Drunk, they can avoid the emotions that come along with the cultural weight of having sex for the first time, and they only have to feel bad about it the next day, when it is too late and the deed is done. Girls rarely feel in charge of their own desire when it comes to sex, and certainly this starts with their first time. It’s easy to see why girls might revert to choices they later regret, and it’s easy to see why they often don’t know what it would even mean to feel “ready.”
Some may wonder, then, whether I think there is an age or developmental passage at which point I think a girl is officially “ready.” But the answer to whether a girl is ready to have sex is entirely individual. Judith Levine, in Harmful to Minors, shares one of my favorite stories: a thirteen-year-old girl asks her mother how she would know when she was ready. Her mother replied, “When you want it so much that you feel you can’t not have it.” She went on to note that sex changes the way you feel about the other person, and that once you do it with that person, you can’t undo it or unfeel what you felt.{92} This mother honored her daughter as a sexual being. She told her to listen to her own desire but also to recognize that there are emotional consequences to sex. If only all teenage girls could receive the same advice about losing their virginities, my guess is that a lot more girls would feel in control of their sexual lives.
NO—THE MANY FACES OF VIOLATION
Jennae was raped during Hurricane Katrina. While the rest of the country was terrified about the children and the dogs and the levees and the homes and all the people lost, Jennae experienced her own, very personal devastation. It was easy, sure, because no one was looking. It was easy because everyone’s eyes were glued to the television, or making plans to get out, or gathering in the Superdome. It was easy because Jennae just lay there, unsure what else to do. No one was around. She didn’t think anyone would care. She had already been called a slut at school. She had already had sex with seven guys, the fourth being her boyfriend’s best friend, who she hadn’t really wanted to have sex with, but he came into her bed one night, and she didn’t know how to say no. That was a violation, too, of course, but Jennae would say it wasn’t. Or she wasn’t sure. Because every guy she slept with she sort of wanted to, or she liked the attention, and a few she really wanted to, so she wasn’t sure how to separate the two—rape and not rape, violation and not violation.
But this time, it was surely rape, because she is almost sure she said not to. She’s almost sure she tried to push him off. She can’t be sure. They all run together sometimes—the one she really liked, the one she didn’t know if she liked but thought she could, the one she definitely didn’t want to have sex with. They had all led up to this moment for Jennae. The boy had come by because she hadn’t evacuated with her family because she had been fighting with them, and she had said she could handle things herself. He wasn’t violent, but he was intentional, forceful. He didn’t even try to kiss her. He was from her school. He knew she was a slut. And with her panties off, she saw that she couldn’t really handle herself. She knew in that moment, her head to the side so she wouldn’t see his face, that she wouldn’t handle anything again.
Jennae’s story is heartbreaking, and not just because she was raped. It’s heartbreaking because violation for her, like so many other girls, was a thing without clear outlines. The sex she had with boys before her rapist was also violating—maybe. The lines remain unclear because how she felt regarding sex, her intention, what she wanted and didn’t want, have all long been blurry. Jennae is typical in this way. Like any other girl, she received all the confusing messages about sex. She had normal sexual desire. She got something from sexual attention that was both easy to get and hard to get elsewhere.
Danita told me about how she came to be a loose girl. A neighbor boy molested her when she was eight, and ever since then, she has felt unable to connect in the ways she wants with a boy. She said, “I like sex. Who doesn’t like sex? But it’s like every time I try to be close with a guy, I feel like he wants to push me where I don’t want to go. I don’t want to tell them I was raped. It’s, I don’t know, a turn-off for most guys. So usually I just go along with things, even when I’m not that into it.” When Danita met someone she really liked and got into a relationship with him, she stopped wanting to have sex. She didn’t want him to touch her, which confused her. She said, “After all those times I had sex, I couldn’t understand why I would suddenly feel sickened by sex with someone I wanted to be with.”
These experiences of having sex when you only sort of want to, or even don’t want to, is one of the defining qualities of loose-girl behavior. We have sex because we want something from it that has nothing to do with the sex itself—in Danita’s case, it’s the assurance that the guy will still want her, that he won’t go away. It’s so hard to say no when you feel like a boy’s desire for you means so much about you, when you believe it will make you worthwhile. Add to this the fact that boys’ sexual aggression is generally considered a normal part of their sexual development—boys will be boys, and they can’t help themselves. The end result is usually a sense of violation, much like the violation a person feels after rape. Once Danita got comfortable and safe with a man, her body finally reacted to that violation. She shut down.
Beatrice asked me outright how to say no. She felt like she needed a script—a polite set of lines she could follow each time—so she would stop having sex with men she didn’t want to have sex with simply because they wanted her to. We came up with a few responses she could feel comfortable with, including white lies about why she couldn’t: “I have to get up early tomorrow,” “I’m not feeling well,” “I have a boyfriend.” Some may judge her for the white lies. People may think Beatrice should simply say, “I don’t want to” and leave it at that. Of course she should be able to do that, but she didn’t feel ready. Saying “I don’t want to” meant they wouldn’t try again. It meant she would have to let go of the idea that their wanting her mattered in a larger way. She wasn’t at a stage in her recovery where she could do that yet.
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.{93} 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.{94} 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?{95} 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.