Sometimes, abstinence can simply be the product of divided attentions. While most people feel sexual urges and desires, they aren’t always quite strong enough to drive them to action, especially when other engagements are drawing their energies.
Remembering her late teenaged, collegiate life, Amina recalled, “I was too busy being good at math and science in college, and too busy making friends, to have a sex life. Then I felt like I needed to check off a box and was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to do this now.’ ”
Amina said that this experience of first or early sex—almost as a chore to be dispensed with—was common among her compatriots. It certainly was true for some of my high-school and college friends, and for me. It wasn’t as though we weren’t curious about sex, that we didn’t long for physical intimacy, engage in fantasy, or masturbate. It’s just that when a suitable partner didn’t make him or herself readily available, we busied ourselves with other things . . . things that in turn distracted us from any kind of laser-focused search for sexual intimacy.
This dynamic of having interest but no discernible opportunity to follow through on it leads to another, too rarely discussed, category of single women: the unintentionally chaste.
It’s so easy, in high school or college, if you have not forged a specific sexual connection, if your energies, to use Jane Addams’s term, have been diffused, rechanneled as enthusiasms for art or drugs or sports or science, to simply find yourself . . . not having sex. Not because you don’t want to, not because you don’t believe in it, but just because, well, appealing opportunities aren’t always as plentiful as Hollywood summer movies would suggest.
Then, as the assumptions of the media and of peers grow surer, your virginity becomes more freighted. It comes to mean more, it gets harder to confess, looms larger every passing year. You become fearful that a friend, or a potential partner, might judge you for your lack of experience, might think you prudish or frigid or babyish, when really you were just busy.
So, you keep not having sex, and the not having it keeps getting more important. In 2013, the New York Times ran a story12 by a thirty-five-year-old woman who wrote that when she was young, she’d held off out of fear of being hurt. But, as time passed, her expectations rose. “After so many years of holding out, I can’t change now.”
Too few people talk about this, but it happens. All the time. It happened to me. I was twenty-four when I lost my virginity, though I happily would have been done with it as a teen. The actress Tina Fey has said that she was twenty-four as well, joking that she “couldn’t give it away.” One close friend was well into her thirties by the time she first had sex; I’m less sure about others, now heading into their forties, because, as time has worn on, these brilliant, sexual, beautiful women find it ever harder to talk about their virginity.
A lack of sex, as much as a surfeit of sex, can come to define a woman. And, while protracted and cumbersome virginity is one thing, a formerly active sex life that goes fallow can provoke its own kind of self-reproach and self-doubt.
“Sex would be great,” said fifty-two-year-old television commentator Nancy Giles. “But I have to like somebody. I can’t just have sex for sex.” It hasn’t been for lack of trying. Giles has tried to be more casual. Once, she said, “I forced myself because it had been so long. I wasn’t being celibate on purpose; it’s just that no one really moved me.” Giles attended a dinner party designed to introduce couples, and clicked with one of the guys. “I decided to go for it,” she said. “But it was so bad. I remember thinking: ‘Get me out; I wanted to get out of there so badly.’ ”
Still, Giles’s lack of enthusiasm for unfettered encounters has made her feel bad, as though she was doing womanhood wrong. “It seemed for a long time like everyone knew the code for meeting people and having sex but me. It made me feel like I was a total fucking freak. But I can’t even hug people if I don’t like them.” She tried a second time with the man she’d had bad sex with, and during their second liaison, she said, “the only thing that made it more interesting was that I was watching the Giants game over his shoulder” during sex. After that, she started feeling bad about having had sex with someone she didn’t care about. It’s only recently, Giles said, that “I finally have stopped feeling like a freak because I’m not dating.”
Nothing to be Afraid Of
“I’m not married, and I’m sexual,” said Frances Kissling. “And that is about the scariest woman a patriarchal system can find.” Frances recalled how, when she got out of her ten-year live-in relationship, she entered a phase that she described as “very, very, very, very sexually active.” A Catholic advocate for contraception and abortion, she understood both that birth control can fail, and that while she would have an abortion, she didn’t want to have to do it. She also knew that she never wanted children. So she had her tubes tied.
She remembered vividly, she said, the experience of having sex for the first time after her tubal ligation, and experiencing “this enormous feeling of freedom. I remember while we were having sex, saying ‘This is how men feel!’ There was just not the remotest possibility at all that I was going to get pregnant.”
Frances’s unapologetic verve for sex, but not for commitment, she said, makes her scary because it doesn’t conform to what we think we know about what women desire, just as Kristina worries about hurting men by behaving rapaciously, in a manner that society most associates with male sexuality. When Frances meets a man, she explained, “I am never thinking ‘Is he attracted to me? Is he going to ask me out? Is this a relationship?’ ” It’s disconcerting. “When people can’t figure out the mechanism by which they have power over you, you become very threatening,” she said.
