Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (29 page)

This chapter starts with two vignettes and additional examples from the interviews with American teenagers to show how both girls and boys have learned that sex carries risks that are beyond their power to fully control. It then examines a gender-specific risk—the slander of being called a slut, which looms much greater for American girls than it does for their Dutch counterparts. American boys, in turn, confront the assumption circulated in same-sex peer culture and the media that they seek “soulless sex,” a notion that many fervently resist, articulating an almost “hyper-romanticism.” The second half of the chapter examines the same themes using vignettes and segments from interviews with Dutch teenagers. We will see how Dutch boys and girls learn from a variety of institutions that it is possible and nec- essary to “do it safe.” We also see how assumptions about the “normality of love” allow girls to avoid being slandered as sluts and boys to integrate ideals and reality. At the same time, assumptions about the “normality of love” can also obscure important differences between girls’ and boys’ readi- ness for love and sex.

Sixteen-year-old Stephanie is a quintessential “all-American good girl.” As she explains, “I get the good grades. I’m obedient; I follow the rules most of the time.” But she is also a cheerleader, and in small-town Tremont, people often get the wrong idea: they think “[cheerleaders] are slutty and that they

sleep around—probably because they wear such shorts skirts.” Getting a bad name has serious and long-lasting repercussions, as one of Stephanie’s friends discovered: “She was drinking and, if you drink, then you are auto- matically easy, so she got a really bad reputation and guys started spreading rumors that, you know, she was a sure thing. . . . One little thing can wreck your whole reputation for all of high school.”

Boys don’t have to worry about these kinds of mistakes, Stephanie ex- plains, “because . . . [if you are a boy] you are cool if you drink, you are cool if you have sex.” Stephanie believes “girls and guys are a lot different.” She does not blame boys for the fact that “they always want something physi- cal, it’s just the way they are, their hormones or the way that they think. Also, it is peer pressure because I know that if guys do it, then they are considered cool.” The whole thing is extremely unfair, according to Stepha- nie: “Because if guys do it they are looked up to and if girls do it they are looked down upon.”

When Stephanie and her boyfriend had been going out for nine months, she started researching birth control options on the Internet. But, as we know from chapter 3, her mother, Cheryl Tober, did not respond positively to the news. “You may think that you are physically ready because your hormones are, but you are emotionally not going to be ready,” Stephanie recalls her saying. Shortly thereafter, Stephanie and her boyfriend had their first intercourse, unprotected. Stephanie cannot say why: “[My boyfriend] never pressured me ever to do any of that.” Still she felt pressure, “like I was obligated to because we were going out for so long.”

While Stephanie has a blurry recall of what came before, the aftermath of her first sexual intercourse is ingrained in her memory: “I was just, like, scared to death. I was a nervous wreck and I told my mom about it because I tell her everything and I just wanted her to know that she was right. I was definitely not emotionally ready. My boyfriend and I were both a wreck.” But only Stephanie was shamed at the pharmacy the next day:

I had to go and get the morning-after pill, which was scary because they just looked at you like, “You stupid teenagers.” . . . I had to get counseling to get it, and I was crying the whole way through because they just looked down on you.

Her mother responded as a friend, who helped Stephanie “get over it,” and as a disciplinarian, who “shortened [her] chain.” Now there are limits to how long Stephanie can spend alone with a boy. Stephanie does not mind. She doesn’t want to be put in a position again to do something before she

is ready. She and her boyfriend broke up shortly after their fateful inter- course, but not before hashing over the big mistake at great length:

[We talked] about how we shouldn’t have done it and how it was a big mis- take and we were pushing ourselves too hard. After talking about it, you know [that helped] like being able to get over feeling really ashamed of my- self because I didn’t think that I would ever do that because I wanted to wait until I was like eighteen or married.

When Jesse was fourteen, “drunk out of [his] mind,” Jesse had sex with a girl who was also drunk. Without the two knowing each other, Jesse and the girl “were like ‘hey let’s go do this.’ It just came on spontaneously. The next thing you know, we were in bed.” They had sex without protection but got lucky. No pregnancy resulted. At that time, Jesse was taking other risks as well. “The path I was going along was definitely the wrong path,” he recalls. And for a while, he was smoking marijuana daily and drinking heavily on the side: “I’ve gone through the experience of being [kind of] addicted to a drug,” he says. “That was like what I did.”

