Dirty Little Secrets

Chapter 1 GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS Female Sexual Development

As years went by sex became exactly what I wished to win, because it told me that I was valuable and beautiful, and those things were so important to me.

When Faith was eleven years old, she went with her family to the community swimming pool like she had each summer. Every summer prior, she had pushed through those gates, pulled off her outerwear, and jumped right into the deep end. She prided herself on her back dives and her handstands and the fact that she could swim underwater from one end of the pool to the other without once coming up for air. But this summer, something was different. Faith felt hesitant. She walked more slowly. She was hyperaware of her body, of the small breasts that had ached and pressed beneath her chest during the fall and spring, and of the fact that her inner thighs now touched.

There were boys at the pool. Boys! They had been there every summer, of course. How had she not noticed? The boys didn’t turn to look at her as she walked along the edge of the pool, which suddenly mattered in a terrible way. Was there something wrong with her? Was she ugly? Was she fat? Was she not sexy? Rather than jump right into the pool she lay on a lounge chair and considered how she appeared to the boys who might look at her. She lifted a leg so her thigh fat wouldn’t spread. She left her sunglasses on even though that might make funny tan lines on her face, because she thought she looked good with them on—glamorous, like a movie star. Faith’s mother, concerned, asked why she wasn’t going in the water, but Faith just shrugged. She wasn’t going to tell her mother the real reason—that she felt watched, desperate, both embarrassed that the boys would see her and terrified that they wouldn’t.

Lana, just a little older than Faith, was always an exceptionally pretty girl. Her father, especially, took tremendous pride in her round, blue eyes and blond curls. When she was little, he liked to bring her to the fire station where he worked and show her off to his coworkers. His friends told him he better be careful when she grew up, and he laughed and rolled his eyes, but Lana could tell that he liked that they thought this. She was quite aware of all of this, actually—her father’s admiration of and pride in her looks. And she was equally aware of her mother’s jealousy over the way he treated Lana. From a very young age, she did what she could to be extra pretty. She smiled sweetly. She spoke politely to her father’s friends, answering all their questions.

When she started puberty at ten years old, though, her father distanced himself. It was subtle, but it was clear: where once she had been her father’s daughter, now she was handed off to her mother. Lana continued to do everything she could to be pretty, and—following cultural guidelines—sexy. She wore shirts that showed off her young breasts. She wore skirts that exposed lots of leg. She wore makeup and nail polish and perfume. Her mother felt she was out of control. Her father became stricter and told her she needed to focus on her schoolwork, not boys, which only made Lana feel betrayed.

So, at the young age of twelve, Lana began to pursue boys. She let them touch her however they wanted. She gave blow jobs regularly. She worked her way through the boys at school. At the same time, she grew withdrawn and depressed. She fought with her parents. She started bringing in bad grades. One day her mother said to her, “Where did my Lana go? I don’t even know who you are anymore.” Lana didn’t know who she was anymore, either.

Before girls become women, they are whole, energized, excited. They take on the world without hesitation. They are their own directors, in charge of their lives. But then things almost always change. Mary Pipher famously described this seismic shift that comes about as girls enter puberty. She writes, “Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle.”^{11} As girls enter adolescence, they also enter another culture, one in which how they appear to others becomes how they exist. “Girls stop being and start seeming,” Pipher notes, quoting Simone de Beauvoir.^{12}

Sally Mann, my favorite photographer, captures this transitional time in her collection At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women. In each photograph, girls are on the cusp of something. They are both children and too knowing. In some, it is obvious by the ways they hold themselves that they know too much. In others, you can see the light that has begun to fade. Ann Beattie writes in her introduction to the images, “Twelve-year-old girls know what brought them to the present moment, but that’s as far as they’ve gotten.”^{13} In other words, they fully know themselves, even as they have begun this change, but they can’t see where they are headed.

Boys and girls enter adolescence—they become “tweens”—already amid challenges. They go through their greatest physical and emotional growth since infancy. Puberty—a well-known test for most—comes earlier these days. Although the average age of puberty onset is 10.5, with most girls entering puberty between the age of 8 and 13, there is evidence that this age is dropping.^{14} In 1997, a landmark study of approximately seventeen thousand girls found that 15 percent of Caucasian girls and 50 percent of black girls already started to show signs of puberty by age 8.^{15} More recent research suggests an even further drop to age 7. A fifteen-year study out of Denmark published in 2009 determined that the average age of breast development for girls has dropped a full year—from 10.88 years to 9.86 years.^{16}

Age of menarche, a girl’s first period, does not seem to be lowering, however. In other words, many girls’ secondary sex characteristics—breast development, pubic hair growth, and widening hips—are developing early, but first menstruation, which means ovulation and hence the ability to get pregnant, does not arrive with those secondary sex characteristics. (Researchers theorize that increasing amounts of obesity and estrogen in our environment (via Bisphenol A [BPA], pesticides, compounds in cigarettes, and phthalates) cause the earlier onset, but no studies have been conclusive.)^{17} Caucasian girls’ average age of menstruation is 12.6, which is not significantly earlier than it was in the 1970s. We do know, though, that black and Mexican American girls’ median age of menarche has always been lower—12.06 for non-Hispanic Blacks and 12.25 for Mexican Americans.^{18}

As I alluded to briefly in the introduction, when adolescence hits, there is also a vast overproduction of brain cells and neuronal connections. It is during the early teen years that kids prune out the connections they don’t use. At the same time, their frontal lobes, which control judgment, logic, and organization, are not yet well developed. New teens have access to most emotions, but they don’t yet have the skills to deal effectively with them.

For girls, these developmental changes are particularly affected by what happens in the environments surrounding them, and most particularly in the ways they are sexualized by our culture. The images that control our understanding of girls are, in fact, so pervasive, such an ordinary part of our lives, that they are almost unseen. To even say that girls are sexualized in our culture verges on not saying anything at all.

Images of womanhood, of who we are supposed to be, are fed to us from infancy—go to any store that sells toys and there is a distinct “girls’ aisle” where everything is pink and tulle and satin. It doesn’t matter that there are also career-themed Barbies, or other dolls and playthings meant to encourage independence. The point is simply that everywhere a girl looks, from the moment she comes out of the womb, but then especially once she reaches adolescence, the media establishes clearly that it owns her sense of self.

What we speak of less, though, is how that wave of objectification and those mixed messages—“be sexy but not slutty”—are so strong that girls really don’t have a fighting chance. Magazines, billboards, commercials, Internet ads—these are just the tip of the iceberg. Take a quick glance at some of the top teen girls’ magazines and you see these headlines: “How to Get a Guy’s Attention,” “383 Ways to Look Hot,” “Look Pretty,” “How to Get Perfect Skin,” “Get Pretty Now,” and “Be Irresistible.” Girls see more than four hundred advertisements per day telling them how they should look.^{19} The images are so pervasive that we barely notice them.

Naomi Wolf calls the sexy-but-not-slutty images “flattened beauty,” attractiveness defined by a cultural ideal that has nothing to do with girls’ organic, individual beauty.^{20} Airbrushed bodies and flawless faces sit on the cover of every popular women’s magazine. The television runs a reel of size zeros and twos, of symmetrical faces and perfectly styled hairdos. Such people populate some of the most popular shows teenagers watch—iCarly, Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and Glee. Models, celebrities, and pop stars plaster advertisements, billboards, and screens. These people are all we see, which is a constant reminder to average-looking people that we are not that, but that we should certainly spend every moment trying to be that if we, too, want to be seen.

The most pervasive and scrupulous of these images, however, are the ones pertaining to sex and romance. Everywhere we look is a carefully designed suggestion of sexiness and the clear message that girls’ primary interest should be getting a boy’s attention through her looks. Open any teen magazine. Watch any commercial aimed at teen girls. She washes her face, wears a tampon, buys school supplies, and wears sneakers all in some sexy manner that reveals the intention of getting boys to notice her. And it starts way earlier than the teen years—just about every Disney princess plot revolves around snagging a man. The Little Mermaid is a perfect example. The main character Ariel doesn’t even speak, and then she gives up her entire identity as a mermaid and singer to get her guy. The meaning has been the same for decades: be available but not too available and, most important, get male attention at all costs. Girls have limited choices in how to respond to these messages. If they want social acceptance, though, the options vanish and there is really only one message left: “be sexy but not sexual.” The message is only made worse by the sheer number of outlets available to deliver it.

Even those images that seem to support independence and strength—ass-kicking girls like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars, or self-contained girls like Bella’s character in the Twilight movies or Elena Gilbert on The Vampire Diaries—often maintain impossible standards of attractiveness. More important, they are almost always caught up in the process of trying to make a boy love them or of keeping a boy’s love. Bella, for instance, is painted as an everygirl. In the Twilight books she is not supposed to be anywhere near as attractive as the actress who plays her in the movies. But even in her ordinariness, a stunningly gorgeous vampire wants her and only her. He has eyes for no one else. Bella begins as a self-contained teenage girl who knows who she is and is not swayed by others’ opinions of her, but soon after Edward falls for her, her entire existence hinges on his love. Stephenie Meyer encourages a fantasy most all girls have: to be as plain as they are but to be adored and chosen by a really hot, really respectful guy.

Elena from The Vampire Diaries is exceedingly attractive, so it makes perfect sense that two hot vampire brothers spend much of their time trying to get with her. Although Elena’s character, like Bella’s, is supposed to be independent, not swayed by boys, the plot shifts soon enough so that her entire life depends on the love she shares with the brothers.

