do that. The shame is eating me alive.” This brave woman’s pain is not that she had sex. Her pain comes from feeling silenced, from living an unnecessarily unspeakable life.

My hope is that this book begins some movement toward cracking that silence, toward the conversations we need to have with one another, and toward the transformation we need in our culture to change the direction teen girls have been herded into for so long. We
must
have these conversations. We must speak honestly. We must be louder.

Mostly, we have to tell our stories, because in our stories lie salvation for other girls and women. It seems so cliché—stories save lives. But that’s true. It was a story that laid the foundation for my own healing. I was a senior in high school, seventeen years old, and I took an elective English class called Minority Voices. We read stories about teenage girls who felt lonely, exiled, confused about who they were, and my whole world broke open: I wasn’t alone. There were others out there who felt what I felt. There were others expressing what I couldn’t yet express. This changed everything for me. Not yet, not in a tangible way. I was still going to hurt myself again and again. I was still going to let every crush I had, every boy who looked my way, consume my brain. I was still going to choose boys over self-enhancement. But those stories were there, in the back of my mind. They lingered. They made me want to write. And eventually, I found a way to write my own story, hoping a girl would one day read it and see herself, would keep my story in the back of her mind, and would one day tell her story, too—all these stories in a round, all these stories breaking the silence.

PART THREE

RESOURCES

APPENDIX

FOR SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS

Discussion Questions

1. What sorts of things do you think students learn about sex at school? In particular, what do girls learn?
   
2. How are sex-related issues currently addressed in your school? What needs to be addressed in a more effective way, and what needs addressing at all?
   
3. If abstinence is in your school’s sex education curriculum, is it aimed primarily at girls? What is the message connected to abstinence at your school?
   
4. Are cultural messages and cultural expectations exposed inside your school’s sex-education curriculum?
   
5. Are school counselors trained in how to deal with sex and relationship issues among the students?
   

SUGGESTED SEX-EDUCATION EXERCISES

Girls Will Be Girls

1. Students should find examples of expectations for girls in their culture. They will likely find them in commercials, ads, magazine articles, and other media.
   
2. Next, students write up sentences: According to [the ad, the article], I need to be ______________ to get/have ______________.
   
3. Have students work in groups to design their own ad campaign to support girls’ self-esteem. Point to some of the ad campaigns already in existence—one example is Nike, or the Dove Real Beauty Campaign.
   
4. Have students design hypothetical organizations that they feel girls could use, such as ones that encourage girls in sports or science.
   
5. Students then should start over but go through the exact same process for boys.
   

Ms. X

Students write questions for a teen sex-advice column. They can be real questions they have or questions they would expect to see in such a column. Put the questions into a hat and have them each choose one. Then, they work in twos to answer each question as though they were Ms. X. Finally, discuss their Ms. X answers as a class, encouraging them to pay attention to the question, What about girls’ desire?

SUGGESTED TRAINING CURRICULUM FOR SCHOOL COUNSELORS DEALING WITH SEX AND RELATIONSHIP ISSUES

1. Discuss what counselors see from girls versus boys regarding sex and relationships.
   
2. Explore examples of what girls versus boys are taught via the prevailing culture (use magazine ads, round-ups of television shows, and so on).
   
3. Discuss in small groups adults’ own assumptions about teenage girls’ sexual desires and desires about relationships. Open this up to the larger group to share discoveries.
   
4. Share worksheets for dealing with loose-girl feelings and handling loose-girl behavior.
   
5. Hand out two or three cases of loose-girl behavior from a student and have counselors role-play how they would respond to the student and address the behavior.
   

FOR PARENTS AND CARETAKERS

Tips for Talking about Sex with Your Teenage Girls

1. Use simple, straightforward language. Know that your adolescent is intelligent, probably savvy, and well aware when someone is being dishonest or circumspect. Respect your teen as emotionally intelligent. Trust that she knows what she wants. You are only there to help her safely get what she wants.
   
2. Don’t assume heterosexuality. Actually, don’t assume anything about your teen when it comes to sex.
   
3. Avoid “the talk”—a onetime conversation—and instead continue to be available for open communication about sex with your teen. This means being open to questions, asking her questions when you feel concerned, and talking regularly about the cultural messages in media that your teen sees and absorbs each day.
   
