Christina expected her values to be tested when she entered college. “I knew I’d have to stick to my morals,” she said. “If I didn’t want to drink, I wasn’t going to do that. If I didn’t want to have sex with someone, I wasn’t going to do that.” Within a couple of months, though, she began to, as she called it, “loosen up”: venturing out to parties, having a drink or two, making out with boys on the dance floor. “I guess I kind of did glamorize all that,” she admitted. “I think I kind of envied the freedom of these girls who didn’t have a lot of rules set up for them. I wanted to know what that felt like.”
At one of those parties, early in the fall of her sophomore year, she met Ethan, a tall, gentle boy who, like her, was from a conservative community. They talked all evening, and found they enjoyed each other’s company. At first she was hesitant to enter into a relationship, but within a month or so, they were dating exclusively, and by the end of October, they began having sex. “It was just very natural,” Christina said. “I wanted to get to know him in that way, and he wanted to get to know me in that way. There was no pressure. It was totally my decision and all very partner-y.”
Which is exactly how one would hope girls’ experience of intercourse would be. Could that care and concern for a partner have been an unintended by-product of her conservative education? Was it simply because she was older than many girls at first intercourse? It’s hard to say. Christina did credit her school with teaching an overarching ethic of kindness and respect for others—though apparently that didn’t preclude people teasing her about her race. She also believed that since sex was off the table, boys in her class were forced, for the most part, to see girls as something other than sex objects. At the same time, that education left her especially insecure and ignorant about her body and its responses. “I didn’t know anything before I got to college,” she said. “I had no idea what a clitoris was. And there’s still so much I don’t know.” Like what? I asked. “Well,” she said slowly, “I worry about what’s ‘normal’ in sex, but you can’t ask because everyone is different. So I can’t . . .” Christina trailed off. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s ‘normal’ for me. Like . . .” She hesitated again and then looked at me shyly. “Like is it normal never to have orgasms?”
Christina and Ethan were together for about six months. She never regretted losing her virginity with him, but once they broke up, she wondered, what now? “Am I going to be a person who only sleeps with people if I’m in a serious relationship? Do I want to make a rule that I’ll go on a certain amount of dates with someone before I sleep with him? And if I do sleep with another person, that would bring my number to two. Do I care about that number?”
The “number” was a common source of concern among girls. Even those who felt that virginity was a vestige of another time wondered how many sexual partners was too many. (The “number,” like virginity itself, included only intercourse—no one counted boys with whom, say, they’d had oral sex.) Losing their virginity in itself may not have tainted them, but was it possible to go too far? The stigma of the slut, the girl who was overly and overtly sexual, who allowed herself to be used, still held: their character could still be compromised, for themselves as well as others, by their sexual activity. “I guess I would feel icky if my number started to climb into the double digits,” Brooke admitted. She glanced over at Christina, who was counting on her fingers, silently enumerating Brooke’s lovers. “Stop that!” she snapped, laughing, and then grew serious. “I feel that sex is important. I don’t want to have sex with people who don’t mean something to me. And I’m not old enough yet to have had that many partners who do mean something.”
Caitlin shook her head and pushed impatiently at her glasses. “I kind of don’t feel that way,” she said. “I feel like I could have sex with someone and it could mean nothing. I remember the first person I had sex with after the guy I’d been with for three years. It was so surprising that it could feel . . . emotionally light, just fun and relaxed and easy.
“And what is that, anyway, to ‘mean something’?” she continued. “Does it mean you have to love the person? Could it be about an out-of-body experience? Could it just be that this person was a good person and I appreciated how generous they were? Isn’t that meaningful?”
Brooke shrugged, picking at her nail polish. “Maybe it’s my own self-consciousness. For me, saying no is so hard under any circumstances, even to a favor for a friend. So I can see myself accidentally letting things escalate with someone I didn’t want them to escalate with, and that wouldn’t feel good to me. But I guess if I was turned on by someone who I wasn’t into emotionally . . . I can’t really imagine it, but that would be okay.”
“It’s such a relative thing,” Christina mused. “Where I came from is so different than where you came from, so what sex means to me is so different. If a year ago I’d had sex with two people, I wouldn’t have been okay with that. But now I am. So I think the ‘meaningful’ has to be a sliding definition both for each person and over time. And I think . . . I think I don’t care anymore about someone’s number. I mean, for safe sex, yes, but in terms of feeling like they’re a morally better or worse person . . . I used to think the checklist of whether or not you were a good person was about ‘are you drinking, are you smoking, are you having sex, are you loose in these ways’? That’s not my checklist at all anymore. Because everyone has so much more depth and so many more dimensions than that.
“And I don’t think I want to set lines for myself anymore, either,” she added. “Because you’ll be disappointed when you cross them. I have to trust myself to know what feels good and natural and what doesn’t.”