Yes, we’ve had shows like Ugly Betty, starring a more realistic looking female someone who didn’t have that “flattened beauty,” who didn’t spend all the episodes trying desperately to be loved. But the show was so unique in this way that the entire plotline had to involve the fact that she wasn’t our cultural ideal. The show’s name even called this very attractive woman “ugly”! And anyway, while viewers raved for one season, by the second season, they were over it, ratings fell, and the show was canceled. This disappearance is familiar. Darlene Conner from Roseanne and Angela Chase from My So-Called Life, also long gone, were strong, sarcastic characters who really didn’t care what you thought of them—but even then, cool, plain Angela spent pretty much all her on-screen time chasing Jared Leto’s character, who was, let’s face it, super good looking but equally vapid and dumb.

Recently, Lauren Zizes’s character on Glee gives new hope. Puck, the attractive, popular player, falls for her. First, the focus is on her large shape. He tells her he loves her curvy body, but, unimpressed, she says, “I look like what America looks like.” Finally he admits he likes most that she’s more of a badass than he is.

Even if we were to assume that a violent female, an “asskicking” female, equals a strong female, one study found that in films where females participated in violent action, 58 percent of those female characters were portrayed as submissive to the male lead and 42 percent were in romantic relationships with them.^{21}

So, even Lauren Zizes is guilty of this. (Her character still defies all expectations of what’s come before, and, hey, she’s on prime time, so I cannot feel disappointed.)

If our media has an obsession with romance and love, then it shows sexiness to girls as the way to get that romance. Generally, when we talk about girls in the media, people express outrage about excessively sexy images, which they argue lead to promiscuity. It’s true that sexual behavior and images of sex in our media have increased rapidly over the decades. Partially, this is simply because of increased tolerance for sexual imagery. Also, the modes of technology—places where we can see those images—have multiplied. But I would argue that our concerns about sexualization are mostly misguided. When given a bare-backed, tousled-hair photo of Miley Cyrus, only adults see a postcoital image. Kids generally don’t pick up on the subtleties of sex in images until they become more sexually experienced. Images alone don’t create promiscuity. The real problem is that girls see those images as their tickets to male attention and romance.

Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne write in their book Sexy So Soon: “[S]ex in commercial culture has far more to do with trivializing and objectifying sex than with promoting it, more to do with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that sex as portrayed in the media is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical.”^{22} In other words, our media shows sex as something artificial, unnatural, maybe even porn influenced. Think about some of today’s female singers, such as Ke$ha, Rihanna, and Beyoncé, who have expressed their sexuality by accentuating cleavage, wearing stripper heels, and pouting at the camera. How does that have anything to do with real sex or intimacy? Girls learn that male attention—and potentially then romance and love—comes from appearing artificially sexy.

And yet these singers, like most of those in the media outlets that exploit sexuality, are not trying to do anything other than appeal to our demands. Girls want direction for attracting men, and this is how to do it: girls need only learn how to appeal to boys’ sexual desire. Girls take notes on how to make themselves desirable, on how to move, dress, pout, and wear makeup. For the purpose of selling things, learning how to court the male desire for real companionship or intimacy isn’t nearly as provocative.

But while the media images encourage sexiness, institutions such as the National Abstinence Education Association, Focus Adolescent Services, and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy pressure girls to not be sexual at all. In fact, the institutions seem as obsessed with trying to control girls’ sexuality as the media does. Parents and schools often exert this antisexual pressure as well.

In today’s culture, abstinence and virginity connote morality for girls in a way that’s different from that for boys. That is, although we reference honor and strength and basic moral ideals when we teach boys about being good, we mostly reference virginity for girls. As Jessica Valenti notes in The Purity Myth, “While boys are taught that the things that make them men—good men—are universally accepted ethical ideals, women are led to believe that our moral compass lies somewhere between our legs.”^{23} Virginity is not just a sexual choice; it’s the most prominent way to frame who you are as a person.

Valenti also identifies the “desirable virgin,” the feminine ideal of our culture, who is both sexy and not sexual (we’ll explore more about the virgin myth in chapter 3).^{24} As most of us know, living up to such expectations is all but impossible, but it is particularly tricky for the adolescent girl who is dealing with new sexual curiosity and developmental challenges. On the one hand is abstinence-only education and on the other hand is the push to make themselves desirable: girls learn quickly that there is no happy medium.

The images and pressures are indeed so tremendous that it is sometimes hard to remember that beneath all of it there is a girl who has genuine sexual curiosity and desire, a girl who suddenly is receiving massive amounts of attention not for her intelligence or sense of humor, but for her body.

In Loose Girl, I wrote about how, at the age of eleven, walking on the sidewalk into the next town as I had every day that summer, an older man in a semitruck honked his horn and smiled at me, and I understood for the first time that I could get attention without having to do anything. And I understood that this was what it meant to be a girl; this is where we had power and meaning in the world.

Stephanie has a similar story. When she was seven, in the first grade, she had a boyfriend. Most all the girls and boys in her class had boyfriends and girlfriends. It was just something they said. It’s not like any of them did anything other than hold hands or kiss on the cheek. But for Stephanie, having a boyfriend felt intensely important. She explained to me that she knew even then that if a boy wanted to be with her, it meant something was important about her. Like in all the Disney movies she’d seen, the most handsome, valiant males choose the girl characters, and the girls’ destinies are fulfilled through this process. When her boyfriend decided he wanted to be another girl’s boyfriend instead, Stephanie was devastated. Her main focus became getting another boy to like her, and somehow she knew that to be liked—even at seven—she had to be physically attractive, maybe even sexy. Stephanie told me she feels like she never had a chance, that her narrative about boys making her worthwhile began so young that she has no idea who she might have been otherwise.

It is easy to see how genuine sexual desire gets submerged within each girl, even lost. In conversations with adolescent girls, researchers have found that girls will not speak spontaneously about their own desire; rather, they will only speak of their own desire in terms of relationships. In the educational psychologist Deborah Tolman’s research, she found that even when asked directly, many girls don’t quite know how to answer.^{25} They note that it isn’t something they discuss. They get angry. They giggle. They say they don’t have those kinds of feelings or that they don’t want them. Or some of the young women note that girls just don’t feel desire in that way, unable to claim an “I” voice on the subject. Those who will finally speak about their desire only do so when they feel safe enough to do so, when they can trust that their words will not be manipulated.

Sexual desire for anyone doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Indeed, desire is very much a socially constructed experience, and our society is not keen to include teenage girls in a discourse about sexual desire. We quickly divert such conversations into discussions of virginity and abstinence-only education, the perils of teenage pregnancy, or girls as sexual victims. Certainly all of these topics are valid, but nowhere do we have a means for girls to direct the narrative of their own sexual desire.

I can’t help but imagine a society in which girls are allowed this sort of direction. What would it mean for girls to look inward to their talents and strengths and uniqueness, rather than at billboards and television shows and magazines, to find out who they are sexually? What would it mean for girls if they could define their passion through internal avenues of desire? Imagine a girl able to express herself sexually with a boy, unconcerned about how her body looks or whether he thinks she’s sexy. Imagine a girl who trusts that when she does express herself in that way, boys will respect her as an equal partner and the rest of her community will celebrate her strength and passion rather than judge her as a whore.

If we are to break down all the reasons we aren’t there yet culturally, we must first look at why girls aren’t permitted to have this freedom. For a girl, sexual feeling itself becomes tied to being looked at. Without any cultural guidance about sexual desire, we can only ascertain that we must look a certain way to even have sexual feelings. Well-known feminist author Naomi Wolf notes: “Men take this core for granted in themselves: We see that, sanctioned by the culture, men’s sexuality simply is. They do not have to earn it with their appearance. We see that men’s desire precedes contact with women.”^{26}

Women’s desire does not always come before that of a man’s desire for her. We know, in fact, that women’s sexual desire is often dependent on being desired. In a New York Times Magazine article about female desire, the psychologist Marta Meana determined that “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic. It is dominated by the yearnings of ‘self-love,’ by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.”^{27}

In other words, a women’s physical arousal is in direct relation to how much she is wanted—gazed at, one might say—by another. It is difficult to imagine how such desire is not at least somewhat culturally created, how it is at least partially, as Wolf suggests in her quote, tied up with a sense of permission—it is safe to be a desiring woman now that someone else has suggested I am acceptable.

Charlene is a good example of this. She grew up in a tough neighborhood. She watched her single mother scramble to pay the bills. Her father was long gone. She had one sister who was four years younger, so she didn’t feel like she had anyone she could relate to. The first time she felt a boy look at her with longing in his eyes, she knew it was something to pay attention to. She spent the greater part of her teens “boy hunting,” she said. She wanted to feel that she was desired, because at home she felt so completely undesired. When she felt sexual desire, she told me, it was entirely about that fantasy. If some hot guy with status wanted her, she got turned on and couldn’t help herself from having sex with him. The feeling, she said, was intoxicating, because those were the only times her body felt alive with desire, which made her feel alive, period.

These false beliefs—“I’m not good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, quiet enough…”—are one of the defining features of girlhood. For loose girls, sex and sexual attention become the answer to these beliefs. They possess the potential to make us good enough, pretty enough, lovable enough. This is why promiscuous behavior for a loose girl doesn’t end in adolescence. It often grows into an addiction of sorts. We try and try again to make the sex mean something about us. But ultimately it only harms us further.

Often, too, teenage girls’ experience of desire is subverted and redirected into narratives about male attention. This might be partially due to hormones, but certainly it’s also a result of cultural expectation. Genuine sexual desire is lost inside the power of getting that attention. The influence of this, the heady control of getting a boy or man to look our way, to desire us, is perhaps the easiest way for girls to feel any kind of influence when it comes to their sexuality. In a culture where girls’ genuine sexual desire is shrouded in silence, where there is no language of ownership for girls’ own sexual feelings, it is easy to see how girls gravitate toward this kind of power.

