Sometimes survivors do have sex that is compulsive or reactive. We also want to be sure to recognize that sometimes that’s about trying to relive the experience to process it or change the script or other unknown unconscious motivations which can be about processing and healing. In other words, even in some cases where it is or appears troubling to an outsider, it may just be where someone is at in their own process, and outsiders should carefully consider the judgments they may make about that, or any way they may pathologize behavior that may not be pathological. Hopefully, people can also start to garner an awareness that judging a rape survivor’s sexual behavior can put even more baggage on a person than it can to non-survivors.{86}
So, while statistics tell one story, beneath the statistics are the more personal stories, the ones that deserve our attention and that might be more accurate than studies. The point here is not that some of those who’ve experienced abuse don’t act out promiscuously; it’s that some do and some don’t, and we don’t always know what’s behind people’s reasons for having sex. Danger always lies in making quick assumptions about people’s sexual behavior, especially when those people are female.
HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE LOOSE GIRL
I realize it’s odd to segue into homosexuality here, since being gay is not a mental illness, a self-harming behavior, or a transgression. But in examining the various associations with promiscuity, we must take a look at homosexuality. For years, the gay community has been stereotyped as promiscuous. This association came about mainly in the 1980s, when HIV/AIDS swept through the political and social landscape. Gay men are the ones most associated with promiscuity, and then bisexuals and transgendered people. Many assume that gay women are quick to commit, thus downplaying promiscuity. But homosexual people are just as likely as heterosexuals to want monogamy, or to use sex to feel loved, or to feel shame about sexual desire. The statistics bear out this truth. According to a survey administered in San Francisco, 58 percent of gay men and 81 percent of lesbians are in long-term relationships.{87} Another survey of 156 male couples showed that the average length of relationship was 8.9 years.
Miriam, nineteen years old, has slept with five men and more than fifty women. She grew up as one of eight kids, a middle child, and felt lost in a sea of children at home, no more visible than any of her siblings. Eventually, she grew up and left home. She moved in with a girlfriend who brought people home as “gifts” for them to share. At first, Miriam said, she couldn’t believe her luck, but over time she started feeling bad about herself. She needed every woman who came through the house to want her more than they wanted Miriam’s girlfriend, which also made her feel bad. Eventually, she started an affair with one of the women. She knew she was hurting her girlfriend, but she didn’t know how to stop herself. The other woman made her feel so special, like there was no one like her, which was of course the opposite of how she’d felt growing up. When I asked Miriam if she considered herself a loose girl, she said she absolutely did. Just because she liked girls, she said, didn’t change that she had those same feelings, that craving to have someone make her matter.
LOOSE GIRLS IN CONTEXT: A CONCLUSION
Promiscuity is bred among all sorts of mental illness, substance use, histories of sexual abuse, and sexual orientations. It is listed as a symptom of various problems teens may run into. And yet almost no studies have isolated it to learn about how to treat it. Many girls and women who have approached me for help have noted that they’ve had plenty of therapy in their lives, often for depression, anxiety, or adjustment disorders—a term therapists use when a person comes to therapy for basic life-adjustment issues, such as divorce, empty nest, job loss, etc. But even with all that counseling, they have felt like no one could ever help them or even adequately address their loose-girl issues.
Some of the problem is due to the relationship between the client and therapist. Sexual behavior tends to be underreported because of the sense that talking about sexuality is taboo, particularly across generational differences. If clients bring up transgressive sexual behaviors at all, counselors often assume that the best approach is to get their clients to stop the behavior. Even more likely is that the promiscuity as a separate issue doesn’t get attended to: we assume that if we treat the more general issue—substance abuse, depression—then the promiscuity will resolve itself as well. But unfortunately, girls who learn to act out sexually tend to keep doing so until they address the core issues surrounding those actions; usually those issues include a tremendous amount of shame and neediness. And that point—that shame and neediness sit at the heart of loose-girl behavior—is probably the most important one a counselor to a loose girl can know.
Next we look at how losing one’s virginity ties in to loose-girl behavior and how loose girls experience continual violations throughout their sexual lives.
Chapter 7
SAYING YES, SAYING NO
Consensual Sex and Rape
I lost my virginity at age fourteen. Really, it was rape. After that I pretty much gave sex out to whoever asked.
YES—LOSING VIRGINITIES
Sandy, who is fourteen, told me she doesn’t plan to have intercourse until she is in love. “That’s really the only way to do it,” she said. “Right? Because otherwise you just feel bad about it.” I asked her what she meant by “feeling bad.”
“I mean, everyone will think you’re a slut and no one will want to be your boyfriend.”
“Doesn’t that seem a little extreme?” I asked. “Why would people react that way?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “It’s just the way it is.”
Every girl learns early “The First Time” narrative. There is only one acceptable way to lose your virginity. You fall in love, the two of you decide you want to share your love in a deeper way, you do it, and he loves you forever. Usually, too, this happens on your wedding night. You “save yourself” for him so you can be special and pure, so you can be clean and worthy of him. Girls are taught that their virginity is a gift, one that they should give only to the “right person.”
Of course, most girls don’t have this experience. As I noted in the introduction, the statistics tell us that half of adolescents and a quarter of early adolescents have had sex, and most have had experiences that are much more complicated.{88} Many—two-thirds of adolescent girls, in fact—regret their first times. Many decide to just “get it over with.”{89} Many speak of their first time as “disappointing,” because the myth around losing one’s virginity, of how special and meaningful it’s supposed to be, rarely matches the reality. Many wind up date-raped or lose their inhibitions via alcohol.
Because it is so socially unacceptable for a girl to want sex outside marriage, she will often create fantasies around losing her virginity, such as believing that she is in love or that her relationship with a boy matters much more than it actually does. According to a series of surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Seventeen magazine, 50 percent of girls ages 15–17 believed that they would marry their first sexual partner.{90} While boys get the luxury of just trying their damndest to get laid for the first time (laden with their own cultural pressures about losing virginity, of course), girls have to devise rituals around it. They must be in love, or they must do it after a romantic night at the prom. They have to wait for the timing, the mood, the meaning, and the guy to be just right. Some girls tire of this eventually. If things don’t line up the way they planned, they wind up just getting it over with. The truth about the first time is that 23.4 percent of first sex experiences are one-night stands, and about two-thirds of U.S. teenagers who’ve had sex wish they’d waited longer. At the same time, 26 percent of teens think it’s embarrassing to admit they’re virgins, and more than half believe that their peers think that having sex by fifteen is socially acceptable. Most believe that their friends have already done it, even when they haven’t.{91}