Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  Will affirmative consent laws reduce campus assault? Will cases be more readily resolved? I can’t say. As Pollitt pointed out, adjudication in many instances will still be based on he said/she said, with accused assailants replacing “She didn’t say no” with “Dude, she said yes!” Among the students in the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll, only 20 percent said the yes means yes standard was “very realistic” in practice, though an additional 49 percent considered it “somewhat realistic.” What “yes means yes” may do, though, especially if states aim solid curricular efforts at younger students, as California plans to, is create a desperately needed reframing of the public conversation away from the negative—away from viewing boys as exclusively aggressive and girls as exclusively vulnerable, away from the embattled and the acrimonious—and toward what healthy, consensual, mutual encounters between young people ought to look like. Maybe it will allow girls to consider what they want—what they really want—sexually, and at last give them license to communicate it; maybe it will allow boys to more readily listen.

  THAT WAS THE hope of a Bay Area nonprofit that invited me to observe a focus group of high schoolers convened on a November afternoon to discuss consent.

  The kids—two African American boys, two white boys, two white girls, a Latina, and an Asian girl—sprawled across couches in a borrowed living room, their conversation subtly guided by a twenty-something facilitator. Over the course of several hours, they wrestled with how alcohol-fueled hookups made “yes” feel like a moving target; with the social costs of saying a direct “no”; with the awkwardness of intervening when a drunk friend was hurtling toward regret; with how they negotiated, or didn’t, consent in their long-term relationships. They talked about assault, too. Two of the girls had experienced some form of violation; another was trying to come to terms with troubling accusations by one close friend against another. One of the boys, too, had been lured into sex by an older classmate when he was too drunk to refuse. He wanted to know: was that rape?

  More often, though, they talked about the complexity of establishing basic boundaries, with partners and within themselves, in a culture of contradiction, in which there has been some, but not enough, change in the expectations for, consequences of, and meaning of sex for both boys and girls. “Like, okay, ‘yes means yes,’” said Michael, who had pushed his shaggy hair, Mark Sanchez style, back in a headband. “But how does that ‘yes’ change with every situation you’re in? When you’re drunk, what does that ‘yes’ mean? Or is it only really ‘yes’ when you’re sober?”

  “And what about people getting drunk in order to say yes?” Annika added, sitting forward eagerly, her elbows resting on her knees. “I know a situation where two people were interested in each other and asked a friend to have a party so that they could get drunk and hook up.”

  Caleb, who had a “fade” haircut and red plastic glasses, jumped in. “The whole problem is that hooking up sober is not so attractive.”

  Annika nodded and continued. “And yes can mean different things, especially if I’m drunk. Like, did I say yes because I wanted to hook up with this person or because I wanted to hook up with someone, or because my friends think it would be cool if I hooked up with that person?”

  Nicole confided that when her “gut” told her to end a hookup, she would immediately start a mental tally of everything she had done up until that point—locked eyes with a boy across a room, flirted, touched his shoulder, kissed him, taken off her shirt—that would have led him to believe she would say yes to more. “And I’m already feeling guilty and worrying about what will happen in that moment of confrontation when I actually say to him, ‘This is my boundary.’”

  “It’s so complex,” said Gabriel, who wore a five-panel cap and a U.S. Marine Corps T-shirt. “As a guy, you have to do the best you can do to prevent a situation from happening in the future. You have to train yourself to look at someone and say, ‘Are you okay with this? Are you one hundred percent sure? Is this definitely a yes?’”

  Lauren, who had recently broken up with her boyfriend, quietly offered that even in a long-term relationship, consent could feel tricky. “It’s like if you’ve had sex once, you’ve said yes forever,” she said, and two other girls nodded. “And it’s always going to end that way no matter what was voiced or what was wanted at that moment, because once you get to that point with someone, that’s what always happens.” “Good girlfriends” say yes, no matter what. They consent—or at least comply—freely, even if the sex is unwanted. They take one for the team to keep their relationships stable, their partners happy. What, these young people wondered, do you call that?

  “You know,” Michael said, “hearing all this . . . I was in a relationship for about a year and I think . . . I was probably on the other side of that equation. I think . . . I didn’t mean to, but I was probably subconsciously pressuring my girlfriend.” He fell silent for a moment, pondering that. “I don’t know that I want to be, like, a leader in gender equality,” he continued, “but whatever I end up doing, wherever I end up going, this is going to be something I incorporate. I think just by doing that with the people you meet at school or the people you work with that you can have considerable influence in changing a culture, a community. I really do.”

  “I Know What It Feels Like to Be Told, ‘It’s Not Rape.’”

  “Do you think you were raped?” I asked Maddie.