Like Faith at the swimming pool, a girl’s sexual maturity must be something of a paradox. Look, but don’t look. Touch, but don’t touch. In this way, being a girl is invariably tied up with need and negation, and with how a girl must negotiate those opposing forces.

For boys, it is entirely different.

Chapter 2 BOY CRAZY The Fantasy Girls Have about Boys

Everywhere I turned there was a new one. I can remember my boyfriend coming to see me [at college] for the first time, and I came rushing up from another boy’s dorm room having just had sex, only to then have sex with him.

Kelsey was always jealous of boys. In grade school she wanted to be Batman or Spider-Man during recess, but she had to be Batgirl or the girl being saved. She developed early, with breasts in the fourth grade. Both boys and girls teased her regularly. They called her “Chesty” instead of Kelsey, and most who used to be her friends turned on her because they didn’t want to be associated with her. She cried often, which didn’t help, and she begged her mother to move to a different school district.

In fifth grade, she began to develop crushes on boys. They were all boys she knew she could never have, but still, she made up elaborate fantasies of them pulling her aside and telling her they secretly loved her. She imagined them kissing her, how their lips might feel on hers. And she imagined them offering to take her away from her life, to live just the two of them on an island where it didn’t matter if kids went to school.

And in sixth grade, when one of the cashiers at the Burger King down the street from her house suggested she meet him in the bathroom, she did so willingly, feeling that finally someone might want her. He lifted her shirt and kneaded her breasts, and then he told her to jerk him off. He didn’t kiss her once. He didn’t even ask her name, but he wore a name tag: Greg. She said she will never forget his name. He was her first sexual experience, her first understanding that boys could do something for her, something no one else could. Even though Greg never asked her into the bathroom again, even though she felt rejected and confused by what had happened, the experience set her on a search she is still stuck inside—a search for boys’ attention. She has since given blow jobs in stairwells at school, had sex in boys’ parents’ cars parked in driveways. She has had anal sex with a friend’s nineteen-year-old brother. None of them has tried to have a relationship with her. None has fallen in love with her. None of her fantasies about what boys can do for her—save her, release her, love her—has come true. But at sixteen she can’t seem to stop. At sixteen, boys still have the only solution Kelsey can see to her feelings of being undesirable.

Kelsey’s story is painstakingly familiar. I too spent much of my life believing a boy could save me from my pain. I too felt irrepressibly drawn to boys. I too couldn’t help myself. There was something about them. Sometimes, still, I can feel it: boy crazy. Other girls feel the same way. Here are some quotes about their own stories from some of the girls I interviewed:

“I felt like a shell of a person that only came alive when a boy or a man noticed me. I felt like the whole world revolved around being noticed and wanted by a boy or a man.”

“My experiences with boys feel like obsession, like there’s nothing more appealing in the world.”

“I get completely gaga over boys.”

“Without a boy in my life I feel like I don’t exist.”

“What is it about boys?”

Yes, what is it about them? This is the question that drives this chapter. My sense is that whatever “it” is, the groundwork begins young.

Lately, my three-year-old son has been playing make-believe. He wraps a cape around his small shoulders and builds a castle out of his oversized blocks and imagines stories for himself. In all the stories, there is someone he has to save, and in every scenario, I’ve noticed, that someone is a female. I have no idea where he has learned this narrative. I try steadfastly, albeit unsuccessfully, as his mother to prune out any books or television shows or movies that involve such a relationship between boys and girls. I work hard to speak of boys and girls as equals. But the narrative of a girl needing a boy to save her, and a boy coming along to do just that, is so insipid in our culture that it slipped into his very young consciousness without my knowing.

In truth, it is easy to see how it happened. In even the most innocuous movies—beginning with the ones meant for children—if a boy looks at a girl, if he finds her attractive in any way, it becomes clear quite quickly that he is in fact in love with her. Not only is he in love with her; he has eyes for no one else. And if he loved her as a child, when they grow up, they will be reunited, usually in some way that involves him rescuing her, and he will still be in love with her all those years later. And then add to this that so many images of girls—in these movies and elsewhere—show them overly concerned with what boys think of them.

And that is just the media. Beneath that is the very real cultural truth that boys simply have more freedoms in our culture. Boys can take up physical space. Whereas girls must rein in their desires, sexual and otherwise, boys can allow their legs to fall open when they sit; they can yell out the car window at girls walking along the sidewalk; and when they chase girls for sex, they are acting like “typical” boys. For these reasons, boys become appealing to girls on yet another level. Heterosexual girls are drawn to boys physically and emotionally, but they’re also attracted to the self-determination and lack of restrictions that boys are allowed in our culture. Studies show, in fact, that girls who adopt the “feminine” role—sociability, empathy, and greater passivity—do not feel as good about themselves as girls who take on more “masculine” traits, such as independence, aggression, and assertiveness.^{28}

So it makes sense that girls might find ways to latch on to boys. Boys have something we want: real freedom. Since there has been no way for girls to harness this freedom, they have learned—sort of smartly, I’d say—to harness boys, the owners of that freedom, instead. And this is where the “bad boy” comes in. We all know who the bad boys are. They are charming, generally unconcerned with us, disinterested in any sort of commitment. They are sexy as only things that we can’t truly have are sexy. And they are dangerous. Girls are taught early on to stay away from these boys, the ones who will give them freewheeling experiences, including—perhaps most especially—sexual desire.

Jackie lives in Los Angeles, where it’s very easy to find what Hollywood considers attractive men. The first time Jackie and I spoke, she asked, “Did you find that you always had to have extremely good-looking men?” She described the kinds of men she always sleeps with. They are B-list actors and models she meets in clubs. I had heard of at least half the men she named or had seen them on television or in an advertisement. She told me she has a crush on a well-known performer. My first reaction was to say that many people fantasize about celebrities, but she and this man had actually exchanged smiles and stares on numerous occasions in L.A. nightclubs. As our conversation continued, I began to understand that this was Jackie’s normal experience of men: Jackie was only pursuing men who were out of her league. When she expressed heartache that one of the guys hadn’t called her again after sex, it seemed obvious to me that it wasn’t because he thought she was unappealing or unlovable in any way, which is what she thought. In my mind, these men were unlikely to date “normal” people. They would have sex with noncelebrities, sure, but they weren’t going to have lasting relationships with them.

Jackie is an intensely smart woman, so I was fascinated by her inability to see the way she continually set herself up to feel bad about herself. It struck me that Jackie liked them “unavailable.” She liked the thrill of scoring someone so unattainable. It was part of the high. At the same time, though she wasn’t aware of it then, she chose unavailable men so when they left she could falsely reestablish her understanding of herself again and again: she isn’t good enough. She isn’t lovable.

Also, Jackie’s B-list celebrities give her an opportunity to express her sexuality in ways that wouldn’t matter as much with mere “mortals,” as she jokingly calls the rest of the men in the world. If the celebrity boys want her, then she can latch on to their desirability. She ups her status as a sexual person with such bad boys.

For a girl, sex is dangerous. It is a motorcycle ride; it is rushing carelessly along a highway, heading somewhere, hair wild in the wind. On that motorcycle is the man who takes her on the ride, her arms wrapped around a firm, protective chest. That kind of wild, carefree sex is everything a girl can’t have, unless she is willing to become a slut. Unless she wants to become potentially unmarriageable, unworthy of respect. Sex is that bad boy. Naomi Wolf in Promiscuities writes, “The demon lover’s tendency toward chaos and escape and risk and selfishness may be seen as a projection of inadmissible female longings onto the male—a way of safely handling and vicariously experiencing the release of women’s own wish sometimes to be ‘out of control.’”^{29} No wonder bad boys are so appealing to so many girls! No wonder they will do whatever they must to get inside that experience with such a boy! For her, sexual feeling is only allowed in the presence of a boy who can contain her, who will take responsibility for the wildness and loss of control. Boys become the stand-in for everything she can’t do herself, and she winds up playing out all her drama, discovery, and passion in her relationships with those boys.

A girl doesn’t need to feel sad or lost or hurt to become a loose girl. She simply needs to want freedom, to want the wingspan that will let her live her desires. This, I suspect, is why plenty of girls I interviewed suffered through so many of the same feelings but didn’t have loveless childhoods. At the core, loose girls are a cultural problem. Yes, difficulty at home can exacerbate looseness. Yes, abuse and molestation make the problem much, much worse. But the bottom line is that girls get attached to boys and male attention because our culture allows boys the sorts of freedoms girls want.

Fourteen-year-old Lourdes met her last boyfriend at an underage club. He was twenty-four, hanging out there with a few of his friends who seemed younger than him. She said there was no question that he was leering at all the teenage girls, but rather than being turned off, she found this provocative. She saw it as daring on his part. He danced with her and then offered to drive her home. After that she saw him every day, but she had to hide it from her parents because of his age. He picked her up from school and would take her back to his apartment that he shared with a few other guys, and they’d have sex. At home, Lourdes’s father drank and went into rages. Lourdes and her younger sister had to hide in their room with a chair against the doorknob until he had passed out. She’d made the mistake of getting in the way of his rages before, and she wound up whipped by his belt. Her mother, who was a devout Catholic (or, as Lourdes called her, “a religious freak”), never did anything to intervene. Instead, during her father’s rages, Lourdes’s mother cried in the kitchen and spoke to God in Spanish. “You know,” Lourdes said, “helpful shit like that.” Lourdes just wanted out of her house, but she also felt guilty because she didn’t want to leave her sister alone with her parents. She thought many times about getting pregnant. She knew for a fact that her father would have kicked her out (and her mother would have just cried and talked to God in Spanish).