Indeed, sexual women have, in America’s past, been viewed as such a threat that, in the mid-twentieth century, the language of female sexuality was tied to both pugilism and war. As Elaine Tyler May writes, physically violent words, including knockout and bombshell, began to be used in reference to sexual women; a photograph of pinup Rita Hayworth was attached to the hydrogen bomb dropped on the Bikini Islands. And those islands, site of explosive military action, gave their name to the two-piece bathing suit.13
In a more sexually open society, we are, very slowly, getting better at recognizing and acknowledging female desire, as opposed to just female sexual appeal. But it’s still most digestible when it remains in a comfortable, old-fashioned framework: that women’s active sex lives precede an inevitable marriage, that multiple partners are really a bunch of auditions for permanent commitment, that while women may get randy, they yearn most profoundly for emotional connection, that too much youthful promiscuity will provoke later regret, that the habitual pursuit of strings-free congress, as Kristina’s therapist is sure, must be born of a lack of self-respect.
We get nervous when we are confronted with evidence that this model does not always hold, when we encounter women who are motivated by a spirit of conquest, who do not experience sexual hang-ups or guilt, who do not want touchy-feely ties with all or any of their sexual partners, and who do not in fact want to commit to them. This is (but) one of the ways that women get labeled sluts and deviants, considered unwell or unfit or unfeminine or damaged.
The slow realization that women’s sexuality, when truly unleashed from hetero and marital expectation, might begin to look more like traditionally male sexuality is the stuff of social, economic, and sexual revolution. As Liza Mundy argued in her book The Richer Sex, which posited that women’s growing economic power will reverse traditional heterosexual dynamics, “women are becoming the gender that wants sex more than men do.” Mundy interviewed women who wanted to accumulate sexual partners “for maximum exploration.” Mundy ventured that as economic power shifts further in favor of women, women will become “pickier about the appearance of the men they have sex with.”14
Whether or not this upending of the sexual marketplace is as far underway as Mundy believes it to be, what’s certainly true is that there is a far more robust
dialog among women about the reality of intense and capacious female sexual appetites.
Hooking Up
If there’s anything the nation feels more anxiety about than sexually empowered adult women, it’s sexually active girls in their late teens and early twenties, the women who are preparing to head into the world not necessarily to become wives, but to become people.
That anxiety has been made manifest most lately in the media obsession with so-called hookup culture. The term is meant to indicate the habits of high-school and college students, especially ambitious, high-achieving college students at high-end universities, who have physical encounters, generally understood to include anything from kissing to petting to oral sex to penetration, with peers to whom they do not commit.
Many of hookup culture’s critics and defenders have framed this behavior as directly tied to the postponed marriage age and filling up of young female adulthood with other concerns. As New York Times reporter Kate Taylor explained in a 2013 article about the culture of casual sexual encounters at the University of Pennsylvania, the women she interviewed about their hookup habits “saw building their resumes, not finding boyfriends (never mind husbands), as their main job” at college.
The sloughing off of marital priority sends shivers down the spines of both entrenched social conservatives and nonideologically offended but, nonetheless, very concerned elders.
Hookup agonistes include writer Caitlin Flanagan, whose book, Girl Land, bemoaned the lost innocence of a time when girls could be girls who pined for boys without any pressure to have sex with them. Flanagan has written about how hookup culture has “forced [young women] to abandon” their investment in what she calls “The Boyfriend Story,” in which they are meant to yearn for a boy who loves only them. Flanagan imagines teen girls as having been “hectored—via the post-porn, Internet-driven world—toward a self-concept centering on the expectation that the very most they could or should expect from a boy is a hookup.”
Flanagan has found backup in Donna Freitas, author of The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused about Intimacy.” Freitas, who views hookup culture as “fast, uncaring, unthinking, perfunctory,” and “so common, so obligatory, that it leaves little room for experimentation that bends the rules,” has reported that 41 percent of students who have reported hooking up used negative words such as “regretful,” “disgusted,” “ashamed,” and even “abused” in describing their experiences. She holds out for the “innocent wish for an alternative means of getting to know someone before getting physical,”15 perhaps unaware that many hookups occur between young people who already know each other and share a social circle.
Former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown reacted to Taylor’s story about hookup culture at Penn by calling it “tragic” that “girls are completely editing out tenderness, intimacy, excitement, somebody respecting them. . . .”16 Even in this new world of female ambition and success—a world that Brown herself has embodied—there is the presumption of sacrifice.
This mandated tradeoff becomes even more obvious when critics don’t cast women as victims, but instead as cold, careerist tramplers on the budding flower of youthful commitment. In 2006, claiming that “young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase,” conservative commentator Laura Sessions Stepp blamed this power reversal for an increase in erectile challenges faced by collegiate men.17 In this formulation, women are not just sacrificing their claim to tenderness, but also the very essence of their appeal.
What’s certainly true is that whatever human connection collegiate women may or may not be seeking, many are upfront that it’s not one that leads to marriage any time soon.
