“It’s like that whole thing about queefing,” she continued.
“Queefing?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a fart with your vagina? There were these episodes on South Park about it, and now teenage boys have that as something they can say about girls, and girls know that boys have that, so you feel awkward.” She sighed. “It’s just, there’s this whole comedic culture around making fun of female sexuality, you know? And it’s super strong.”
While queefing had blessedly escaped my notice, the overall rise of the word vagina as a punch line had not. Snarky references to women’s nethers are the new fag—a way to denigrate masculinity, to ridicule or dominate an opponent. Even women use the word to signal that they’re “cool with it,” down with the bros. The implication is that everyone shares a secret distaste toward a lady’s parts, or at least a sense that the word vagina itself is a goof (as opposed to cunt, which wouldn’t be funny at all, and pussy, which as an insult has lost much of its anatomic specificity). So in the 2007 film Knocked Up, Jason Segel taunts a bearded Martin Starr by saying, “Your face look like a vagina.” In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Mila Kunis similarly slams Segel, when he hesitates before diving off a Hawaiian cliff: “I can see your vagina from here,” she calls from the ocean below. “I can see your hoo-hah.” Another female character, in the trailer for the Adam Sandler flop That’s My Boy, heckles an ineffectual Andy Samberg with “Throw [the ball] you big vagina!” Off-screen, an essay on the website Thought Catalog titled “I’m a Feminist, but I Don’t Eat Pussy” went viral in 2013. Among its pithy observations: that while vaginas “feel really good when your penis is inside of them” they are “objectively gross . . . covered in hair. They ooze and slime . . .” They are dirty, the male writer continues, and taste bad, and for women to expect oral sex “when you know the strain it puts on men, is selfish and, frankly, discriminatory.” If that weren’t enough to plunge the average young woman into a shame spiral, heartthrob actor Robert Pattinson, whose fame and fortune were forged from the erotic fantasies of teenage girls, breezily confessed to Details magazine, “I really hate vaginas. I’m allergic to vagina.”
Sign me up for Team Jacob.
No wonder girls are insecure. Remember the shoulder push? The wordless gesture boys use to urge their partners downward? Young women had their own version, but it was a two-palmed shove away from the pelvis, a silent redirection to safer, if less erogenous, ground. Sam said that her ex-boyfriend, whom she had dated for a year, went down on her exactly twice during their relationship. Both times it was his idea. “It was not fun for me,” she said. “I was not comfortable with it at all. I guess because I’ve never been comfortable with my parts down there. It’s not something I find attractive. So I don’t like the idea of someone else down there.” To be fair, she said, he would “finger” her, but he had no idea what felt good; nor, since she had never masturbated, did she: even if she did know, she probably couldn’t have said it out loud. Mostly, he just inserted a finger and sort of rummaged around.
Obviously, I wouldn’t expect girls to be fully aware of their sexual needs or able to articulate them easily—many adult women can’t do that even with long-term partners—but they are at a critical juncture in their development, learning foundational lessons about attraction, intimacy, arousal, sexual entitlement. Those early experiences can have a lasting impact on the understanding and enjoyment of their sexuality. So their aversion to their own genitals was disheartening. Watching girls squirm in response to my questions, I thought again about the images of female sexiness that assaulted them: Fergie’s “London Bridge” going down, Miley swinging naked on a wrecking ball, Beyoncé dancing in her scanties around her suit-clad husband, Nicki giving Drake a lap dance (tweeting beforehand that she had just knocked back some “confidence juice”). The culture is littered with female body parts, with clothes and posturing that purportedly express sexual confidence. But who cares how “proud” you are of your body’s appearance if you don’t enjoy its responses? One sophomore in college showed me photos from her Instagram feed in which she was dressed for a party in a leopard-print crop top, a tiny skirt, and skyscraper heels. Later in our interview she admitted, “I don’t enjoy getting oral sex. I am so in my head. All I think about is if I should tell him that it doesn’t feel good or if he’s getting tired or if he’s even grossed out?”
Women’s feelings about their genitals have been directly linked to their enjoyment of sex. College women in one study who were uncomfortable with their genitalia were not only less sexually satisfied and had fewer orgasms than others but were more likely to engage in risky behavior. (Boys were the opposite: those who felt positively about their penises were more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior.) Another study, of more than four hundred undergraduates, found that early engagement in fellatio led to feelings of inferiority and low self-worth among girls; by contrast, cunnilingus at the same young age was associated with greater self-awareness, sexual openness, and assertiveness. Young women who feel confident masturbating during sex, meanwhile, more than double their odds of orgasm in either hookups or relationships.
So how young girls feel about “down there” matters. It matters a lot.
