In truth, few girls have access to that sexual self. The sexual self is buried deeply beneath all the ways we have worked culturally to keep girls from having a sexual consciousness. Lee Jacobs Riggs writes in an essay:
I let him touch me, never saying no, never saying yes, never probing too much into what his on-and-off girlfriend knew or thought about it. At the same time, I reclaimed the word “slut,” told my friends it was good, I wanted it. I excelled at giving blowjobs because I had wanted to excel at something.
Who knows what I wanted. I know that I had a need to assert myself as a sexual person to a world that had tried to erase that part of me that I felt so significantly. I know that I didn’t want him, but I did want something.{96}
I heard the same sentiment from many of the girls I interviewed. They too had acquaintance rape experiences—they thought. They too hadn’t necessarily wanted to have sex with most of the boys they had had sex with—they thought. The uncertainty I heard again and again is suggestive that many girls—all girls, not just loose girls—don’t have access to a part of themselves that might know what it wants regarding sex. If you don’t know what you want, how can you articulate clearly what it is?
The age-of-consent law, which is the state-by-state determined age by which point a girl is allowed to consent, was established to protect young girls, but it’s easy to see how it furthers the notion that until a girl reaches the age of consent—usually sixteen or seventeen—no consent is acknowledged. Before that age, she is the victim of statutory rape. So, for example, a girl who is fourteen may date a boy who is seventeen. Their relationship might include all the typical excitement and feelings of love and drama found in teenage relationships. But if they have sex, mutually consented to in their minds, the boy can be convicted of statutory rape, and the girl can be left with confusion about this idea that she’s been “raped.” If she understands, as most girls do, that rape means she was forced against her will, how will she reconcile her feelings about her boyfriend and this “fact”?
The law puts forth that same denial about teenage girls having sexual desire. The problem with that, of course, is that teenagers have sex. You can tell them not to all you want, but they have the same biological urge you and I do, maybe stronger, and they don’t have the developmental perspective to control their impulses as well as we do. Then add to that the girl who believes that if she says no to her boyfriend, he’ll find someone else who will have sex with him, and add to that the girl who wants a boy’s attention and knows this is how to get it.
Consent laws have a solid purpose to protect girls when they are truly victims, but legally designating an entire group of people as unable to consent to sex is maybe not the best way to protect girls from having sex that adults don’t want them to have (I should note here that an example of a girl truly being a victim, in my opinion, would be when the male counterpart is twenty or older, and the female is fifteen or younger; in such a situation there is undoubtedly a power differential at play). The Netherlands has a great example of how to use such a law to protect rather than silence. There, sexual intercourse between people aged 12–16 is legal, but victims who were coerced or forced and need the law’s protection can opt to use the statutory consent age of sixteen to prove that a violation occurred. Also, parents can overrule the wishes of a sixteen-year-old, but only if they make a convincing argument to child protective services.{97} An example of this might be if a fourteen-year-old girl were in a verbally abusive relationship with a seventeen–year-old boy, but she was too blinded by her feelings for the boy, or too scared, to see that. Her parents could then employ the consent age of sixteen to press charges against the boyfriend if they can prove the verbal abuse. This law views young people as capable, thinking, self-contained people who can reasonably make decisions for themselves. So, while teenage girls in the Netherlands start having intercourse much earlier, the country also sees some of the lowest teen pregnancy birth and abortion rates (approximately one in one thousand births) and STD rates in the Western world, which gives evidence of their increased levels of contraceptive use.
If we compare a girl from the Netherlands and the United States, we can see how this might happen. A fourteen-year-old girl from the Netherlands may make a mutual decision with her boyfriend to have sex using contraception. A fourteen-year-old girl from the United States may want to have sex with her boyfriend but knows she’s not allowed, so she sneaks it, too uninformed to use protection because no one taught her about sex, thinking her too young. She puts herself at risk of pregnancy, and she likely winds up feeling ashamed.
If we are going to teach girls to say no, we also need to teach them how to say yes. As Riggs writes, she never said no, but she also never said yes. As long as we don’t even give girls the option of saying yes, as long as we don’t believe we can trust them with their own sexual feelings, we are setting them up, to some extent, to be raped. Look at it this way: if a girl can’t separate sexual desire from desperation, if a girl wants attention from a boy because she’s told she should and then experiences that wanting as sexual desire because she has no other discourse for sexual desire, then she will not know what she wants. She will not be able to consent or not consent, because she wants something; it might be sex, if sex will get her the love she’s after or the attention she hopes for, but it might not be. So she goes ahead and has sex, but later she feels awful because she realizes she didn’t want sex or didn’t get what she wanted from the sex.
As we have discussed, girls are trained to have boys pursue them. Or, more accurately, they are trained to want to be pursued. But when they are pursued, they are told they can only say no.
Sue-Lin explained to me that, since she was about twelve, grown men have stopped her on the street and outright asked her to date them. She believes they think it’s OK to ask her so blatantly because she’s Asian. “Men tend to believe we Asian girls are submissive and here to please them,” she said, noting a common, racist stereotype. She usually just ignored them and kept walking or said she had somewhere to be. Once, though, when she was fifteen, one of those men followed her—she hadn’t noticed—and violently raped her in an alley near her apartment building. She knew the second she saw him that he was angry she had denied him, that she’d had the gall to refuse his pursuit. Sue-Lin’s story reveals a twisted result of a culture that can’t tolerate a girl having the wherewithal to say no—or yes.
Jill Filipovic explores this connection between gender norms and rape in an essay. She writes, “The message is simple: Women are ‘naturally’ passive until you give them a little bit of power—then all hell breaks loose and they have to be reined in by any means necessary. Rape and other assaults on women’s bodies…serve as unique punishments for women who step out of line.”{98}
Once women are raped, their punishment doesn’t end there. A common stereotype about rape is that girls who get raped wind up becoming loose girls. They compulsively pursue sex. In other words, women who have been raped are presumed to be unable to have normal, consensual experiences. Though certainly this might be true for some, it is also not true for others. The important point here is that it is one more way victims of rape are denied ownership over their sexuality—first by the rapist, then by the cultural assumptions about them.