“I know it sounds hyperbolic,” said Amanda Litman, who was a senior at Northwestern in 2012, “but I mean it when I say that getting married right now would ruin my life. I want freedom. I want the chance to pick up and move to a new city for a new job or for adventure, without having to worry about a spouse or a family. I need to be able to stay at the office until three in the morning if I have to, and not care about putting dinner on the table.”
That Litman’s vision of marriage is still as a gendered, servile relationship is telling. And a direct rebuke to the pundits who insist that a return to traditional roles might somehow “cure” hookup culture. It is, in fact, the lingering fear of falling into those traditional roles that motivates at least some young women to keep their sexual encounters casual. “For so many of us,” said Amanda, “getting into a serious relationship felt like compromising our ambitions and risking the independence needed to succeed careerwise. Hooking up—often in a friends-with-benefits style, but not always—was our way of exploring the physical side without having to devote the time or, more importantly, the emotional energy to someone else.”
One of hookup culture’s most vocal worrywarts, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, has warned purportedly hook-up-happy college women to be careful what they wish for in their focus on careers. In an item headlined “Love in the Time of Hookups,” Douthat fretted about (conservatively framed) studies that link the number of sexual partners a woman has to her likelihood of future divorce and depression, about how the delay of marriage results in having fewer children. “People pursuing neo-traditional paths to romance have a solid chance of finding, well, neo-traditional forms of happiness,” he wrote, while “people taking a more career-minded path are more likely to see their careers benefit . . . but at the expense, potentially, of other areas of life.”18
The flaw in Douthat’s warnings is that the very people he’s wringing his hands about—pre-professional, predominantly white, collegiate women postponing marriage—are precisely the demographic still most likely to find themselves ensconced in that most “neo-traditional form of happiness,” marriage itself. Though privileged, educated women are marrying later than ever before, and at lower rates than ever before, they are, eventually, marrying far more frequently than their less economically advantaged peers.
What’s more, those Americans with the most education and money, the ones marrying later but most reliably, are also the people currently enjoying the nation’s lowest divorce rate. If his concern is “neo-traditionalism,” the women engaging in what Douthat describes as “a sexual culture . . . well suited to careerism” and “the multiplication of sexual partners” are not its enemy, but its future.
As Salon writer Tracy Clark-Flory, a longtime advocate for and practitioner of casual sex, has written, “I, of all people, was supposed to end up alone. . . . that’s what I was told” by culture warriors including Lori Gottlieb and Laura Sessions Stepp. “In my early twenties, I began passionately defending hookup culture from its critics and often used my own experiences with casual sex to make my case. According to their wisdom, which included such delightful gems as ‘Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?,’ I was destined to end up a sad cat-lady cliche. . . . Instead, I’m nearing 30, cohabitating, engaged, and talking about becoming a mom in the not-so-distant future.” Clark-Flory married at twenty-nine.
There is simply no reason for Ross Douthat, or any of the other social conservatives, to break a sweat over the romantic and familial fates of these privileged and empowered women. Unless, of course, what they’re actually worried about isn’t their future marital happiness but rather that their circuitous route to getting there, which involves establishing themselves economically and professionally and thereby exerting more social and sexual control over their circumstances, is actually a signal of increasing female strength.
That’s how Mundy sees it. And Hanna Rosin, who writes in The End of Men that the girls-as-victimized-by-casual-sex critique of hookup culture “downplays the unbelievable gains women have lately made, and, more important, it forgets how much those gains depend on sexual liberation.” For young women who Rosin argues are “i
n their sexual prime,” and also at the most potentially propellant moment of their careers and social lives, there is a recognition that “an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.”19
The fact that hooking up is a habit depicted in the media as of those most statistically likely to marry is just one of the facts that the hubbub over hookup culture often conveniently obscures. Among the other realities that you’d never quite absorb if you just read coverage of blow jobs and beer pong is that, actually, uncommitted physical encounters on campuses are not a particularly recent phenomenon.
“Hookup culture” was certainly the norm when I was an undergraduate in the mid-nineties. Back then, women made out with boys at fraternity parties and in dorm rooms; they performed oral sex (and more rarely had the favor returned); they had sex, sometimes one-night stands, sometimes recurring assignations, sometimes with strangers, but more often with friends with whom they also drank too much, and with whom they talked and gossiped and danced and ate dinner and breakfast. A few women got into very serious committed relationships that lasted months or years. One friend was with her boyfriend from high school; they stayed together through college and are still married, with three children. Lots more women rarely ever hooked up.
Assault and rape, Greek fraternity hazing and extreme binge drinking were serious, often horrifying, campus problems. But they were not hookup culture. Hookup culture was ordinary. Ordinarily fun, ordinarily frustrating, ordinarily heartbreaking, ordinarily weighted in favor of guys? Yes, like most of life. Completely ordinary for a bunch of sexually curious eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds living in close proximity to each other, beyond the reach of their families.
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Page 27