Eventually, she and her boyfriend broke up. He moved on to some other young girl without even telling her. She was pretty upset, but she went right back to the club, hoping that some other guy would come along. She says that she has her sights set on someone saving her from her life, and who better to do that than an older guy?

Two-thirds of girls younger than age 18 choose sex partners who are close to their age, and a mere 7 percent choose partners who are six or more years older.^{30} But men older than high school age account for 77 percent of births among girls age 16–18 and for 51 percent of births among girls age 15 and younger. Men older than age 25 father twice as many births with teenage girls than do boys younger than 18.^{31} So, while teenage girls partnering with older men is not a significant trend, when it does happen, it seems that girls wind up with older men as the fathers of their children.

Why do some girls want older men? A few of the girls I interviewed told me they felt that teenage boys were immature and that they liked how the older men treated them, referring to dinners and gifts. One noted, “It doesn’t hurt that they have cars, too.” It does seem that girls who like older men gravitate to their money, but research also suggests that girls who choose men so far out of their age ranges also tend toward low self-esteem and depression.^{32} Many of these girls are looking to replace their abusive or difficult families with new ones. They often perceive the men as white knights who will save them from whatever pain they’re suffering at home.

Regardless of the girls’ claims, men who choose teenage girls tend to be immature and insecure, with egos matching those of teenage boys.^{33} Many have criminal histories, so they are not the safe havens girls make them out to be. Of course, partnering with a teenage girl under the age of consent is statutory rape, not to be taken lightly.

Grown men who choose adolescents as sex partners tend to have these immaturities, but they also simply learned about girls from our culture. They, like all boys, learn from media that girls aren’t worth more than their looks and their accessibility for sex; they absorb this message as completely as girls do. Boys erroneously learn, just as girls do, that boys are horny and girls aren’t, and that it is up to the girls to protect their morality by fending off boys’ advances. They learn that boys choose girls, not the other way around. And they learn that the more girls a boy can score, the more manly he is.

It is easy to see how these messages can lead boys to behave badly, to try to get girls in bed and dump them just as quickly, to not feel any sort of responsibility for their sexual behavior in the world. It is also easy to see how we don’t vilify or shame boys for their sexual behavior the way we do with girls. That double standard is still entirely alive and well. Although it might seem that boys get away with murder in this respect, the truth is that—just like girls—they get pigeonholed away from real intimacy. Our culture’s expectations regarding sex harm boys, too. Boys learn that they should want sex, pursue it, and be good at it. They don’t, however, learn about the emotional potentials that come along with their desire, and they don’t learn that most boys share a similar awkwardness and curiosity, along with the excitement and awe, when it comes to sex. In Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, William Pollack argues that boys’ ravenous sexual appetites are more often than not a cover for their fear of sexual humiliation.^{34}

Imagine, if you will, boys and girls exploring sexually and safely in a loving, kind way. Imagine they could learn about how to have relationships, could communicate about their needs, without cultural and parental shaming. Sad how much this vision seems like an impossible dream. Before we can look more closely at ways to rectify this, let’s examine the role of the girl more closely. After all, as boys are boxed into being owners of their sexual identity, girls are given very few options about who they can be when it comes to sex.

Chapter 3 THE UNHOLY TRINITY The Virgin, the Slut, and the Empowered Girl

Chapter 4 BEST FRIENDS AND ROLE MODELS Mothers and Loose Girls

My mother was my first teacher when it came to getting men to notice me.

Cicely’s family fit all the stereotypes of a normal, nuclear family. She lived with her younger brother, mother, and father in a middle-class home. Cicely’s mother had prided herself on making choices for her family that included sit-down meals every night, checking their homework, and always knowing where they would be and with whom. She and Cicely were extremely close, right up until Cicely turned fourteen. That’s when things took a turn. Cicely began to want to wear clothes her mother would not allow. She began to sneak out at night to meet boys, then come home with hickeys all over her neck. Her mother tried everything: reasoning with her, grounding her, sleeping in the living room so she would hear whether Cicely tried to escape through the front door. Nothing worked. Cicely, meanwhile, grew more and more resentful of her mother’s tactics. She felt increasingly isolated from her family, but got a sense of comfort from her friends, who understood her. Mostly, though, she got comfort from boys, who made her feel special in a way she had never felt before. When they didn’t call or liked one of her friends instead of her, she felt devastated, but that initial rush, that feeling that maybe this boy would love her, was worth it all.

Cicely’s story is probably familiar to many mothers with teenage girls. Their daughters are precious, lively, compassionate kids. Their mothers know how to reach them. They enjoy their time together. And then all of a sudden something switches. The daughter goes away. She stops communicating. When the mother tries to talk to her, wanting open discussion, the teen gets angry and stomps away. She yells, “You don’t understand!” and slams the door. But of course the mother understands. She understands better than anyone.

And yet, according to studies of mothers and adolescents, mothers understand less than they think. According to studies by James Jaccard, Patricia Dittus, and Vivian Gordon in Child Development, mothers tend to underestimate their daughters’ sexual activity.^{50} Most all the girls I spoke with affirmed this pattern with their mothers. Plenty told me that their parents would freak out if they knew the extent of what they did with boys—threesomes and oral sex, for instance. They’ve hidden hickeys and lied about where they were going and who they were spending time with. One said, “My mother thinks I’m such an angel. She tells her friends how sweet and smart and together I am. It makes me want to puke. She has no idea who I really am.”

Much research supports that a healthy mother-daughter relationship is prohibitive of promiscuity among teens. Adolescents’ perceptions of their mother’s disapproval of premarital sex and their satisfaction with the mother-daughter relationship are significantly related to abstinence for teens, less frequent sexual intercourse, and more consistent use of contraception among sexually active youths.^{51}

However, in a survey of one thousand fifteen- to twenty-twoyear-old girls and one thousand mothers of teen girls conducted by Seventeen and O Magazine through the research firm Harris Interactive, only 4 percent of girls claimed that their beliefs about sex were influenced by their mothers, and 40 percent said that talking to their moms about sex didn’t really affect their decisions.^{52}

All these mixed messages for mothers don’t help the already-terrifying process of raising teenage girls. Lydia, a self-proclaimed loose girl, told me that her mother relayed those mixed messages in the home. She walked around naked saying, “We’re all girls here.” She encouraged her daughters to feel comfortable with their bodies. But she also told them they should not have sex or lead on boys, who would do anything to get into their pants.

“It was confusing,” Lydia said. “So ultimately I just did what I wanted.”

This sort of disconnect is reflected in the Seventeen and O survey, where 90 percent of mothers claimed that they’d spoken to their daughters about how to make the decision to have sex, but only 51 percent of the girls claimed to have had the same conversation.

A few things are at work in such numbers. One is that mothers are generally uncomfortable talking to their teens about sex. Following the dominant discourse about girls and sex, mothers talk about the issues involved—pregnancy, abortion, and STDs. Most adolescent girls claim that their mothers don’t talk to them about the aspects of sex that they deem more important—such as the emotions involved and the physical feelings. Generally, they feel like they’re receiving warnings and rules, and that the conversation is rarely much of a two-way street.^{53} One of the girls I interviewed told me that her mother would never even know all the things she wasn’t saying; the girl knows that there are certain topics her mother doesn’t want to hear about from her, and one of them is definitely her desire to be with boys sexually.

Mothers are uncomfortable partially because sex is such a taboo subject for teen girls. But they’ve also adopted the social standard that if you discuss sex and sexual desire with your daughter, she’ll fall down that slippery slope into promiscuity. As a result, many tell their daughters about abstinence. They let them know that sex before marriage is off-limits. Then they assume (or pray) that the girls will follow their advice.

Girls, too, often feel uncomfortable talking to their mothers about sex, particularly when they fear judgment, rigidity, or attempts to control. But even without those factors, talking about sex with any parent is burdened with embarrassment.

Certainly, this adds to the reasons that one of the more important topics missing from most conversations about sex is masturbation. Letting a girl know—from early on—that it is perfectly fine to touch herself in private is a great way to support her natural sexual feelings without needing a boy. Even the well-known sex therapist Laura Berman said in an O Magazine interview about talking to daughters about sex, “It’s important to talk to her about having a sense of control and pride over her body, and to let her know there are ways she can make herself feel good before she’s ready for sex, like self-stimulation.” The interviewer asked, “Seriously? Mothers should talk about masturbation?” Berman replied: “If you want to raise a sexually healthy daughter, yes. That may mean attending to your own sexual health. A lot of women grew up with the idea that masturbation is wrong or dirty.” Indeed.^{54}

It’s not just the conservatives and abstinence advocates who wince at such a conversation. “That is private business,” one mother said to me. This head-in-the-sand approach, though, puts a wall up between teen girls and adults. As long as mothers don’t talk to their girls about sex, they are setting up a greater likelihood that their girls will use sex to self-harm.

Masturbation is a major taboo, and a long standing one at that. Some of the myths are familiar—you can go blind, you’ll grow hair on your palms, or your reproductive organs will fail. Others contain that common double standard—boys masturbate, but girls don’t, or girls who do masturbate are hypersexualized, exposed to images or experiences they shouldn’t have been.

But the real truth about masturbation is that it’s as natural and normal as it can get when it comes to sexual exploration. The larger percentage of the population masturbates, and they do so through old age.^{55} In fact, one study suggests that 20 percent of all senior citizens masturbate at least once a week.^{56} The joke goes that 98 percent of the population masturbates, and the other 2 percent are lying. Although statistics suggest that men masturbate more than women, I think we can all agree that this is due to both the stigma put on women for having desires and the likelihood of girls’ and women’s lower honesty in reporting masturbation occurrences, as women are traditionally not accepted for their sexual desires. If girls and women are expected be in love to have sex, then certainly admitting their solo sexual desire is too risky.

