Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  Despite the activism bubbling around us, girls of my generation received a fairly classic education about the body, which is to say a non-education, not so different from one we might have gotten in 1950s middle America. Female sexuality, we learned, was primarily a medical event; new equipment would be required; a fair amount of blood would be involved; boys were the ones with the big (and possibly scary) drives. Our own drives, meanwhile, went undiscussed, grade school through high school. Our teachers did not broach the subject of female arousal, neither did our parents. No one—adults, peers—ever uttered the words masturbation, clitoris, or orgasm. Presumably, this was not necessary information: Girls did not get aroused; we did not need to learn much about our sexual appetites because we didn’t have them, or, at least, we weren’t supposed to.

  This is one of the reasons culture would assume such defining influence in our lives; into that vacuum of information, into the hole left by the lack of straightforward discussion about what sex was or could be like, seeped messages from the world around us, which we could see and hear with increasing clarity. Culture was poised just then for a major shift in tone and focus, a particularly visual and intense brand of consumerism gaining prominence, its tidal wave of high-speed visuals beginning to build, and this is what we glommed onto. Scrambling to make sense of our bodies, we absorbed the imagery from ads and movies and TV, which consisted (then, as now) of visual statements about physical beauty and sexual powerlessness: young women with immature bodies and detached gazes, women who appeared highly sexualized but only in the most commoditized and disembodied way. We paid careful attention to boys, who in turn paid careful attention to our body parts, covertly measured and ranked us by beauty and breast size. We adopted the equipment and tools of adult sexuality—the bras, the razors, the pots of lip gloss, the lacy underwear—but our attention was continually coaxed outward, our early educations in self-scrutiny advanced, our eyes focused on the smooth skin of our calves, the curves of our hips and waists, the presence or absence of body fat and pimples, deflected along the way from whatever sense of bodily integrity we may have been born with or experienced at younger ages.

  We learned, in short, the lessons that imagery would merely reinforce and keep alive over the years. We did not learn how to feel or experience our bodies, how to appreciate our own strengths, how to value or respect or understand the packages we came in. Instead, we learned how to look at them, to pair sexuality with desirability, to measure the worth of our bodies by their capacity to elicit admiration from others. In a word, we learned to dissociate, which is what such an experience of the body requires: Sexuality in this construction is located not within the self—within one’s own body and bodily sensations—but within someone else; the ignition must be turned with a key. To be sexy is to be found sexy, to be permitted to want, you must first be wanted.

  I can remember all too well what this felt like, sexuality less a matter of feeling sexual than of being perceived as sexual. My first high school boyfriend was a hockey player named Steve who also played drums in a band, both activities that designated him as very cool, neither of which interested me a whit. No matter. He singled me out at a party and we spent what felt like an interminable evening making out on a sofa in the basement. We were both stoned and I don’t remember feeling much of anything except a muted pride over having been “chosen,” a tacit understanding that I was to stay there on the sofa with him until he determined it was time to stop, and then some vague embarrassment when I emerged from the basement with my hair a mess and my shirt all twisted. From then on, Steve and I “went out,” if you can call it that, for about six months, which basically meant we spent a lot of time making out after school. I felt shy to the point of muteness around him; we’d walk to a nearby cemetery in the afternoons and barely talk, just plod along in a disconnected fog staring at our feet. The silence felt like excruciating evidence of failure on my part: Quite clearly, my job was to be bubbly and outgoing and interesting, to draw him out and make myself alluring, and instead I was deadly dull, a voiceless blob. Making out with him felt like failure, too, because my body seemed so unresponsive. Steve pawed at me, and his mouth was spitty, and his interest—physical or otherwise—seemed to have little to do with me or who I was. So I’d just lie there, not sure which was more oppressive, the making out or the painfully shy silences that fell before and afterward. Not once did it occur to me that we simply had nothing in common, or that he might be the boring one, or that feeling sexual required more than the presence of a hulking, uncommunicative hockey player. Nor did it occur to me to break up with him. I waited for him to do that, which he did in due time, dispatching a friend to deliver the news. When I got the message, I felt like I’d been fired, but I also felt relieved.

  This was such a typical scenario in high school, at least it was for me, and such an achingly complicated one, like negotiating the most perilous highway. The hunger of boys was so vivid and clear, expected, accepted as fact, and ours was so dangerous and secretive and fraught with consequence. To give into his hunger would brand us as sluts; to withhold too much would make us prudes. And so, if we were to retain any power at all, we had to master the most delicate balancing act, learning without any instruction at all to both provoke and control his hunger, to satisfy it just enough to maintain both his interest and our social position. Our own hunger? Our own pleasure? We didn’t talk about it. And if we thought about it at all, its place on the priority list was very low.