4. Learn about warning signs for as many issues as you can. In particular, know how to identify depression, anxiety, sex abuse, and self-harming sexual behavior. If you see enough signs to feel concerned, step in immediately. The sooner you acknowledge issues and get help, the better chance she will have.
   
5. Talk about safe sex—both physically and emotionally. Educate your teen about contraception. Take her to a gynecologist. But also talk about the fact that sex can create feelings you don’t expect.
   
6. Talk minimally about your own experiences. Always consider before sharing a story whether the story will truly help her. In general, err on the side of silence when it comes to your own sexual experiences. It’s a rare instance that your daughter needs to know anything about your past sex life.
   
7. Model self-care. Make yourself as conscious as you can of your sexual and relational behavior. Do your own therapy. Spend some time examining yourself. How much do you need, chase, and respond to male attention? How careful are you with your sex-related choices? What is your relationship with your partner? In other words, what are you teaching your daughter about intimacy? Do you have the sort of relationship you wish for your daughter? How do you treat the females in your world? What are you showing to your daughter about how she should feel about herself as a female—about what makes her worthwhile?
   

FOR COUNSELORS AND THERAPISTS AND SELF-HELP FOR POTENTIAL LOOSE GIRLS

Loose-Girl Behavior Assessment

1. Do you often use sex to get something—such as long-term love or a sense of worth—from your sex partner?
   
2. Do you use other aspects of male attention to gain a sense of worth or desirability?
   
3. Have you often avoided all else in your evening out, your work, your life, in pursuit of that attention?
   
4. Do you feel that you are needy?
   
5. Do you feel that your neediness makes you unlovable?
   
6. Do you hold fantasies that romantic interests will “save” you from deep-seated pain?
   
7. Have you more than a few times had sex with someone you didn’t want to have sex with simply because he wanted to?
   
8. Do you need every romantic encounter you have—sexual or not—to turn into long-term love, as opposed to consciously thinking about and making choices about whether the person is someone with whom you’d actually want such a long-term relationship?
   
9. Do you often feel dissatisfied in your romantic relationships?
   
10. Have you given up adventures and self-betterment through travel, schooling, and so on, because you didn’t want to be away from a romantic interest or the possibility of male attention?
    

If you answered yes to at least half (five) of these questions, you likely have loose-girl behavior.

CRITERIA FOR SEX AND LOVE ADDICTION

Addiction experts have identified the following criteria. If you answer yes to all or most of these, you likely have addictive romantic behavior.

1. Loss of time with family members, hobbies, and friends
   
2. An experience of being “high” followed by secrecy and shame
   
3. Negative consequences (which may include health problems and financial problems)
   
4. Obsessive preoccupation with the relationship or sex
   
5. Attempts to stop your behavior (or obsession) fail and bring considerable irritability and distress
   
6. Your behavior becomes riskier and more intense
   

The Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous website has a forty-question self-assessment to determine whether you have the signs of sex and love addiction (
www.slaafws.org/download/core-files/The_40_Questions_of_SLAA.pdf
).

—From Kelly McDaniel,
Ready to Heal: Women Facing Love, Sex, and Relationship Addiction
(Carefree, AZ: Gentle Path Press, 2008), 31–32.

WORKSHEETS AND EXERCISES

The following provides cognitive-behavioral approaches to build awareness about and to treat loose-girl behavior.

Build Awareness

When a boy loves me, that means I am _______________.

When I don’t have a boy wanting me, I believe I am _______________.

When I am needy, I do _______________, and believe I am _______________.

Hold on to the first list set below, and after every encounter with a boy, rewrite a new list set based on what happened. Compare the lists to see what you want versus what you actually get.

When I engage sexually with a boy, I want most

1. for example, to believe I’m desirable

2.

3.

4.

5.

When I engage sexually with a boy, I actually get

1. for example, momentary physical attention

2.

3.

4.

5.

Tracking Triggers

Use the following chart to track events that trigger loose-girl behavior:

With your therapist, review what you might have done differently in each situation.

Tracking Self-Harming Thoughts

Use the following chart to track thoughts that trigger loose-girl behavior:

With your therapist, determine how your false beliefs set off loose-girl behavior and how you might better deal with those damaging thoughts.