by Ariel Levy
That day at school, David had been sitting on one of the big couches in the hallway at Head-Royce with a friend. A middle-school girl (who was twelve or thirteen) walked by and caught his friend’s eye. So she pulled up her shirt, pulled out the strap of her thong from under the side of her skirt, and snapped it at him. “When you see that, your first reaction as a guy is that you think, That girls wants it. Wants you. Wants any guy out there,” said David. “But honestly they don’t. They’re just dressing that way. It’s not like it used to be where you’d see a girl and she’d be really flirtatious with you and you’d get that signal like, Oh, she might like me. Now, every girl is really flirtatious. It seems like girls are trying almost to suck up to the guys.”
An example, he said, would be all the lap dancing and girl-on-girl action at school dances. “There’s this whole stereotype, and it’s probably largely true, that guys kind of like two girls kissing each other. So you’ll see a guy sitting on a chair—at, you know, a high school dance—and two girls will just go up and give him this huge lap dance and start making out. You see it and you’re sitting there thinking, Okay, maybe this is what this girl is into, but probably not because she’s been with my friends or she’s been with me: I know she likes boys. So I think she’s just doing it to appeal to the guys…always trying to find this new way in to appeal to the guys.”
One of David’s best female friends, Anne, agreed. “Definitely girls hook up with other girls because they know the guys will like it,” she said. “They think, Then the guys are going to want to hook up with me and give me a lot of attention…definitely. If they think a guy’s going to like it, they’ll do it.”
The transition from being little people focused on playing games to being little people focused on looking lickerish is swift and powerful. Robin, a classmate of David and Anne’s, said she was “always the biggest dork in school until sixth grade, when it clicked in my head you had to dress a certain way. It’s amazing how fast it happened…going from where a couple of my friends still played with stuffed animals to wearing short skirts that barely covered my butt and going to eighth-grade parties. Sexually, we didn’t really do anything, but you wanted to look like you did.”
Robin said that there had been a recent push for a dress code at Head-Royce. “Teachers felt it was distracting for girls to be wearing short skirts and little tank tops; in middle school everyone wears basically their underwear.” The proposed dress code was abandoned because the idea of such regimentation was wildly unpopular in the school’s liberal East Bay locale. “There was so much backlash,” said Robin, “guys said they would come to school in miniskirts to protest.” Her own objections to the prospect of a minimum fabric requirement were practical. “They were talking about not having your bra straps showing, which was just ridiculous because with half the shirts that the girls have now that happens. The principal asked me what I thought about the dress code, and [I said] if it happens, all of the girls are going to need new clothes.”
It’s interesting that the teachers were concerned about boys getting distracted. Teenage boys tend to find teenage girls distracting no matter what they are wearing. As David put it, “What girls don’t understand is guys always want girls. If every girl dressed casually, you’d still like girls. It’s like, you don’t have to exhaust yourselves.” The people who are really distracted by the competition to look and seem sexy are the girls themselves.
The most popular creative outlet for adolescent female energy seems to be the expression of imaginary licentiousness through gesture, demeanor, dress. Of course, teenage girls have long been wiling away the hours doing each other’s nails and applying facial masks; the years when puberty sets in and casts its transformative spell on brain and body are the years in which people grapple and play with their newfound sexual powers. But there is now a rigidly specific message girls are required to convey before they even grasp its meaning.
“To dress the skankiest, I know that sounds terrible, but that would be the one way we all compete. Since seventh grade, the skankier, the smaller, the more cleavage, the better,” said Anne. “I wasn’t particularly sexual then,” when she was in seventh grade, when she was twelve, “but I wanted guys to want me, to want to hook up with me, I guess…even though I didn’t want to hook up with them. I always wanted all the guys to think I was the hottest one.”
Anne may very well have been the hottest one: She was a tall, tan girl with lovely, light freckles across her cheeks, long limbs, and silky gold hair. Her beauty was made poignant by the way you could still see what she must have looked like as a little girl when she grinned. As we spoke she touched her thin, exposed stomach constantly. “My mom had to say, ‘If you weigh less than a certain amount you’re grounded,’ ” Anne told me. Where David was difficult to silence on baseball, books, photography, the merits and drawbacks of small schools versus big universities, and the shape he imagined for his future, Anne seemed to have only one truly engrossing passion: her looks. She expressed interest in becoming a graphic designer and talked a little about the year she had spent on an exchange program abroad. But no topic elicited the same kind of intensity from Anne as her own appearance.
“For me it’s all attached to guys,” she said. “Like I have this weird link between certain guys and my own self-worth. It’s like the skinnier I can be, the more they’ll like me. There’s this one guy, John, he’s David’s friend, we went out a really long time ago. Ever since then we’ve had this sexual chemistry. He never gives me what I want, never shows me that he really likes me, or he does but in small amounts. So I always feel like if I can wear something that he likes or if I can be really thin or if I can do certain things to my physical appearance, he’ll like me more.”