  Deborah Tolman, a Harvard University psychologist who studies adolescent female sexuality, has witnessed the effects of this silence first hand: A girl’s sexual impulses and hungers, she writes, become “the feelings that no one names.” She is not taught that it’s permissible or natural to have a sexual appetite. She is not introduced to the idea that she has a right to sexual pleasure, nor to the possibility that men and women have different sexual needs; often, she is not even told about her clitoris. Without language with which to discuss or understand or question her body, sexuality becomes a puzzle, her arousal a mystery and a taboo. A common response, according to Tolman, is to simply turn the appetite off. “Many girls,” she notes, “may in fact solve the dilemma of their own sexual desire in the face of a culture that does not acknowledge their bodies by not feeling those feelings.”

  I suspect my response as a teenager was a variation on that theme: surges of feeling that often stopped dead in their tracks. I certainly didn’t lack erotic sensation in my teens and early twenties; the hormones raged, a boy could hold my hand or touch my breast and my whole body would be flooded by an astonished, tingly wash of feeling, the physical system was intact and operational. But it shut down easily, as though barbed wire had sprung up around the part of the meadow where deep, internal bodily sensation lived, separating sex and eros. The boy’s touch would turn to pawing; the balancing act—how much to give, how much to withhold—would begin; the mind would start to take flight from the body, which itself was shrouded in so much silence and mystery. And erotic feeling—this deep, private, magical, gleaming thing—seemed to fly off with it, as though it had woken from a dream and found it had no place to go: no safe place, no place where it was encouraged, understood, held, made to feel special, no place where it was allowed to be talked about or coaxed gently into the room. I could be desired, I could (and did) covet that feeling of being chosen, and I could act the part, making out in boys’ cars and in dark corners at parties. But sexuality felt less like a physical pleasure than an out-of-body experience, less like a mode of expression than an award to win, a performance.

  Performance, of course, is not the same as satisfaction. Permission is not the same as agency; the ability to say yes is not the same as the ability to say yes, with him but not with him, or yes, like this but not like that. The sexual revolution, in full bloom by the time I hit high school, seems to have given the girls in my circle a half-filled tool kit, an ability to act sexual without much of a corresponding sense of what it really meant to be
sexual, a door that opened into a poorly-lit room. This may have been a by-product of the difference (which was considerable) between the sexual revolution, which advocated freedom of expression in the most love-the-one-you’re-with general way, and the women’s movement, where activism tilted toward the more tangible arenas of reproductive freedom and sexual health. In the mid-seventies, women all over the city were actively engaged on those fronts—they were attending conferences on abortion and birth control, they were bringing home speculums and examining their own cervixes on kitchen tables; they were writing Our Bodies, Ourselves in an office not two miles from my back yard—and their efforts certainly trickled down to my peers and me. They equipped us with birth control pills and information about sexually transmitted diseases. They gave us gynecologists who would answer questions if we were brave enough to ask them. They gave us at least a rudimentary sense that sex was something we were allowed to do. But they went only so far. What did not trickle down—what may have never quite crystallized within the movement itself—was a deeper sense of empowered desire, a construction of female sexual pleasure as an end in and of itself, a yes articulated in our own voices.

  What might it have been like to feel that we could do the choosing instead being chosen? How might we have felt if we’d been raised to talk as openly about our sexual appetites as we were about our appetites for food and clothing, if we’d been encouraged to scrutinize and understand our actual sexual bodies—how they worked, what they needed, how they responded to touch—instead of their tangential sexual parts, the shape of the breasts, the size of the thighs? That kind of framework was not in our consciousness—and wouldn’t be, for many of us, until we were well into our thirties and forties, a time in a woman’s life when the concept of agency, grappled with over many years, finally settles into the bones. But back then, talking directly about our own bodies seemed inconceivable; sexuality was a freedom that terrified as much as it tempted, and so it became a minefield we pretended not to inhabit. We didn’t name the mines—this one is fear, this one is power, that one is raw hormonal energy—and we most certainly weren’t equipped to defuse them, and what I remember most pointedly from those years is a terrific sense of discord, a feeling reinforced by all those unraised and unanswered questions, as though the sexuality of women, my sexuality, had been left on the back burner somehow, undiscussed and uncharted and ultimately understood to be less important than the sexuality of men.

  Which, to an extent, it was. Had any feminist theory about sexual politics reached me during those years, I might have gathered that men’s bodies have a long and deeply rooted history of eclipsing women’s bodies in the collective consciousness, that for decades both our cultural and medical definitions of sexual “normalcy” have been based exclusively on male sexual function, male needs, male equipment. Feminist sex researchers have argued about the persistence of this thinking throughout the twentieth century: From Masters and Johnson to the American Medical Association, they claim, the dominant research bodies have relied overwhelmingly on the sexual behavior and interests of young, white, middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual men, a bias that ignores female bodies entirely and frames healthy sexuality in the narrowest possible genital terms, as an ability to achieve orgasm during intercourse. Women have been expected not only to accept that paradigm but also to adjust their own needs and expectations to it: To be sexually “normal,” many women learn, is to be as goal-oriented and genitally focused as a man—or, at least, to mirror and amplify his goal orientation and focus. In the prevailing view, writes Lenore Tiefer, a New York-based psychiatrist, urologist, and sex researcher, “normalcy can be easily summarized: men and women are the same and they’re all men.”