The Psychological Clitoridectomy
Sex is probably not the first thing that jumps to mind when you think about Indiana. But it happens that the state university in Bloomington is home to the Kinsey Institute, a center of research on sexual health founded by biologist Alfred Kinsey. I flew there one icy winter afternoon to meet Debby Herbenick, an associate professor at IU’s School of Public Health. Herbenick, who is also a sex columnist and the author of books such as Sex Made Easy, was the very picture of the modern sexpert: in her late thirties, with long, dark hair and cocker spaniel eyes, and dressed in a chic houndstooth minidress with over-the-knee boots. Her own research is in an area called genital self-image: how people feel about their private parts. Over the past few years, she said, young women’s genital self-image has been under siege, with more pressure on them than ever to see their vulvas as unacceptable in their natural state: “They need to shave them, decorate them, or otherwise groom before sex,” she said. “There’s this real sense of shame as a girl if you don’t have your genitals prepared, a real sense that there is a possibility someone will judge them.”
Most of the young women I met had shaved or waxed their pubic hair, all of it, since they were about fourteen. When I asked them why, the girls would initially say it wasn’t something they’d ever questioned: they already shaved their legs and armpits, and they’d seen older girls who were bare, so it seemed the thing to do. They said hairlessness made them feel “cleaner” (mistakenly, as it turns out. Though it diminishes the risk of pubic lice, clear cutting creates a festive-sounding “happy culture” for most other STDs: without the shield of protective hair, for instance, the labia can become carpeted with genital warts). As with self-objectification, girls considered depilation a personal choice, something done “for oneself,” for comfort, hygiene, practicality. Invariably, though, they would bring up another motivation: avoiding humiliation. Consider the trajectory of comments by Alexis, a sixteen-year-old at a public high school in Northern California. “I didn’t really think about it,” she began. “One friend had an older sister who was doing it, so she started, and then we all did it. It was like a chain reaction.
“But then, I also heard these guys in class one day talking about a girl. Her shorts were low cut and when she’d raised her arms, her shirt had lifted up, and they were like, ‘I could see pubic hair! Man, it was so gross!’”
Girls are already self-conscious about their (typically unnamed) pubic region; it doesn’t take much to stoke that insecurity. Ruby, in Chicago, was one of the girls who said shaving made her feel “clean,” especially during her period. But she, too, added, “I remember these boys telling stories about this girl who ‘got around.’ And guys would go down there to finger her, or whatever, and there would be hair, and t
hey were appalled. So I just . . . I mean, guys act like they would be disgusted by it.”
Herbenick said that in her college town, chalkboard displays outside local salons offered sales on “back-to-school waxes” in the fall; April brought similar specials on spring break Brazilians. “That’s a pretty public reminder that you better look a certain way,” she said. A few years ago, she had a female student confide that she’d started shaving after a boy announced—during one of Herbenick’s class discussions—that he’d never seen pubic hair on a woman in real life, and if he came across it on a hookup partner, he’d walk out the door.
Full-frontal waxing—which is not only pricey but excruciating—was once the province of fetishists and, of course, porn stars. The first “Brazilian” salon (so named because its owners were from that country) in the United States opened in New York in 1987, but it was an episode of Sex and the City that took the practice mainstream. By 2006, trendsetter and the former Posh Spice Victoria Beckham declared that Brazilian waxes should be “compulsory” starting at fifteen. (Let’s check back with her in 2026, shall we, when her daughter reaches that age.) There’s no question that a bald vulva is smooth. Silky smooth. Baby smooth—some would say disturbingly so. Perhaps in the 1920s, when women first started shaving their legs and armpits, that, too, seemed creepily infantilizing, but now depilating those areas is a standard rite of passage for girls, an announcement, rather than a denial, of adult sexuality. That first wave of hair removal was driven by flapper fashions that displayed a woman’s limbs; arms and legs were, for the first time, no longer part of the private realm. Today’s pubic hair removal may indicate something similar: we have opened our most intimate parts to unprecedented scrutiny, evaluation, commodification. Largely as a result of the Brazilian trend, cosmetic labiaplasty, the clipping of the folds of skin surrounding the vulva, has skyrocketed: while still well behind nose and boob jobs, according to the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (ASAPS), there was a 44 percent rise in the procedure between 2012 and 2013—and a 64 percent jump the previous year. Labiaplasty is almost never related to sexual function or pleasure; it can actually impede both. Never mind: Dr. Michael Edwards, the ASAPS president in 2013, hailed the uptick as part of “an ever-evolving concept of beauty and self-confidence.” The most sought-after look, incidentally, is called—are you ready?—the Barbie: a “‘clamshell’-type effect in which the outer labia appear fused, with no labia minora protruding.” I trust I don’t need to remind the reader that Barbie is (a) made of plastic and (b) has no vagina.
Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana’s campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing “good sex.” “Men are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm,” Herbenick said. “Women talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men.”
