Jackie is an intensely smart woman, so I was fascinated by her inability to see the way she continually set herself up to feel bad about herself. It struck me that Jackie liked them “unavailable.” She liked the thrill of scoring someone so unattainable. It was part of the high. At the same time, though she wasn’t aware of it then, she chose unavailable men so when they left she could falsely reestablish her understanding of herself again and again: she isn’t good enough. She isn’t lovable.
Also, Jackie’s B-list celebrities give her an opportunity to express her sexuality in ways that wouldn’t matter as much with mere “mortals,” as she jokingly calls the rest of the men in the world. If the celebrity boys want her, then she can latch on to their desirability. She ups her status as a sexual person with such bad boys.
For a girl, sex is dangerous. It is a motorcycle ride; it is rushing carelessly along a highway, heading somewhere, hair wild in the wind. On that motorcycle is the man who takes her on the ride, her arms wrapped around a firm, protective chest. That kind of wild, carefree sex is everything a girl can’t have, unless she is willing to become a slut. Unless she wants to become potentially unmarriageable, unworthy of respect. Sex is that bad boy. Naomi Wolf in Promiscuities writes, “The demon lover’s tendency toward chaos and escape and risk and selfishness may be seen as a projection of inadmissible female longings onto the male—a way of safely handling and vicariously experiencing the release of women’s own wish sometimes to be ‘out of control.’”{29} No wonder bad boys are so appealing to so many girls! No wonder they will do whatever they must to get inside that experience with such a boy! For her, sexual feeling is only allowed in the presence of a boy who can contain her, who will take responsibility for the wildness and loss of control. Boys become the stand-in for everything she can’t do herself, and she winds up playing out all her drama, discovery, and passion in her relationships with those boys.
A girl doesn’t need to feel sad or lost or hurt to become a loose girl. She simply needs to want freedom, to want the wingspan that will let her live her desires. This, I suspect, is why plenty of girls I interviewed suffered through so many of the same feelings but didn’t have loveless childhoods. At the core, loose girls are a cultural problem. Yes, difficulty at home can exacerbate looseness. Yes, abuse and molestation make the problem much, much worse. But the bottom line is that girls get attached to boys and male attention because our culture allows boys the sorts of freedoms girls want.
Fourteen-year-old Lourdes met her last boyfriend at an underage club. He was twenty-four, hanging out there with a few of his friends who seemed younger than him. She said there was no question that he was leering at all the teenage girls, but rather than being turned off, she found this provocative. She saw it as daring on his part. He danced with her and then offered to drive her home. After that she saw him every day, but she had to hide it from her parents because of his age. He picked her up from school and would take her back to his apartment that he shared with a few other guys, and they’d have sex. At home, Lourdes’s father drank and went into rages. Lourdes and her younger sister had to hide in their room with a chair against the doorknob until he had passed out. She’d made the mistake of getting in the way of his rages before, and she wound up whipped by his belt. Her mother, who was a devout Catholic (or, as Lourdes called her, “a religious freak”), never did anything to intervene. Instead, during her father’s rages, Lourdes’s mother cried in the kitchen and spoke to God in Spanish. “You know,” Lourdes said, “helpful shit like that.” Lourdes just wanted out of her house, but she also felt guilty because she didn’t want to leave her sister alone with her parents. She thought many times about getting pregnant. She knew for a fact that her father would have kicked her out (and her mother would have just cried and talked to God in Spanish).
Eventually, she and her boyfriend broke up. He moved on to some other young girl without even telling her. She was pretty upset, but she went right back to the club, hoping that some other guy would come along. She says that she has her sights set on someone saving her from her life, and who better to do that than an older guy?
Two-thirds of girls younger than age 18 choose sex partners who are close to their age, and a mere 7 percent choose partners who are six or more years older.{30} But men older than high school age account for 77 percent of births among girls age 16–18 and for 51 percent of births among girls age 15 and younger. Men older than age 25 father twice as many births with teenage girls than do boys younger than 18.{31} So, while teenage girls partnering with older men is not a significant trend, when it does happen, it seems that girls wind up with older men as the fathers of their children.
Why do some girls want older men? A few of the girls I interviewed told me they felt that teenage boys were immature and that they liked how the older men treated them, referring to dinners and gifts. One noted, “It doesn’t hurt that they have cars, too.” It does seem that girls who like older men gravitate to their money, but research also suggests that girls who choose men so far out of their age ranges also tend toward low self-esteem and depression.{32} Many of these girls are looking to replace their abusive or difficult families with new ones. They often perceive the men as white knights who will save them from whatever pain they’re suffering at home.
Regardless of the girls’ claims, men who choose teenage girls tend to be immature and insecure, with egos matching those of teenage boys.{33} Many have criminal histories, so they are not the safe havens girls make them out to be. Of course, partnering with a teenage girl under the age of consent is statutory rape, not to be taken lightly.
Grown men who choose adolescents as sex partners tend to have these immaturities, but they also simply learned about girls from our culture. They, like all boys, learn from media that girls aren’t worth more than their looks and their accessibility for sex; they absorb this message as completely as girls do. Boys erroneously learn, just as girls do, that boys are horny and girls aren’t, and that it is up to the girls to protect their morality by fending off boys’ advances. They learn that boys choose girls, not the other way around. And they learn that the more girls a boy can score, the more manly he is.
It is easy to see how these messages can lead boys to behave badly, to try to get girls in bed and dump them just as quickly, to not feel any sort of responsibility for their sexual behavior in the world. It is also easy to see how we don’t vilify or shame boys for their sexual behavior the way we do with girls. That double standard is still entirely alive and well. Although it might seem that boys get away with murder in this respect, the truth is that—just like girls—they get pigeonholed away from real intimacy. Our culture’s expectations regarding sex harm boys, too. Boys learn that they should want sex, pursue it, and be good at it. They don’t, however, learn about the emotional potentials that come along with their desire, and they don’t learn that most boys share a similar awkwardness and curiosity, along with the excitement and awe, when it comes to sex. In Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, William Pollack argues that boys’ ravenous sexual appetites are more often than not a cover for their fear of sexual humiliation.{34}
Imagine, if you will, boys and girls exploring sexually and safely in a loving, kind way. Imagine they could learn about how to have relationships, could communicate about their needs, without cultural and parental shaming. Sad how much this vision seems like an impossible dream. Before we can look more closely at ways to rectify this, let’s examine the role of the girl more closely. After all, as boys are boxed into being owners of their sexual identity, girls are given very few options about who they can be when it comes to sex.