  She gazed down at her fingers and shrugged. I considered the decades of argument behind that question: not long ago, the answer, maybe my own answer, would have been a definitive no. So much had changed, and so much had not. “Legally?” Maddie asked. “Yes, I was. Asking for a condom doesn’t imply consent. But the way everyone treated me afterward . . .” She shrugged. “People will say, ‘You had to switch schools because of that? That’s nothing.’ And guys are like, ‘Oh, that’s not rape.’ So, I don’t know.” Maddie fell silent a moment. “Lately, I’ve been writing blog posts and articles on changing ‘rape culture.’ Because I know what it feels like to be told, ‘It’s not rape.’ And I know how horrible it was afterward. If I can prevent that, or worse, from happening to someone else, that’s all I want to do.”

  Maddie had been careful during our conversation never to use her assailant’s real name. At one point, though, she slipped, and once I was home, it was the work of a moment to find him online. He’d been on the basketball and track teams in his high school, appeared to be a solid student. He’d joined a frat this year, as a college freshman. None of that meant he’d assault someone, though both his history and interests put him at risk: fraternity brothers and athletes are disproportionately represented among repeat offenders. My eyes fell on the name of the large university he attended. I had, at that time, eight nieces who were also college students. It chilled me to realize that he was in school with one of them.

  CHAPTER 7

  What If We Told Them the Truth?

  Charis Denison stood before seventy tenth-graders in the all-purpose room of a Northern California high school. A blond woman in her early fifties, permanently tanned from a former career as a wilderness ranger, she was barefoot, having kicked off her boho-chic wedge sandals, and was wearing her habitual tunic and jeans. A silver chain encircled one ankle, and a beaded mesh bracelet wound up her left arm. On her right hand, above a stack of jangling bangles, she sported a plush, anatomically correct vulva puppet. At the moment, her finger was fondling its clitoris as she commented, “I talk to so many girls where the first person to actually touch their clitoris is somebody else.” There have been times over the past two hours when the students—both boys and girls—who were sprawled across the carpeted floor, were a little squirrelly, a bit inattentive. Now, though, they were rapt. “It’s hard when you’re trying to have a sexual experience with someone and you don’t know what feels good to you,” Denison said. “It’s hard to let someone else have that power to decide. So if someone is choosing to become sexually active with someone else, it’s really good
to be sexual with oneself first. It’s good to figure out what you like.”

  That’s right. Denison just encouraged teenage girls to masturbate, and she did it in front of teenage boys. She told the whole class not only that girls have clitorises but what those organs are for—the only thing that they are for: to make them feel good. And that, in the annals of American sex education, is nearly unheard of. Denison doesn’t call herself a sex educator, though. She sees herself as a “youth advocate,” providing accurate information and a nonjudgmental forum in which kids can discuss sex and substance use along with larger ideas of ethics and social justice. She travels to high school communities across California—most, given her frank approach, are private like this one, though an increasing number are public—visiting each class several times a year, building cumulatively on what came before. Her curriculum incorporates decision making, assertiveness skills, sexual consent, personal responsibility, gender roles, and the diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity. But “my job,” as she told today’s tenth-graders, “my whole job is to help you make as many decisions as possible that end in joy and honor rather than regret, guilt, or shame.”

  Denison talks about risk and danger in her classes (though she doesn’t necessarily use that language). She addresses anatomy and contraception, if those aren’t part of students’ regular health curriculum. By graduation, even if her students plan to stay abstinent until marriage (“which is awesome!”) or will never have sex with a man, she expects them, nonetheless, to be able to put on a condom, “drunk, dizzy, and in the dark.” She also talks about something usually omitted in the parental “talk” and by the football coaches who, inexplicably, teach “health”: sexual activity should be a source of pleasure for teenagers. Not only is hers a more honest perspective, but she believes (and research confirms) that it is ultimately the most effective strategy for reducing risk. “To some parents in school communities, that doesn’t sound right,” Denison told me, “but it is right. [Teens] abstain with more information because they have options, because they have knowledge, because they have alternatives. It’s so clear to me that in this area the less specific and the less open we are, the more and more at risk we’re putting these kids—especially girls.”

  Denison’s approach is controversial, so controversial that I had a hard time finding a school that would let me observe her in action. Her philosophy doesn’t exactly jibe with the just-say-no thinking that’s dominated sex ed for the last three decades, but it’s one that is slowly, gradually gaining credence. In 2011 the New York Times Magazine profiled Al Vernacchio, a revolutionary Philadelphia educator who famously compares sex to eating a pizza: Both start with internal desire—with hunger, with appetite. In both cases, you may decide, for any number of reasons, that it’s not the right time to indulge. If you do proceed, there should be some discussion, some negotiation—maybe you like pepperoni and your dining companion doesn’t, so you go halfsies, or agree that one person will get his pick next time, or choose a different topping altogether—and a good-faith effort to satisfy everyone involved. There is no rounding bases in that metaphor, no striking out. The emphases are desire, mutual consent, communication, collaboration, process, and shared enjoyment.

