“Hi, Slut!”
There is a metal go-go cage in which a group of Duke girls clad in tiny denim
skirts and halters perform a modified pole dance, but no one seems to be
watching…. Much to the disappointment of many students, female and male,
there’s no real dating scene at Duke-true for a lot of colleges. “I’ve never
been asked out on a date in my entire life-not once,” says one stunning
brunette. Nor has a guy ever bought her a drink. “I think that if anybody ever
did that, I would ask him if he were on drugs,” she says. Rather, there’s the
casual one-night stand, usually bolstered by heavy drinking and followed the
next morning by-well, nothing, usually. “You’ll hook up with a guy, and you know
that nothing will come out of it,” says Anna. The best thing you can hope for,
she says, “is that you’ll get to hook up with him again.”
-Janet Reitman, Rolling Stone, June 1, 2006
When Rolling Stone magazine starts to read like the National Review, then
clearly something has gone very wrong. Not since the Cuban missile crisis of
1962 has there been such bipartisan agreement that we have a problem. It is
certainly puzzling. On the one hand, girls are more educated and women more
successful in business than ever before. At the same time, girls report that in
their private lives, they are feeling enormous pressure to be sexually active
and don’t know how to say no. Numerous studies from left, right, and center have
shown that when women get to college, they are extremely dissatisfied with the
lack of a “dating scene.” They long to be taken out but instead are made to feel
they are weird if they don’t “go with the flow” of the hookup scene instead.
“The guy means nothing to you” is the socially correct view to adopt. Even an
article in a women’s magazine encouraging the sisterhood to be happy as
singles-“Down with the Husband Hunt!” was the charming title-the author had to
admit that she “succumbs … from time to time” to the theory “that we are
living in a lopsided dating universe in which the cards are all stacked in favor
of the guys.” Kerry Ball, twenty-nine, of Miami, told her, “Men are just looking
for girls to mess around with rather than have a relationship with or even
simply date. There are so many single girls looking for relationships that these
guys have no trouble finding someone to sleep with them.” The number of
unmarried women between ages thirty and thirty-four has more than tripled during
the past thirty years, and the percentage of childless women in their early
forties has doubled. You might say that the “glass ceiling” has shifted from
work to women’s personal lives.
At this writing, something called PSD is all over the news, and perhaps it may
be helpful. I first read about PSD in Wired, and since Wired is a technology
magazine, I assumed it was referring to Photoshop files (which have PSD file
extensions) or that the writer had misspelled Canada’s PST, provincial sales
tax. Neither assumption was right. But this new breakthrough is revolutionizing
people’s intimate lives.
PSD stands for “pre-sex discussion.” As Regina Lynn glowingly reports, the sex
therapist Roger Libby has recently discovered that if you get to know the person
you’re about to have sex with, even a little bit, the sex itself is improved.
“Sex is so much more than intercourse and [in his new book] he encourages
readers to have an extensive pre-sex discussion, or PSD, before becoming
sexually involved with a partner.”
Is sex more than just intercourse. This idea is not old-fashioned, like modesty
or courtship, you understand. This is a modern thing. Libby is an adjunct
professor at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San
Francisco, and his advanced studies of humans have led him to conclude that
young people, especially, should conduct PSDs. (His book is billed as A Guide to
Intelligent Sexual Choices for Teenagers and Twenty-somethings.) Then we come to
the actual elucidation: “A PSD is an intimate and entertaining conversation that
informs prospective lovers about each other’s feelings, desires, expectations,
fantasies and her/his sexual knowledge and sophistication. It’s an introduction
to the possibility of a sexual relationship or encounter.” Indeed, “a properly
conducted PSD … includes the meaning of sex.”
Whenever I hear experts marketing older notions as newfangled radical concepts
that have just occurred to them, like PSDs, it makes me wonder HDDTTPA?-How dumb
do they think people are? It takes a college- educated expert to be infected
with the opposite notion in the first place; hence the surprise at the
“revelation” of PSD, known to the rest of us as common sense.
But I can certainly appreciate the need for a verbal paint job. After all, look
at what happened to me. Around ten years ago I began to notice that many young
women were becoming disenchanted with casual sex, but it was equally clear that
waiting for “the one” was seen as a bit pathological-only for those with
hang-ups. Single at the time, and not yet living in our moment of heightened PSD
awareness, I decided to pen a defense of sexual modesty. I knew that my
arguments-that preserving the erotic depends on a sense of mystery, for
example-might be challenged; but nothing prepared me for the tongue-lashings I
would receive from my elders for questioning the ancien régime of the 1960s. The
alarm was sounded, and all the professional smirkers were dispatched to the
front lines. Katha Pollitt called me a “twit” who should be in charge of
designing “new spandex chadors for female olympians.” Camille Paglia simply
declared, “Oh, she makes me sick!” In a sense, it was touching to see sworn
ideological enemies join hands and come together-at long last-for the purpose of
descending on me: feminists, antifeminists, libertarians, pornographers. At
least I was a uniter, not a divider. Playboy featured my book under the heading
“A Man’s Worst Nightmare.” The Nation solemnly foretold that I would “certainly
be embarrassed” and regret my stance “in a few years.” I should be ashamed of
myself. To some baby boomers, it seemed, modesty is much worse than adultery.
