What is Wanting?
Gender starts cutting down kids’ experimental options early: a preschool teacher told me the boys in her class refuse to use the red crayon because “red is a girl’s color.” By middle or junior high school, the gender codes have been cast in steel, enforced both by the “hidden gender curricula” of school programs and by the “feeling rules” kept in check by both adults and other children.1 Kids, especially during the jangled early- and midadolescent years, are urgently concerned with what sociologist Gary Fine calls “impression management,” the personal effort to control and monitor what other people think of you. For the vast majority of young people, social survival is a matter of conformity. And one of the safest survival strategies is to toe the line of gender, assiduously acting the part assigned to the body you’re in and steering clear of people who don’t.
In school, perhaps more than at home (which is why parents are sometimes appalled when they catch their kids unawares among their friends,) both masculinity and femininity are narrow balancing beams, easy to tumble off. Girls must appear amenable to sex but not too amenable. If a girl is standoffish or proud, she is a “bitch.” But if she talks too dirty or behaves too lasciviously, she’s a “slut” or a “ho.” A boy who does the latter is admired as a “player.”
If he does the latter towards girls, that is. Because if a boy is shy or insufficiently enthusiastic about, say, discussing the size of a classmates breasts, he can find himself ostracized as a “faggot.” Masculinity is policed chiefly by boys against other boys, and homophobia is its billy club. “Anything that is feminine, boys learn to reject—sensitivity, empathy, vulnerability,” said Deborah Rakowsky, a guidance counselor in a suburban middle school.
What may be most consistent about gender norms is the degree of their toltaritianism. A child, said Connell, does have the option to “collude, resist, or conform” when faced with prevailing gender codes. If he resists, he may reap the benefits of pride, integrity, and a certain liberation. But he will also pay a price. As sociologist Laurie Mandel put it, “To deviate is not accepted.”
None of this is good for kids—or for sex. For while young people are doing their damndest to avoid rocking the boat of gender, there’s evidence that gender is sinking the ship … Research shows that strong belief in the ideologies of masculinity and femininity makes for bad and unsafe sexual relations. Joseph Pleck, a research psychologist at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and one of the founders of the pro-feminist men’s movement, discovered that young men who subscribe to traditional ideologies of masculinity … are less likely to use condoms. Evidence of dating violence between teenagers is spotty but troubling. Although a certain number of young couples report relationships of frequent mutual violence, girls are much more likely to be the victims than the instigators or perpetrators; they report, along with extreme physical injury, emotional hurt and persistent fear following the incidents.5 Extreme masculine identity, including the sort that is socially rewarded, has also been linked with violence. In 1986, the FBI found that college football and basketball players, the masculine elite, were reported to the police for sexual assault 38 percent more often than the average male student. Members of prestigious fraternities were also disproportionately involved in sexual violence against women.6
Nor does femininity stand girls in good stead for taking care of themselves sexually. According to Deborah Tolman, a senior researcher at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, “Feminine ideology is associated with diminished sexual health.” The more concerned a girl is with looking pretty and behaving tractably, the more likely she is to bend to peer pressure from older guys, have sex while high on drugs, and to take sexual risks such as unprotected intercourse. The “rejection of conventional feminine ideology,” on the other hand, “is associated with more agency,” said Tolman. The less “girly” a girl is, the more she’ll take hold of her own sexual destiny, having sex when, with whom, and in what way she wants.
Gendered sexuality goes far deeper than social attitudes or behavior. It shapes our very fantasies, which are the wellspring of desire, not only what we believe we should want, but also what, in our hearts and groins, we do want: the silent, menacing male stranger; the reserved but sexually yielding, then voracious, girl next door. Without alternatives to these ingrained fantasies (and again, particularly in the hyperconformist adolescent years) these caricatured desires can impede the process of discovering and accepting the idiosyncrasies of what a person might really want in sex and of finding emotional fulfillment in relationships.
Accepting one’s sexuality is no mean task, though. A “desire education” may be in order. And that brings us back to gender. Because gender so profoundly affects both the nature of desire and the ability to acknowledge it, which then affect a person’s confidence in acting on it happily and responsibly, such an education would need to be gender-specific. If the following precepts seem obvious, the necessity of stating them is evidence of the current state of sex education and popular opinion. Indeed, simply guiding young people to explore their desire may be, at the moment, a radical idea.
For some girls, like Deborah Tolman interviewed, the signals of desire are palpable and recognizable. These girls describe feelings of great urgency and “unmistakable intensity,” Tolman wrote.10 “The feelings are so strong inside you that they’re just like ready to burst,” one girl said. Said another, “My body says yes yes yes yes” (but her mind, no no no.) Teen girls’ desire can have almost fluidlike symptoms, reported guidance counselor Rakowsky, laughing and shaking her head. “They tell me it makes their stomach hurt, it makes them sleepy, it gives them a headache.”
But desire doesn’t always speak clearly. Listening requires interpretation. And, sadly, many girls tell us they don’t know if they’re feeling sexual desire or pleasure at all.
Masturbation, said Thompson, is the first step toward understanding, and owning, one’s desire. “One of the things that masturbation teaches is that much of what you feel is in your own body. So many girls elide all the feelings they have in a relationship with one person. They don’t recognize that a large part of those feelings are really there already, and they can have those feelings without that person. A girl can realize, ‘Oh, I had something before this [relationship].’ That [realization] is good and sustaining. It can carry someone through romantic disappointment,” as well as help a girl extricate herself from an abusive or destructive, but sexually compelling, relationship.
