Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  The girls I met often talked about “friends with benefits” as the Holy Grail of romantic arrangements: regular sex with a caring-enough partner who makes no emotional demands of you. The truth was, though, that it could be a tricky balance to strike. “‘Friends with benefits’ is something college students say they want,” said Lisa Wade, the sociologist, “and maybe for good reason—it might be a very functional way to go. But that’s theoretical. I don’t see it happening.” Among the students she followed, neither the “benefits” nor the friendships could be maintained. “The problem is, friendliness is off the script in hookup culture. The minute someone says, ‘I like you,’ it’s interpreted as wanting a relationship. If you can’t tell someone you like them as a person, then you can’t really be friends, can you? So the only way to maintain an ongoing sexual relationship is to treat the other person badly, to be a jerk, so they know it’s not a romantic thing.” The less enthusiastic partner in those FWB encounters was not necessarily the boy. “I had two FWB situations in the past year,” said one college freshman I met. “Each time, I told the guy I don’t want a boyfriend right now. One kind of sputtered out without being discussed, but in one case he got more attached. He said, ‘I kind of want something more,’ and I was like”—she shrugged—“‘I kinda don’t.’ I liked him. It was fun to spend time together, and I was attracted to him, but in the end, I didn’t like him enough. That’s what it comes down to. And now we’re not friends anymore, really, which sucks.”

  Holly and Robert continued their . . . whatever it was, through the fall and winter of her sophomore year. But in March, when I checked in with her one last time via Skype, he had just broken it off. Holly, it turned out, had “caught feelings” for him and initiated “the Talk,” to DTR (define the relationship). He wasn’t interested. They hooked up one last time, on St. Patrick’s Day, when she was “incredibly intoxicated.” She described lying on top of him, naked from the waist down, and leaning in for a kiss; he turned his face away and said no. That had hurt. “I’ll say it,” she told me. “I definitely loved him, and the times he and I spent together were some of the happiest I have spent this year. To be honest, right now I feel like complete shit. But I want to make it clear: I don’t regret any of this nonrelationship. Even though we were never officially boyfriend and girlfriend, we had feelings for one another, cared for one another, and enjoyed ourselves together. So, though in many respects this is the classic example of the way the hookup culture has ‘damaged’ relationships, I want you to know: I am not a victim of that culture, but a participant in it.”

  BY ELEVEN O’CLOCK, the streets around Megan’s campus were crowded with girls in tiny skirts, boys hoisting beers. It was the first weekend of spring, and everyone was partying. As we cut through a quiet quad, a couple of boys called out, “Come here!” to Megan. When she didn’t respond, they yelled, “Where are you going!” Then, still met with rejection, they sneered, “Sluts!”

  “I hate that,” Megan said, rolling her eyes.

  Like Holly, Megan tended to blame herself rather than a persistent double standard when she was treated disrespectfully. “Boys don’t take me seriously,” she’d told me. “I kind of ruined that. I sabotaged myself. I try to meet new people and go to parties where I can be seen differently. If they find out about me, they feel like they have more leeway to grab my ass or try to make out with me on the dance floor. No one wants to take the slutty girl on a date. It bothers me, but not enough for me to change my behavior.”

  Leslie Bell, the psychologist and the author of Hard to Get, has said that women are neither “primarily victims nor victors in hookup culture, but they are often misinformed.” They need, she believes, to clearly understand what they can and will not get out of casual encounters—hookups are unlikely, for instance, to help them develop the skills necessary to have either good sex or good relationships. That’s wise advice, but it doesn’t change the terms of the debate. Some girls bragged to me that they could “have sex like a guy,” by which they meant they could engage without emotion, they could objectify their partners as fully and reductively as boys often objectified them. That seemed a sad, low road to equality. What if, instead, they expected boys to be as sexually giving as girls? What if they were taught that all sexual partners, whether total strangers or intimates, deserved esteem and generosity, just as people do in any human interaction? What if they refused to settle for anything less?