The Boy Scouts of America, the Christian Coalition, and the Roman Catholic Church are all vocally opposed to masturbation. Christine O’Donnell, who ran for the Delaware Senate in 2010 (and lost), spoke on MTV in the 1990s about how masturbation was a sin because it was equivalent to committing adultery.^{57} In 1994, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the U.S. surgeon general, was forced to resign from her position because she suggested that masturbation should be a part of sex education. Conservatives and moderates were outraged to the point that Elders left her post.

Meanwhile, when we look beyond opinion and stigma, research suggests that masturbation is an essential part of sexual development, and girls’ hesitations about masturbation are correlated with having uneasiness about intercourse.^{58} The sex educator Sharon Thompson notes that one of the things masturbation teaches is that all those things we feel happen inside our own bodies.^{59} So many girls make all that sexual excitement about the other person. In reality, those feelings are their own creation and they could have those feelings without needing a boy around to feel them. Assuming that girls will develop more confidence about their sexual feelings if they do masturbate, they might also be more self-directed about their sexual behavior. They will likely know better what they want and what they don’t. And what better way for girls to acknowledge and attend to their sexual desires without putting themselves in the way of STDs and pregnancy?

So how should mothers address sexual behavior with their girls? Lynn Ponton, author of The Sex Lives of Teenagers, created a comprehensive list of considerations, including starting early, before adolescence; being conscious of talking to your children about sex and sexual feeling without mentioning your own; continuing the conversation and communication long beyond a singular talk; and recognizing that your work as a parent is to guide and suggest but not to direct.^{60}

If daughters are going to have sex, and we know from the statistics that many will, then mothers should make condoms available to their daughters. We know that adolescents use condoms more than adults do, which means they are willing to use condoms.^{61} Therefore, parents have a responsibility to keep their children as safe as they can by providing condoms in case their teenagers are choosing to have sex. And parents need to talk with them about condoms early. A study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined that mothers who discussed condom use with their teenage daughters before first intercourse had daughters who were three times more likely to use condoms than those whose mothers discussed condom use with them after first intercourse.^{62}

Another very important issue arises when it comes to mothers and daughters regarding sexual behavior. Many mothers are still dealing with unresolved feelings surrounding their own promiscuity. They either continue to act in loose-girl ways, or they feel anger or pain or resentment about those feelings themselves (see chapter 9 for more about the grown-up loose girl). We know that modeling is one of the primary ways children learn. It doesn’t matter what mothers say to their daughters if they don’t walk their talk.

Children—perhaps especially teenagers—are hyperaware of hypocrisy. Communication to teens about sex—from media, from parents, from educational institutions—is loaded with mixed messages. Teenagers look perhaps most critically at their parents for hypocrisy and will quickly dismiss a mother’s admonishments if she isn’t following the same advice. And if a mom is acting out sexually, needing too much attention from men, or even focusing too much on romance, girls pick up those messages more than anything else that might be said.

This is not to say that all loose girls have loose-girl mothers, but having a loose-girl mother generally means that the mother is somewhat oblivious, which won’t help her daughter’s emotional health when it comes to sex. Research shows that parents who are insecurely attached—meaning that important bonds were disrupted when they were children—tend to parent in ways that pass on that insecurity to their daughters.^{63}

Janet and Shawna are a mother and daughter who have lived on their own since Janet and her ex-husband Greg divorced. Janet always told Shawna that she didn’t want her to give herself away to just any boy, but when Janet began to date, Shawna felt like she was seeing her mother in a different light. She dressed in sexy outfits. She changed her hairstyle. Once Shawna saw her mother French kissing a date in the kitchen. His hand was squeezing her behind. Shawna felt sick but also slightly aroused. She was happy for her mother, but it also frightened her. She felt like she didn’t know her mother at all.

Janet and Shawna’s situation is a common one for many teenage girls. Janet isn’t necessarily doing anything wrong, but without any discussion, Shawna sees her mother’s behavior as hypocritical. There are layers to every story, too, that are harder to see. In that brief anecdote, for instance, you don’t see that Janet also had a history of needing men’s attention. When she married, that need went into a sort of remission, but suddenly free she found herself craving attention again. In this cycle, Janet will find it hard to be there fully for Shawna. But if Janet can build awareness about her own behavior, she can discuss her tendencies with Shawna. They can talk about how women are made to feel in their culture and how hard it is to fight the current. She can promise Shawna that she will work on this issue in her own life and that Shawna can come to her with any feelings about the process, even unpleasant ones. In other words, Janet doesn’t have to be perfect. No parent can be. But she can take responsibility for herself and be honest, the two most important things a parent can do.

Hannah has a very different story. Her parents divorced when Hannah was ten, and a few years later, her mother met Chris at a singles’ dance. Hannah’s mother immediately began to transform, and not in a positive way. Whatever Chris liked, her mother did. For instance, Chris liked high heels, so Hannah’s mother went out and bought a few pairs and she wore them all the time. Hannah didn’t like Chris one bit. He insulted her father, whom he’d never met. And he insulted Hannah, too. When Hannah would say something back to him—something like, “Excuse me?”—her mother told her to stop it, to not act fresh with Chris.

Every day, Hannah felt like she had to hold herself still, not talk, not express any of her feelings. If she did try to talk to her mother, Chris would show up and give her mother a why-do-you-let-herget-away-with-it expression. Soon after, her mother would warn her to knock it off. It got so bad, in fact, that Hannah started having occasional panic attacks. Her mother found Hannah shaking uncontrollably in the bathroom one time, and she still did nothing. One time, Hannah said point-blank to her mother, “You choose him over me,” and her mother didn’t deny it. Now, Hannah says, she tries not to think about it too much. Instead, she fantasizes about having a boyfriend. She told me, “I think of having a boyfriend’s arms to wrap me up tight, kiss my hair, hold my hand, and cuddle with. I find myself now looking at any guy, imagining that. I don’t find many guys at my school attractive, and the ones that are have personalities that ruin it, or they’re into smoking pot, or I just have no way of approaching them. Now whenever I think I like a guy, I don’t know if it’s just because I’m desperate like my mom or if my crush is genuine. I just want to feel good and have someone there to love me like that. And it doesn’t help the way my mom is acting, and what she says makes me think I can’t be happy if I don’t have a man.”

Hannah’s mother has tons of work of her own to do before she can be a positive influence on Hannah when it comes to romance. Like Janet, she needs to examine her own issues with men and the ways she has turned to men to fill something in her that she can’t fill on her own. Clearly, Hannah’s mother has put her own desperation for love above her care for her daughter, something I too commonly hear from teenagers. Unless Hannah’s mother puts her daughter’s feelings first, Hannah will continue to feel confused about her own impulses when it comes to romance. Hannah has difficulty separating her identity from her mother’s, which is typical of a mother-daughter relationship, but particularly one where the mother has no boundaries around her behavior.

Every once in a while, I hear positive stories, too. I know a fourteen-year-old girl named Nel who recently started dating, and one evening she came home with a hickey on her neck. Her mother saw it, let her daughter know she saw it, and told her that she was fine with that hickey. Her concern, she let Nel know, was that Nel was making choices she wanted to make. She only wanted to be sure that Nel felt comfortable with what was happening and that she wouldn’t do something she didn’t really want to do. At first Nel rolled her eyes and said, “I know, Mom!” But about an hour later, Nel came back to her mother and said that she did realize that sometimes boys wanted to do more than she felt ready for, and sometimes even she wanted to do more than she was sure she was ready for. Nel and her mother wound up having a long, open discussion about how boys are always considered the horny, sexual aggressors, but really there were things girls wanted to do, too. But girls are very aware that if they let boys know they want those things, they quickly get labeled “sluts.” Nel and her mother agreed that this was unfair, and together they discussed ways Nel could work her way around this double standard while still staying true to herself, such as by thinking through her sexual behavior before acting, and perhaps even talking to her mother about it first.

Sometimes the media gets it right also. One mother-daughter sex talk that received lots of attention for being honest, realistic, and all-around positive came from the NBC drama Friday Night Lights. On the show, the character Tami, Julie’s mother, treats Julie with respect, asking her open-ended questions about her feelings and experiences. She also shares her own honest feelings. Here is an excerpt:

A conversation like this one, and like the one Nel and her mother had, is a great example of mothers encouraging and supporting open dialogue about sex while respecting their daughters’ thoughts and feelings. In both examples, too, the mothers take responsibilities for their feelings about their daughters’ sexual behavior rather than projecting those feelings on the girls. This is a big difference from the kinds of conversations I hear about too often—one in which a mother simply tells her daughter that she should not have sex until she is married, or alternatively, one in which the mother is trying to be her daughter’s best friend. When a mother shares too much of her own past experiences with sex, or when she encourages her daughter’s sexual feelings as a way of validating her own, she crosses a boundary, one that can feel violating to a girl.

So a balance such as the ones Nel’s mother and Julie’s mother managed to find—where they remained their daughters’ mothers, guiding them and providing safety for the girls while also supporting their daughters’ feelings and sexual discovery—is a difficult balance indeed. Mothers have a unique responsibility here, one they must take very seriously as they navigate their ways through the treacherous field of a teenage girl’s sexual discovery.

This has been a long-standing stumbling block. My mother’s generation had mothers that tended toward silence. They simply didn’t speak about sex to their daughters. One day, the daughter’s period arrived, the mother took her to get Kotex, and that was it. They were told to not have sex before marriage. The end. Some of the mothers of my generation tried to do things differently, but many went too far the other way, offering too much about sex, breaking boundaries, wanting to share like friends. The mothers of today have still been mostly left out in the cold with this subject, mainly because mothers are women, which means no one has told them that their desire was normal when they were growing up, that it is a necessary part of the equation when it comes to sexual development. Mothers so often feel helpless in the face of this task of guiding their daughters safely through the wild, roaring rapids of adolescent sexuality. They try to tell their daughters what they need to know. They warn them. But such tactics don’t work with adolescents, who need to know that their knowledge and beliefs are respected. The most important thing a mother can do, really, is to just listen.

