OTHER PROGRAMS
There are other approaches to treatment out there. Some loose girls have connected to the approach found in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA), since there is plenty of overlap between the loose girl’s experience and someone who identifies as a sex or love addict.{120} Others try alternative approaches, such as therapies that address posttraumatic stress disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, or anxiety disorders in general. It is important to find what you respond to. The main thing to remember is that change is ongoing. Your pain will always be your pain. No one—really, no one—will save you. It is just a decision, and when you are ready, when your daughter is ready, when your client is ready, you, she, will do this.
At the end of a chapter about change for the loose girl, we must restate where the chapter started. You will always be this girl. You will never go through a struggle in life without finding yourself up against these thoughts or desires. You will not magically become someone new. Change is a journey, with no clear end point.
Chapter 11
WAVES
Protecting against Loose-Girl Behavior
Jo is a single mother and former loose girl who has been doing her best to work though her own issues with male attention as she raises her teenage daughter. “I’m so worried,” she told me, “that I won’t be able to help her. I try to behave in ways that will show her a woman can make good choices. But sometimes it feels like a failed effort.” When I asked her what she meant she spoke about all the magazines, the television shows, her daughter’s friends, and the boys. “I feel helpless in a world that has already determined what will happen to my daughter. She’ll think everything she needs comes from some guy, and she’ll never believe in herself enough to be everything I know she can be.” After a few moments, she added, “I don’t mean that. I sound so pessimistic.”
Beyond the loose girl, beyond the shame, the behavior, the question of right or wrong, beyond all the dirty little secrets, is the culture that created this dilemma for girls. In so many ways, Jo is right. Her daughter doesn’t have a fighting chance against the cultural wave explored in chapter 1.
Parents ask me often, “How can I protect my girls?” Colleagues in psychology and education wonder, “Is it even possible to prevent what happens to girls regarding sex?” This chapter explores this idea of prevention, how we can work to overhaul the culture to do so.
When I asked Jo what she is doing, she said she’s doing the opposite of what her parents did. Her parents told Jo not to have sex. That was it. Just don’t do it. Jo recognizes that telling her daughter to stay away from boys, or to not have sex, would be useless. She said, “I don’t want to do that to her. She should have sex! Oh God, I’m sure parents all over the world would judge me for that one. I think she should be able to have sex. I just don’t want it to become her whole life, like it did for me.”
For decades, the push has been along the same lines as what Jo’s parents told her. And the results have been consistent: nothing has changed. The large majority of those who pledge abstinence at thirteen lose their virginities by sixteen and are just as likely to engage in oral and anal sex as those who didn’t pledge, according to a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.{121} With limited guidance and plenty of shame about contraception, they wind up with STDs and pregnancies. They get married too young, to the wrong person, because they just want to have sex already and not be judged as bad. Many become what we can now define as loose girls, young women who use sex and male attention to fill emptiness and need, who wind up disappointed and ashamed, unsure how to change their behavior, and terribly judged.
Jocelyn M. Elders, in her foreword to Judith Levine’s book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, wrote:
We lead the Western world in virtually every sexual problem: teenage pregnancy, abortion, rape, incest, child abuse, sexually transmitted disease, HIV/AIDS, and many more. Yet when the Surgeon General issues a call to action on sexual health urging comprehensive sex education, abstinence, and other measures to promote responsible sexual behavior, and advocates that we break our “conspiracy of silence about sexuality,” we want to fire the Surgeon General.{122}
We are caught in an odd rigidity on this issue, one that is burdened with false, fear-inducing dangers about what it is to be a girl, when meanwhile the biggest danger of being a girl is how impossible it is to wade through the fear-inducing propaganda to find the truth.
When the child psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term adolescence, sexuality came to be seen as more of a test than a natural progression. It became a danger to traverse, a danger that adolescents must not allow to take over their lives to avoid future problems, such as impulsivity. Like Freud’s theories about sexual stages, this was simply another theory, certainly not evidenced by research. This isn’t to say Hall’s notion of adolescence hasn’t been immensely useful. Obviously, it has. My comment is only to point out that our panic about girls having sex is based on a man-made philosophy, not empirically supported research, and is therefore worthy of questioning.
It is important to note these odd biases, because they are so hugely in the way of us making any headway on the very real cultural issues attached to girls and sexuality. We must begin to change our minds about how to transform the culture when it comes to teen girls and sex.
Jacquie went to school in the Midwest, among cornfields and wheat. Her experience of sex education involved anatomical drawings of the reproductive sex organs (but not the clitoris, she told me when I asked) and a whole lot of information about how to protect herself from boys. The boys were in another classroom, getting their own education. When I asked what the boys learned about, she said that she didn’t know but suspected they weren’t being taught to protect themselves from girls. She’s right. Most sex education for boys is limited to anatomy, birth-control options, and wet dreams.
While she was being taught how to say no, she regularly wondered how to say yes. Was that even possible for a girl? She was itching to experiment. For one, she was horny, like any healthy adolescent girl. For another, she was curious. Incidentally, she told me, she gained nothing from her sex-ed curriculum and wound up pregnant at sixteen. She had an abortion, and her born-again Christian mother kicked her out of the house. She has been unable to have a healthy relationship with almost anyone since. She told me, “Sometimes I think I’m not cut out to love and be loved. Is that possible, that some people are just too fucked up to get loved?”
Jacquie is a strong—and awfully sad—example of how sex education fails girls. It sets up the same lie girls are sold everywhere: boys are horny; you are not. Boys get what they want; you get to be there for their purposes. So be careful. And always the underlying message is there for girls: don’t act on your sexual urges or you will be immoral and unworthy. In essence, we set our kids up for failure when it comes to sex.
Clearly, the just-say-no approach doesn’t work. When we continue to take this approach, we bang our heads against the wall of increasing teen pregnancy, STDs, and exceeding confusion and desperation about what sex means. Abstinence education fails girls. The statistics bear this fact out. There is no difference statistically between those who pledge abstinence and those who don’t. In the 1990s, there was a slight drop in teen pregnancies and STDs, which, not surprisingly, abstinence advocates jumped all over as evidence that abstinence works. But both the Alan Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined through closer research that the drop was due to increased contraceptive use and increased engagement in sex other than vaginal intercourse.{123} Unprotected vaginal intercourse had declined, not intercourse and sex itself.