August 11, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Is this what we wanted for our daughters?
An excerpt from Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher
Girls face two major sexual issues in America in the 1990s:
One is an old issue of coming to terms with their own
sexuality, defining a sexual self, making sexual choices and
learning to enjoy sex. The other issue concerns the dangers
girls face of being sexually assaulted. By late adolescence,
most girls today either have been traumatized or know girls
who have. They are fearful of males even as they are trying
to develop intimate relations with them. Of course, these
two issues connect at some level and make the development of
healthy female sexuality extraordinarily complicated in the
1990s. . .
America doesn't have clearly defined and universally accepted rules about sexuality. We live in a pluralistic culture with contradictory sexual paradigms, We hear diverse messages from our families, our churches, our schools and the media, and each of us must integrate these messages and arrive at some value system that makes sense to us.
Paradigms collide within each of us as we make decisions about our own sexuality. For example, Louise, a dignified widow, came into discuss how she should behave sexually. She enjoyed dating, but her friends had warned her that men liked sex by the third date. Louse had been dating one man for several months and felt like a prude for refusing to have sex. She was afraid she'd lose him, and yet her values were that sex comes with marriage.
Paradigms collide between people. There are no clear agreements about the right ways to be sexual, so each couple must negotiate an agreement for themselves. At best, communication in this area tends to be awkward and fragmented. At worse, no one even tries. The real crash-and-burn misunderstandings come when people with radically different ideas date without discussing their paradigms. For example, two people go on a date and one of them believes sex is recreation while the other believes sex is the expression of a loving relationship. The next morning they awake with rather different expectations about their future together…
Our culture is deeply split about sexuality. We raise our daughters to value themselves as whole people, and the media reduces them to bodies. We are tuaght by movies and television that sophisticated people are free and spontaneous while we are being warned that casual sex can kill us. We're trapped by double binds and impossible expectations.
A recent study of teenagers in Rhode Island documents the confusion. Teens were asked to respond to questions about circumstances under which a man "has the right to have sexual intercourse with a woman without her consent." Eighty percent said the man had the right to use force if the couple were married, and 70 percent if the couple planned to marry. Sixty-one percent said that force was justified if the couple had had prior sexual relations. More than half felt that force was justified if the woman had led the man on. Thirty percent said it was justified if he knew that she had had sex with other men, of if he was so sexually stimulated he couldn't control himself, or if the woman was drunk. More than half the students thought that "if a wman dresses seductively and walks alone at night, she is asking to be raped." Clearly at least 80 percent of these teenagers didn't know that a man never has a right to force sex.
Our cultural models for ideal female sexuality reflect our ambivalence about women and sex. Men are encouraged to be sexy and sexual all the time, Women are to be angels sometimes, sexual animals others, ladies by day and whores by night. Marilyn Monroe understood and exploited this split. She was an innocent waif and a wildcat, a child and a sultry sexpot. Understandably, girls are confused about exactly how and when they are to be sexy.
Girls receive two kinds of sex education in their schools: one in the classroom and the other in the halls. Classroom education tends to be about anatomy, procreation, and birth. Students watch films on sperm and eggs or the miracle of life. (Even these classes are controversial, with some parents thinking that all sex education should come from parents.) Some schools offer information about sex, birth control and STDs, but most schools' efforts are woefully inadequate. Most do not help students with what they need most -- a sense of meaning regarding their sexuality, ways to make sense of all the messages, and guidelines on decent behavior in sexual relationships.
In the halls of junior highs, girls are pressured to be sexual regardless of the quality of their relationships. Losing virfinity is considered a rite of passage into maturity. Girls may be enocuraged to have sex with boys they hardly know. Many girls desperate for approval succumb to this pressure. But unfortunately the double standard still exsts. The same girls who are pressured to have sex on Saturday night are called sluts on Monday morning. The boys who coaxed them into sex at the parties avoid them in the halls at school.
At the Red and Black Café, where local teens dance to grunge bands, the graffiti on the walls of the rest room speaks to the confusion. One line reads: "Everyone should make love to everyone." Just beside that line another girl had written: "That's how you die of AIDS."
Reviving Ophelia, pp 206-207