Two years later, Jesse describes himself as radically altered. He is deeply in love with his girlfriend of ten months. He has had many different girl- friends over the years, but “this is the only one I ever want to have from now on. . . . We’re just so happy together and I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.” Defying his father Harold Lawton’s characterization of boys (chapter 3), Jesse says, “My first priority in life is being in love with my girlfriend, and giving her everything I can.” He thinks he is different from other teenage boys: “Most teenage guys are pretty much in it for sex. . . . The only reason they get involved in relationships with girls is to have sex. . . . I guess it’s just a sexual drive or whatever but I can’t really relate to that.”

Jesse and his girlfriend use condoms every time they have sex. But mea- suring his sexual behavior against what he sees as the gold standard, he comes up short: “The best situation for two people to have sex would be if they were totally committed to each other, like married,” Jessie says. More- over, like many of his American peers, Jesse views sex as something that requires readiness for fatherhood. “It’s pretty dumb that I do have sex be- cause I am not ready to become a father right now. That’s like probably the worst thing that could happen to me.” But, says Jesse: “I guess it is some-

thing that I’m willing to deal with . . . the risk of that, you know.” Yet, the risk comes with an emotional cost:

If you’re not looking to have a baby, sex is definitely a risk. . . . I have had a situation where condoms have broken and I was like, flippin’ out of my mind, about ready to puke. I was like, “Jesus Christ, we’re dead. I’m screwed for the rest of my life.” . . . But it turned out okay. . . . Yeah that scared the life out of me.

If one of the lessons in the dramatization of adolescent sexuality is that sex is dangerous, as Jesse and Stephanie illustrate, then the American teenag- ers I interviewed seem to have taken that lesson to heart. The sense that sex is by definition risky is communicated not just at home but also in the other institutions that teenage girls and boys encounter—schools, phar- macies, and health clinics.
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Sexual and reproductive education and ser- vices are uneven across the United States—with some teenagers receiving relatively easy access to information and services, while others encounter many barriers to clear information about the contraceptive technologies that can protect them against sex’s unwanted consequences.
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With the rise of “abstinence-only” education, even school districts not directly funded under this policy have shied away from teaching about condoms, con- traception, and abortion, as well as about the positive aspects of sex and relationships.
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The lack of access to basic sexual health information and services is par- ticularly apparent in Tremont, where a “pregnancy crisis center” perches prominently on one of Tremont’s hills, and where even the school nurse does not know where Tremont girls go to get contraception.
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Some Trem- ont girls are quite enterprising. Stephanie researched the Internet. Laurie checked out books from the library. But another Tremont girl, Ashley, does not recognize the word “contraception.” She says that she knows what the pill is, but has not “any idea” where to get it. Contraception “seems like kind of a topic that people just kind of close off on,” says Alexandra. And Lisa, an ambitious straight-A student, describes a pregnancy prevention project at school:

We did a big teen pregnancy thing and everyone had to carry . . . this little doll and it had a key and every time it cried you had to hold the key in it and

it would wake you up in the middle of the night crying and you’d have to turn the key and you got graded on how many neglects it had and it can tell if you would hit it.

Teenagers growing up in Corona, by contrast, receive much more sex education. Caroline says she learned about diaphragms, condoms, and the pill in her health education class. Hence Kimberley, who received no sex education at home, learned at school how to “keep yourself safe and protected and do everything you can to not come across any problems.” Yet, despite receiving a great deal more information at school than their Tremont counterparts, several Corona teenagers articulate the notion that sex can be life-ruining. As we saw, Jesse, a Corona boy, is either unaware of emergency contraception or does not know how he and his girlfriend might obtain it to protect themselves more fully against pregnancy. Kelly, a Corona girl, says that fear of AIDS is “probably the main thing that would stop [her] from having sex.” “The risk of AIDS alone,” she explains would make it hard for her to trust a potential sexual partner. “Because no matter how much I cared about the guy, he may be lying to me. I want to think that he wouldn’t . . . but I don’t want to run the risk of ruining my life just for that.”
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Some American boys—from both Tremont and Corona—voice a similar suspicion of potential sexual partners and of the dangers their previous sex- ual experiences might pose to their health. When Michael considers having sex with a girl, he always wants to know “who she’s been with, if anybody at all. Like diseases and stuff, you don’t want that.” Girls who have had sex are viewed differently from those who are inexperienced because of the risk of contracting an STI, says Steve. Using the language of drug addiction, he explains: “Guys will wonder ‘is that guy clean that she’s done it with?’ Be- cause if I want to get with her in the future or something and I don’t know what’s happened or if she’s going to be pregnant or something, it makes me start to wonder.” Given the risk of contracting an STI through sex, Steve would prefer to lose his virginity to a girl who was also a virgin, “unless I was older and it was just between me and her and we had been dating for a while. . . . If I knew she was clean herself.”