I trudged on, under the heavy burden of the Scarlet M, baffled but fascinated by
the eruption I had instigated. After the New York Observer printed a front-page
caricature of me as an SS officer, it dawned on me that my opponents were
illustrating their intolerance far more colorfully than I could have done on my
own. Although we live in a supposedly liberated age, our hysterical
witch-hunting of those who question our ideal of recreational sex suggests
something else: that our liberation does not extend quite as far as we imagine.
But I wasn’t discouraged, not even when I received death threats, because I was
too busy reading fascinating letters from young women. Precisely because being a
romantic is nowadays an unpardonable sin, these young women, thousands of them,
had been sure that something was very wrong with them. Seven years later, I
still receive the same kind of letter, and it never fails to touch me. Here are
excerpts from various letters; you’ll notice a common thread. First, from
Rachel:
You basically laid out almost exactly how I felt as a woman. I am twenty years
old and have been asking myself questions like, “What’s wrong with me? Why
haven’t I had sex yet?” … Anyway, reading your book, my faith was restored.
I am a romantic…. I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t just slept with this
guy or that one like my friends do. And I’ll say I was so close to doing that
just because I thought it would help me grow up. Be more my own age. Even my
mother wanted me to do it. And that’s why I thank God I read your book when I
did. I began crying toward the end when I realized that nothing was wrong with
me and that I was lucky to still have what I have. My desire to be with one
person isn’t childish or immature…. I’m not scared; I just don’t have an
interest in [sex] as a sport.
From Carrie:
Your book honestly helped me make sense of a lot of what I had experienced. I
went through a bad stage in college where I remember thinking that my instincts
(that what I was doing was bad) were irrational and struggled to adopt an “it’s
no big deal” attitude. Your book was the first time I really sorted through
things enough to recognize that our instincts are there for a reason and that
the “it’s no big deal” attitude is such a horribly depressing view to accept.
About 70 percent of these e-mails and letters indicated that the writer felt
that wanting marriage and children was an aspiration she needed to “hide.” (From
J: “Have I ruined something wonderful by giving in and hiding what I really
wanted-marriage and children?”) This did not surprise me, but I was shocked that
according to nearly half of the letters, a girl’s own parent thought something
was wrong with her for not being sufficiently casual about sex. Here is one
example, from an e-mail sent in October 2004:
Somehow with it being perfectly normal for twelve- to fourteen-year-olds to have
field/bush parties, getting drunk and having sex and doing whatever the locally
available substances were, I managed to be one of the few that “escaped with my
dignity intact,” I guess. I did end up getting ditched after eight months by a
guy because I wouldn’t have sex with him…. I just didn’t like him that
much. But I certainly did feel ashamed and embarrassed about remaining a virgin
so long…. I am twenty-three now. My mother freaks out if I want to borrow
the car to drive a friend back to [a nearby town] and return in the dark, but
when I’d just turned twenty, and she and I went to Michigan to visit a guy I
wasn’t technically seeing at the time, and to see the tall ships in Bay City,
and I ended up in his hotel room, which was next door to ours. He was better at
conversation and had something more interesting on TV, and Mom was staying up
reading and watching QVC, so I wouldn’t be able to get much sleep there, either.
After she found out that we hadn’t had sex, she asked me whether I was frigid or
gay. He was nearly forty! Perfectly fine for your twenty-year-old daughter to
screw a guy twice her age, just as long as she doesn’t return *your* car after
dark when she’s going somewhere that’s all of forty-five minutes away. My mom
thinks I’m a freak.
Usually these stories were depressing, but I did hear one that was priceless. A
friend of a friend, in her late twenties, returned from a romantic weekend and
was sharply interrogated by her mother-but not in the way you might expect. When
she found out that her daughter hadn’t slept with the new boyfriend after a
whole weekend away, the mother warned her ominously, “You’re gonna lose him!”
(She didn’t; they eventually got married.)
Parents want to know how to speak to their children about sex, and kids
certainly want to hear from parents. (“Teenagers Want More Advice from Parents
on Sex, Study Says” is a typical news headline.) And the experts tell us that
parents are the biggest influence on whether a teenager decides to have sex. Yet
there is one big stumbling block: Often parents don’t realize that their sexual
revolution has become the entrenched status quo. Today many young women feel
oppressed by the expectation that they will engage in casual sex, just as their
mothers once felt oppressed by the expectation that they would be virgins until
marriage. Parents in the grip of a notion that they need to be “cool” want to
show they understand that the kids are going to “do it anyway.” Ironically, this
adds to the pressure. For boys too, You’re liberated, so get going! doesn’t
always translate into an “I care” message. William Nobel, MD, of the Pediatric
Association of the University of Texas, shares a story about his practice:
Recently Todd, an anxious fifteen-year-old male patient, presented to clinic
with vague reproductive tract complaints. He was accompanied by his mother, who
returned to the waiting room after the initial interview. His history gradually
revealed a series of sexual encounters with a woman several years his senior.
