by Rachel Hills
But this shift has done more than just multiply the ways in which women are permitted to be sexual. It has also expanded the ways in which a woman can be designated “unwoman.” This chapter looks at sexuality as an arena in which womanhood is created and reinforced, and examines how the female sexual ideal has changed over time.
How to Be a Woman: Sex and Femininity
If having sex for the first time made her a woman, Brit crossed the threshold into adulthood the spring before her sixteenth birthday: the same year her parents divorced and she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. She and her then boyfriend had been dating for a few months, and although he was happy to linger on kissing, touching, and oral sex, Brit was keen to move things along to intercourse. “Oral sex did nothing for me,” she recalls—and that was true whether she was giving or receiving.
When they finally did have sex, Brit didn’t enjoy it as much as she had expected to, although she pretended she did, putting on a show of fake-but-dramatic orgasms for the next two and a half years of the relationship. But sex did make her feel more grown-up, even though at that point in her life she had yet to learn to cook, drive, or even properly insert a tampon. Still, at fifteen, Brit felt mature and self-composed, more like an adult than she did a child. And being sexually active affirmed her sense of having arrived in the world.
“I feel like a guy can go through high school and be a virgin and still be cool,” she muses, sitting on a bench in Manhattan’s Union Square. “I went to a really small school, and if a guy wasn’t having sex, people figured it was because he chose not to. Whereas if a girl wasn’t having sex, the only explanations were that she was religious or because she was undesirable.” Later, she tells me, “The marker of girlhood to womanhood is virginity, and I think it’s something we wrestle with for the rest of our lives, because so often we’re not adults when we first have sex.”
Even the act of becoming a girl is bound up in the symbolism of sex and romance. In 2008, two Illinois sociologists, Kristen Myers and Laura Raymond, brought together small groups of elementary-school-aged girls to talk about their experiences of girlhood, anticipating conversations about school, friendships, and common extracurricular activities such as dance class and soccer. But once they were in the room with their subjects, the study took an unexpected turn. Whether the girls were in kindergarten or about to graduate to middle school, they all wanted to talk about one thing: boys.
“Are we going to talk about boys?” one girl asked anxiously at the beginning of the third-grade group’s first get-together. “Because if we do, I’m going to freak out. No talking about crushes!” Fifteen minutes later, she had changed her mind. “I want to talk about crushes,” she announced. “I just want to talk about that now.” She decided that the group should go around the circle, declaring in turn which boys they “liked” and which boys they “like-liked.” She would go first. “I like-like Toby,” she said. “I have a big crush on him.”
Other groups of girls Myers and Raymond spoke to engaged in similar banter. The kindergarteners and first graders spoke about what it meant to have a crush (“If a boy really likes you, they have a crush on you. If they like-like you, then they love you”), while the older, fourth- and fifth-grade girls talked about their infatuations with Disney stars such as Zac Efron and the Jonas Brothers. Conversations about boys were high energy and full of excitement, punctuated by shrieks and laughter as each girl revealed to the others who she liked.
Like Brit and Jessa leafing through Cosmopolitan on a Sunday afternoon, for the girls in the Illinois study, boy talk was a means of cementing female friendship. Girls bonded over exchanging secrets, the thrill of liking the same boy, and how hilarious it was to have a crush on a boy in the first place. But the degree to which boy talk dominated their conversations—and conversations that had been framed at the outset as being about girls, at that—suggests that boys hold another, deeper significance in female interaction. That almost by definition, to be a girl is to be vocally interested in boys.
The notion that there is something “special” about the relationship between boys and girls is pervasive in media targeted at children. A 2009 study published in Gender & Society found that although G-rated films were not allowed to show sex, violence, or nudity, many popular children’s movies contained a suite of implicit messages about sexuality. In particular, the researchers observed the way that heterosexual romance was portrayed as “magical,” “exceptional,” and “transformative,” with relationships between opposite-sex characters accompanied by soaring music, soulful eye contact, and sweeping natural vistas in a way that other types of relationships—such as those between friends, or between children and parents—were not.
In Disney’s Aladdin, Jasmine and Aladdin fall in love as they glide through the sky on a magic carpet; in The Lion King, childhood friends Simba and Nala discover their feelings for each other as they run through the jungle to a chorus of heartfelt music. By comparison, Simba’s friendship with Timon (a meerkat) and Pumbaa (a boar) is treated as comic relief. In these movies, love is literally transformative: in The Little Mermaid, Ariel must secure a kiss from the prince to keep her voice and legs, while in Beauty and the Beast, a kiss from Belle turns the prince into a man again. “The primary account of heterosexuality in these films is one of heteroromantic love and its exceptional, magical, transformative power,” the researchers wrote.
It is little wonder, then, that the girls in the Illinois study were so eager to talk about boys, or that doing so was such a source of excitement for them. They were responding to a culture that teaches us that romantic relationships are the most interesting types of relationships there are, and that these exciting connections properly unfold between girls and boys—not between girls and other girls, or between boys and other boys.