She had evidence, albeit inverted, to support this idea. “John gets mad at me if I wear sweatpants,” she said. “One time I went to Ecuador and I lost a lot of weight and he was, like, disgusted by me. He got mad at me because I didn’t have an ass anymore. I was in tenth grade.”
Anne tried hard to hold up her end of the bargain—to be as hot and to wear as little as possible. Her demand in return was that John reserve his attention for her exclusively. In fact, her aspiration was for boys in general to make her the sole focus of their appreciation. “I remember one time I was at John’s house with him and David, and I was looking at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue,” Anne said. “I got in a really, really terrible mood and I wouldn’t talk because I thought Heidi Klum was just so pretty, and I was, like, mad. I get really upset when guys find girls really attractive. Because I want that attention.”
Though she was deeply invested in getting attention for her sexuality, Anne’s own experiences with sex had been disappointing. She and John lost their virginity together, an encounter she had hoped would be romantic and “involve a lot of emotion,” but it turned out otherwise. “My first time I said that I wanted to be in love and he, like, got mad at me. He was like, Oh, that’s not gonna happen, are you kidding me? So then I said, Oh, wait, I don’t think I’ll be in love; it’s okay. I guess I didn’t really want to, but I told him I did. He was like, I feel like I’m raping you! He broke up with me a week later.”
For most of her friends, Anne said, things were similar: Sex was something you did to fit in more than something you did for pleasure. “It’s an ego thing. We talk about it like at lunch on the patio; people think it’s cool. It’s competitive: who can hook up with the most guys and who can have sex, who can be the most…like my friend is having her eighteenth birthday party and she wants to have strippers there.”
Anne asked me if things were different when I was in high school. I told her that it was the same in the sense that you always wished you could be the prettiest and the most popular, the one who guys wanted to be with and girls wanted to be. But the obligation to present yourself as the skankiest—which means the smuttiest, the loosest, the most wanton—even before you’ve become libidinous (before you are “particularly sexual,” to borrow Anne’s p
hrase), is something new. When I went to high school, you wanted to look good and you wanted to look cool, but you would have been embarrassed to look slutty.
Anne looked at me, baffled. “So how did you get the guy?” she asked. “Charm?”
Anne is not making lewd tapes of herself and putting them up on the Internet. She’s not doing anything untoward on the back of the school bus. She isn’t even snapping her thong at boys in the hall. But performing is still an engrossing part of her life. “I definitely feel like because I’ve put so much consciousness into my appearance in the past, now I get scared of having a relationship that’s actually based on what’s inside of me,” she said.
Monitoring her appearance and measuring the response to it have been her focal point. If her looks were a kind of hobby—if dressing and grooming and working out were things she did for pleasure—then the process would be its own reward. But she spoke of her pursuit as a kind of Sisyphean duty, one that many of her friends had charged themselves with as well.
If girls seem more focused on what is expected of them than on what they want, they aren’t the only ones. In her book Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (2004), Deborah L. Tolman, associate director and senior research scientist at the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College, observed that “in the many hundreds of studies that have been done to determine what predicts adolescent girls’ sexual behavior, only a handful ha[ve] identified girls’ sexual desire as a potential factor.” For understandable reasons, our overwhelming focus on teen sexuality in the wake of AIDS has been on danger and “risk behavior.” Tolman writes that “this tendency, an artifact of public policy and funded research geared toward avoiding the risks of sexuality, leads us to single out girls as the receptacle of our concerns.”
Again, there is a basis in logic here: Girls are the only ones who get pregnant, and girls can contract HIV more easily from intercourse than boys can. But if our fears for teens and teen girls in particular are justifiable, our response has not been. We are pouring an enormous amount of money into abstinence-only education—that is, sexual education that promotes virginity and discredits or disregards contraception—despite the fact that not a single study has shown this approach works. Under the administration of George W. Bush, annual funding of $168 million was allocated for fiscal year 2005 to three federal programs designed to promote abstinence-only education. (Those are Section 510 of the Social Security Act, the teen pregnancy prevention section of the Adolescent Family Life Act, and the Special Projects of Regional and National Significance program.) In total, this country has spent nearly $1 billion on abstinence education since 1996.
Eighty-six percent of public school districts that offer sex ed require the promotion of abstinence, and 35 percent require abstinence be taught as the sole option for unmarried people; both teach that contraception is ineffective or don’t talk about it at all. A December 1, 2004, report from Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) concluded that the most popular federally funded abstinence-only sex education curricula contain distortions of medical evidence and basic scientific facts. There is not a single federally funded program to promote comprehensive sex ed that covers both abstinence and contraception, despite the fact that more than 75 percent of parents would like their children to be taught about condoms, abortion, sexual orientation, how to deal with the pressure to have sex, and how to deal with sex itself, according to a study conducted by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation called “Sex Education in America: A View from Inside the Nation’s Classrooms.”
What teens have to work with, then, are two wildly divergent messages. They live in a candyland of sex…every magazine stand is a gumdrop castle of breasts, every reality show is a bootylicious Tootsie Roll tree. And these are hormonal teenagers: This culture speaks to them. But at school, the line given to the majority of them about sex is just say no. They are taught that sex is wrong until you have a wedding (they have seen those in the magazines and on the reality shows too, huge affairs that require boatloads of Casablanca lilies and mountains of crystal), and then suddenly it becomes natural and nice.