  It was time for me to return to the land of the grownups—Megan was heading to a frat party, and we both knew that I’d never get past the bouncer at the front door. Megan fussed over me, worrying about whether I could find my way across campus alone, where I’d get a cab, whether I’d be all right. We said good-bye and hugged, and I began to walk away.

  “Be safe!” Megan called after me.

  And I thought to myself, “You too.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Out: Online and IRL

  The snow had been falling thick and wet all morning outside my hotel room window. Two inches. Four inches. Six. By two o’clock, everything in the midwestern college town I was visiting had shut down. Classes had been called off. No cars or buses braved the slick roads. Students from the ski and snowboard club had jury-rigged a speaker system at the top of a hill that was barely steep enough for a child to sled down, and they were giddily, somewhat tipsily, freestyling to their beats. By three o’clock dusk was settling, and all my appointments for the day had been cancelled.

  Except for one. Far down the street, I spotted a figure trudging in Timberland boots and a down jacket, hands jammed into pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind. I headed to the lobby, arriving just in time to catch a blast of cold air as the revolving door spun. There was the stomping of snow-covered boots, the unwrapping of a scarf from pink cheeks, the doffing of gloves. A hand extended to give mine a firm-gripped shake. “You must be Peggy.” A smile, a look squarely into my eyes. “I’m Amber McNeill.”

  The New Street Corner

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that Amber braved a blizzard to meet me. The gay girls who responded to my e-mail queries were the most insistent about being heard. “I am a young, queer woman of color,” one girl wrote to me. “We have to talk—I am your unicorn!” I received more responses than I expected from queer girls across spectrums of both ethnicity and orientation. One eighteen-year-old Korean American identified as asexual: not physically attracted to either men or women. I have to admit, that one threw me—interviewing her, I felt like I was talking to a lifelong vegan for a book on the joys of eating meat. But she wanted it on the record that hers was a legitimate sexual orientation, not arising from abuse or rejection. “I don’t recall ever feeling any other way,” she said. “I was just never interested in sex. I find it kind of . . . gross.” What’s more, she added, there is a thriving asexual community on the Internet: support groups, educational material, meetup sites.

  At the beginning of every interview I conducted, I asked which pronoun—or combination of pronouns—to use when referring to a girl’s sexual partners. Many identified unambiguously as straight or gay, others as bisexual or bi-curious. Several times an interview itself became a place to explore incipient feelings. Lizzy, for instance, a soft-spoken eighteen-year-old in the first month of her freshman year at a mid-Atlantic college, fidgeted and blushed through much of our discussion, staring at the floor or past my shoulder as she spoke. A miasma of low-grade depression seemed to hover around her, and she was so unresponsive that I began to wonder why she had volunteered to talk to me at all. She told me she had been the type of girl who was excluded and bullied in high school, called “bitch” and “fat” by the “athletic-pretty-smart ‘whole package’ girls that boys generally like.” Still, she did have a boyfriend during her junior year, a fellow clarinetist in the school orchestra named Will. “I never really felt sexual desire for him, though,” she said. “It was more like he was my best friend. We would hang out, watch TV, go to the movies. Sometimes we’d kiss a little b
it, but not full-on making out.”

  I asked her what those sessions felt like. She shrugged. “Nice, I guess. It wasn’t really my thing. To be honest, I don’t really understand what’s so great about it.” After about four months, Will began to push her to go further—much further—via increasingly insistent texts: “We should totally have sex!” he wrote, and “Come on! It will be fun! It will be great!” and “Why not? I don’t understand!” “I told him he was making me uncomfortable,” Lizzy said. “We’d never even done anything below the neck! But he would just keep bringing it up, texting me over and over.”

  Although Lizzy didn’t think she should have to justify a disinterest in intercourse with a boy she’d barely kissed, one who demonstrably had no respect for her limits and whose conversational skills did not extend past the keyboard, she nonetheless tried. Maybe, she said, her reluctance stemmed from shame over her body. “You see a lot of models and superstars, and they’re so skinny and gorgeous,” she said, looking down at her soft belly. “Even shopping for clothes—clothes are cut for people who are skinny, and I’m just not skinny.” Then she shook her head. “But really, I wasn’t attracted to him enough to even want to try. It was just, ‘Oh, no! He wants to have sex and I don’t.’” After two months of fending him off, she suggested they “take a break.” Will, her supposed “best friend,” never spoke to her again.

