by Ariel Levy
By any measure, the way we educate young people about sexuality is not working. We expect them to dismiss their instinctive desires and curiosities even as we bombard them with images that imply that lust is the most important appetite and hotness the most impressive virtue. Somehow, we expect people who are by definition immature to make sense of this contradictory mishmash. Our national approach to the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy is predicated on the assumption that teenagers will want so badly to maintain their purity for marriage—despite the fact that half of their parents’ marriages end in divorce—that they will ignore their own hormones, ignore the porn stars on MTV and all the blogs and blow jobs on the Internet, and do as their teachers tell them. Unsurprisingly, teenagers are not cooperating with this plan.
Rather than only telling teens why they shouldn’t have sex, perhaps we also ought to be teaching them why they should. We are doing little to help them differentiate their sexual desires from their desire for attention. Many of the girls I spoke to said sex for them was “an ego thing” rather than a lust thing. Anne said of her first time, “I guess I didn’t really want to, but I told him I did.” And hers is not an uncommon experience; about a quarter of girls between ages fifteen and nineteen describe their first time as “voluntary but unwanted,” according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The only message that seems to be successfully transmitted to girls about sex and sexiness is that it is something they need to embody to be cool. What’s saddening is not that they will end up used goods like Miss Tape or unfit to wear white dresses to their fantasy weddings, but that from the very beginning of their experiences as sexual beings they are conceiving of sex as a performance you give for attention, rather than as something thrilling and interesting you engage in because you want to.
To write Dilemmas of Desire, Deborah Tolman interviewed two sets of teenage girls, one at an urban public school and one at a wealthier suburban public school, asking them specifically about their experience of wanting, as opposed to their experience of “sex,” which so often becomes a conversation about being wanted. She was struck by “how confusing it is to develop a sexual identity that leaves their sexuality out,” which was what she heard most of her subjects attempting. Whether or not they had had sex, the girls had remarkably difficult times experiencing or expressing sexual desire. Tolman describes girls who seemed to have “silent bodies,” who found a way to ignore or muffle any arousal because they were afraid really feeling it would lead them into the treacherous territory of pregnancy and disease. They could not allow themselves to experience “embodied sexual desire,” as Tolman calls it, and, unsurprisingly, they experienced a great deal of confusion and anxiety instead.
Tolman compares these girls to Freud’s earliest patients—intelligent, articulate women who suffered “hysterical” symptoms such as the loss of feeling or movement in parts of their bodies because they were so detached from their sexual needs. After (primitive) therapy, their bodies came back to life. Once these women had the opportunity to acknowledge their own sexuality, they could “embody their desire rather than disembody themselves,” Tolman writes. Since we are talking about teenagers here, it’s important to note that Freud’s women didn’t have to have sex to feel better, they first and foremost had to be allowed to have sexual feelings.
Tolman also observed girls with “confused bodies,” who couldn’t determine if the emotional wanting and physical excitement they experienced was sexual. One girl described being “all hyper and stuff…I guess you could say it was a sexual feeling.” But it also could have been a feeling of anxiety, or fear, or antsiness. And how was she to know which was which? Sexual feeling was new to her, as it is to all teenagers.
Though these girls didn’t experience or had trouble recognizing sexual desire, some of them had experienced sex—it was something that “just happened” to many of them. Like Anne, some didn’t really want to, but told their partners they did. Others had silent mouths to match their silent bodies and said nothing. Tolman points out that “not feeling sexual desire may put girls in danger and ‘at risk.’ When a girl does not know what her own feelings are, when she disconnects the apprehending psychic part of herself from what is happening in her own body, she then becomes especially vulnerable to the power of others’ feelings.” Simply put, you have to know what you want in order to know what you don’t want.
Tolman isn’t suggesting we should encourage teen girls to run out and have sex, she is saying that we should stop focusing all of our attention on sexual intercourse at the expense of educating our children about sexuality as a larger, more complex, more fundamental part of being human. Importuning them to be virgins isn’t working; what do we have to lose?
There is another side to this debate, of course, and to try and understand why so many people are resistant to broader sexual education I called Peggy Cowan. I had first met her at the abstinence-only conference in New Jersey which she helped organize in 2001, and when we spoke again in 2004 she had become the president of the New Jersey Physicians Advisory Group. She explained her conviction that adolescents shouldn’t be taught about contraception like so: “We don’t tell our kids, ‘Don’t drink and drive but if you do, wear a seat belt.’ ” Because this is true, and because Cowan is an earnest, polite person, at this point in our conversation I hoped I would be able to respect her perspective and learn from her. “People say ‘scare tactics’ as if we have an agenda, but my agenda is medical,” she said. “One out of four teens has an STD! I had three teenage daughters and I was scared to death…looking around, seeing all the pitfalls out there. I had single sex ed and I wish they had that now because it protects modesty; now kids are too comfortable talking about things they shouldn’t talk about. I heard of one woman teacher who tells kids how to masturbate. Explaining it! About fantasizing when you shower!”
I asked Cowan if she was against teenagers masturbating.
“I can’t say that a young person, when they become sexually aroused, can stop just short of sex.”
