What You Really Really Want (11 page)

Consider, for example, the “innocent virgin” we were describing in the section on age earlier in this chapter. Picture her in your mind's eye. Maybe take a moment now to draw a picture of her, or write down a description of what she looks like.

What did you draw or describe? Was it a white girl with long hair? Maybe blond, blue-eyed, or freckle-faced?

If it was, it's not an accident. Because we live in a racist society that values white girls more than girls of color, we tend to imagine that purity is pale. That assumption has a terrible flip side: Girls of color are often viewed as always sexually available, simply because of their race. Just look at the specific stereotypes: Latina women are “spicy,” Middle Eastern and South Asian women are simultaneously “exotic” and “repressed,” Asian women are “submissive,” Black women are “wild” or “animalistic”—it doesn't matter what disgusting stereotype you choose; it boils down to the same thing: Women of color are assumed to be always available for sex.

“It's easy to feel cheap when you have dark skin, frizzy hair, and a big butt,” says Mag. “TV, magazines, people on the street, people in class—it seems like everyone feels like they have
a need, no, a right, to your body that you don't have. I've had random white children come up to me and slap my ass. I've had men take photos while I wasn't looking, or strangers come up to me and ‘compliment' me on how luscious my backside looks, and what they'd like to do with me.”

You're smart enough to see how ridiculous assumptions about the sexualities of women of color are. Of course every individual woman wants different things that have nothing to do with her skin color. But the problem with this paradigm goes past how reductive it is. By treating women as though their race dictates their sexuality, we're also telling women that their actual desires don't matter and probably shouldn't even exist. As you know by now, nothing could be further from the truth.

But it gets even more twisted: Because of these racial stereotypes, many girls of color are pressured by their families and communities to live the stereotypes down by (sing it with me if you know the tune by now) being unimpeachably innocent of sexual desire. So the wider culture is sexualizing girls of color right and left, and yet, in the end, they still often get shoved into the same virginity trap as do white girls.

On top of all of this, it's important to keep in mind one of the main reasons women of color are expected to be always sexually available—because in countries where they've been historically enslaved or colonized by white cultures, the white men in those cultures felt free to rape them with impunity. That women of color in colonized countries should have any say-so in what happens to their bodies, sexually or otherwise, is a pretty new idea in the grand scheme of things, and one that
women of color have had to fight hard for, and still have to fight for today.

For some women of color in colonized countries, getting in touch with their ancestors' pre-colonization attitudes toward sexuality can be profoundly healing or liberating. Jessica Yee, founder of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, explains it this way: “As I have listened to my grandmothers explain to me, sex used to be sacred and even upheld as an enjoyable part of our life as First Nations people.... Colonization, Christianization, and genocidal oppression have drastically severed the ties to traditional knowledge that would enable us to make informed choices about our sexual health and relationships. The fact is that many of our communities are reluctant to go anywhere near the topic of sexual health because it is viewed as ‘dirty,' ‘wrong,' or a ‘White man's thing.' We carry a long history of being sexually exploited, from the early Pocahontas and squaw days right up to the modern oversexualization of ‘easy' Native women that permeates so much of the media.... In generic sexual health campaigns, I often hear the slogan ‘Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself'—which I have always found to be incomplete. In our communities, I say, ‘Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself, and Be Proud of Your Culture'—because that last element will enable us to accomplish the first two.”

Economic class can be difficult to talk about. It's about more than just how much money you or your family make or have made at any given moment. It also has to do with how much money you had growing up, what kind of education you had access to, your parents' class backgrounds, and how you were taught to think about money and class.

When it comes to sexuality, class functions a lot like race. Girls from lower-class families are stereotyped as “fast.” Middle-class girls are expected to be “good.” And upper-class girls—think Paris Hilton or the Kardashians—can pretty much do whatever they want. And the same pressure is applied to the
marginalized girls, the ones thought of as always available, to live down those stereotypes by being extra pure.