  Other boys, and even adult men, had shown interest in her since, but she never reciprocated; the prospect of physical intimacy repelled her. I asked her to recall a time when she felt sexual pleasure in her body. She blushed. “I can’t think of one,” she said. What about arousal? The color in her cheeks deepened. “I haven’t explored any of that. I just want to get through my classes and do my work. And it’s hard to open up to people. It takes a lot of effort.”

  I could see that for her it did—our conversation proceeded in fits and starts; she was perhaps the least voluble of the girls I met. Then I asked, “We’ve really only discussed boys. Have you ever felt attraction to other girls?” Again, Lizzy’s face grew pink, but this time it seemed to be with pleasure. “I have this really good friend,” she admitted, and then, for the first time in our conversation, she laughed. “I kind of like her both ways, you know? It’s like I’m balanced on the edge. There’s just something . . . amazing about her.” She laughed again, her smile lighting up her face. “I can’t even put my finger on it. I’ve never met a person where I’ve felt . . . it’s just there.”

  Lizzy had never personally known anyone who was gay, but she’d read about homosexuality on the Internet, specifically in fan fiction: original stories penned and passed around online by devotees of popular books, TV shows, plays, movies, or pop songs. The erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey famously started out as fan fiction based on Twilight. Harry Potter has eighty thousand fanfic stories on one site alone. A fan fiction story based on The Hunger Games had, at this writing, over two million views. Fan fiction may “cross over” between worlds or genres, so Harry Styles, for instance, might lose his Direction and find himself in Middle Earth. It also often includes erotic, typically same-sex, canoodling (presumably) never dreamed of by the characters’ creators: Mr. Spock gets with Captain Kirk; Holmes with Watson; Batman with the Joker; Hermione with Ginny. Women and girls are the largest creators and consumers of fan fiction. It’s hard to say why, then, the overwhelming percentage of its sexual encounters are between men. Maybe it’s because women are still underrepresented in mainstream media, and so are less compelling as characters. Or maybe writing about male bodies liberates women from the judgments about appearance, behavior, or assertiveness that typically freight their sexual exploration. Whatever the reason, fan fiction provides a form of freedom to young women: it’s generally without commercial motive or viability, a corner of the media from which, with few exceptions, no one is profiting.

  Like anything in the boundless olio of the Internet, that breadth can have drawbacks as well as advantages: one eighteen-year-old girl from Staten Island recalled stumbling on graphic fan fiction in middle school. “Little girls and big girls and occasionally guys write a lot of porn based on characters they like,” she said. “I would read it all. I didn’t know about BDSM until I read fan fiction; it’s in a lot of the sex scenes. And for a long time, I thought the average size of a limp penis was eight inches—and that then they grow larger. And I thought, ‘I never want one of those near me!’”

  Lizzy, an avid fan of the TV show Dr. Who, was first exposed to lesbianism by chance, on a Tumblr blog that coupled two characters who, in the show itself, are straight. “At first it was weird,” Lizzy said, “but the actual story was really good. It worked. So I kept reading. And it broadened my view of the world. I mean, I hadn’t really thought about this stuff before. It was . . . not embarrassing. Just strange. Foreign. Exciting.”

  Adults, me included, often fret over the hazards of the Internet for kids, especially where sex is concerned. Our fears are understandable: the easy access to extreme porn, the distorted female bodies, the sexting scandals: it is enough to make anyone born before 1980 feel that Armageddon is nigh. But as with so much of contemporary culture, it is hardly that simple. As long as adults still avoid open discussion of sexuality, teens will inevitably seek information on today’s electronic street corner. That presents both problem and opportunity. Yes, there are discussion board sites such as Reddit, which can quickly devolve into creepshots of women’s cleavage or teen girls’ butts in short shorts, bikinis, and the like. (The company’s policy against posting nonconsensual porn, announced in early 2015, has so far done nothing to abate such “communities.”) But there are also Scarleteen, Go Ask Alice!, and Sex, Etc., where the advice offered may be explicit but is scrupulously medically accurate.