Fathers have their own set of challenges.

Chapter 5 DADDY ISSUES How Fathers Matter

I’ve spent my life trying to replace my dad who had nothing to give me, who never even tried.

Sarah, now in her late twenties, has slept with seventeen or eighteen guys, all in about five years. Three-quarters of them were one-night stands, and she can’t remember all the names or what order they came in. One was a professor in the college she attended. Three or four of the guys were actual relationships that lasted a year or more. Sarah didn’t have sex until she was twenty-one which is later than the average for girls (which is seventeen). In high school she was into sports and schoolwork and not so much into boys. She did have a boyfriend her senior year—but she believes she messed that up when she started looking to her best friend, a girl, for emotional fulfillment instead of him. All of this sounds perfectly normal.

But then, Sarah’s best friend had sex with Sarah’s father. From then on, everything changed. She said, “I like to blame my father and my shitty genes for my promiscuity, but I know this is just an excuse.” True, but her father’s behavior was also a reason. Sarah has more recently been in therapy because, twelve years after the incident between her friend and father, she still finds that her depression is uncontrollable.

Breanna had a military dad, and his job required him to travel overseas for the majority of her childhood. When she was nine years old, he left again for a one-year tour of duty overseas. A friend’s father was known for taking the neighborhood children on camping trips, with and without their parents, and Breanna’s mother thought it was a nice gesture, especially since her father was gone. It was on that camping trip that she says she learned about her body and her friend’s father’s body when he molested her. Her father returned several months later only to tell her mother that he wanted a divorce. The two events, both terrible disappointments and betrayals for Breanna, led her down a desperate path to feel loved by a man.

Stories like Breanna’s, and to some extent Sarah’s, are the stories we expect when looking for narratives behind loose-girl behavior. We expect loose girls to have problems with their fathers. Why? Well, the assumption is that a girl who seeks attention in men has daddy issues.

A number of readers have asked me whether I’ve found that the majority of girls who contact me have absent fathers (I haven’t). Google the words girls, promiscuity, and reasons, though, and you will find many articles and blogs noting that the reason girls are promiscuous is that their fathers were absent or otherwise unavailable. Fathers don’t give girls what they need. They pull away when a girl hits puberty, perhaps frightened of the girl’s emergent sexuality or put off by their sudden attitudes. Or they left long ago, a shadow in the girl’s life. We assume that girls look for that elusive father figure in other men.

As one preacher writes in his blog:

I searched and searched for the source of his statistic that 90 percent of teen girls who get pregnant didn’t have loving relationships with their fathers, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. This type of lack of evidence crops up repeatedly in discussions of daddy-daughter issues. I don’t doubt that it can be a part of the picture, but I fear we tend toward giving fathers too much responsibility for their daughters’ sexual lives.

A communications professor wrote in an article on AskMen.com that girls with “daddy issues” exhibit sexual aggressiveness, excessive flirting, and clinginess.^{66} Here lies the issue that we’ve discussed in previous chapters: cultural assumptions weigh down the terms he uses. Girls who want sex are “aggressive,” and girls who want more than sex are “clingy.” Would we say that about boys? But what’s key here is that he provided no real evidence that girls with daddy issues possess these traits. It’s just another cultural assumption.

A psychologist who devotes much of her career to actively preventing same-sex marriage writes on her own website (syndicated on a Catholic organization’s website):

Again, the author provides no source material as evidence, and her comment is entirely presumptuous. Yet another psychologist writes:

Keep looking, and you will find the same sentiment again and again. The actress Megan Fox said that “girls are awful” because they all have daddy issues.^{69} And, still, where is the evidence?

The truth is, the idea that promiscuous girls have daddy issues comes directly from Sigmund Freud. He put forth the Oedipal complex, which theorizes that boys unconsciously want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. Carl Jung then coined the Electra complex, which is the psychosexual theory that girls develop a sexual attachment to their fathers. They carry this attachment into adulthood, always searching to replace their fathers with other men.

The Electra complex has made its way into plenty of literature—most notably in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy.” We see it in self-help books and movies and television shows. In the second season of Tough Love, for example, the matchmaker Steve Ward had the women explore their daddy issues by writing letters to their fathers. The message here is that until the women resolve their issues with their fathers, they won’t be able to have healthy relationships with men. Almost all the “slutty” girls on television have absentee fathers—Serena on Gossip Girl, Tyra on Friday Night Lights, Rayanne on My So-Called Life. Girls are abandoned by their fathers and look to replace them with men.

When we finally look more closely at the research, we find that one of the largest predictors of teenage pregnancy and early intercourse is indeed a single-parent home, and most of those homes, of course, are fatherless. (Single-parent households are also correlated with all sorts of risky behavior for children, including alcohol and drug use.)^{70} There is also some evidence that fatherless households, or households with marital strife, particularly when the father withdraws, are correlated with earlier puberty, but only in higher-income households.^{71} The assumption is that the presence of fathers provides a sort of protection against growing up too quickly, and without that presence, girls might be hardwired to go out and find themselves a protective mate, although that doesn’t account for why this seems to only hold true in higher-income families.

A 2003 study was able to find evidence of increased early sexual behavior and teen pregnancy in a group of 242 U.S. teen girls without fathers living at home, but not other behavioral problems, which suggested a causal relationship between absent fathers and sexual behavior. In the same study, 520 New Zealand girls did not show this individualized behavior increase; rather, many behavioral problems increased.^{72} But in a study that came out the same year, published in Child Development, researchers found that boys and girls living in two-parent homes with irritable, impulsive fathers had more behavioral problems than those living with just their mothers.^{73} So, although there does seem to be some evidence that fatherless girls will become more sexual, there’s also the suggestion that those with “bad” fathers wind up with behavioral problems.

I certainly don’t want to suggest that fathers don’t ever influence their daughters regarding sex and relationships, because they likely do. Exactly how, though, is more of a mystery. There are plenty of studies that reveal some sort of correlation between sexual behavior and absent fathers. The problem is that most of what we find seems informed by cultural ideals, which makes this sort of research hard to wade through. For instance, many studies claim that girls are more likely to be promiscuous, but then those studies don’t define promiscuity. Do they simply mean that girls seek out more sex? Or do they mean that girls seek more sex that will make them feel bad? None of these studies distinguish the two. They say girls are sexually active, as though that by itself means something negative to be avoided.

Likewise, it’s consistently not clear whether the teenage girls in such studies engage in riskier behaviors because there is a father missing or simply because one of their primary caregivers is missing. One study, performed by a researcher who was concerned with the ways prior research was often used to argue against same-sex marriage, looked more closely at the dynamics in a range of families and found that the gender of parents in child-parent relationships has minor significance when it comes to children’s psychological adjustment and social success.

Because of these various biases, we can’t assume that absent fathers by themselves lead to loose-girl behavior. To say so oversimplifies a complex, culturally cued issue. Certainly, I’ve found this in my own interviews with various girls. Loose girls—girls who act out sexually in ways that are self-harming—come from single mothers, single fathers, intact families, happy homes, and even experiences of sexual abuse and incest. Whatever type of home you can imagine, loose girls grow up there. All it takes is for a girl to have some sense that she isn’t good enough, isn’t lovable, isn’t right. And that is too easy for a girl to feel when every image reflected to her reminds her that she will never be as pretty as she should, when every message she’s given about who she must be to be worthwhile is confusing, ambiguous, and contradictory to the others.

Still, fathers matter to girls, and perhaps it goes without saying that when fathers are absent or abusive or otherwise not present and loving, girls will probably feel they aren’t good enough, aren’t lovable, and so on. Put a different way, a girl’s relationship with her parents—whomever and how many of them there are—matters. And if there’s a father in the picture, that father can do things to better ensure that his daughter won’t engage in self-harming promiscuity.

Chantal lives in a single-father household, which is how I spent my adolescent years as well. She was close with her father, who was concerned that Chantal would miss having a mother in her life. He did everything with her and her younger brother. He took them camping, to baseball games, to festivals and on road trips. He didn’t date, which upset Chantal. She wanted him to find a partner, to have someone he could share with. When I pressed her, she admitted what she really wanted was for him to stop sharing with her. He spent too much time with her, she said, and she wished he would focus on someone else. There wasn’t anything inappropriate going on; he just didn’t seem to have much of a life beyond his kids and his work, and that frustrated her. “So many of my friends complain that their dads are never around,” she said. “I’d love it if my dad were never around. He’s a loser.”

Chantal is seventeen and has had sex with fourteen guys. When I asked what it is she wants, she said, “Something different. I just want some way out.” She began to cry. “I’m scared that I’ll never get away from him. It’s like he needs me or something. It’s gross.”

Chantal’s relationship with her father—though close and loving—suffocates her. Her story is an example of how the Electra complex isn’t solely responsible for girls using sex to fill something inside. It’s also an example of how ineffectual a father can sometimes be when he is simply trying to love his daughter. In Chantal’s case, she felt her father was too close. As she said, it felt “gross.”

In the single-father household I grew up in, my father often commented on women in my presence in ways that taught me what made girls and women desirable. He noted when women on television were pretty. He told me my friend had a cute body. He said he liked to take walks past cheerleader practice at the high school across the street from our home, and he encouraged me to try out for cheerleading, too. He also touched his girlfriend’s ass in front of me or made sexual noises when he looked at her body.