  Similarly, in 2009 the Population Council published the It’s All One Curriculum, downloadable for free online, created in conjunction with, among others, the United Nations General Assembly, the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, and UNESCO. Integrating ideas about human rights and gender sensitivity, these guidelines aim to help educators and others “develop the capacity of young people to enjoy—and advocate for their rights to—dignity, equality and responsible satisfying and healthy sexual lives.” That curriculum, like Denison’s and Vernacchio’s, presents sexual exploration (whether alone or with others) as a normal part of adolescence. Sure, there are hazards, but there are also joys, and our role as caring adults is to help our kids balance the two. I admit that, as a mom, the idea of my child becoming sexually active is only marginally less mortifying than the thought of my parents doing anything beyond the three reproductively necessary acts it took to conceive my brothers and me. But the consequences of parental silence, classroom moralizing, and media distortion are far worse. There has to be a better way.

  Strange Bedfellows: Sex and Politics

  In 1959 abortion was still criminal. Unmarried women could not legally procure contraception, and pharmacists, according to sociologist Kristin Luker, author of When Sex Goes to School, would refuse to sell condoms to men they thought were single. Although, even then, over half of women and three-quarters of men had intercourse before their wedding day, there was broad public agreement that sex should be reserved for marriage. That was about to change—radically and quickly. The introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 was the first salvo in the sexual revolution. That was followed three years later by the publication of The Feminine Mystique, which launched a new wave of feminism. A decade after that, the Supreme Court guaranteed women’s right to abortion. As sex became untethered from reproduction, the notion of “waiting until marriage,” or even until adulthood, grew increasingly obsolete: between 1965 and 1980 the percentage of sixteen-year-old girls who’d ever had intercourse doubled. A group of activists, led by Mary Calderone, the physician who founded the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), hoped those changes would herald an age of positive, value-neutral, medically accurate sex education.

  That was not to be. Instead, according to Jeffrey Moran, author of Teaching Sex, to ensure minors’ ongoing access to contraception, congressional liberals skewed negative, popularizing the idea that teen sex, while perhaps inevitable, was inherently risky and a “crisis” requiring damage control. They argued that the “epidemic” of teen motherhood triggered by the new sexual freedom was, particularly among African Americans, responsible for spiraling poverty. (In truth, although the birth rate among black girls was three times higher than among whites, the overall teen birth rate dropped steadily through the 1960s and 1970s.) The only pragmatic response was to teach kids to protect themselves. So the Adolescent Health Services and Pregnancy Prevention and Care Act of 1978, introduced by Senator Edward Kennedy, while perpetually underfunded, championed educational programs that would focus on risk management, contraception, abortion education, counseling, and “values clarification.” It also established a murky, nonspecific idea of “readiness,” rather than marriage, as the expected standard for sexual behavior. That, Moran wrote, infuriated conservatives. As Diane Ravitch, an educational consultant and activist, railed (inaccurately, by the way), “Is it appropriate for the government to teach its citizenry how to masturbate? To explain how to perform cunnilingus? To reassure them that infidelity is widespread?”

  With that, sex education, previously relegated to innocuous “Family Life” classes, where it was embedded in lessons on successful marriage, became a battleground: a vector for right-wing trepidation about the erosion of traditional matrimony, the rise of women’s rights, the growing acceptance of homosexuality, even the potential dismantling of gender itself. In 1981, partly as a reward for the New Right’s support of his presidential bid, Ronald Reagan signed what was nicknamed “the chastity law,” the first legislation requiring that federally funded sex education, as its sole purpose, teach “the social, psychological and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity.” Reagan, however, allocated only $4 million a year to the bill; it wasn’t until the Clinton administration—oh, the irony!—that annual funding for abstinence education shot up to $60 million, a slab of pork tucked into the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. As the money grew, the message it promoted became even more restrictive: to get the cash, public schools would now have to teach that marriage was the only acceptable sphere for physical relations, and that sex outside of it at any age (including after divorce or widowhood) would lead to irreparable physical and emotional harm.

  Under George W. Bush, the funding for abstinence-until-marriag
e programs continued to rise, reaching, at its peak, $176 million a year. So it was that in 1988, when the AIDS epidemic was in full swing, only 2 percent of sex ed teachers taught abstinence as the best way to prevent pregnancy or disease, yet by 1999, 40 percent of those supposedly teaching comprehensive sex ed considered it the most important message they were trying to convey. By 2003, 30 percent of public school sex education classes provided no information whatsoever about condoms or other contraceptives (beyond their failure rates) and by 2005 over 80 percent of federally funded abstinence-only programs were found by a congressional report to be teaching blatantly inaccurate information, including such “facts” as that the Pill is only 20 percent effective in preventing pregnancy, that latex condoms cause cancer, that HIV can be transmitted through sweat or tears, and that half of homosexual teen boys already have the virus.