I asked Thompson if girls should be taught, through books and films or conversations with adults or each other, how to name and classify the sensations of arousal. “It’s essential,” she said. “A large number of girls have those feelings and have no idea what they are. They only suspect they have to do with sex.” When arousal occurs, “they go into a sort of trance state and absent themselves from themselves: they have no idea what happens next. They’ve been educated to believe they wont have those feelings, and it sends them into this hysteria. If only there was some foreknowledge about the feelings and a permission to have them, they could be recognized, and they could make decisions to protect themselves.”
Can a girl care about beauty and also be tough and feisty? Can she be a “sex object” and also a “whole person”? Unlike many other feminists, Sharon Thompson doesn’t worry too much about girls who pimp and vamp. “They are trying on different ways to be an adult woman,” she said of the problem of “objectification.” “It’s almost an extension of dress-up. It’s not necessarily [developmentally] definitive or bad. When you try on acting sexual, at least it’s an admission, a taking possession of a sexual self.” Of course, she’d like to see a much wider range of what it is to be sexy in American culture, including lesbian styles, butch, femme, fat, thin, and in between, and so would I. “It’s a misfortune that we don’t like the styles of being sexual that are most prevalent in our culture,” she said, meaning “we” feminists. “But when you put on one of those images, it doesn’t mean you can now pretend you don’t have a mind. You can still possess other parts of yourself.”
Because girls receive so many messages that what they really want is love (and thus interpret the urge for sex as love), adults who care about girls “should make knowing about and understanding girls’ sexual desire central, rather than bury the possibility of girls’ sexual desire and agency under relational wishes,” writes Deborah Tolman.14
The problem is, of course, that sexual desire is not buried under relational wishes only in theory or only by adults. To many girls much of the time, love and lust feel mixed together, inextricable. That’s how they feel to many grown women, too, which makes educating their daughters a tough job.
Boys, it is assumed, are brimming with desire. And, from my vantage point at the back of the auditorium of a residential facility for delinquint boys, during an eigth- and ninth-grade sex-ed class, that certainly looked true … The curriculum for the day was fairly standard: information about the female reproductive system, the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and at the end, childbirth. But alongside the official discourse, an unofficial one, a discourse of desire, was asserting itself. From girls, Michelle Fine had heard “whispered interruptions.” In this room, the boys’ announcements of lust were delivered fortissimo (though they were also interruptions). But like Fine’s girls, these boys also communicated something about what was missing. In their case, it was a language that allowed for nuanced emotion, including doubt about sexuality.15
Boys learn that they should want sex, always be ready for it, and also be “good” at it. They learn early to pay attention to their sexual parts and to name at least the grossest manifestations of arousal (hang around any group of male seven-year-olds and you’re sure to pick up the word boner or its equivalent). But adults give them almost no clue about the potentialities of their own bodies, much less women’s or other men’s, and even fewer strategies for sorting out the mélange of curiosity, ardor, awkwardness, fear, and awe they feel. As I witnessed at the Long Island school, those feelings too often devolve into thin bravado and sexist cant.
Boys’ desire education, then, would be different from girls’. Simply put, the emphasis might fall on the other side of the love-lust divide.
While boys feel permission to experience their sexual bodies, they may hardly be closer to knowing the full range of that experience than girls are. From the get-go, they are expected always to want sex. “There is a pressure all around boys to commodify sex. Sex is an ‘it,’ a thing to get,” said Tolman, when we spoke at the early stages of her long-term study of boys’ feelings about sexuality and masculinity. She suggested that these demands require a kind of alienation not only from feelings but from the body as well. “Boys are considered all body. But if we really try to understand what their experience is, I would bet they are observing sexuality in a profoundly dissociative way. They are watching, not feeling. I don’t think boys are having incredibly wonderful sexual pleasure, even though they are supposed to. They may have orgasms more than girls. And coming is pleasure. But performance is such a big part of it, too. That stinks for women and for men.”
Helping boys to connect feelings with sexual performance may contribute to sexual equality, implies Harvard psychologist William Pollack in Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood. Rather than charge girls with resisting and boys with refraining from sex, we should recognize that boys are not “sexual machines” any more than girls are sexual doormats, says Pollack.16
The achievement of equality does not require that we desexualize boys as we have girls. The masculine self-recognition of sexuality is something to be celebrated. Rather, the message to boys should be about their own as well as girls’ sexuality should be that it is as variable as the people in whom it resides … Placing girls on a pedestal of purity is not the same as respect. It only perpetuates the division of the female population into virgins and whores, a division upheld with dreary diligence by our nation’s schoolchildren.
Gender provides fixed points of reference and defenses against ambiguity and the unknown sexual future. It’s not hard to understand why most kids cling to the strictly conformist styles of masculinity and femininity. Challenging the certainties of gender may discomfit young people in the short term, but it can enrich their lives for the duration. Comfort with the unknown may be the most important ally in the interrogation of desire and in its fulfillment throughout a lifetime.
5 – “Fact Sheet: Dating Violence among Adolescents,” Advocates for Youth (accessed at www.advocatesforyouth.org), Washington, D.C., n. d.
6 – Bernard Lefkowitz, Our Guys (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 278-79.
10 – Deborah Tolman, “Daring to Desire,” Sexual Cultures and the Construction of Adolescent Identities, ed. Irvine, 255.
14 – Tolman, “Daring to Desire,” 251.
15 – Janet R. Kahn, “Speaking across Cultures within Your Own Family.”
16 – William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (New York: Random House, 1998), 150-51.
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