My father was the main man I turned to in order to understand the male species. I looked to him for a sense of what men liked in women. My father’s immense inappropriateness showed me that men liked girls who were pretty and sexy. He also let me know that men preferred girls who didn’t make waves, who didn’t need too much. Meanwhile, I needed so much that he wasn’t giving me. Because my mother was gone, I needed him to give me emotional attention. I needed him to care about my feelings, to guide me down a positive path. I needed him to listen—really listen—to what I had to say, to not demean my feelings, and to show interest in what I did.

Fathers don’t need to be physically absent to abandon their daughters. There are many ways to leave. Many fathers worry about how to negotiate boundaries—particularly regarding physical contact—with their sexually blossoming daughters, but they often set up bigger boundaries than necessary. Some physically withdraw, unwilling to provide affection anymore. Others become more controlling with their daughters. Both reactions set a girl up to feel left out, misunderstood, and treated unfairly.

Many fathers also make the mistake of stepping away from their daughters because their daughters pull away from them first or because they suddenly don’t understand who this angry, easily hurt girl is. For many fathers—my own included—girls are overwhelming creatures, so different from boys. Many fathers don’t know how to handle them.

My sister’s room and my room were down a long hallway, and I remember my father racing past that hallway. It seemed to us like he didn’t want to know what was down that hall. He was terrified of us. We exasperated him. Two teenage girls! He had grown up with brothers and didn’t have a clue as to how to deal with our outbursts, our needs, and our sadness.

In these situations, though, fathers must find ways to do the opposite. They need to actively engage their daughters, to ask them about their interests, their hopes, and their feelings. They must find ways to push past the discomfort and awkwardness that can at times accompany such interactions. Daughters need their fathers. They need every possible person who might love them—who might care about how they feel or might care what happens to them—to actively show them that they do.

Fathers are likewise in an excellent position to teach their girls about the various ways our culture degrades and disrespects females. They can clarify that they will not treat women that way and that they won’t stand for people treating their daughters that way either. They can address how girls are expected to look good rather than do good. They can encourage them to get involved in something that isn’t about what boys want from them, and they can support their daughters’ talents in sports, arts, and intellectual pursuits.

At the same time, they can be understanding that many of their daughters will want to be attractive to boys, will concern themselves with “typical” girl interests, such as clothes and makeup. They can both be careful to not judge those interests and make clear that what makes their daughters special in the world is who they are, not what they look like. This is a hard one, because every last message girls get from mainstream culture suggests the opposite. Every last message tells girls that they are the sum of their physical parts, that they can tell whether they matter in the world by whether boys like them. Fathers are in a unique position to show them that men can feel otherwise, that girls can be wholly loved simply by being themselves.

An odd response to this effort, though, is the purity ball, which we explored briefly in chapter 3. Purity balls are Christian ceremonies in which girls pledge their virginity to their fathers and fathers vow to protect their daughters’ chastity. Girls wear white gowns, fathers wear tuxes, and they slow dance after their vows. But the reasoning behind the creation of these ceremonies might not be what you expect. In a TLC special about them, Randy Wilson of Generation of Light, the Christian organization that founded purity balls, noted that all girls have the same questions: “Am I beautiful? Am I worth pursuing?” He said that fathers needed to answer this question for them so they didn’t go out into the world to find out from someone else.^{74} While I can get behind the idea that fathers need to be an active part of their daughter’s self-esteem, this idea that girls need to feel beautiful—and therefore worth pursuing—distresses me. If fathers focus on their daughter’s appearance, just like the rest of the world is already doing, they miss out on the chance to teach their daughters that they are worth pursuing for much better reasons.

Worse, the purity balls drop all the control over who a girl can be as a sexual creature into fathers’ laps—into men’s laps. The message is this: “Men know what’s best for you. Your father decides who you can be sexually.” It would make much more sense to me to have mothers and daughters in such ceremonies, where mothers pledge to share their wisdom and guidance regarding sex, and where daughters vow to communicate with their mothers about their sexual exploration.

Janice’s story is a good example that shows how purity balls, and the intention behind them, miss the mark on what girls need from their fathers. Her father died from cancer when she was eleven, just as she was in the throes of puberty. She has many positive memories of him comforting her when she was scared, playing games with her, and reading to her at bedtime. Janice’s mother was devastated after his death, and Janice remembers those first few years as grief stricken and painful. Her mother was a mess, barely capable of taking care of Janice and her younger brother. But over time, the grief softened, and their household felt less dreary. That is when Janice began to find boys. Her mother started dating again just as Janice did, too, and her mother fell immediately for a man whom Janice didn’t get along with. Soon, he became her stepfather, which only made Janice feel lonelier. He was nothing like her father, and Janice didn’t understand why her mother would choose him. Janice started hooking up with boys, which was not really satisfying but gave her something to look forward to. She experienced a sort of high, she told me, when a boy turned his eyes to her body and she knew she had some sort of control over him. She loved the feeling of connection, of her body pressed against someone else’s, the sense of safety, of solidity. A boy’s presence felt like the opposite of having lost her dad. Janice did not want a relationship with any of them. She only wanted those brief moments of connection.

The problem was that she felt awful afterward. Every time they went their separate ways, Janice felt the familiar pain of abandonment. In other words, she craved a momentary sense of intimacy, much like the intimacy she was now missing from her father, but she didn’t want the long-term responsibility of a relationship with some boy. Add to this that the boys at her school began to talk, and soon she became known as a girl who would put out.

In college, Janice finally had a chance to start over, but the pain she held in her heart about her father never went away. She felt desperately confused. She still had never had a boyfriend, and she wasn’t sure she could ever trust a boy to not leave her, especially after the way they treated her in high school.

Janice’s story is an example of how complicated father issues can be. They are rarely straightforward. For Janice, so many issues were at play. The first, of course, is that she lost her father and was left to struggle with her grief in a way for which no one was to blame. Then Janice faced cultural expectations at her high school about her sexual behavior. Over time, this too affected who she would wind up as in relation to boys. Finally, there is the fact that her mother remarried a man with whom Janice felt no connection. Those three wounds entangled themselves inside Janice’s experience of herself as a sexual person and as a person who could have a relationship.

Would a purity ball have saved Janice? The question is outrageous enough to reveal how impotent such a solution is for most people. Most girls don’t live the fairy-tale lives such a ceremony promises. They lose people, their parents divorce, they are sexually abused, they are made fun of and excluded. When they grow up, men rarely arrive on white horses, like they did for Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Men rarely show up at the father’s door and offer to take over caring for the father’s daughter. And why would we want that for our girls anyway? Why aim to treat our girls like helpless princesses when they can instead relish their competence as surgeons, welders, artists, scientists, and teachers? When they can do something worthwhile in the world, not just look good on someone’s arm?

Such an approach has the power to keep our daughters safe from all sorts of self-harming behavior, not just promiscuity. In the next chapter, we look at these other means of self-harm.

Chapter 6 LOOSE GIRLS IN CONTEXT Risks and Losses

Chapter 7 SAYING YES, SAYING NO Consensual Sex and Rape

Chapter 8 BRAVE NEW WORLD The Loose Girl Online

I have a Pavlov’s dog–reaction to the sound of a text coming in. I immediately think, “Could it be someone who wants me?”

Fifteen-year-old Johanna sends text after dirty text to boys. She has never actually had sex with a boy, but she knows the language that goes along with it. She tells boys what she wants to do to them, and she tells them what she wants them to do with her. Her favorite part is how the boys always beg her to say more. In real life, boys don’t give her that sort of attention, so she loves it. It is the one time she feels sexy and powerful.

On a regular night, she has about five boys she “sexts” with. A couple of times she has sent pictures of her breasts, and once she sent a photo of her entire naked body. She knows full well that pictures can really get you in trouble, though, because a friend of hers sent a photo to her boyfriend, and he proceeded to send it to half their grade’s boys. Recently, she’s also begun having cybersex: she goes online to a chat room to talk dirty with a random user. She loves the power, loves the sense that boys want her. Like many girls, she learned about cybersex at a slumber party. One of the girls knew of it—perhaps from an older sibling—so they found a site online, made up a character, and tried things out. They shrieked when they obtained the interest of someone and then collapsed in hysterics on the ground every time they came up with something new to say. But Johanna remembered that party a year later when she felt unwanted and ugly and had developed crushes that were never reciprocated, so she went back to the same site and got a rush from the power that came with having a random stranger want her, even if the random stranger could easily have been another teenage girl. Like role-playing in video games, cybersex is a way to try on a persona who girls can’t be in real life, not without serious repercussions.

Johanna is part of the 39 percent of teenagers who have sent racy messages via text and part of the 20 percent who has sent nude photos.^{102} The largely held assumption is that our teenagers are in a whole new world when it comes to sex, and regarding technology, that is absolutely true. The current generation is the first one to have so much immediate technology at their fingertips. Flirting looks different now. Bullying and rumors have a new weapon.

Parents and school officials are scared, and our often frantic concern about kids being exposed too early to sex through technology makes some sense. According to Child Trends Databank, the proportion of children with home access to computers has steadily increased to more than 90 percent as of 2009, and 93 percent use the Internet. According to a 2009 survey of eight- to eighteen-yearolds, 36 percent had a computer in their bedroom, and 71 percent of them also had a television in their bedroom.^{103} We know that porn is readily available to most Web viewers. One need only click the button that says “yes” to the question that reads, “Are you 18 years or older?”

As part of this fear, a number of states have criminalized the sending and sharing of nude photos, like the ones Johanna sends, hitting teenagers with child pornography and sex offender charges. As of this writing, at least twelve states have introduced legislation to prohibit or deter sexting. State laws range from minor dings on a juvenile record to child pornography convictions. Each state controls the severity of its laws about sexting, and school officials and parents of girls who’ve had their pictures distributed bring the most charges.^{104} The question is, What really happens to girls who use this sort of technology?

