Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  “What do you think you’re doing?” her mother continued. “How old is this person? How do you know she’s not thirty-five?”

  Hannah’s mother—her father had passed away—was more accepting of her daughter’s sexuality and budding relationship: she offered to try to smooth things over with Amber’s mom and arrange for the girls to visit. Amber’s mother refused. No way was her daughter visiting some stranger in Canada. “I would beg her to let me see Hannah, just for a day,” Amber recalled. “It didn’t have to be in Canada: her mom would let her visit us. But my mom said no. It was like she thought if she kept us apart, I wouldn’t be gay anymore.”

  By summer, Amber’s mother had calmed down enough to allow Hannah to visit for three days. She could stay at their house, but the girls had to sleep two levels apart. Amber didn’t care. She was going to see her girlfriend in person. Nervously, she Googled “what do two girls do together.” She needn’t have worried: the instant they were alone, Amber and Hannah began kissing, and the feeling was unlike anything Amber had previously experienced. “I was so into it,” she recalled. “It was just a natural, normal thing, exactly how it was supposed to be. That’s how it probably is for everybody else when they’re in an intimate relationship, that kind of feeling I had.”

  Girls in relationships with other girls spoke very differently about sex from those who were involved with boys. A senior at a California public high school who identified as bisexual told me that she enjoyed the reciprocity she found—and had found only—in her same-sex encounters. “It’s so different,” she explained. “It’s like my turn, her turn, my turn, her turn.” Another bisexual high school senior said she tended to be more passive with male partners. “With another girl . . . well, you can’t both be passive. Nothing would happen. With a guy it feels like he’s doing something to you, but with a girl, you’re doing it with each other.” A college junior in the Midwest told me that sex with her girlfriend felt “off the script”: since there was nothing they were supposed to do, they were free to create the sex life that worked for them.

  Because she had never had intercourse with Jake, Amber considered herself a virgin when she and Hannah met. I asked her if she believed herself to be one now. She shook her head. “I was so confused, though, so unclear about what ‘gay’ meant, that I had to Google ‘When is a lesbian not a virgin?’”

  What was the answer? I asked her. “There wasn’t one,” Amber said. “For me . . .” She paused for a long moment. “I think it’s just the second that you are being intimate, touching each other more than just kissing. Not your breasts, necessarily, but below the waist. The second you touch there, you’re not a virgin anymore.

  “But honestly, I don’t really have a definition. I just knew. I guess I would define it . . . maybe once you have an orgasm with someone? Once you have an orgasm with someone, you’re definitely not a virgin anymore. Yeah, that’s how I would define it.”

  When Is a Girl Not a Girl?

  Amber and Hannah’s relationship deepened during their senior year of high school, and as it did, Amber grew more confident in other parts of her life. She discovered she liked public speaking and acted as emcee for a school-wide talent show; she was elected to the homecoming court; she socialized more. Although she stayed in the closet for the most part, she ditched the skirts and makeup in favor of a more pared-down, androgynous look. “I would just own it,” she said. “It was fun! And nobody had a problem with it.”

  That first afternoon we met, she pulled up a photo on her phone of what she used to look like and passed it over to me. The girl in the photograph—her blond-streaked, carefully styled hair flowing to her shoulders, candy-pink lipstick, blue eyeliner and mascara—looked nothing like the young woman in front of me. At the same time, the current version of Amber wasn’t much different from any of the straight girls I’d met, at least when they were dressed for school rather than for the party scene: she wore jeans—she said they were men’s, but I wouldn’t have guessed—a hoodie emblazoned with her college’s name, and hiking boots. She wore no makeup, but neither, during the day, did many other girls. Her hair was pulled back with a black headband and fastened into a short ponytail. Even so, during our first conversation, the planes and shadows of her face seemed perpetually to shift: maybe it was a trick of the light, or maybe I was just tired, but sometimes she looked clearly like a girl and other times, quite suddenly, she could easily have passed for a boy.