The sexual liaisons included other risks as well, including alcohol and
substance use. The teen’s anxiety resulted from an awareness that his behavior
placed him at risk for HIV. He requested HIV testing. While discussing the
testing and evaluation for other sexually transmitted infections, the boy began
to cry.
“I don’t think that my mom loves me,” he sobbed.
“Why do you say that?” I responded.
“She doesn’t care where I go or who I’m with or if I come home at night. I don’t
have a curfew and she never asks what I’m doing.”
Reluctance to set limits is not simply a U.S. phenomenon. Because of the
challenges parents face after divorce-or many times simply because they believe
freedom is the better approach-mum’s the word. “Parents often don’t want to be
in their kids’ bad books,” says Sara Dimerman, a child and family therapist who
is based in Toronto. After a twelve-year-old girl was stabbed on a street in
Toronto’s entertainment district at two-thirty AM one Saturday in May 2006, many
people wondered why a twelve-year-old girl had been partying at all hours in the
first place. The answer, apparently, was that eighth-grade graduation now
resembles a high school prom, and many twelve-year-olds party all night like
older teens. Coed sleepovers and all-night clubbing often have the parents’
blessing: “Twelve is the new fifteen,” said the local papers.
In a survey of 1,000 girls in Britain, seven times as many teens picked “lap
dancer” as a “good profession” as picked being a teacher. And Jessica, a
twenty-one-year-old camp counselor in Paris, tells me she cannot believe the way
the twelve-year-olds speak to one another: Les garçons disent aux filles, “Je
veux te niquer,” et les filles répondent, “moi aussi.” C’est comme si ils se
disaient, “Comment vas-tu?” et “ça va bien.” (The boys say to the girls, “I want
to f-k you,” and the girls say, “me too!” It’s like saying, “How are you?” and
“I’m fine.”) Si la fille ne répond pas “moi aussi,” ils se moquent d’elle en
disant “es-tu homosexuelle ou quoi?” (If a girl doesn’t say “me too!” then it’s
like, “Are you gay or what?”)
Who is countering these pressures? Well, there’s Sharon Stone, who travels
around the world and hears from young people while she is signing autographs.
Often she is asked, “What to do if I’m being pressured for sex?” In March 2006,
asked this by yet another girl, Stone saw fit to make public the advice she’s
been giving teen girls for a while: “I tell them what I believe-oral sex is a
hundred times safer than vaginal or anal sex. If you’re in a situation where you
cannot get out of sex, offer a blow job.” This advice was widely circulated. One
Internet-based sex educator who works with teenagers thanked Stone for her
“frank discussion”; he also “thought of teens I’ve talked to while doing sex
education who have had sex when they really didn’t want to.” On the other hand,
he “worried she may be unaware of the many STDs that can be transmitted via oral
sex.”
Sexually transmitted diseases are indeed a problem: over 4 million new cases are
diagnosed each year. But the reason Stone’s advice is awful goes far beyond
STDs, I’m afraid. If a girl doesn’t want to have sex, why can’t she just say no,
without having to offer an oral consolation prize? Nowadays, girls are made to
feel that they have to offer something, and it had better be more than just the
pleasure of their company.
The sad fact is that much of the sex teen girls have is unwanted. In a study of
279 female adolescents published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent
Medicine in June 2006, about 41 percent of girls ages fourteen to seventeen
reported having “unwanted sex.” Most of the girls had “unwanted sex because they
feared the partner would get angry if denied sex.” And even when sex is wanted,
it tends to be regretted soon after-especially by girls. According to a study
done by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy in 2004, two-thirds of
all sexually experienced teens said that they wished they had waited longer
before having sex (in studies in both 2000 and 2004, the number of girls who
regretted sex was consistently higher than the number of boys).
People are always surprised to learn this-as Diane Sawyer was when her famous
special on Norplant in urban high schools revealed that all of the sexually
active girls the reporters talked to wished they had waited until marriage. The
adults in the segment were strongly in favor of Norplant for teenage girls, so
hearing the girls confess this came as a shock.
The marriage educator Marline Pearson, who teaches at Madison Area Technical
College in Wisconsin, described the pressure on girls “to have lots of casual
sex.” By the time girls are fourteen to sixteen, according to one of her young
students, “they don’t have any concept of sex as something special. After awhile
it makes them feel worthless. There is no pleasure. They aren’t enjoying it.”
Pearson sadly remarks, “I increasingly hear girls talk about sex as something
you just do. Get it over with, get desensitized, so you don’t think or expect
too much of it. Sad commentary.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Girls Gone Mild
by Wendy Shalit
Copyright © 2007 by Wendy Shalit.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2007
Wendy Shalit
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6473-1