It gets even more complicated in the place where economic pressures interact directly with sex. I'm talking about sex work, of course, which includes all jobs in which people exchange sexual services or performances for money. That could be anything from prostitution to stripping to acting in porn films to being a waitress in a sexualized establishment like Hooters.

Most of the people doing sex work are women, and just as there's a wide variety of sex work that women do, there is also a real range of reasons why women do sex work. Some women and girls have no choice; they're victims of what's called “sexual trafficking,” which means they're basically kidnapped and forced to do sex work. Some women, however, have lots of choices and choose to do sex work because they find it enjoyable and rewarding. The majority of sex workers fall somewhere in between: They haven't been kidnapped, but they don't have a lot of good choices available to them, either. Maybe they haven't had access to education or skills training, or maybe they live somewhere where the economy is poor and no one is hiring. It's also true that women across the board are paid less than men for the same work: about 70 cents for every dollar a man gets paid. Often, sex work pays better than most other jobs women have a chance of getting. So what's the point? That many women who choose sex work (as opposed to being trafficked into it) choose it for largely economic reasons.

Beyond sex work, women are constantly exposed to more mundane sex-money interactions. Consider them the big sisters to the old if-a-guy-pays-for-dinner-you-owe-him-sex trope.

For example, consider the woman who has to choose between leaving a partner who's not healthy to be with and having a place to live for herself and/or her kids. This happens all the time. If she breaks up with her partner, she loses her partner's financial support, which is all that's between her and a pretty dire situation. Or what about a woman who is trying to get ahead in her career in order to create a better economic situation for herself, only to be forced to deal with the sexual attention of a boss or colleague? That's a big reason sexual harassment laws exist—so that women don't have to choose between economic freedom and sexual freedom. But it can be hard to prove harassment, and there's a lot of pressure on women in male-dominated workplaces to “be able to take a compliment,” “be one of the boys,” or comply with other “boys will be boys” codes that ultimately mean that women who call out powerful men in the workplace about their harassing behavior can expect to be punished—even fired—instead of being helped.

Women's sexuality is also often policed on the job: Women are vulnerable to criticism and punishment from higher-ups if they're deemed “too sexy” or “not sexy enough” for the workplace. We're still far from a day when women are truly free of sexual pressure on the job.

Reproductive freedom is also influenced by economics and class. If you can afford birth control and STD prevention and testing, or have access to insurance that covers it, you're going to be able to manage the risks that come with sex a lot better than if you don't have that kind of access. The same goes for access to abortion. In the United States, it's illegal for any federal money to pay for abortion, and that means that people who rely on Medicaid or other federal programs for their healthcare have no practical access to abortion.

It may seem strange to have a section about how gender affects sexuality in a book that's explicitly for women, because in many ways, this whole book is about how gender affects sexuality. But gender isn't just a question with two answers, one for women and one for men.

What do I mean by this, exactly? A few different things. For one, women are often stereotyped into gender categories depending on their behavior. For example, women who are loud, ambitious, opinionated, or aggressive are often considered “unfeminine,” no matter what they look like or how they carry themselves. And women express gender in all kinds of different ways. Some women are incredibly “girlie”—they like pink and lace and makeup and delicate, shiny things. Some women are androgynous, which means that they're neither masculine nor feminine, or else that they're fairly equal parts of both. Some women are straight-up masculine, preferring short haircuts, work boots or sneakers to heels, and men's shirts to women's blouses. (I'm being a little reductive here, as gender expression is about much more than what you wear or how you groom yourself, but I'm using these visual examples as a kind of shorthand to get to my larger point.)

Women also vary in gender in ways that go deeper than gender expression. Some of us identify as “genderqueer,” a term that means different things to different people, but that generally means that the person using it doesn't feel like their gender can be described by the gender binary (the idea that there are only two genders, “man” and “woman”). Some women identify as women even though they were born as biological males. And
many trans women do not identify as having ever been biologically male. These women usually call themselves transgender. Then there are women who were born with ambiguous genitals and the doctors decided they should be raised as women (often these women had involuntary surgery, as babies, to remove the “nonfemale” parts of their bodies). These women often identify as intersex.