Caitlin was messing with Christina’s computer and had cued up another Pam Stenzel video. This one was called “Definition of Sex.” Stenzel was still pacing in front of the “High Cost of Free Love” sign, spieling like a Catskills tummler. She talked about a girl she’d met who’d had a “radical hysterectomy” at eighteen; her cervical cancer was diagnosed in ninth grade, caused by her contracting HPV in seventh. (While she warned, correctly, that condoms can’t fully protect against HPV, Stenzel neglected to mention there is a vaccine, offered by pediatricians when children are eleven, that will. Nor did she mention that regular pap smears will effectively screen for abnormalities.) Then she began to talk once again about virginity. “I’m now going to give you the medical definition of ‘sex,’” she said. (And right there a viewer should have been suspicious, since, as I’ve said, there actually isn’t one.) “This is the medical line over which you can’t step, and if you have ever stepped over this line, you have risked disease and you need to get tested, and don’t you DARE! Don’t you DARE tell anyone you’re a virgin! Here is the line over which you can’t step. Absolutely no genital contact of any kind. That’s hand-to-genital, mouth-to-genital, genital-to-genital. Oral sex, which is mouth-to-genital, is sex. Hence the name ‘oral sex.’ And if you have had oral sex, you are not a virgin and don’t you dare tell anyone you are.”
The girls watching the video giggled and occasionally gasped in shock. Weirdly, though, I found myself agreeing with Stenzel, if not with her conclusions or her effort to shame and terrorize her audience. Our definition of “sex” is too narrow. I realize that it’s idealistic to call for a dismantling of virginity for the sake of girls’ health, but even questioning the implications of our assumptions about it has value. It is worth asking how putting this one act into a separate category is keeping girls (and boys) safer from disease, coercion, betrayal, assault; whether it gives them more control over their sexual experience; whether it encourages mutuality and caring; how it affects their perception of other kinds of sexual interactions; what it means for gay teens, who can have multiple sex partners without heterosexual intercourse. Again, this is not because that form of intercourse is no big deal, but because it’s not the only big deal. I’d rather young people think of sex more horizontally, as Dennis Fortenberry suggested, as a way to explore intimacy and pleasure,
than as this misguided vertical race to a goal. What if your first kiss were a form of virginity loss? The first time you had oral sex? What if it was first love? What if, as Jessica Valenti suggests in The Purity Myth, a girl didn’t lose her virginity until she’d had her first orgasm with a partner?
Before leaving Christina and her friends, I asked how she would raise her own daughter if she had one. She pondered that for a moment. “There are huge holes in my sex education that I can’t ignore,” she finally said, “but at the risk of losing the other lessons that benefited me, I wouldn’t wish to have done it differently. Still, I really want to have a more open discussion with my children. I can’t quite imagine being at a level of saying, ‘Okay, so this is what your clitoris is,’ but then again, I’d want that for them if that would make them more comfortable in the world.
“I guess I would have to tell my daughter, ‘It’s totally your decision,’” she continued. “‘It’s whatever you feel comfortable with. But you have to be safe: there are these bad things that can happen in sex, but there are also benefits.’ I would have to tell her, ‘It’s very much up to you and how you feel.’ Because I think, in the end, it is the most personal of all decisions.”
CHAPTER 4
Hookups and Hang-Ups
Holly, a sophomore at a private East Coast college, volunteered to talk to me for a specific reason. She wanted it known that some college girls, girls such as she, enjoyed the so-called hookup culture. “In books and articles they always say that if a girl sleeps around she’ll get called a slut or that all girls only really want relationships,” she said, sweeping her strawberry blond hair back over one shoulder. “Otherwise, it’s just about how hookup culture is good for guys, and how they feel this sense of accomplishment when they’ve had sex with a number of girls. But I’ll just put it out there: I feel accomplished after I have sex with someone that I wanted to have sex with. Last Thursday morning I woke up and apparently everyone in my sorority house knew I’d had sex because they’d heard the bed squeaking through the ceiling. And everyone goes, ‘Holly! High five! You get it, girl!’ I felt accomplished, just like a boy would. I felt like, ‘I went out, I looked good, I showed myself off, and I got it last night. Good for me.’”
What’s Sauce for the Gander
As with oral sex in the 1990s, discussions of the current “hookup culture” are fertile ground for good old-fashioned media-induced panics. The take-away from most reports tends to swing extreme: Hookups are terrible for girls! Hookups are liberating for girls! Girls are being victimized! Girls are going wild! Here is what they rarely say: young people are not, in fact, having more sex than they used to—at least, if you define sex by intercourse. The seismic tectonic shift in premarital sexual behavior really took place with the Baby Boom generation, according to Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who, with her colleagues, has conducted the most comprehensive research on college student hookups. That was when the introduction of the Pill, the rise of the women’s movement, and relaxed attitudes about supervision of “coeds” ignited the sexual revolution. Nor did today’s young ’uns invent the concept of casual sex. What has changed, however, among college students and increasingly among high schoolers, is that when relationships do occur, instead of starting with a date, they often begin with noncommitted sexual contact. Rather than being a product of intimacy, then, sex has become its precursor, or sometimes its replacement. That’s what is meant by the term hookup culture. “Casual sex was happening before in college,” said Debby Herbenick at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, “but there wasn’t the sense that it’s what you should be doing. It is now. I have students who say people should be able to have no emotions in sex, and if you can’t, there’s something wrong with you and you’re missing out.”