  Amber was not always certain herself which she was. It was in trying to answer that question that she found the Internet, previously so dependable, finally failing her. YouTube videos and websites she scoured suggested she might be transgender, a term she had never before heard. (It would be years before Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner graced the covers of glossy magazines.) She spent the next twelve months, until just before she left for college, worrying that it was true. “It scared the living shit out of me,” she said. “I was like, what am I going to do? I was going to have to go through all these surgeries and get my name changed. I thought it was the only option.”

  Certainly the Internet can be a trove of misinformation, distortion, dis-expertise, and bad advice. On Google, a nicked cuticle becomes a life-threatening emergency; so does working out or taking a shower (though, if you stopped exercising, you could bathe less and minimize both risks). So a young gay woman who had never heard the word butch, let alone transgender, could easily become confused, especially if, like Amber, she was raised in a community with conventional ideas about masculinity and femininity. An estimated 0.3 percent of Americans are thought to identify as transgender—that’s close to seven hundred thousand individuals. (About 3.5 percent of adults identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, though rates are higher among those ages eighteen to twenty-nine.) The true number is hard to quantify, though, since it may or may not include those who identify as “genderqueer”—living between genders, beyond genders, or as a combination of genders. At its fullest (and some would say most threatening) manifestation, genderqueer upends notions of femaleness and maleness, masculinity and femininity, changing them from a biological inevitability into a customizable, ever-changing buffet of identities, expressions, and preferences. There was the 2013 story, for instance, of Arin Andrews, who began life in a girl’s body, and Katie Hill, who began life as a boy. They fell in love in a support group for transgender teens, went through their transitions together, and continued forward as a heterosexual couple. Or the darker tale of Sasha Fleischman, born a boy in Oakland, California, who is agender—that is, not identified with either sex, preferring to be addressed by the pronoun “they.” As a high school senior, Sasha suffered severe burns to the legs when another teen set Sasha’s skirt on fire aboard a city bus. An outpouring of support followed—a local protest march peopled by boys wearing “skirts for Sasha”; thousands of dollars raised on the Internet to offset medical bills; local school policies changed to allow gender-nonconforming students to choose which bathrooms and locker rooms they want to use, which sports teams they want to join.

  Modern college campuses are replete with gender warriors who specify whether they are cis-gender (meaning their emotional, psychological, physiological, and genetic genders match), nonconforming, or transgender. They may replace he and she with neutral pronouns such as ze, ne, ou, hir, they, or even it. The rejection of the “gender binary” can be truly radically liberating. At the same time, a rush to label a young person as “nonconforming” may risk unwittingly calcifying traditional categories. Consider the case of a male-to-female transgender first-grader whose family sued her Colorado school for forbidding her to use the girls’ bathroom: her parents said their first inkling that their son, the only boy in a set of triplets, was unusual came when he was five months old and reached for a pink blanket meant for one of his sisters. Later, he rejected a car he was given for Christmas, showed no interest in sports-themed clothing, and donned a princess dress rather than a fireman’s uniform in fantasy play. Five-month-olds don’t know pink f
rom blue. And choosing tulle over tools? With all due respect to the family and the child, who may indeed be transgender, that hardly seems like “proof” of anything other than adult bias. Yet nearly every press report I read not only trotted out those anecdotes but placed them in the story’s lead. Even as I admired the child’s parents for supporting their daughter, that inflexible definition of masculinity—which would see a boy as actually female before accommodating his love for sparkly gowns—concerned me.

  Some of Amber’s reasons for questioning her gender identity were similarly retrograde: they included being more dominant in bed, standing up for herself, planning to pursue a career in business, and hating to cook. Nor was Amber the only young lesbian I met who wondered whether her clothing and attitudes meant she was actually male. Valentina, eighteen, the girl who called herself my “unicorn,” also spent her senior year of high school thinking she “must” be transgender. Growing up in a low-income, largely Mexican American neighborhood in Chicago, she shunned anything conventionally feminine: Barbies, pink, skirts, frills. Dressed in a flannel shirt and loose jeans, she told me that in middle school other girls would crawl into her lap to cuddle, calling her “Big Daddy” (she was broadly built) and ask advice about boys. By high school, she was scouring the Internet for clues as to her identity. “I wanted to know,” she said, “‘Am I gay?’ ‘Am I transgender?’”