  This notion did trickle down, and far more vividly than any ideas about female sexual empowerment. Am I acting the right way? Is this what he wants? How is he feeling? In the absence of any sense that it was permissible or even possible to focus on my own body and my own hunger, these became the great preoccupying questions, matters of performance that would actually grow more tormenting as I got a little older and should have, I felt, become wiser, more confident, and sexually adept. The disconnected gropings in high school were followed by disconnected sexual encounters in college, blank and invariably alcohol-fueled affairs that tended to be high on passivity and need for validation, low on agency and pleasure. There were exceptions to this rule—men I loved, men with whom I felt safe enough to let down my guard—but I certainly didn’t outrun the feeling that sexuality had to do with pleasing men, nor did I outrun the feeling that my own body was somehow secondary, that his body—his hunger, his orgasm—was the important thing, that my satisfaction would be or at least should be directly related to his. Men’s bodies worked, it seemed, and they worked properly and efficiently and normally, and if mine couldn’t work the same way, with the same urgency and focus, that must have indicated some failure on my part.

  This is a terrible way to learn about the body, living under a curtain of voicelessness and uncertainty, taking all your cues from boys who harbor their own unarticulated feelings and insecurities and agendas, trying to tap into their hunger while yours retreats to a distant corner. And feminist gains aside, it remains a woefully standard lesson, one that never quite got buried in the earthquake’s rubble. A (very) young woman I know, a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore named Jessie, tells me a story about a recent sexual escapade: She’d gone to a party, had a fair amount to drink, and ended up in bed with two boys from the soccer team, one of them a junior. She appears rather nonchalant about this—she uses the words “weird” and “fun”—and her description seems to encapsulate something about the sexual revolution’s legacy, how much it’s given girls and also how little. Jessie has buckets of permission, far more than I did at her age, and in some respects the freedom has served her well: She’s grown up in a climate of vastly increased sexual tolerance; she appears less mystified by her own sexuality than I was at her age, or at least less inhibited; and she seems, to some extent, to have an easier, more natural relationship with her body, courtesy of both a post-Title IX athletic bravado and a slightly solidified sense of female entitlement.

  But Jessie also suggests how easily permission can mutate into pressure, and how hollow it can be if it’s not bolstered by honest dialogue and wisdom. In her book The Body Project, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a professor of history, human development, and women’s studies at Cornell University, describes a fundamental crisis in the most physical aspects of contemporary female adolescent life, with both biology and culture encouraging behaviors and attitudes toward the body that girls may not be emotionally ready for. Girls appear to be physically maturing at earlier ages today, and they are certainly sexualized at earlier ages: Weaned on Madonna, surrounded by sexual imagery, they live in an intensely explicit and visual sexual culture; more parts of their own bodies are adorned and on display; the race to lose virginity is far more heated than it was during my adolescence, with nearly half of all teenagers making it across the finish line by age sixteen. All of this takes place, Jacobs Brumberg argues, in a context with precious few social protections, which leaves girls unsupported in their development and vulnerable both to peer pressure and to the excesses of popular culture. Referring to the repressive but also protective attitudes toward female sexuality in the Victorian era, she writes: “As a society, we discarded the Victorian moral umbrella around girls before we agreed upon useful strategies or programs [to replace it]—a kind of social Gore-Tex to help them stay dry.”

  Jessie is an example, which is what came to mind when she told me about her night with the two soccer players. A little shocked by her story, I started hinting around about issues of desire and control: Did she do this because she felt she had to or because she really wanted to? Did she know she could say “no” to these two boys? Was the sex about what they wanted or what she wanted?

  “Oh, it was what I wanted,” she assured me, but I couldn’t help sensing an old narrative at work: fema
le desire shaped and defined by male desire; sexual wants linked to pleasing others; the old tyranny of sexual repression replaced by its opposite, a tyranny of sexual permission in which young girls learn to see erotic expression as a personal goal long before they’ve developed a clear, individual, or even remotely adult definition of the term. A little while later, Jessie told me more about one of the boys, the junior, whose name was Marshall. She’d had a crush on him for weeks. He was “totally hot,” a rising star on the soccer field. She hadn’t heard from him since the party, but she hoped he’d call (“I’m taking my cell phone everywhere,” she said, tapping her coat pocket). I also managed to glean that before the party, they’d only spoken two or three times.

  I doubt this plot line is unique. Most kids today (about 89 percent) will get some kind of sex education between grades seven and twelve, but in about half the cases, this will consist of a single class, not unlike mine with Mrs. Morse. More often, sex ed gets folded into health classes, where discussion of physical arousal and intimacy is eclipsed (if taken up at all) by talk of STDs, AIDS, or abstinence, currently the preferred approach in more than 4,000 school districts. Not surprisingly, in a Kaiser Foundation study on sex education conducted in 2000, almost half of all teens surveyed said they needed more information about how to deal with the emotional issues and consequences of sex. As was the case in my generation, most teenagers still get the majority of their information about sex from each other and from the media, where the operating definitions of sexuality are as limited and paper-thin as ever.