“Not mutual masturbation,” I said. “Just masturbation. Kids shouldn’t hear about that? Wouldn’t it help them to resist sex?” Is it not, actually, exactly the kind of thing we should encourage teens to do with their very real, entirely natural, impulses and curiosities at a time in their lives when they may well be too young to deal with the ramifications of sex?
“I think that’s intimate personal stuff,” Cowan said. “I don’t know that I have a position on that. No one’s ever asked me that question before.”
Well, everything to do with sexuality is intimate and personal. But if we are bold enough to cross that boundary to tell young people not to have intercourse, surely, while we’re at it, it is appropriate—it is our obligation—to talk to them about how to understand and cope with and enjoy their sexuality. Sex is different from drugs; we can’t tell them to just say no and leave it at that. Sexuality isn’t something they can opt out of.
Cowan was right that one in four people under twenty-five has a sexually transmitted disease. But, like all abstinence-only advocates, she was puzzlingly unwilling to confront the fact that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the promotion of abstinence at the expense of comprehensive education helps to remedy this situation. On the contrary; every single peer-reviewed clinical study on these issues has concluded that the more people are educated, the less they spread and contract STDs.
Clearly, part of the problem is that sex ed in this country has been commandeered by the far right—as has the White House and with it the funding that fuels abstinence-only programs. But if conservatives are averse to any discussion of sex outside of marriage, liberals often seem allergic to the idea of imposing sexual boundaries or limits…and simply telling kids sex is fine isn’t necessarily any more helpful than telling them sex is bad. Both of these approaches can ultimately have the same result: a silence about the complexities of desire, feminine desire in particular.
One seventeen-ye
ar-old girl I interviewed in Oakland (in the most legislatively progressive area in this country) said her mother “doesn’t really care how sexy we are. She was really involved in the women’s movement, so she thinks whatever you do to feel secure and confident is fine.” The tricky thing is that adolescents don’t automatically know what to do to make themselves feel sexy or secure or confident. They sometimes have “confused bodies” and they frequently have confused heads. Adolescent girls in particular—who are blitzed with cultural pressure to be hot, to seem sexy—have a very difficult time learning to recognize their own sexual desire, which would seem a critical component of feeling sexy.
Many of the issues confronting teenage girls are the same ones affecting grown women: the prioritizing of performance over pleasure; a lack of freedom to examine their own varied, internal desires; an obligation to look as lewd as possible. (A few days after the 2004 presidential election, Paris Hilton was on the red carpet at P. Diddy’s birthday party at Cipriani, lifting up the voluminous skirt of her pink gown and exposing her vagina to the paparazzi, thus outdoing her friend Tara Reid, who accidentally exposed a nipple to photographers at that same party. All I could think of was Anne’s comment: “To dress the skankiest…that would be the one way we all compete.”) But whereas older women were around for the women’s movement itself, or at least for the period when its lessons were still alive in the country’s collective memory, teenage girls have only the here and now. They have never known a time when “ho” wasn’t part of the lexicon, when sixteen-year-olds didn’t get breast implants, when porn stars weren’t topping the best-seller lists, when strippers weren’t mainstream. (The April 2005 issue of Harper’s magazine reported that a Palo Alto middle school had a career day in which a speaker touted stripping as a profession.) None of this can possibly be “ironic” for teens because it’s their whole truth—there’s no backdrop of idealism to temper these messages. If there’s a way in which grown women are appropriating raunch as a rebellion against the constraints of feminism, we can’t say the same for teens. They never had a feminism to rebel against.
*Pseudonyms are used for subjects under the age of eighteen.
Six
Shopping for Sex
One of the earliest promos for the HBO series Sex and the City pictured Carrie, the bubbly protagonist played by Sarah Jessica Parker, in a postcoital flush next to a handsome guy in bed. He looked bewildered when she got up to go and told him, “I’ll give you a call…maybe we can do it again some time.” Another clip in that same promo showed Carrie drinking with her friends at a boisterous, brightly colored club. Samantha, the brassy sexual enthusiast played by Kim Cattrall, told them, “You can bang your head against the wall and try and find a relationship or you can say screw it and go out and have sex like a man.”
This promo amounted to Sex and the City’s thesis statement. Audiences were captivated. The show became a Sunday night ritual for 10.6 million Americans, and Carrie Bradshaw became a household name. The cast of Sex and the City appeared on the August 28, 2000, cover of Time magazine, staring out seductively above the words Who Needs a Husband? People were alternately thrilled and appalled to hear women talking about masturbation, female ejaculation, and the taste of sperm on a sitcom. The conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote in 2000, “This is not how women talk. This is how some men might talk—if women would let them.” Others complained that the casual sex the characters engaged in was really more representative of life in the gay community, of which Sex and the City’s creator, Darren Star, and executive producer, Michael Patrick King, are members. But to me, Sex and the City always felt like a pretty realistic reflection of heterosexual, recreational New York: cocktails, self-involvement, shagging.