The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it’s become disproportionately common in porn—and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List—it’s also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it’s up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old—and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is?—found that it was mainly boys who pushed for “fifth base,” approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. Girls were expected to endure the act, which they consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed that discomfort on the girls themselves, for being “naïve or flawed,” unable to “relax.” Deborah Tolman has bluntly called anal “the new oral.” “Since all girls are now presumed to have oral sex in their repertoire,” she said, “anal sex is becoming the new ‘Will she do it or not?’ behavior, the new ‘Prove you love me.’” And still, she added, “girls’ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation.” According to Herbenick, the rise of anal sex places new pressures on young women to perform or else be labeled a prude. “It’s a metaphor, a symbol in one concrete behavior for the lack of education about sex, the normalization of female pain, and the way what had once been stigmatized has, over the course of a decade, become expected. If you don’t want to do it you’re suddenly not good enough, you’re frigid, you’re missing out, you’re not exploring your sexuality, you’re not adventurous.”
I recalled a conversation I’d had with Lily, the girl who was exasperated by her high school boyfriend’s preoccupation with intercourse. He watched a lot of porn, too, she’d said, and was particularly game to try anal sex. She complied mostly because she wanted to please him. “The first time, we had to stop right away because I hated it,” she said. “Later, he pressured me to do it again; he said that we hadn’t actually done it before, since it was so short. At that point I guess I did it out of stubbornness. Like, Okay, fine. I’ll do it again and I still won’t like it.” She laughed. “Which clearly isn’t very healthy.”
In sexual encounters, girls, it seemed, were growing more accustomed to coercion and discomfort than, say, orgasm, afraid to say “no” lest they seem uptight. Consider that at every age three-quarters of men report regularly climaxing during partnered sex, while only about 29 percent of women do. Or that girls are four times more willing than boys to engage in sexual activity they don’t like or want, particularly oral and anal sex. Women also, Herbenick said, use more negative language than men when describing unsatisfying sexual experiences. Again, they talked about pain. But they also talked about feeling degraded and depressed. Not a single man surveyed expressed similar feelings. According to Sara McClelland, who coined the term intimate justice, the whole notion of comparing women’s and men’s reports of “sexual satisfaction” assumes a common understanding of what the phrase means. Clearly, that’s not the case. Not if, going into their encounters, women anticipate less pleasure and more pain than men. Among the college students McClelland studied, women tended to use their partner’s physical pleasure as the yardstick for their satisfaction, saying things such as “If he’s satisfied, then I’m sexually satisfied.” For men, it was the opposite: the measure was their own orgasm. (Women’s commitment to their partners’ satisfaction, by the way, was independent of that person’s gender, which may explain, in part, why girls are more likely to orgasm in same-sex encounters.) So when young women report sexual satisfaction levels equal to or greater than young men’s—which they often do in research—that may be deceptive. If a girl goes into an encounter hoping it won’t hurt, wanting to feel close to her partner, and expecting that he will have an orgasm, then she’ll be satisfied if those criteria are met. There is nothing wrong with wanting to feel close to a partner or wanting him to be happy, but “absence of pain” is a pretty low bar for your own physical fulfillment. As an eighteen-year-old high school senior told me, “I understood before I started having sex what it meant for a guy to finish. You know it has to happen for sex to be over and for them to feel good. But I had no idea what it meant for a girl. Honestly? I still don’t know. It’s never addressed. So I’ve gone into it all without really understanding myself.”
Listening to girls’ litany of disembodied early experiences, it sometimes struck me that we’d performed the psychological equivalent of a clitoridectomy on our daughters: as if we believed, somehow, that by hiding the tru
th from them (that sex, including oral sex and masturbation, can and should feel fabulous) they won’t find out, and so will stay “pure.” What if the opposite were true: what if understanding one’s physical responses, truly “expressing your sexuality” instead of just impersonating sexiness, could actually raise girls’ expectations of intimate encounters? What if self-knowledge encouraged them to hold a higher standard for their experiences, both within and outside relationships? What does, or should, “sexually active” mean, anyway? Clearly, the classic definition is obsolete. It may be that we have to reconceptualize “sex” entirely, starting with virginity.
CHAPTER 3
Like a Virgin, Whatever That Is
Christina Navarro sat cross-legged on a pillow on the floor of her college cooperative, watching a YouTube video on her laptop. On the screen a forty-something woman named Pam Stenzel paced back and forth in front of a sign that read, “The High Cost of Free Love.” She was dressed in a denim jacket and jeans, pontificating in a gravelly, I’m-down-with-the-kids voice about virginity. “If you’re here today and you’re a virgin,” she said to a rapt audience of high schoolers, “Good for you! GOOD FOR YOU! You have something so special, so valuable it is worth whatever it takes to get to your marriage with no past, fear, or disease.” The students cheered and applauded.
Stenzel is one of the nation’s most renowned (or, depending on how you look at it, most notorious) abstinence-only educators, invited to the White House and the United Nations, a guest on programs such as The Dr. Laura Show and Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Allegedly the daughter of a rape victim who was adopted into a Christian home, she has dedicated her life to promoting chastity and exalting virgins. She earns as much as $5,000 a gig; according to tax records, her company, Enlighten Communications, takes in around $240,000 a year.
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