Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  Kardashian’s A-list ascent has been a perfect storm of social media and pop and porn cultures, her celebrity not a result of talent, achievement, or skill but of the relentless pursuit of attention: she is famous for being #famous. Curiously, the adjective most used about Kim by her fans (besides hot) is relatable. She seems authentic to them even though they know that her “reality” is entirely artificial: staged, edited, curated, cross-promoted, co-branded, augmented, and enhanced. Perhaps more than anyone, she has mastered the body “product”: figured out how, as a woman, to harness the contradictory demands of the media landscape and to do it for her own enormous profit. Again, this can be read as empowerment—if your definition includes perpetuating shopworn stereotypes about women. Girls point to her style, her work ethic, and her wealth—aren’t those admirable qualities? Yet, as the blog Sociological Images pointed out after Kardashian’s wax figure was installed in Madame Tussauds, Kim’s true contribution has been an ingenious “patriarchal bargain”: her acceptance of roles and rules that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power she can wrest from them. It’s difficult to see how Kardashian’s success expands options for anyone but herself. (Okay, it helped her sisters.) It’s feminism defined by “I’ve Got Mine,” underscored by the winking title of her 2015 book, Selfish. Even Tina Brown, the former Vanity Fair editor who virtually invented high-low journalism, was concerned that a 2014 Vogue cover positioned Kim as “aspirational” to young women. Those aspirations, Brown wrote, “now have very little to do with any notion of excellence, either of character or of comportment. Our hopes have gotten so cheesy that even the cheese is ersatz.”

  If the script handed down by our hypersexualized culture expanded the vision of “sexy” to include a broad range of physical size and ability, skin shade, gender identity, sexual preference, age; if it taught girls that how their bodies feel to them is more important than how they look to others; if it reminded them that neither value nor “empowerment” are contingent on the size of their boobs, belly, or ass; if it emphasized that they are entitled to ethical, reciprocal, mutually pleasurable sexual encounters; then maybe, maybe I’d embrace it. The body as product, however, is not the same as the body as subject. Nor is learning to be sexually desirable the same as exploring your own desire: your wants, your needs, your capacity for joy, for passion, for intimacy, for ecstasy. It’s not surprising that girls feel powerful when they feel “hot”: it’s presented to them over and over as a precondition for success in any realm. But the truth is that “hot” refracts sexuality through a dehumanized prism regardless of who is “in control.” “Hot” demands that certain women project perpetual sexual availability while denying others any sexuality at all. “Hot” tells girls that appearing sexually confident is more important than possessing knowledge of their own bodies. Because of that, as often as not, that confidence that “hot” confers comes off with their clothes.

  CHAPTER 2

  Are We Having Fun Yet?

  Alatte can be a great prop, kind of like a cigarette in a 1940s noir movie. Giving it a stir, taking a thoughtful sip, offers you time to gather yourself, which can be pretty vital when a virtual stranger, one who is basically old enough to be your mother, asks you point blank how often you masturbate, whether you’ve ever had an orgasm, or to describe your last sexual encounter with a partner. In fact, it gives the stranger asking the questions something to focus on as well, because, let me tell you, launching into a discussion of blow jobs with someone you’ve just met, someone young enough to be your daughter, can feel just a smidge uncomfortable. So I was relieved that Sam, eighteen, a senior at a California high school, had chosen to meet me on the patio of her favorite café, even if we were sitting next to a couple of middle-aged guys in Dockers and button-downs who were clearly shocked by our conversation. Sam was tall and full-figured, with golden skin and dark, loose curls that flowed nearly to the middle of her back. Her mother, a middle school math teacher, was African American; her father, whom she had rarely seen since her parents split, was white. Her mom had remarried a man from Samoa about five years ago; Sam calls him Dad. “I knew about romance and all that from an early age because I’d meet my mom’s boyfriends,” Sam told me. “And when I went through puberty, she had books around.”