If you process this information through the average adolescent mental computer, you end up with a printout that reads something like this: Girls have to be hot. Girls who aren’t hot probably need breast implants. Once a girl is hot, she should be as close to naked as possible all the time. Guys should like it. Don’t have sex.
It’s interesting (in a nauseating kind of way) to watch educators struggle to make this message coherent. In 2001, I went to the New Jersey Coalition for Abstinence Education’s conference in Plainsboro, which was attended by teachers from the Northeast who needed to fulfill a minimum requirement of one hundred hours of continuing education. Hundreds of teachers, mostly women, were gathered in a huge auditorium inside a massive conference center in the middle of nowhere, sitting through hours of speeches while photographs of garish herpes lesions and magnified roving hordes of crabs were projected on a screen over the stage. (That night, I dreamt I got a rare form of lethal mouth cancer from a particularly passionate French kiss. I woke up anxious and aroused.)
My favorite presentation focused on the misadventures of one Miss Tape. An extremely tall speaker named Mike Worley introduced himself to us by listing his basketball credentials and then bragging that he was a twenty-eight-year-old virgin. (He hadn’t yet met the one, so there had been no big day, so why would he have had sex?) He told us there were certain rules he imposed on his dating life in order to maintain his purity: A movie with friends was always better than a movie alone, a movie at the theater was always preferable to a movie on the VCR, and if a young lady managed to make it back to his bachelor pad, the blinds had to be open, his halogen light had to be on the highest setting of brightness, and of course under no circumstances could she go into his bedroom. People, teenagers, could tinker with the specifics when they set their own guidelines, he said, but the most important thing was to never, ever take off your pants.
To illustrate his not terribly complex point, Worley called a stocky young man from the audience onto the stage and then pulled out a length of clear packing tape. “This is Miss Tape. She looks pretty good, right? She’s tall, right? She’s…what else is she?” Worley raised his eyebrows at us encouragingly.
“Thin!” someone shouted out.
“Right! She’s thin,” he said, and wiggled the piece of tape so it undulated in the air. “And she has nice curves!” Worley winked.
“So they have sex.” To illustrate the act of coitus, Worley wrapped the piece of tape around the volunteer’s arm. After a few more minutes of make believe, we came to the inevitable bump in the road when Worley said the volunteer had decided to move on to other chicks. Worley ripped the piece of tape off his arm.
“Ouch,” said the volunteer.
“How does she look now?” Worley asked, holding the crumpled Miss Tape up for inspection.
I fought back the urge to yell, “like a dirty whore?”
If I, as an adult, find this kind of educational exercise unconvincing, shame-inducing, and lame, imagine how well it works to influence the impulse control of the average teenager, who (I like to think) is less rational, less self-aware, and more hormonal. In addition to being laced with misogyny (do you want to be defiled like Miss Tape or do you want to be a nice, clean, thin virgin?), the abstinence-only approach has the disadvantage of being unrealistic. Planned Parenthood has repeatedly pointed out that relying on abstinence is ahistorical; teenagers have been experimenting with sex since the beginning of time. Even if we all agreed that teenagers shouldn’t be sexually active under any circumstances—and therefore didn’t need to know anything about contraception or disease prevention—they are. The majority of high school students graduate without their virginity, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Eighty percent of Americans become sexually active while they’re still in their teens. (If history is any indication, that number will continue to rise: As recently as 1982, that nu
mber was only 64 percent. In 1968, the year of the summer of love, it was 42 percent.)
Though sexual activity among teenagers barely varies across the developed world, the rate of teen pregnancy in the United States is extremely high compared to the numbers in other wealthy countries. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), a nonprofit organization that conducts research and policy analysis on worldwide reproductive health (and is quoted and respected by both liberal and conservative groups), Japan and most western European countries have adolescent pregnancy rates of less than 40 per 1,000. (Uber-progressive Holland shines with only 12 pregnancies per 1,000.) The numbers go up in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, where there are between 40 and 69 teen pregnancies out of every 1,000. But in the United States, we have more than 80 teen pregnancies per 1,000. Rather than being on par with other nations of comparable privilege, our teen pregnancy rates match those of Belarus, Bulgaria, and Romania. On their Web site, AGI offers a succinct explanation for this fairly pathetic state of affairs: “The primary reasons why U.S. teenagers have the highest rates of pregnancy, child-bearing and abortion among developed countries is less overall contraceptive use and less use of the pill or other long-acting reversible hormonal methods, which have the highest use-effectiveness rates. Factors in cross-country differences in teenagers’ contraceptive use include negative societal attitudes toward teenage sexual relationships, restricted access to and high cost of reproductive health services, [and] ambivalence toward contraceptive methods.” AGI also points out that “though teenagers in the United States have levels of sexual activity similar to their Canadian, English, French and Swedish peers, they are more likely to have shorter and more sporadic sexual relationships.”