Talking about boys as a bonding mechanism isn’t solely a childhood thing; it is a social theater that continues into adulthood. Sarah, whom we met in chapter 1, recalls a woman she encountered when she was backpacking through South America. They didn’t hit it off at first, until one evening when they were walking through town with a mixed-gender group of friends, and the guys split off to walk ahead. The girl started telling Sarah about her ex-boyfriend, and Sarah began to feel like she knew her better, that she could understand and relate to her more. “I’ve always felt like talking about boys and love and sex is a really good tool for connecting with women,” she observes.
Good Girls Go to Heaven
Learning heterosexuality—and learning femininity—entails more than just being attracted to men. It means learning to perceive yourself as the opposite of men, and learning to perform and express your sexuality in all the opposite ways to those that men are taught.
Where men are taught that their sexual power derives from their ability to chase and win the people they desire, for most of the past two hundred years, being a “good woman” has meant playing the role of the sexual sentry, of saying no however much you might want to say yes.
But although it might seem timeless, the belief that women are naturally less sexual than men is a relatively modern invention. In ancient Greece, women were considered the weaker and more passive sex, because they had no penis with which to penetrate their partners. But their weakness was also believed to make them more licentious, not less. In the Old Testament, it was Eve, not Adam, who was vulnerable to the temptation presented by the serpent. Indeed, some scientists believe that early human females behaved much like other female primates during periods of peak fertility, having sex up to fifty times per day with numerous male partners.
It wasn’t until the 1800s that women—or more specifically, white, middle-class women—were repositioned as enforcers of virtue, the angels of their respective houses, as the famous nineteenth-century English poem put it. And it was only in this era that excess female desire began to be conceived not just as a potential social problem but as a matter of spoiled identity, exemplified in the emergence of the “nymphomaniac”—ambiguo
usly defined as anything from a woman who masturbated in public to one who desired more sex than her husband.
Echoes of this idea that too much sex “spoils” a woman can be found today in what feminist author and activist Jessica Valenti refers to as “the virginity movement”: the religious lobby that urges young people to abstain from sex until marriage but puts most of the onus of maintaining said abstinence on young women. Within the virginity movement, women also stand to lose more—socially and morally—if they do have sex.
But if purity is a source of esteem for some women, the idea that sex corrupts it can have calamitous effects. I meet Annabelle, a college freshman at the University of North Carolina, at a Starbucks a few hundred yards off campus. Small and blond, with a bohemian sense of style, Annabelle grew up in a small Baptist town where virginity mattered a lot. It mattered to her parents. It mattered to her church. It mattered to her school. And it mattered to Annabelle as well. “Growing up, I was always, always, always taught that your purity is part of who you are as a woman,” she explains. “Not even a part of who you are. Your purity is who you are as a woman.”
Virginity mattered to Annabelle’s high school boyfriend, too, enough that he didn’t want to have sex, at least in the penis-in-vagina sense of the word, until he was married. “He thought it was immoral,” she explains. He did not think it was so immoral, though, to force Annabelle to have sex with him in other ways, raping her orally and anally on a regular basis for a period of almost two years.
It was a cycle of abuse that destroyed Annabelle’s confidence and drove her to depression, to the point that in her final year of high school, she attempted to take her own life. She couldn’t talk to her friends about what her boyfriend was doing to her, because they believed that sex before marriage was a sin. “And even though I wasn’t initiating it,” she says, “that’s what was happening to me.” She couldn’t bring herself to tell her parents, either, until after the relationship had ended. The shame was too grave. “I wasn’t a virgin anymore, and that meant I wasn’t whole or pure,” Annabelle explains. “And if I wasn’t whole and pure, I wasn’t, like, a woman.”
This idea that being a “good woman” means refraining from sex is more pronounced among some groups than others: women from more conservative, religious, or rural backgrounds, for example. But you don’t need to be religious to internalize the idea that “good girls” don’t have sex.
I grew up an atheist in Sydney, in Australia, a relatively secular country. But although my high school friends and I talked about sex constantly, we were also wary that it was dangerous. We were afraid that if we had sex too soon, we might get pregnant while we were still teenagers—something that would jeopardize the futures we were beginning to plan for ourselves. As children of the eighties and early nineties, the specter of HIV loomed large in the backs of our minds, too. But pregnancy and disease weren’t the only things we were afraid of. We were also scared of being hurt or used, of being declared a slut.
I still recall a conversation I had in eighth or ninth grade with one of my closest friends, the gregarious daughter of Turkish Muslim immigrants. She was bolder and more confident than I was, and also more religiously devout. Chewing on sandwiches in the schoolyard one lunchtime, we were speculating together over what point in a relationship you could trust a guy enough to be sure he wasn’t using you for sex—and accordingly, at what point you could safely have sex with him. I suggested that engagement might be a reasonable marker, if you wanted to be really safe. My friend countered that you couldn’t be sure even then. It was best to wait until you married. I told her that I felt the same way, more because I didn’t want her to think I was slutty than because I actually agreed with her statement.