Nor do the boys seem any less aware of the threat of an unintended teen pregnancy than girls. Like their female counterparts, they talk about teen- age pregnancy as a very prevalent and possible outcome of sex. And if any- thing, several American boys suggest a greater sense of powerlessness than do girls about their capacity prevent it. Like Jesse, they seem to have little

faith in condoms or other contraceptives and they see having sex as playing Russian roulette. Adam believes that “no matter how many combinations [of contraceptives you use] you’re still not safe.” Illustrating a similar senti- ment, Phillip says he is certain he does not want to have sexual intercourse any time soon because he does not “want to deal with the responsibilities [of pregnancy] right now.” While the fear of impregnating a girl may deter some from having sex, other boys like Jesse “take the risk” and have it hang over them. Donald uses condoms, but:

I don’t do it very often because I always have that feeling in the back of my head, what if I somehow did get her pregnant because I don’t want to get someone pregnant this young. . . . You might think, “I am never going to get her pregnant.” But you never know. It could happen. And then you are kind of screwed for life.

Indeed it
could
happen. Steve, interviewed a few days after Donald, has two friends who have unintentionally impregnated girls. Donald may be his third. Steve knows Donald just found out that day that his girlfriend had a positive pregnancy test. With the rest of his life hanging in the bal- ance as he awaits a second pregnancy test, Donald is scared, Steve says. If the second one comes back positive, Steve thinks that Donald “would want to name [the child] and he’d want to care for it, but he does not want to have it.” If Donald’s girlfriend’s second test comes back positive, it is more likely than not that she and he
will
have it since American teenage girls are twice more likely to carry a pregnancy to term than they are to terminate it.
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Access to abortion services has become increasingly difficult in recent decades in the United States.
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Abortions are quite economically costly for most American girls. And a common conception of abortion as “killing a baby,” even if it takes place in the earliest weeks of fetal development, may, as several of the American teenagers suggest, make it emotionally costly as well.
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People often ask pregnant girls questions like, “Are you going to have an abortion, or are you going to love the kid, or are you going to give it away,” says Steve. The choice, says Dorothy, is life-altering: “The girl has to deal with the fact that she is pregnant, that she may have to abort or give it up for adoption. She has to deal with that for her entire life.” Randy echoes a similar sentiment. Sex is “a greater risk” for girls, he says: “If they get pregnant . . . and they decide to have an abortion, it’s harder on them. [It will] stay with them forever knowing that they killed the baby. . . . If

they do have the baby, that’s [also] a lot of like trauma.”

Another potential trauma that American girls face is being slandered as a “slut.” The category of the slut is very salient in interviews with American girls: almost half of the girls spontaneously use words, like “slut,” “slutty,” or “easy” in reference to perceptions of girls’ sexuality, or recount examples of girls who have been quite randomly slandered as a slut. Although some accounts that American girls and boys give suggest acceptance in Ameri- can peer culture of teenage sex in the context of long-term relationships, Stephanie posits that sexual intercourse is “always [viewed as a] negative” in girls.
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And like Stephanie, Laurie sees an endemic double standard: “If the guy does it, he’s like cool or a pimp. The girl does it and she’s a slut and everyone thinks of her badly, [which] I think is definitely something that should change but it probably never will.” Finally, Kimberley has “seen a lot of girls, like, just made into these bad, horrible images that they can’t get out of just for like one dumb [sexual] experience.”