The word hookup itself, as I’ve said previously, is ambiguous, indicating anything from kissing to oral sex to intercourse to anal sex. To make things more confusing, there are different types of hookups: one-time hookups, repeated hookups, exclusive hookups, “friends with benefits.” The only common thread is that there is no thread—or, more correctly, no strings: no emotional commitment, no promise by either partner of anything beyond the moment. According to the Online College Social Life Survey, which included some twenty thousand students at twenty-one universities, 72 percent of both male and female college students hook up at least once by senior year, with the average number of partners being seven. The behavior is most typical among affluent white heterosexuals and least common among African American women and Asian men. Twenty percent of college students hook up ten times or more by senior year; 40 percent hook up three times or fewer. Only a third of these hookups included intercourse; another third involved oral sex or some form of manual genital stimulation; the rest consisted of kissing and what my grandparents would have called “heavy petting.” So it’s not exactly the fall of Rome out there. Kids themselves tend to overestimate the sexual activity of their peers, again, perhaps driven by media “scripts”—from the 92 percent of songs on the Billboard charts that are about sex to movies such as No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits to TV shows from Pretty Little Liars to Vampire Diaries to Awkward to Grey’s Anatomy (Mindy Kaling, creator and star of The Mindy Project, has joked that her eponymous character has dated more men in a few seasons—making out with thirty of them—than she, the real Mindy, has in her entire life). There is also the rise of hookup apps such as Tinder, that portray millions of people as blithely bed hopping. But overstating the amount of sex going on is not young people’s only perception-reality gap: when Herbenick anonymously polled the one hundred fifty students in the Human Sexuality class I had visited, over 70 percent of both sexes believed that their classmates solely sought hookups, while less than half believed others were interested in relationships. The truth is, nearly three-quarters of the boys and 80 percent of the girls said they’d prefer a date to a hookup, and nearly 80 percent of both sexes would like to be in a loving relationship within the next year.
Some girls, such as Holly, reported feeling affirmed by hookups, released from emotional responsibility for their partner, free to acknowledge straight-up lust. At the same time, the actual sex? Meh. Girls’ physical satisfaction in hookups tends, once again, to be secondary, an afterthought. They are considerably less likely, for instance, to receive oral sex in casual encounters, and when they do, it’s rarely to climax: only 17 percent of women reported orgasms in first hookups that included oral sex alone, as opposed to 60 percent whose most recent cunnilingus experience was in a relationship. (Men in hookups, incidentally, overestimate their partners’ orgasms by a third to a half.) In hookups involving intercourse, 40 percent of women said they’d come (half the rate of men who did), as opposed to three-quarters in serious relationships. Orgasm may not be the only measure of sexual satisfaction—girls sometimes complained to me that the pressure from boyfriends to “achieve” climax stressed them out, especially when they were sexually inexperienced—but since young women are up to six times more likely to say they enjoyed an encounter (either in a relationship or a hookup) when they did come, neither is it irrelevant. Perhaps one could argue that it takes time for men to learn a female partner’s body and responses, but it also requires interest—and basic respect. Young men routinely express far less of both for hookup partners than for girlfriends or even “friends with benefits.” As one boy put it to Armstrong and her colleagues, “In a hookup, I don’t give a shit.” Women were equally invested in their partners’ pleasure either way. That may partly explain why 82 percent of men said that the morning after a hookup, they were generally glad they’d done it, compared to 57 percent of women.
Even so, 57 percent is a lot of girls, enough to show pretty clearly that hookups neither are driven by nor benefit only boys. As the age of first marriage rose and the idea of finding one’s husband during college became an anachronism, Armstrong and her colleagues found girls’ willingness to devote time to relationships waned.
With years of single life still ahead of them, many want to focus their energy on “self-development”: pursuing academic, personal, and professional goals or hanging out with friends. Parents, too, have urged them to focus on ambition rather than romance. Hookups allow them to do all that while still enjoying an active sex life. Besides, how many times can you—or do you want to—fall in love? Hookup culture, then, acts as a kind of buffer, a placeholder until the time for more official adult partnerships begins. The girls I met often claimed to be too “busy” for relationships. On one hand, it was heartening to hear that their lives didn’t revolve around men. Yet it was also hard to imagine a time when that “busyness” would abate—it would arguably become more intense after college, when they’d be career building or attending graduate school. What were they so busy doing, anyhow? It’s not like they had to shop for food, prepare their own meals, or pick up their children at school. While I was all for broadening possibilities, the idea that romance and ambition were mutually exclusive troubled me. It sounded a bit too redolent of “you can’t have it all,” a phrase that blames individual women rather than structural inequities for our struggles at work and home.
Girls & Sex Page 10