Media concerns itself, of course, with the sensationalized, fear-inducing stories, such as the one about Jesse Logan, the eighteen-year-old Ohio girl who hung herself after a nude photo of her had been disseminated throughout her school. The tragic story quickly segued into one about the necessity of criminalizing the kids who dispersed the photo and about holding the schools accountable. In a Today show interview with Jesse’s mother and the Internet expert Parry Aftab, Aftab noted that we need to enforce these laws “in order to keep our children alive.”^{105}

Hope Witsell, a thirteen-year-old in Florida, killed herself after a topless photo of her was sent around her high school and the high school in a neighboring town. She sent the photo after pressure to do so from a boy she had a crush on.^{106} Really, though, the harm didn’t originate with the sexting, which is how Witsell’s and Logan’s cases were presented. It came from the girls’ peers, who bullied them. The photos were just tools of a much greater harm, which is rarely addressed as seriously: slut shaming.

In January 2009, six teenagers faced child pornography charges for taking photos of themselves and being in possession of the photos. Three fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls from their high school in Pennsylvania had sent seminude photos to the three sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys. School officials seized the phones and reported them to the police, leading to the charges.^{107} In Florida, a sixteen-year-old girl and her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Phillip Albert, were charged with possession of child pornography. Albert, who is now twenty, sent a nude photo of his ex-girlfriend to seventy people out of anger after a fight with her. He was sentenced with child pornography charges and required to go on the public sex offender’s list. He was kicked out of school, he struggles to find a job, and he can’t even live with his father because his father lives near a high school, something Phillip is no longer allowed to do.^{108}

But is sexting really worthy of such extreme policing? There has been much hesitating and changing minds in the courts, which suggests that we might be overreacting, typical of people’s fears surrounding teenagers and sex.

Let’s take a look at the data. In the 2008 study “Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies,” by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, researchers found that risky behavior online was generally in cahoots with risky behavior offline. Those who engaged in sexual acts away from their phones and the Internet tended to do so on their phones and the Internet as well. Indeed, almost half of sexually active teens tend to be involved in sexting and cybersex as well.^{109}

Turned around, though, the statistics change. Sexting and sexual Internet activity does not seem to lead to real-life sexual activity among those who don’t already engage in it. Regardless of all the increased access to sex online, teen sex rates haven’t skyrocketed. In fact, they’ve lowered some during the past decade.

In my mind, we are missing the point regarding what to panic about. The issue isn’t the “dicey mix of teenagers’ age-old sexual curiosity, notoriously bad judgment and modern love of electronic sharing,” as Riva Richmond called it in a New York Times article.^{110} One could argue, in fact, that sexting is not only safe but also keeps kids safer than if they were having real-life sex.

No, the issue is that many girls—you guessed it, loose girls—use sexting and cybersex to try to feel wanted, and just like when they use male attention and sex in similar ways in real life, they don’t get what they’re after. When I asked the girls I interviewed why they sexted, their answers all pointed to a desire for connection. Amelia said, “It makes what is basically impossible to me possible, which is a hot guy liking me and wanting me in all ways.”

“All ways?” I asked.

“Well, sexually, I guess,” she said.

Amelia uses sexting and cybersex to pick up boys she likes who she meets in school or online, but is too shy to speak to in person. She contacts them and is immediately flirtatious. Within one or two exchanges, she starts in on the dirty talk. She engages in this way with them obsessively, and if they stop responding, or reject her in any way, she feels crushed.

Mariah has regularly had cybersex since she was in the eighth grade. When she discovered sexting, she started doing that regularly, too. Like the majority of females who report having sexted, she initially felt pressured to do so by the boys with whom she was texting. Over time, though, she grew to like the easy attention. Sexting and cybersex have pretty straightforward scripts, too, which only made it easier for her.

In real life, Mariah is still a virgin. She says she doesn’t act the same way in person as she does via text and Internet, so boys don’t realize the things she knows about sex. I asked Mariah what she felt she knew about sex, and she said, “Just that boys like it when girls act like sluts.” Mariah doesn’t connect her sexting and cybersex behavior with her own sexual arousal: the two hold completely different purposes. One is to get male attention, and the other is something private and personal, unrelated to how she might act under a boy’s watch.

The danger here is not necessarily that girls are victims of predatory males. It’s that they are victims of very narrow definitions of sexual desirability, and in many ways, sexting is one more way girls wind up viewing sexual behavior as completely removed from their own desires. Girls believe that a girl’s desirability comes not from her personality or her coolness or how fun she is. It comes from her ability to fit into a male-defined stereotype of a sexually willing girl.

A recent national survey by the Girl Scouts Research Institute found that girls age 14–17 tend to describe themselves on social media sites as “fun,” “funny,” and “social,” and they downplay the idea that they might be smart or ambitious, or otherwise less appealing to boys and popular cliques.^{111}

Pornography sets a similar standard. Readers may be surprised to hear that lots of adolescent girls watch porn. There are no reliable statistics for this, of course, because girls are hard-pressed to admit it, but anecdotally, in my work and interviews with women and girls, about half have admitted to watching porn, some of them even watching regularly, as teens.

As with sexting and cybersex, there is no solid scientific evidence that exposure to pornography leads to widespread or predictable negative psychological effects, so again, we need to be careful where we put our energy regarding concerns about such exposure. In my experience working with teenage girls, they watched pornography partially because it turned them on and was an exciting avenue for masturbation, and partially because they wanted to know how to have sex.

The problem here is that girls think they are learning about sex, but really they’re learning what men want. Shaved vaginas, asses in the air, facials—these are all male fantasies, not sex defined by females. Like Mariah noted, boys like girls who act like sluts. Porn just reinforces that. As Judith Levine writes, “In my opinion, the problem with sexual information on the Net is not that there is too much of it but that too little of it is any good”—and she wrote that in 2002.^{112}

Almost a decade later, we can say that’s changed some. There are a number of excellent websites intended to provide real information about real sex to teenagers (see the appendix for a list of these), sites that give teenagers answers to real concerns, and that don’t exist for titillation.

And, then, there are the social sites—Facebook being the most influential. This is where hundreds of thousands of girls post pictures of themselves in bikinis or underwear to get attention from men. One guy wrote on the website Facebook Horror Stories, “Dear cute girls of Facebook, thank you for posting almost naked pictures of yourselves. I no longer need to look at porn since I have hundreds of photos of you in bikinis to whack off to. Thank you for inserting yourself into my spank bank.”^{113} This guy has caught on to the wave of loose girls looking for attention. Facebook has become an easy way for a loose girl to act out.

Cate has a bunch of photos of herself in her underwear in her album on Facebook. Every time she posts a new one, she told me, at least a couple guys who have been out of touch contact her again. It makes her feel good to know people think of her. I asked her what she thinks they contact her for. “I think that’s pretty obvious,” she said. “They just want to have sex with me. But it still makes me feel good.”

“Good, as in worthwhile?” I asked.

“Exactly,” she said.

Jennifer sends certain Facebook friends seminude photos when she feels like she’s lost their attention.

“It works like a charm,” she told me.

There are some real concerns about older men soliciting teenage girls via Facebook. A few cases have been reported, such as one about a thirty-four-year-old man in North Carolina who had a sexual relationship with a minor after getting to know her on Facebook, or the twenty-seven-year-old Pennsylvania man who changed his relationship status to “Engaged” to a fourteen-year-old girl (the joke in all the headlines was that there was no “statutory rape” relationship option).^{114}

But while these men are clearly predatory, simply posting sexy photos to Facebook isn’t necessarily dangerous, at least not in that way. Just like with sexting, the harm is mostly related to what the poster is hoping to get from having those photos up, and then what she actually gets. She gets attention for her body, of course. But what does that attention really mean about her? Of course, it means nothing. Having a nice body—or even just having a female body, which is all a girl really needs to get some male attention—doesn’t take a girl very far in life.

Studies have made clear that most of what teenagers do on the Web can be considered positive. Most have a “full-time intimate community” they communicate with online—whether through instant messaging, Facebook, MySpace, or other sites—and they don’t do much more than that. When they do, they seek information or experiment with digital media production, such as figuring out how to accomplish something on their own. A study done by the MacArthur Foundation determined that, although it may look like kids are wasting their time online, they are actually building technological skills and literacy, something needed to succeed in our modern world.^{115}

Researchers have also found that Internet and cell phone communication leads to greater self-disclosure, which builds closer, more intimate relationships with friends.^{116} This is another reason that websites providing real, frank information about sex—and an opportunity for questions—are so valuable. Where talking to parents is important, such a conversation can be embarrassing, for both parties. Even the most self-assured parents would be fooling themselves if they thought their teens were telling and asking them everything. We can think of resources online, and the self-disclosing conversations among peers, as bolsters to the support and education parents and schools can provide.

Parents will get nowhere, however, if their fears turn into what teenagers perceive as violations of privacy. Blocking their Internet usage, checking up on their computers, and wrangling passwords from their teens will only lead teenagers to tell even less, and the more open the lines of communication are between teenagers and adults concerning sex-related issues, the better.

Meanwhile, Johanna continues to send dirty texts, but she won’t send any more photos. She told me that at some point she realized it was degrading.

“More degrading than the words?” I emailed.

“Yeah.” She emailed back from her phone.

I asked her what she thought about other girls sending photos. “If a girl wants to do it, that’s up to her,” she said.

Her signature from the phone quoted her favorite band, Escape the Fate. “My heart’s on an auction.”

When I asked her what that meant to her, she said, “It sums me up.”