  As with their straight peers, the Internet can be double-edged for LGBTQ teens. According to the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network’s 2013 report Out Online, they experience cyberbullying at three times the rate of heterosexuals—girls more often than boys. Yet LGBTQ kids also turn to the Web for information and support—crucial for a population whose attempted suicide rate is still five times that of other teens. Over half of LGBTQ young people who were not out in person used the Internet to connect virtually with others like them, according to the report. More than one in ten disclosed their sexual identity to someone online before telling anyone in the “real” world, and over a quarter were more out on the Internet than they were in their offline lives.

  Ideally, queer teens wouldn’t need to resort to trolling gay chat rooms for information or acceptance. At the same time, the Internet has provided an unprecedented pathway to normalizing and embracing sexual identity. Lizzy offered a glimmer of how that might begin, as did the young woman who’d found online support for her asexuality. But it was nineteen-year-old Amber, at a college hundreds of miles from Lizzy’s, who best illustrated the potential (and a little of the weirdness) of our hyperconnected world.

  After introducing ourselves in the chilly hotel lobby, we headed up to my room; Amber settled into a wingback chair under a circle of lamplight and began to tell me how, even while keeping up the appearance of the straight, popular girl her parents expected her to be, she was secretly working through something else online, something she didn’t always understand, building a second identity that, in the end, proved the most real of all.

  Playing the Straight Girl

  The first time Amber misrepresented herself online, she was just nine years old, doing exactly the sort of thing parents fear: chatting with strangers on a gaming site. “People would try to start these sexual conversations with me,” she said. “I don’t even know if I really knew what sex was. I was just a naïve kid.” Eventually her parents wondered why she was spending so much time on the computer and checked her history. When they discovered what she’d been doing they instantly forbade her, indefinitely, from going online. Amber didn’t mind the punishment so much as her parents’ horrified reaction. “I felt like I’d been doing so
mething really, really bad,” she recalled. “I was a wreck. I didn’t touch a keyboard again for a year.”

  When she did, though, she got into Second Life and The Sims, virtual worlds in which users, represented by onscreen avatars, can once again interact with one another. Whether on the Internet or a PlayStation, Amber always chose to be male. “I didn’t think anything of it,” she explained. “It was just what I liked. I would make my boy avatar, then go on these websites and talk to girls, tell them they were pretty or whatever a fifth-grader would say. I never really questioned it. I honestly didn’t even know what the word gay meant. Nobody talked about it: not my parents, not my school. Which is weird because it’s not like I grew up in the middle of nowhere: we lived near a big university. I went to a high school of three thousand students. But no one said anything. So I never questioned my sexuality.”

  This was, of course, years before the Supreme Court ruling that made same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states. Still, it wasn’t exactly the Dark Ages: celebrities such as Melissa Etheridge and Ellen DeGeneres publicly embraced their sexuality in the 1990s. Openly gay characters were increasingly common (and nuanced) on TV and in movies, too. Perhaps as a result, the average age of coming out in the United States began to plummet: from twenty-five in 1991 to between fourteen and sixteen today. “Children report awareness of sexual attraction at about age ten,” Caitlin Ryan, director of the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University, told me. “That’s earlier than most adults, including parents, believe. But sexual orientation isn’t only about sex. It’s also about social and emotional relatedness, human relationships, feelings of connection.” As an example, she pointed to the Broadway musical Fun Home, based on cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir. Nine-year-old “Small Alison” first confronts her own difference when she sees a butch deliverywoman enter a diner. “Ring of Keys,” the showstopping song she sings, is not about eroticism but identity, recognition: a paean to the woman’s “swagger” and “bearing,” her “just right” cropped hair, jeans, and lace-up boots, her way of being, of presenting to the world.