As we grew older, waiting until marriage was no longer a desirable option, either personally or socially. But my friends and I were still wary of the havoc that sex had the potential to wreak on our reputations and emotions. When we watched Grease, it was naïve Sandy, not rebellious Rizzo, whom we identified with, whose songs we sang theatrically as we walked down the school corridors. Our favorite film was Clueless, and we would toss the line “You are a virgin who can’t drive” at one another flippantly—not because we saw it as an insult, as it was delivered in the film, but because we took it as a given that everyone we knew was a virgin who didn’t yet know how to drive. And we did all these things as girls who didn’t take the idea that our value lay in our virginity particularly seriously.
Like me, Katie, a soft-spoken twenty-three-year-old from Detroit, didn’t grow up in a household that advocated abstinence. If anything, her parents were more liberal than she was. Katie’s father encouraged her to go on the Pill when she was in high school, “just in case,” and when she went away to college, he sent her off with a pack of condoms. “My parents definitely stressed that there was no shame in expressing my sexuality,” she says. “They didn’t push it or anything, but they were definitely more comfortable with it than I was.”
But Katie’s mother and father weren’t the only influence on her early beliefs about sexuality. When she was in middle school, Katie spent her afternoons in after-school care with her classmates, and like Brit and Jessa, the girls would pass the time by talking about boys. Then only eleven, Katie was still nearly a decade away from having sex for the first time, but she already had strong beliefs about when and how she would do it when the time came. She planned to wait until she finished high school, or until she met someone she fell in love with.
Katie’s friends had thought about their future sex lives, too. They intended to stay virgins until they married and were vocal about their opinions on the subject. “They made it sound really romantic,” Katie recalls. “They talked a lot about how special it would be to only have one partner, and I was like, Yeah, that does sound kind of cool.” During the same period, Katie was starting to spend more time at church and began to internalize “some of those messages, for better or for worse, about being abstinent.” When she was twelve she made a private commitment to herself not to have sex until she married, and in the summer after she finished high school, she made that commitment public in the local newspaper.
Katie didn’t judge other people for being sexually active, she stresses. “It wasn’t like I thought they were dirty or anything.” But she did place a lot of value on her own virginity. She spoke about her decision often with friends and acquaintances, in the same way that her sexually active peers would talk to her about their hookups. She even made mention of it in her Facebook biography: “I’m proud to say I’m a virgin,” she wrote. “I felt good about the fact that I was waiting,” she explains.
Sitting across from Katie in a burger chain perched along the banks of the Detroit River, I am struck by how beautiful she is: tall and slim, with dark skin and high cheekbones. She is smart, too. When we met, she had recently been accepted to graduate school at Harvard. But she also suffers from cripplingly low self-esteem, and being a virgin was one thing that made her feel special, she tells me. That’s one of the reasons she was so determined to hold on to it. “I felt like my virginity set me apart, and I liked that because there was so much other stuff about myself that I didn’t like. I feel like I’m too skinny—I don’t have big boobs or a big butt, and I wish I was curvier. Being a virgin was the one thing I was proud of.”
But Katie didn’t stay a virgin for as long as she intended. She had sex for the first time in her junior year of college, with the man who is now her fiancé. Although he didn’t put pressure on her to have sex, she worried that if she didn’t, he would end the relationship. When she did have sex, she cried about it almost every day for a year. “I thought: I can’t believe I gave in. Now I’m just like everybody else. I fucked up.”
Katie concedes now that she probably “put too much emphasis” on the fact that she wasn’t having sex. She also believes she had too much confidence in her ability to halt the physical aspects of her relationship before they went further than she was comfortable with. “I w
ould go over to his place and spend the night. We wouldn’t do anything, but I was sleeping in the same bed. Then we started messing around, but I still thought I could handle it. And then the bar kept being raised. We were doing more and more, but I was still convinced that we weren’t going to go all the way. I was sure that I wasn’t going to mess up.” If she was able to rewind the clock and start over again, she believes she would do things differently. “I think that if you want to stay abstinent you need to not put yourself in certain situations,” she says carefully. “You need to just keep it at kissing or holding hands or whatever your limit is. I far exceeded my limit.”
Katie is now caught in what she describes as a “limbo space,” where she is no longer a virgin but she does not feel able to be freely sexual, either. Sometimes she and her fiancé will go through periods in which they will have a lot of sex; other times, they will go weeks or months having none at all. For Katie, the only sex that it is okay to have is accidental. In her mind, each encounter is the last—a momentary slip-up born alternately of passion and resignation.
That Katie’s sex is deliberately unintentional means that, like many lapsed abstinence pledgers, she is also reluctant to use contraception. “That would be like admitting I have a sex life,” she says. “Every time we have sex, I’m like, Please, God, let my period come.”
Sitting Pretty: The Submissive Sex
Like stereotypes of men’s sexual insatiability, the belief that women are sexually passive is bound in the symbolism of the female body. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex: “The sex organ of a man is simple and neat as a finger; it is readily visible and often exhibited to comrades with proud rivalry; but the feminine sex organ is mysterious even to the woman herself.”