Dirty Little Secrets (15 page)

The law defines rape as forcible sexual relations with a person against that person’s will. Seems simple enough. But nothing about sex—and particularly sex among minors—is simple. Thirty-three percent of sexually active teens aged 15–17 report that sexual activity moved too fast in their relationships. Twenty-four percent have engaged in sexual activity that they didn’t really want to do.
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And in a study published in the
Journal of Sex Research
, of all the times committed couples aged 18–24 had sex, only one in five of those times did the coupling include desire.
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In other words, women had consensual sex much more often than they actually desired the sex. In an essay titled “The Not-Rape Epidemic,” Latoya Peterson notes all the ways she and her friends have been “not raped” in their lives and how that has harmed them. For example, how many times do girls walk down the street and get catcalled by grown men? How many times do girls have sex because they want to be liked, or approved of, or loved? How many times do girls lie about their ages to men and then wind up having sex with them?
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As we begin to think more deeply about the complications regarding teenage sexual behavior, the language of rape clearly becomes inadequate.

I certainly experienced this ambiguity myself. I wanted to have sex, sort of. But the desire I had for sex was so completely submerged beneath my desire for attention and love that I couldn’t be sure if that were true. Every time I had sex, I had no sexual agency, no sense of my own sexual desire. Instead, my neediness controlled my sexual choices. In this way, I had no sexual self, no self that wanted to have sex for sex’s sake. If there was no clear sexual self, then how could I consent to anything? I had absolutely no connection, no consciousness or awareness about the part of me that might want in an unadulterated way to have sex.

In truth, few girls have access to that sexual self. The sexual self is buried deeply beneath all the ways we have worked culturally to keep girls from having a sexual consciousness. Lee Jacobs Riggs writes in an essay:

I let him touch me, never saying no, never saying yes, never probing too much into what his on-and-off girlfriend knew or thought about it. At the same time, I reclaimed the word “slut,” told my friends it was good, I wanted it. I excelled at giving blowjobs because I had wanted to excel at something.

Who knows what I wanted. I know that I had a need to assert myself as a sexual person to a world that had tried to erase that part of me that I felt so significantly. I know that I didn’t want him, but I did want something.
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I heard the same sentiment from many of the girls I interviewed. They too had acquaintance rape experiences—they thought. They too hadn’t necessarily wanted to have sex with most of the boys they had had sex with—they thought. The uncertainty I heard again and again is suggestive that many girls—all girls, not just loose girls—don’t have access to a part of themselves that might know what it wants regarding sex. If you don’t know what you want, how can you articulate clearly what it is?

The age-of-consent law, which is the state-by-state determined age by which point a girl is allowed to consent, was established to protect young girls, but it’s easy to see how it furthers the notion that until a girl reaches the age of consent—usually sixteen or seventeen—
no
consent is acknowledged. Before that age, she is the victim of statutory rape. So, for example, a girl who is fourteen may date a boy who is seventeen. Their relationship might include all the typical excitement and feelings of love and drama found in teenage relationships. But if they have sex, mutually consented to in their minds, the boy can be convicted of statutory rape, and the girl can be left with confusion about this idea that she’s been “raped.” If she understands, as most girls do, that rape means she was forced against her will, how will she reconcile her feelings about her boyfriend and this “fact”?

The law puts forth that same denial about teenage girls having sexual desire. The problem with that, of course, is that teenagers have sex. You can tell them not to all you want, but they have the same biological urge you and I do, maybe stronger, and they don’t have the developmental perspective to control their impulses as well as we do. Then add to that the girl who believes that if she says no to her boyfriend, he’ll find someone else who will have sex with him, and add to that the girl who wants a boy’s attention and knows this is how to get it.

Consent laws have a solid purpose to protect girls when they are truly victims, but legally designating an entire group of people as unable to consent to sex is maybe not the best way to protect girls from having sex that adults don’t want them to have (I should note here that an example of a girl truly being a victim, in my opinion, would be when the male counterpart is twenty or older, and the female is fifteen or younger; in such a situation there is undoubtedly a power differential at play). The Netherlands has a great example of how to use such a law to protect rather than silence. There, sexual intercourse between people aged 12–16 is legal, but victims who were coerced or forced and need the law’s protection can opt to use the statutory consent age of sixteen to prove that a violation occurred. Also, parents can overrule the wishes of a sixteen-year-old, but only if they make a convincing argument to child protective services.
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An example of this might be if a fourteen-year-old girl were in a verbally abusive relationship with a seventeen–year-old boy, but she was too blinded by her feelings for the boy, or too scared, to see that. Her parents could then employ the consent age of sixteen to press charges against the boyfriend if they can prove the verbal abuse. This law views young people as capable, thinking, self-contained people who can reasonably make decisions for themselves. So, while teenage girls in the Netherlands start having intercourse much earlier, the country also sees some of the lowest teen pregnancy birth and abortion rates (approximately one in one thousand births) and STD rates in the Western world, which gives evidence of their increased levels of contraceptive use.

If we compare a girl from the Netherlands and the United States, we can see how this might happen. A fourteen-year-old girl from the Netherlands may make a mutual decision with her boyfriend to have sex using contraception. A fourteen-year-old girl from the United States may want to have sex with her boyfriend but knows she’s not allowed, so she sneaks it, too uninformed to use protection because no one taught her about sex, thinking her too young. She puts herself at risk of pregnancy, and she likely winds up feeling ashamed.