  I asked Sam whether her mother had explained to her about periods and reproduction. She nodded. What about masturbation? She laughed. “No,” she said. The location of her clitoris? She laughed again. What about orgasm? She shook her head. “My parents are liberal,” she said. “And they’ll talk about sex generally, or joke about it. We’ll watch South Park or talk about the disfigurement of girls in the Middle East. But when it comes to me, it’s a little more iffy. Then it’s more like a conservative household, where we don’t talk directly. If I approached them, they’d be open to discussing it, but it’s hard for them to bring up and it’s hard for me to bring up.”

  Like most of the girls I met, Sam was both curious about sex and resourceful, so she did her own research on the subject, looking up on the Internet whatever she didn’t know—through Google searches such as “how to give a blow job,” or by checking out porn (“just to see how things fit together,” she said). And, of course, she learned from doing. “Freshman year in high school was when everything became a reality,” she recalled. “Sex, drinking, all of that. That’s when you weren’t just watching it on TV anymore. But we weren’t really partying yet. It was mostly for appearance. Like, you’d go to some park on the weekend and take a shot and sort of pretend you were drunk. And you’d hook up with some guy and maybe go to second or third base.”

  I stopped Sam right there. The terrain of relationships and sexual intimacy had changed since I was a girl. Along with it, there was a whole new vocabulary that both tripped me up and, as I’m someone passionate about words, fascinated me: Talking, for instance, did not mean conversation, but was a synonym for what, in an earlier era, would’ve been called “seeing” someone. As in “We’re not serious, Mom. We’re just talking.” (It seemed a particularly ironic choice for today’s teens, given their preference for connecting via text over actual conversation.) “Hooking up,” a phrase that has inspired a full-scale media panic about the morals of a new generation, could mean anything from kissing to intercourse. Its ambiguity was the source of perpetual misunderstanding not only between girls and adults but among peers: hooking up was so vague a term that they could never be quite sure what their friends were up to. Catching feelings meant developing an emotional attachment and was, for many girls, something to protect against when hooking up, just as they would guard against catching herpes or chlamydia. A boy being “all cute” meant he may have “caught feelings” since he was behaving in a caring, thoughtful way toward a girl—what I would have called “romantic.” Dating, though never a word much used beyond sixth grade, was the last step on the path toward a relationship, coming well after “hooking up” and “exclusive hooking up.” Girls sometimes referred to their genitals as “my junk,” and the phrase “making love” prompted gagging sounds. I couldn’t help but notice that much of this new lexicon was devoid of terms not only connoting intimacy, but also indicating joy or pleasure.

  So what, I asked Sam, was today’s version of “the bases”?

  She took a long swig of her latte. “Well, first base would be kissing,” she said. “Second base would be a hand job for a guy and fingering the girl.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Already it seemed to me that a few steps had been skipped.

  “And third base would be oral.”

  “Both ways?” I asked.

  Sam laughed again and shook her head. “For the guy,” she said. “Girls don’t get oral sex. No. Not unless you’re in a long-term relationship.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Back up. I don’t actually recall oral sex as being a base at all.”

  Sam shrugged. “That’s a difference between my generation and yours,” she said. “For us, oral sex is not a big deal. Everyone does it.”


  Why Do You Think They Call It a Blow “Job”?

  There has been a lot of anxiety over the past couple of decades about teens and oral sex. Much of it can be traced back to the late 1990s, to a New York Times report that among middle-class teens, oral sex—and by “oral sex,” it meant fellatio—not only was becoming ubiquitous, but that they were engaging in it far earlier and more casually than teens’ busy (read: neglectful) working parents realized. One health educator was quoted as saying, “‘Do you spit or do you swallow?’ is a typical seventh-grade question.”

  Two years later, the Washington Post covered a parent meeting called by middle school counselors in Arlington, Virginia, a town of “elegant brick homes, leafy sycamores and stone walls”—again, code for white and middle class—to discuss the fellatio craze among thirteen-year-old girls. The reporter linked that incident to a wider regional trend, based largely on “student grapevine”–generated claims of girls who had dropped to their knees during study hall or at the back of a school bus.