  “Did you feel like you were in the wrong body?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “Did you feel like you wanted to be a man?”

  “No,” she said again.

  “Then why did you think you might be transgender?”

  “That’s exactly it!” she said. “What finally made me realize I wasn’t trans was reading about people who said, ‘I felt like there was a guy inside of me trying to get out.’ I never felt that. I never felt like I should be a guy. I like my vagina. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a girl, either.”

  Such confusion is understandable, according to Jack Halberstam, professor of English and director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California, who writes about transgender issues. Even as some young people may be helped—sometimes saved—by the recent visibility of transwomen such as Cox and Jenner or by TV shows such as Amazon’s Transparent, tensions between “butch” women and transmen have been building. “The whole concept of ‘butch’ is now seen as a kind of waiting room in which you stay until you change your gender physically,” Halberstam said. “We don’t have words for someone who has strong cross-gender identification but feels good about their bodies. Butch has become anachronistic, but trans implies transition, possibly hormones and surgery. Genderqueer is as good a holding term, but it’s clumsy, really.” I pondered the idea of “cross-gender identification.” That, too, seems often culturally determined, to the detriment of girls such as Valentina and Amber. When we’ve defined femininity for their generation so narrowly, in such a sexualized, commercialized, heteroeroticized way, where is the space, the vision, the celebration of other ways to be a girl?

  As for Amber, “I looked heavily into it,” she told me during our first meeting. “I could tell you everything under the sun about being transgender. I’d go through these lists I’d find online. They would ask questions like, ‘Do you cry when you think about having a vagina?’ And I’d think, ‘No, not really.’ Maybe if somebody told me I could choose one sex or the other I would have picked the other, but I don’t feel upset about it. I had all these conflicting feelings. Like, I don’t really care about my boobs. That’s weird, right? So then I dealt with ‘Am I a biological mistake?’”

  Ultimately, Amber realized she did not want to give up who she was, did not want to be someone completely new: “I mean, say your name is Cheryl,” she explained, “and you’re becoming Sean. You have to not want to be Cheryl anymore and never talk about Cheryl again.

  “Well,” she added, sitting forward in her chair, “I love being Amber. I could never in a million years imagine not being Amber. I am Amber. And I don’t know if I fit being a lesbian perfectly, but I’m definitely not a transgender person. I can live my life in this body, confident and happy, and in a healthy relationship.” She leaned back again, letting her hands drop to her lap. “And it took me a year, an entire year, to be able to sit here and tell you that.”

  DURING OUR CONVERSATION on Skype, Amber and Hannah told me they have no fear of holding hands, snuggling, or kissing on the streets of Ottawa. They’re a bit more circumspect when Hannah visits Amber. Amber’s mom still hasn’t fully come around. (“She’ll never accept us like she would if I were with a straight person,” Amber said.) And while people have been mostly accepting on her college campus, the couple has occasionally been harassed by groups of young men. Still, Amber has been experimenting with being more public about who she is. She recently volunteered to serve on a panel of LGBTQ people who visit classes at her school to talk about their experiences and answer questions. She has also declared a double major in economics and public policy and is toying with going to law school and ultimately entering politics. “I’d like to try and get a House of Representatives seat,” she told me, and then laughed. “I’ve got a little bit against me in running for office—I’m both a girl and gay. But I’ll figure it out.”

  “Well,” I said, “it just might be your time.”

  She nodded, smiling. “I always tell myself that,” she said. “Things are opening up for women and us gay people. I guess we’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Blurred Lines, Take Two

  I met Maddie Reed at the community college where she was enrolled in a special program for home-schooled or otherwise “independent” high schoolers. She shook my hand and smiled, a pale, curvy girl with a spray of freckles across her nose and reddish-brown hair that hung past her shoulders. She’d attended classes here for a semester and planned to stay another year, until graduation. That meant she wouldn’t, as she once dreamed, write for her high school newspaper, or go out for the softball team, or attend the prom. “I don’t think about it,” she said as we strolled through campus, looking for a quiet corner where we could talk. “I don’t let myself. It’s still a fresh wound. And I know other girls have it way worse. At least I have a vague idea what happened to me. At least there weren’t pictures of it going around. But I wasn’t really aware that this was a problem before. I thought it was just something that happened in . . . I don’t know, other parts of the world.”

  Who Stole Consent

  The attention to sexual assault over the past few years has been unprecedented. From dorm rooms to press rooms to the White House, fighting rape, especially on college campuses, has become one of the most prominent, contentious civil rights issues of our time, up there with gay marriage, abortion, and police brutality. What is the definition of sexual assault? What constitutes consent? How should schools fairly handle allegations? This is not, though, the first time that acquaintance rape has sparked debate. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a flurry of divisive, high-profile cases. The first, and perhaps most appalling, was in 1989, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, where a group of high school boys assaulted a mentally disabled girl (a young woman they’d known since childhood) with a broomstick and a baseball bat. The case featured several elements that would resurface in the current national upheaval: the boys were star athletes in an idyllic, football-crazy town; although their actions had been initially reported as out of character for them—a “stupid mistake” by otherwise “decent” kids—they had in truth been abusing their godlike status since middle school: bullying classmates, destroying property, creating mayhem. They were disdainful of girls and female teachers (one of the boys regularly exposed himself in school and frequently masturbated during class); treated sex primarily as a form of male bonding (watching porn together, convincing younger girls to give them successive blow jobs, and secretly watching one another’s escapades with unsuspecting partners). The girl they assault
ed was incapacitated, though in this case mentally rather than by drugs or alcohol; bystanders declined to intervene. After the boys’ arrest, many of the town’s adult residents defended them, claiming that the girl was a “sexual aggressor” who had “asked for it.”

  Around that same time, allegations against thirty-year-old William Kennedy Smith stunned the public in a different way: he was, after all, a medical student, clean cut, wealthy, privileged—a Kennedy. He met his alleged victim while drinking at a Florida bar with his uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy, and his cousin Patrick, a future congressman. The woman later claimed that in the wee morning hours, Smith tackled her as they strolled on the sand near the family’s Palm Beach estate; then he pinned her down and raped her. Smith insisted their sex was consensual. He was ultimately acquitted; many believed the verdict might have been different had the judge admitted testimony by three other women (a doctor, a law student, and a medical student) who, in sworn depositions, said that Smith had also assaulted them, though they didn’t report those incidents to the police. Before the media had finished dissecting that case, former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson was charged and convicted in Indiana of raping an eighteen-year-old Miss Black America pageant contestant during a late-night date; he served three years of a six-year sentence. None of these assailants fit the prevailing image of the rapist as a deranged guy in a ski mask leaping out from a dark alley. The accusers knew their attackers, and had, to a point, gone with them willingly. That was, of course, used by defense lawyers as proof of consent, or at least partial collusion—the women “should have known” what was going to happen to them. Anyway, supporters argued, why would these high-status, upstanding males “need” to rape anyone? They could get all the women they wanted. It wouldn’t be until 2015 that Tyson’s former manager admitted that such charges were “inevitable” for the boxer, adding that the only surprise was that Tyson was not the subject of further complaints. Several of the Glen Ridge boys eventually went to prison for their crime; another, against whom charges were dropped, joined the military. In 2005 he entered his estranged wife’s house, shot her and a fellow soldier, wounding them both, then killed himself—all as his infant daughter lay in the next room. As for Smith? A 2004 assault charge by an employee was dismissed in civil court; in 2005 he settled another suit with a different employee, who accused him of sexual harassment.