Little by little, the show became less about women having “sex like men” and more about the characters trying to negotiate their independence as they pursued intimacy with lovers, husbands, children, and each other. That’s how the show grew and became so good. How many episodes could you really have watched about women using men for sex? It’s a narrative dead end. So the characters and their stories became increasingly layered, and there were subplots about cancer and abortion and divorce and religious conversion.
The spirit of the show remained consistent, however, because the truly defining pursuit of their world wasn’t sex so much as it was consumption. Sex and the City romanticized the weather in Manhattan, the offices of Vogue magazine, the disposable income of the average journalist, but what it romanticized the most was accumulation. There was as much focus on Manolo Blahniks and Birkin bags as there was on blow jobs. Buying things became a richly evocative experience as seen through the lens of Sex and the City…a feathery pair of mules became the linchpin of a glamorous, romantic evening in Central Park. It was as though without the shoes, everything else—the moonlight, the trees, the man—would dissolve into the night, leaving nothing but the bleak mundanity of regular life in its place.
Another episode was devoted to the reclamation of a lost pair of silver stilettos that represented, to Carrie, her freedom and worth as a single person. The shoes were accidentally or intentionally taken from Carrie at a friend’s baby shower. When that friend balked at replacing the $485 sandals, the episode became not about etiquette or excess but about “choice.” Was Carrie’s choice to be single—and inextricably, somehow, to wear $485 shoes—less meaningful than her friend’s choice to be a wife and mother? In that episode, titled “A Woman’s Right to Shoes,” as in many others, acquisition was the ultimate act of independence. One of the reasons the series was such a big hit was that it accurately reflected the vertiginous gobbling—of cocktails, of clothing, of sex—that was the status quo for American women of means by the turn of the millennium. Carrie sailed around town with shopping bags on her arm, a condom in her purse, and a little gold Playboy bunny pendant twinkling on her neck.
The ethos of the show was all about women getting themselves the best and the most, sexually and materially. They were unapologetically selfish, and civic-mindedness was scoffed at. Carrie didn’t vote; in one episode Samantha told another character, “I don’t believe in the Republican party or the Democratic party…I just believe in parties.” The only time in the series Carrie was confronted with the prospect of doing something for charity, she dismissed the idea as ludicrous. (A do-gooder asked if Carrie would consider teaching writing to disadvantaged students and Carrie snapped, “I write about sex. Is that something they’d like to learn, these kids, writing about blow jobs?”) Sex and the City’s idea of giving back was more in line with the Bush Administration’s prescription to the nation after 9/11: The best thing you can do for your fellow man and your country is to shop till you drop.
Sex and the City told a hugely influential story about women, with every bit as much cultural power as shows like That Girl and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The opening sequence culminated with Carrie twirling on the street, much like Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore had before her, and she became a similar kind of pop role model. Sex and the City offered a complete lifestyle package—what to wear, where to eat, when to drink (always), who to have sex with—for the high-end, urban liberated woman. But if Sex and the City was a deeply seductive feminist narrative, it was also a deeply problematic one, one that articulated many of the corruptions of feminism we have been contemplating.
Like Female Chauvinist Pigs, Sex and the City divided human behavior into like a man’s or like a woman’s. Instead of being a confident woman, Samantha had the “ego of a man.” When Charlotte decided to make two dates in one night she was “turning into a man,” but when she worried whether she would be able to eat two meals in a row, “just like that, she was a woman again.” As is the case within the scene of young New York and San Francisco lesbians, the fantasy Manhattan of Sex and the City was a sphere in which sex was just another commodity, something to be acquired rather than shared, so sexual encounters often ended with someone feeling like a conqueror and someone feeling compromised. Rather than
the egalitarianism and satisfaction that was feminism’s initial promise, these sexual marketplaces offer a kind of limitless tally. Like the teenagers who put the cart before the horse and want to “get” sex before they feel desire, the protagonist of Sex and the City often thought more about the way she was experienced than about what she was experiencing. She usually “couldn’t help but wonder” what was going on in the head of the man she was seeing, and rarely evaluated her own happiness as such. In an early episode she said, “I actually catch myself posing” around her love interest, Mr. Big; “it’s exhausting.” The idea of women measuring men’s interest instead of thinking about their own satisfaction lived on after Sex and the City went off the air in a best-selling self-help book called He’s Just Not That Into You (2004), authored by a former writer and consultant of the show. This book, which Oprah Winfrey called “true liberation” and felt “should be on every woman’s night table,” displayed in its very title a prioritizing of mind-reading over feeling. “Many women have said to me, ‘Greg, men run the world,’ ” writes author Greg Behrendt. “Wow. That makes us sound pretty capable. So tell me, why would you think we were incapable of something as simple as picking up the phone and asking you out? You seem to think at times that we’re ‘too shy’ or we ‘just got out of something.’ Let me remind you: Men find it very satisfying to get what they want. (Particularly after a difficult day of running the world.) If we want you, we will find you.” Women generally find it pretty satisfying to get what they want too, but He’s Just Not That Into You is not about what women want. It’s about becoming better discerners of what men want. (And somehow that is true women’s liberation.) Sex and the City was great entertainment, but it was a flawed guide to empowerment, which is how many women viewed it.