  Girls’ bodies have always been vectors for a society’s larger trepidations about women’s roles. It was likely no coincidence, then, that those early blow job scandals surfaced just as oral sex was making front-page news for another reason: the country was gripped by an obsession with a certain blue Gap frock and a cigar that was by no means just a cigar. President Bill Clinton’s alleged dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern less than half his age, dominated the headlines, sending mortified parents leaping from the couch to twist the radio dial or grab the TV remote when the latest reports aired. Most famously, in January 1998, Clinton testified under oath that “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” A few months later, when DNA from his semen was discovered on the fabled dress that she had squirreled away as a memento of their tryst—and, might I say, ick—he insisted that he had not perjured himself because their relationship involved only oral sex. Suddenly, people across the nation were hotly debating whether mouth-to-genital contact was, indeed, “sex.” If it wasn’t, what exactly was it? And how were Americans supposed to explain the president’s hairsplitting to their children?

  Oral sex had only recently become a standard part of Americans’ erotic repertoire. Historically, both fellatio and cunnilingus were considered more intimate than intercourse, acts to be engaged in only after marriage, if at all. In 1994, just a few years before the Clinton affair broke, Sex in America, the most definitive survey at that time to be released on this country’s sexual practices, found that while only a minority of women over fifty had ever performed fellatio, among women under thirty-five, three quarters had done so. (Most men, whatever their age, said they had been both providers and recipients of oral sex.) The rise in going down among straight couples, the authors wrote, was the biggest sexual change of the twentieth century. By 2014 oral sex was so common as to be unremarkable: as one researcher quipped, the number of Americans who thought Barack Obama was Muslim was larger than those who had never given or received oral sex.

  But the notion that the practice was aging downward, that among teens it was becoming more common and less meaningful than intercourse, was most definitely a new phenomenon, one that caught not only parents but also researchers off-guard. There was very little hard data to back those early journalistic claims. Oral sex practices of minors had been considered unfundable in academia; even if one could get the money, what parent would allow their child to be questioned on the subject? More generally, there was a presumption among conservative politicians that talking to teens about any form of sex, even in the name of research, was tantamount to handing them an instruction manual. Because of that, vital information about kids’ sexual behaviors, including disease transmission, went virtually unstudied.

  By 2000 the Clinton presidency was winding down, but the blow job panic had just begun. A new story in the New York Times declared that sixth-graders were now, basically, treating fellatio like a handshake with the mouth. According to one Long Island child psychologist, girls that age would tell him earnestly that they expected to wait until marriage for intercourse, yet had already given head fifty or sixty times. “It’s like a goodnight kiss to them,” he claimed, “how they say good-bye after a date.” The director of the Parenting Institute at New York University, meanwhile, predicted that soon a “substantial” number of kids would be having intercourse by middle school. “It’s already happening,” he told the Times. (That was not true: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in most states rates of intercourse among middle schoolers were dropping.) An article in the now-defunct Talk magazine blamed dual-career “parents who were afraid to parent” for an epidemic of oral sex among seventh-graders—again acting out larger anxieties about women, in this case working mothers, through concerns about unsupervised, wayward girls.

  It was Oprah, however—isn’t it always Oprah?—who sounded the loudest alarm. In 2003 she invited onto her show a reporter for O Magazine who had interviewed fifty girls about their sexual practices. “Hold on to your underwear for this one,” the writer said, before revealing her ultimate stunner: the rainbow party. In this version of Girls Gone Wild, young women barely past their Barbie phase were donning different shades of lipstick, then fellating groups of boys in turns, leaving behind a “rainbow” of makeup on each penis. The girl whose color hit farthest down was declared the “winner.”