If we are going to teach girls to say no, we also need to teach them how to say yes. As Riggs writes, she never said no, but she also never said yes. As long as we don’t even give girls the option of saying yes, as long as we don’t believe we can trust them with their own sexual feelings, we are setting them up, to some extent, to be raped. Look at it this way: if a girl can’t separate sexual desire from desperation, if a girl wants attention from a boy because she’s told she should and then experiences that wanting as sexual desire because she has no other discourse for sexual desire, then she will not know what she wants. She will not be able to consent or not consent, because she wants something; it might be sex, if sex will get her the love she’s after or the attention she hopes for, but it might not be. So she goes ahead and has sex, but later she feels awful because she realizes she didn’t want sex or didn’t get what she wanted from the sex.

As we have discussed, girls are trained to have boys pursue them. Or, more accurately, they are trained to want to be pursued. But when they are pursued, they are told they can only say no.

Sue-Lin explained to me that, since she was about twelve, grown men have stopped her on the street and outright asked her to date them. She believes they think it’s OK to ask her so blatantly because she’s Asian. “Men tend to believe we Asian girls are submissive and here to please them,” she said, noting a common, racist stereotype. She usually just ignored them and kept walking or said she had somewhere to be. Once, though, when she was fifteen, one of those men followed her—she hadn’t noticed—and violently raped her in an alley near her apartment building. She knew the second she saw him that he was angry she had denied him, that she’d had the gall to refuse his pursuit. Sue-Lin’s story reveals a twisted result of a culture that can’t tolerate a girl having the wherewithal to say no—or yes.

Jill Filipovic explores this connection between gender norms and rape in an essay. She writes, “The message is simple: Women are ‘naturally’ passive until you give them a little bit of power—then all hell breaks loose and they have to be reined in by any means necessary. Rape and other assaults on women’s bodies…serve as unique punishments for women who step out of line.”
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Once women are raped, their punishment doesn’t end there. A common stereotype about rape is that girls who get raped wind up becoming loose girls. They compulsively pursue sex. In other words, women who have been raped are presumed to be unable to have normal, consensual experiences. Though certainly this might be true for some, it is also not true for others. The important point here is that it is one more way victims of rape are denied ownership over their sexuality—first by the rapist, then by the cultural assumptions about them.

Are victims of sexual molestation promiscuous? The answer is yes, and also no. One out of four females experiences sexual abuse by the time she reaches eighteen, and that includes only reported cases.
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We’ve known for a long time that sexual abuse is related to higher rates of depression, anxiety, increased sexual inappropriateness, drug use, and alcohol, but more recently, researchers have looked more closely at these findings and discovered that there is a distinction between those who pursue sex after the abuse and those who avoid it.
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Some victims use indiscriminate sexual behavior to cope with the pain, others have learned that saying no doesn’t matter, and others develop sexual interest too early in a manner that ultimately confuses them. Characteristics of the person who was victimized also affect whether that person becomes sexually precocious or whether she avoids sex altogether, both as ways of coping with the abuse. But family support helps protect against promiscuity among those who’ve been sexually abused. (Interestingly, family context had less effect on those who didn’t report a history of abuse.) Studies have shown that when mothers believed their daughters and took proactive measures to help protect them, girls tended to experience less negative effects.

One of the more interesting findings is that sexual abuse victims are more likely to use drugs and alcohol in relation to their sexual activity,
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surely as a way to cope with the sexual experiences, which also might explain their increased likelihood of multiple partners.

Lena was raped during her first week at college in her dorm. She was drunk and underage, so she was too terrified to report it. Soon after, she fell into a depression and experienced enough suicidal ideation that she had to leave school. Her mother, desperate and at a loss, found her a psychologist with whom she spoke for the first time about being molested as a child by her youth pastor. It had gone on for two years, and the worst part for her was that she had liked it. She realized through her counseling sessions that she drank so she could have intimacy with people. Otherwise, the shame she felt was too powerful. And that the depression she experienced was from shoving that shame far down.

As we’ve seen, shame controls so much of girls’ sexual lives, from losing their virginity to being raped. It is the common denominator that interferes with healing and recovery, and the one that holds girls away from a sense of their own sexual identity.

Rapidly increasing technology keeps providing more opportunities for sexual behavior among and violation of girls. In the next chapter, we examine what happens to girls’ sexual identities online.

Chapter 8

BRAVE NEW WORLD

The Loose Girl Online

I have a Pavlov’s dog–reaction to the sound of a text coming in. I immediately think, “Could it be someone who wants me?”

F
ifteen-year-old Johanna sends text after dirty text to boys. She has never actually had sex with a boy, but she knows the language that goes along with it. She tells boys what she wants to do to them, and she tells them what she wants them to do with her. Her favorite part is how the boys always beg her to say more. In real life, boys don’t give her that sort of attention, so she loves it. It is the one time she feels sexy and powerful.

On a regular night, she has about five boys she “sexts” with. A couple of times she has sent pictures of her breasts, and once she sent a photo of her entire naked body. She knows full well that pictures can really get you in trouble, though, because a friend of hers sent a photo to her boyfriend, and he proceeded to send it to half their grade’s boys. Recently, she’s also begun having cybersex: she goes online to a chat room to talk dirty with a random user. She loves the power, loves the sense that boys want her. Like many girls, she learned about cybersex at a slumber party. One of the girls knew of it—perhaps from an older sibling—so they found a site online, made up a character, and tried things out. They shrieked when they obtained the interest of someone and then collapsed in hysterics on the ground every time they came up with something new to say. But Johanna remembered that party a year later when she felt unwanted and ugly and had developed crushes that were never reciprocated, so she went back to the same site and got a rush from the power that came with having a random stranger want her, even if the random stranger could easily have been another teenage girl. Like role-playing in video games, cybersex is a way to try on a persona who girls can’t be in real life, not without serious repercussions.