If nothing is more frightening than a woman’s desire, then a young girl’s desire is even more horrifying. We ostracize because we are jealous; the slut is the one getting all the male attention. Or we ostracize the slut because we want to protect our girls, because there is some sense that all sex-related behaviors for girls will lead to harm. Or we ostracize simply because we are afraid of what feels different and unfamiliar. Whatever the reason, when we banish the slut, more often than not it’s the punishment that harms her, not her behavior.
In fact, if she embraces her behavior, it can earn her a different label. Where for years no one wanted to be called a slut, more recently, being a slut can be a self-proclaimed badge of honor. Meet the “empowered” girl.
THE EMPOWERED GIRL
Seventeen-year-old Ramona wrote me this: “All my family knows about my sexual history since I got expelled from two schools. They have taken me to three shrinks, and I see one every week. They disapprove of my sex life, but now if they forbid me to go out, I’ll sneak out as I used to. In the city I live, many men from different countries come to visit and all my friends and I have a list of nationalities we kissed and had sex with, and I’m winning of course. I’ve had thirty-two different nationalities and want to have more. In four years I have had sex with fifty-six men. I know I’m taking risks and the number is terrible for my age, but I’m not the only one or the worst. I just like having sex.”
Something new has entered the culture of women. Lynn M. Phillips, in Flirting with Danger, calls this the “together woman discourse,” in which women are “sassy” and free in their sexual agency, but in actuality, that “freedom” is limited to a heterosexual stance, one that aims to attract men.{41} In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy refers to it as “raunch culture,” a culture in which some women have co-opted what men think is sexy and made it supposedly empowering.{42} She includes such examples as Girls Gone Wild, pole-dancing lessons, striptease marathons, and women who buy Playboy. Tied up with this is the idea that being a slut is a good thing. It means you’re strong, in control of your sexuality. The notion starts in the right direction—women can own their sexuality—but it’s almost as if, more often than not, women fall back into the familiar tire grooves of what men desire about women’s sexuality.
Certainly, this empowered-girl culture has invaded adolescence as well. Thirteen-year-old girls proudly extol their abilities to give blow jobs, which they do in the bathrooms at parties or at school. Middle and high schoolers have sex parties. Girls compete with one another to dress as slutty as possible. In Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, Laura Sessions Stepp notes that, in our hookup culture, teenage girls have abandoned dating and courting altogether and are simply engaging in sexual acts with others.{43} They don’t have to want to be boyfriend and girlfriend. They don’t have to even like each other.
This may sound empowered, but think about how it would be perceived if such a girl didn’t have a male partner, or at least didn’t attract one, or if she gave off the vibe that she needed a man. Would she be seen as empowered—or pathetic? Such sexual behavior smacks of the same intentions Levy identified in her interviews with women about raunch culture. If girls have no interest in boys beyond getting their attention and giving blow jobs, then what exactly are they getting out of the arrangement other than the reputation that comes along with it? If they don’t need boys’ sexual attention, why are they competing for their attention? How exactly is this empowering for them?
The month before Loose Girl hit the bookshelves, Marie Claire published an interview with me about the book. The interview noted what I’ve come to call my “number,” which was forty-something. I had slept with some forty-odd boys and men during my loose-girl years.{44} Soon after, one of the Jezebel bloggers posted about the interview. She wrote that I was just another person who felt I earned the right to have a memoir when clearly I was just like any other woman. She noted that forty men was not very many at all and that plenty of women had many, many more men. How dare I try to make money off the fact that men didn’t want more than casual encounters with me, as though that were something I experienced and no one else did. And she made it clear that I could not be both a feminist and a person who had had sex mostly because I felt badly about myself.{45}
Two hundred fifty-six comments came next. Grown women said things like, “40 men? I’ve had that many men in a month. Where’s my book contract?” They did the math and determined that I had only slept with two men a year, which by no means gave me the right to publish a book about promiscuity. “How dare she call herself a slut!” one of the women wrote. “You want a slut? I’m a slut!”
Girls and women like Ramona, and like these commenters, carry pride about their sexual behavior, similar to the sort of studly pride we see in boys. A proportion of our culture, tired of the old double standards about sex, have begun to say, “We can have sex because we want to!” Put another way, “We can have sex like men! We can treat our sexuality like men treat theirs!”
Certainly, I agree with this motive, and oh, how I wish we could. But as Levy argues, empowerment in the form of stripping classes and posing for risqué spring-break videos means using the same degrading method a patriarchal society has used to control women to degrade oneself. I would argue that handing out blow jobs like candy could be defined the same way.
“Let’s not kid ourselves that this is liberation,” Erica Jong said to Ariel Levy. “The women who buy the idea that flaunting your breasts in sequins is power—I mean, I’m all for that stuff—but let’s not get so into the tits and ass that we don’t notice how far we haven’t come. Let’s not confuse that with real power.”{46} That power would surely include some sense of ownership over our sexual identities; it would surely include girls’ understanding that sexual desire lives in them, not in boys’ attention to them. Lynn Phillips adds that this notion of empowerment “supports an illusion that young women’s supposed autonomy and entitlement somehow insulate them from the possibility of victimization,” which explains the anger at Jezebel over my sense that, for the most part, my experience with sex had sucked.{47}
I can’t assume anything about how Ramona really feels. Perhaps she truly does enjoy her conquests. But while I applaud the idea of a girl going out there and doing with sex whatever she damn well pleases, I don’t quite believe that such an achievement is uniformly possible. As Jong suggests, we have much too far to go. Our society is still much too steeped in a double standard about sex for me to believe that anyone, particularly anyone so young, can exist so entirely outside cultural expectations. Also, girls having sex with whomever they want, whenever they want, and without the desire for anything more, seems, like Levy noted, to be a little too close to men’s fantasies about girls and women. I’m not convinced that this should be the primary model we put forth for women’s sexual freedom.