  Well, what parent wouldn’t freak out? Children were having indiscriminate sex (or indiscriminate not-sex) everywhere! Under the table at bar mitzvahs! Behind the monkey bars during recess! No one, least of all Oprah, seemed to question the actual logistics of any of this. Exactly how were girls managing to complete multiple, random sex acts during the school day without an adult’s notice? Were thirteen-year-old boys really up to fifteen public blow jobs in the space of a few hours? Wouldn’t any rainbow effect be rinsed off or at least indelibly smudged by each subsequent partner? A 2004 NBC News/People survey taken shortly after the rainbow party story broke found that, in truth, less than one half of 1 percent of children ages thirteen to sixteen said they’d attended an oral sex party. Although that’s not zero, it’s hardly rampant.

  So, no, children were not having orgies. That said, the seed from which the “rainbow party” myth sprouted did come from somewhere: oral sex has become relatively commonplace among teens. By the end of ninth grade, nearly one in five children has engaged in oral sex; by age eighteen, about two thirds have, with white and more affluent teens indulging more than others. Pinning that change on Bill Clinton or the sexual revolution or parental permissiveness, however, would be simplistic—and incorrect. Right-wing influence on sex education has played an equal, if not greater role. Federally mandated abstinence-only programs, which began in the early 1980s, not only reinforced that intercourse was the line in the sand of chastity, but also, using the threat of AIDS as justification, hammered home the idea that it might well kill you. Oral sex, then, was the obvious work-around. I doubt, though, that social conservatives would consider it a victory that, across a range of studies, college students who identify as religious are even more likely than others to say oral sex is not “sex,” or that over a third of teenagers included it in their definition of “abstinence” (nearly a quarter included anal sex), or that roughly 70 percent agreed that someone who engages in oral sex is still a virgin.

  I wondered, though: If teens didn’t consider oral sex to be “sex,” how did they perceive it? What did it mean to girls to give or receive oral sex? Did they enjoy it? Tolerate it? Expect it? One evening, shortly after her graduation from a suburban Chicago high school, a young woman named Ruby allowed me to join her and four of her friends for a chat. We met in Ruby’s bedroom, one wall of which she’d painted midnight blue. Leggings, T-shirts, and skirts tumbled out of half-open dresser drawers. The girls sprawled on the floor, across the bed, on a beanbag chair.

  When I asked about oral sex, a girl named Devon shook her head. “That’s not a thing anymore,” she said, waving a h
and dismissively.

  “So what is it, then?” I asked.

  Devon shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

  “Well, it’s not that it’s nothing,” added Rachel.

  “It’s not sex,” Devon countered.

  “It’s like a step past making out with someone,” said Ruby. “It’s a way of hooking up. A way to have gone farther without it being seen as any big deal.”

  “And it doesn’t have the repercussions that vaginal sex does,” Rachel added. “You’re not losing your virginity, you can’t get pregnant, you can’t get STDs. So it’s safer.”

  That, unfortunately, is not entirely true—though, again, because oral sex is ignored by parents and educators, there is a widespread belief among teens that it is risk free. The result is that while their rates of intercourse and pregnancy have dropped over the past thirty years, their rates of sexually transmitted diseases have not. Teens and young adults account for half of all new STD diagnoses annually and the majority among women. The new popularity of oral sex has been linked to rising rates of Type 1 herpes and gonorrhea (a disease that, about a decade ago, researchers thought was on the verge of eradication). Avoiding STDs, though, isn’t really why girls engage in oral sex. The number one reason they do it, according to a study of high schoolers, is to improve their relationships. (Nearly a quarter of girls said this, compared to about 5 percent of boys.) What, though, did “improving a relationship” mean exactly, especially since so many also told me that oral sex, at least where fellatio was concerned, was a way to emotionally distance themselves from their partners, protect against the overinvestment they feared would come with intercourse. For years, psychologists have warned that girls learn to suppress their own feelings in order to avoid conflict, to preserve the peace in friendships and romantic partnerships. Was performing fellatio another version of that? Whether they hoped to attract a boy’s interest, sustain it, or placate him, it seemed their partner’s happiness was their main concern. Boys, incidentally, far and away, said that the number one reason they engaged in oral sex was for physical pleasure.