This fascination has at times made me hesitant to commit the loose-girl syndrome to an addiction model. It is important to determine what really is addiction and what is shame with respect to behavior that is simply culturally unacceptable. As with everything surrounding teenage girls and sex, the lines are blurry. Our society is so firmly opposed to any teenage sexual behavior, particularly from girls, that it would be easy to say that all sexual behavior is negative and should be treated as addiction. But teenage promiscuity isn’t always the result of severe pain or low self-esteem. Statistically, that is more often the case, but as with any statistics, it is important to acknowledge that there is a percentage of girls who develop low self-esteem because of how society judges and punishes them for wanting and having sex.
That said, addiction is often a very real part of loose-girl behavior. The feelings and bad behaviors have lots in common with other process addictions, such as sex and love addictions, but they are distinctly their own thing. We can define the loose-girl affliction as needing male attention to feel worthwhile. Sex addicts are obsessed with sex. They think about it constantly, need more and more sex to reach the same high, and are dysfunctional in their lives because of it. Love and relationship addicts are obsessed with getting love, with having relationships, and they spend a great deal of time ritualizing how to get them and how to keep them. If a relationship is threatened, they focus obsessively and act compulsively to keep the relationship or get it back, and they experience unbelievable despair when a relationship ends. All these addictions include being trapped in a cycle of pursuit and pain. All of them have a great deal of fantasy tied to them, and those fantasies get in the way of being able to have any kind of real intimacy with another person.
Pseudorelationship addictions are also about power and control. Kelly McDaniel, a love, sex, and relationship addict therapist, writes, “Women who become addicted to relationships and sex are escaping not only painful feelings, but the painful cultural inheritance that places them in an inferior position to men. Sexual power can turn the tables.”{84} Young women learn to use sex to try to control their relationships, to try to make men like them. Sexual attention is easy to get when you’re a girl, so girls often use it to try to make things go where they want, to try to maintain the good feeling that comes from being wanted. One can see how easily that can slip toward sex again and again—how gratifying it feels to a girl to have a boy’s attention on her and no one else—even if the addiction is not to the sex. Taken further, one can see how the girl who winds up having sex again and again with random boys feels awful and used.
Perhaps some of this sounds familiar to you. Perhaps you, too, try to heal something inside with a relationship or with a man. Throughout the book, I’ve noted that it is almost impossible to be a girl in our culture and not feel that way. Everywhere we look, we’re told that everything we could ever want, every wish we want fulfilled, will come with a man’s love. If we follow this, then almost everyone has the potential to become a love addict. Or perhaps, too, you think about sex constantly, or you use sex to get something else. Since girls aren’t permitted in our culture to have sex without wanting love, and since girls want sex just as much as boys do, perhaps you might potentially fit the bill for sex addiction.
My story in Loose Girl has been called the story of a sex addict and love addict. When Marie Claire published an interview with me, they titled the piece “Confessions of a Sex Addict,” which was followed by that Jezebel blogger who wrote that I wasn’t a sex addict; I was just a typical girl. I absolutely agree. I wouldn’t define myself as a sex addict, and I would categorize myself as a typical girl. And if we follow the definition for sex and love addiction, almost every woman has behavior that has at times crossed into love addiction or sex addiction. It is how we try to have control in a world where girls are not allowed control over their sexual identities, their desires. It is how we have power—false as it is—in a world where girls aren’t given much power.
For this reason, focusing on the label “addict” doesn’t always make sense, nor does unpacking which addiction you have—especially since so many of them overlap. Most love addicts are also loose girls. Most sex addicts are also love addicts. Most loose girls are also relationship addicts. It’s not terribly useful to try to narrow down which ones you are. More useful is to examine the addict aspect of your condition, to see yourself as a person with an addictive personality, and to simply note how easily you keep those addictions alive (see the appendix for addiction criteria).
Of course, it might be useful to get diagnoses for some conditions, especially those for which there are empirically tested treatments. If we have well-researched solutions, by all means, let’s use them. But it is also my opinion, after counseling many girls with relationship issues, that most process addictions—including the loose-girl condition—should be treated not as disorders but as culturally cued issues, as should the addictions we developed as a result, which we must wrestle with as we aim for more fulfillment in our lives. We must work with them personally, and we must work with them culturally, meaning that we must work on ourselves, and we must do what we can to transform the culture that sets us all up to be addicts.
LOOSE GIRLS AND SEXUAL ABUSE
Sex abuse and molestation are commonly associated with promiscuity. The assumption is that when children’s formative experiences with sex are some sort of violation, they will be unable to have a normal relationship to sex in the future. This makes perfect sense until we address the question of what makes for a “normal” relationship to sex, particularly when we’re discussing teenage girls. Is the fact that they are having any type of sex somehow abnormal? I can’t help but notice, for instance, as I read through various studies about adolescent boys, that sexual activity is almost never listed as a “problem.”
In a meta-analysis (a study of studies) performed in 2001, researchers found a significant correlation between sexual promiscuity and childhood sexual abuse.{85} But when we look more closely at the data, we see again that promiscuity is undefined. What does this mean to the various authors of the studies? Does it mean simply sexual activity, which tells us nothing at all? Or does it mean sexual activity that makes the subjects feel like garbage? And do they feel like garbage because of the sexual abuse they suffered?
Many advocates for sexual abuse survivors have argued that this assumption that victims inevitably become promiscuous is offensive. Sexual abuse is a situation in which a person’s autonomy is taken away from him or her, and when we make assumptions about the effects of this, we take away autonomy once again. Heather Corinna, owner of the blog Scarleteen: Sex Ed for the Real World, notes that she can’t imagine that there is any group of people more conscious of having sex when they want it versus when they don’t than sex abuse survivors. Think about it. When you’ve had an experience that was clearly unwanted, then you are more prepared to recognize it when it approaches again. She additionally writes: