Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  It’s not just about sex, though—according to Schalet, there’s a fundamental difference in the two countries’ conceptions of how teenagers become adults. American parents consider adolescents to be innately rebellious, in thrall to their “raging hormones.” We respond by cracking down on them, setting stringent limits, forbidding or restricting any behavior that might lead to sex or substance use. We end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy: teens assert independence by breaking rules, rupturing their relationships with parents, separating from the family. Sex, which typically involves sneaking around or straight-up lying, becomes a vehicle through which to do that. Charis Denison, for instance, told me that roughly half the questions she fields from students about parents involve how to get contraception or STD testing without Mom and Dad finding out; the other half are on how to bring up sensitive issues so they will actually listen. Both speak to a rift between teenagers and those who love them most—one we parents more or less create. Girls, Schalet said, particularly suffer, wrestling with the incompatibility of remaining a “good daughter” while becoming sexual. They end up either lying to their parents or copping to their behavior but keeping it invisible, outside the home. Either way, closeness can be compromised. Think back to Sam, who said her politically progressive parents behaved “more like a conservative household” where sex was concerned; Megan, who laughingly told me her dad “thinks I’m a virgin”; Holly, whose mother told her “you shouldn’t be having sex” when she asked, at age nineteen, to go on the Pill. Each girl was forced to pretend with her parents, to act the innocent. That didn’t change her behavior; it just left her unsupported and vulnerable.

  Dutch teens, on the other hand, remain closely connected to parents, growing up in an atmosphere of gezelligheid, a word most Americans can’t even pronounce, but which Schalet translates loosely as “cozy togetherness.” Parents and teens are expected to discuss the children’s psychological and emotional development, including their burgeoning sexual drives. As part of that, Dutch parents permit—wait for it—sleepovers, which are rare in the United States, except in the most progressive circles. A full two thirds of Dutch teens ages fifteen to seventeen with a steady boy or girlfriend report that the person was welcome to spend the night in their bedrooms. That’s not to say it’s a free-for-all over there. Quite the opposite: the Dutch actively discourage promiscuity in their children, teaching that sex should emerge from a loving relationship. Negotiating the ground rules for sleepovers, while not always easy (parents admit to a period of “adjustment” and some embarrassment), provides yet another opportunity to exert influence, reinforce ethics, and emphasize the need for protection. Schalet calls it a kind of “soft control.” And you can’t really argue with the results.

  Holland is not perfect. Girls are still more likely than boys to report having been forced to do something sexually. They are more likely to experience pain during sex or have difficulty reaching orgasm. Although they express equal interest to boys in pursuing both lust and love, and can freely admit to sexual desire, Dutch girls who have multiple casual partners or one-night stands do risk being labeled “sluts.” Schalet found, though, that the word didn’t carry the same sting or stigma that it does in America. The Dutch boys she interviewed, meanwhile, expected to combine sex and love. They said that their fathers had expressly taught them that their partners must be equally up for any sexual activity, that the girls could (and should) enjoy themselves as much as boys, and that, as one boy said, “of course you should not be so stupid to [have sex] with a drunken head.” Although she found American boys often yearned for love, too, they tended to consider this a personal quirk, a trait their peers, who were always DTF (“down to fuck”), did not share.

  Getting Down and Dirty—and Ethical

  “I’m comfortable talking to my parents about sex.”

  Charis Denison watched as the ninth-graders began to move. Those who agreed with the statement she had just made headed to the north end of the room; those who disagreed went to the south. Denison had made clear that staying in the middle was not an option: the point of this exercise was to force students to take a stand, to defend or maybe even change deeply held beliefs. In this case, however, nearly everyone chose “disagree.”

  “My parents are weird,” one girl explained, seeming to speak for the entire group.

  Some of the statements Denison tossed out during this lesson seemed like ringers. When asked, “If a teen does have sex, he or she should use a condom every single time,” everyone obviously agreed. Then Denison said, “Oral sex isn’t real sex.” A few kids tried to stick in the center of the room, but Denison wouldn’t let them. “Sometimes in life,” she told them, “you have to make a hard choice. You don’t get to stay in the middle. Sometimes you just have to bust a move.” In the end, the class was divided. “Well,” said a girl who had reluctantly disagreed, “it’s not really sex. But it’s not really not-sex, either. It’s kind of . . .” She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.”

  A boy standing next to her added, “I think you have to be able to get pregnant to be having actual sex.”

  Denison raised an eyebrow. “So, my thirty-five-year-old friend who is a lesbian and has never been with a guy is a virgin?” she said. At that, the boy looked confused. “No,” he said, slowly, “but . . .”

  A girl on the “agree” side interrupted. “I think sex is having an intimate moment with someone,” she said. “It doesn’t have to mean putting something inside of someone.” She received several “snaps” of approval for that reply.

  Denison’s statements became more provocative later, when she repeated this exercise with eleventh-graders. Chaos broke out over whether “a guy going down on a girl is basically the same as a girl going down on a guy.” Several students asked Denison, “It should be or it is?” but she stayed mum. A handful refused to move from the noncommittal center of the room. Eventually, though, nearly everyone landed in the “agree” camp.

  “That’s a big group,” Denison said, looking them over. “Do you see it playing out that way in reality? Raise your hand if you think that girls are getting as much oral sex as guys.” Not a single hand went up. “So I guess we need to talk about what’s going on,” Denison said.

  Next up: “I know someone who has had unwanted sex.” Again, nearly everyone landed on the “agree” side of the room.

  A boy in a Matchbox Twenty T-shirt raised his hand. “What is ‘unwanted’?” he asked. “Is it when you’re drunk and you have sex and then the next day you say, ‘Ugh, I didn’t want that’?”

  “Would you call that unwanted sex?” Denison replied.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  A girl in a striped maxi-dress cut in. “But, I think it’s kind of unfair to say the guy’s a bastard for doing that to you,” she said. “If you were like”—she puts on a ditsy, drunken voice—“‘Oh that sounds cool!’ And then later you go, ‘Not cool, dude.’ That’s not on his plate.”

  “Does it have to be on someone’s plate to feel unwanted?” Denison asked.

  The girl shrugged. “No, I guess not.”

  Denison gestured to the agree side. “People over here: raise your hand if you know more than one person who’s had unwanted sex.” Most did. “Keep your hand up if you know more than two people who’ve had unwanted sex.” Most hands stayed up. “More than three.” Still a lot of hands. “Four.” She paused for a long moment. “I’m in love with the teenage population,” she finally said. “I think they’re the smartest, most creative, most brave population on the planet, but there’s a lot of regret going on around this, a lot of confusion and a lot of messiness. What do we need to lessen that? What are we not doing or what do we need to do?”

  A boy in a stocking cap raised his hand. “I think that mind-altering substances are called that for a reason. You make decisions under the influence that you wouldn’t make sober.”

  Denison nodded. “Every choice we make we either surrender or gain power, right?” she said. “With alcoh
ol and drugs, you’re surrendering power. Which is why people do it sometimes, because they want that. But let’s not be ignorant. Let’s realize that with each sip, you lose some power to discern what’s going on around you; you lose the power to take care of yourself, to judge your emotions.”

  A girl in a gray sweatshirt chomping on a big wad of bubble gum raised her hand. “I think that you have to make the definition of consent very clear,” she said. “If someone doesn’t literally say, ‘Yes I want to,’ then stop. Even if they didn’t say no. Even if they’re intoxicated. Even if they said they wanted to and then changed their mind. That’s not consensual.”

  “She’s saying make consent clear,” Denison said. “You’re making a lot of sense. Someone is hooking up with someone, they’re totally into it. The other person is like, ‘Is this okay?’ And they say, ‘Yeah, bring it on!’ But then, all of a sudden, it starts not being okay. What needs to happen then?”

  “The person needs to say, ‘I’m not okay with this now,’” the girl said. “‘We can either stop or turn it back and do what we were doing.’”

  “That’s awesome. But what if the person isn’t saying it. What could the other person do?”

  “Ask if it’s okay,” the girl replied.

  “Excellent,” Denison said. “It is super sexy to get consent. The idea of just saying”—she dropped her voice an octave, jutted out her chin like a teenage boy—“‘Hey, is this all right? You okay?’” She paused for a second to let that sink in. “That’s nice. It’s not, ‘I would like to take out my legal documentation right now and get my attorney.’” The kids laughed. “And part of it is recognizing that there are a lot of ways to be sexual. It doesn’t have to be this linear thing of going from point A to point B. We have all this language, all these metaphors that say you have to go from here to there.” She brought up the baseball metaphor, with its familiar images of “rounding the bases,” “home runs,” and “scoring.” “There’s never this idea that someone might go up to bat, hit the ball, round second, and say, ‘You know what? I kind of like it here. I’m just going to stay here. I’m not going to go all the way home.’ You’d lose the game, right? But if someone says yes, that doesn’t mean yes all the way through. There’s this useful thing around consent: Any good lover is a good listener. And a bad listener is at best a bad lover and at worst a rapist.”

  The kids gasped. “Whoa!” someone said.

  “It’s about communication,” Denison continued. “That doesn’t mean you sing ‘Kumbaya’ in the middle of intercourse, but it does mean you are sharing with your partner. You are being intimate. You get to decide what that intimacy looks like and feels like, and you get to define what ‘intimate’ is. But there are two people involved—that ‘you’ is plural. Another way you can think about it is: ‘What will be a positive sexual experience for everyone involved?’”

  A boy in a football jersey, both of whose earlobes were pierced, raised his hand. “I never thought of it before, but in that baseball metaphor? You’re trying to score against them.”

  “Exactly,” Denison agreed. “There’s a winner and a loser in baseball. It’s a competition.”

  “So who is supposed to be the loser?” a girl asked. “The other person?”

  Denison just smiled.

  Watching the kids’ interchange reminded me of a conversation I’d had with one of Denison’s former students, Olivia, now a freshman in college. Olivia had told me she’d hooked up a lot during ninth and tenth grades. She couldn’t say why—she certainly wasn’t enjoying herself, and it made her feel, as she put it, “gross.” “There wasn’t a moment that things changed for me,” she said one afternoon as we chatted in a café near her former high school. “I just started to understand that I wasn’t behaving how I wanted to behave and I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. Charis’s class was a huge part of it, though. I learned to consciously make decisions instead of just letting things happen. And I began to really think about my values and my morals.” She tugged thoughtfully at a lock of dark hair. “I think the biggest difference is that now I try to live consciously, with intent. Like, I used to think, ‘Oh, okay, I guess we’re hooking up now,’ instead of thinking about whether I really wanted to be doing it. It’s not that I stopped hooking up entirely, but by my junior year, I was less impulsive. And I felt very much like I was participating in it, not just going along with it.”

  TWO TENTH-GRADERS HELD up a poster-size piece of butcher paper with the words “HOOKING UP IS . . .” printed in purple block letters across the top. A few minutes earlier, Denison had handed out markers and had students write responses to phrases she’d penned on a row of similar papers, such as “ABSTINENCE IS . . . ,” “SEX IS . . . ,” “SEX AND ALCOHOL . . . ,” “BEING A VIRGIN IS . . . ,” “SLUT SHAMING IS . . . ,” “PRUDE SHAMING IS . . .” They’d broken up into small groups to analyze the results and were now reporting to the class. “We observed that hooking up could be a bunch of different things to a bunch of different people,” said a girl whose wavy dark hair fell to her waist. “But it’s usually thought of as ‘no strings attached’ and less complicated. Like something you do at a party.” She laughed. “But sometimes it actually turns out to be more complicated.”

  “That’s really common for teenagers,” Denison said. “You go into a hookup to make things easy, and then sometimes it backfires. Is that what you’re saying? What does that look like?”

  “In some cases one person becomes more attached than the other,” the girl said, “and believes there’s something between them.”

  “If I were to say the word hookup,” Denison asked, “how many people, as a gut reaction, see it as a negative thing?” No hands went up. “A positive thing?” Only boys raised their hands. “How many people imagine it just being a thing—not positive or negative but just another choice?” More hands went up, this time split equally between boys and girls.

  As they continued the lesson, a number of familiar themes emerged. Although all the responses to “Sex is . . .” were enthusiastic—“In a word,” said the tall blond boy who presented for his group, “people think it’s ‘great!’”—everyone raised a hand when Denison asked who among them knew someone who’d had a negative sexual experience. “Yet there wasn’t a single negative thing on that paper,” she mused. “Why do you think that is?” Again, too, they discussed whether oral sex was, indeed, “sex”; only two people agreed that it was, until Denison mentioned her lesbian friend. “Honestly?” the blond boy said. “Sex should be whatever you want it to be.” More snaps.

  Over the next hour or so, they discussed their feelings about virginity (“In our group, we didn’t like the connotation of ‘clean’ and ‘pure,’” said one of the girls) and abstinence (comments on that had included “sad,” “a choice,” and “anal”). A boy wearing a basketball jersey sparked a cacophony of responses to the question, “But what is abstinence anyway? Is it doing anything but intercourse or is it no contact at all, or what?” The group presenting on sex and alcohol initially suggested, sanctimoniously, that mixing the two was a bad idea. But when Denison asked who knew someone who had hooked up sober, not a single hand went up. Not one. “I’m hearing more and more that nobody gets sexual with someone unless they’re in an altered state,” she said. “And that can really feed into that regret factor.”

  “I think in some ways it’s easier, though,” a girl said. “You can be like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking. I was drinking.’”

  “That’s what I call a setup,” Denison responded. “Especially for girls: if you’re a prude for setting limits and you’re a slut if you decide to have sex, then you’re screwed no matter what. At least if you get drunk, you can say, ‘Well, yeah, I didn’t know what I was doing.’ So it’s a way to not be accountable. And you have to have some empathy around that. It’s pretty seductive to be able to have an out of some kind if you’re going to be shamed or feel regret either way. So what are you supposed to do? We have to look at that more closely. We’l
l be talking more about that next time.”

  In the final moments, as she did every session, Denison answered anonymous questions. Here is a smattering from the classes I observed:

  What if I pee during intercourse?

  How do you get STDs from oral sex?

  Is it true that when girls come, they can squirt fluid halfway across the room?

  How big is a normal penis?

  How many calories are in sperm?

  Does your hymen always break when you lose your virginity?

  Do you need lube to give a hand job?

  How can I make anal sex feel better to my partner?

  Denison answered them matter-of-factly, dispensing facts and correcting myths—including that “everyone” is “doing it.” “There’s such a perception that everyone is having sex and hooking up,” she said, responding to a ninth-grader’s concerns, “and that is just not the case. There is such pressure and it’s just not that common, especially in ninth grade. There’s plenty of people who don’t even have their first kiss until at least sophomore year, much less go beyond that. So this notion that someone needs to hook up because it’s ‘time’?” She shook her head. “We have to really work on that. We have to get back to this idea of ‘What am I actually feeling, what do I think about it, what do I want to have happen, and how can I look back without regret?’”