with her, she would be happy and fixed. In the past two years, since she lost her virginity, she has slept with so many guys that she’s lost count of how many. She doesn’t remember the names of half of them, and probably never knew most of them. Some were friends. She only actually dated one or two of them. Josie says: “I am lonely. There is something missing. Having sex and being in the heat of the moment is a high. And when I’m there and doing it, I don’t feel alone anymore.”
Guinevere slept with more than one hundred guys before she turned twenty-five. She had the looks and body to attract plenty of men, but, in her words, “I lacked the brains and confidence to use those things to get what I wanted.” What she wanted was to be found truly appealing, beyond just her looks. She wanted men to want to spend time with her. She says, “All those years I never realized that given a choice most men or boys will take what they can get whenever they want. I made it incredibly easy for them to get it.” She went on to explain the many ways she gave herself away. She didn’t make the connection, she told me, between how easily she gave herself away and how lonely and desperate she felt. She was nice to guys, good to them, gave them whatever they wanted. They laughed together; they seemed to like her. But after they had sex, the boys were gone. She constantly wondered what she did wrong. Was she not good enough in bed? Was she too loud? Not loud enough? Was there something wrong with her?
Guinevere’s confusion about what boys want is an extremely common feeling among loose girls. They get the clear message from media and peers that boys like sex, that boys like girls who are sexy. But then, again and again, the boys leave after sex. Loose girls almost always assume it’s about them—they are simply not lovable enough. There is something horribly wrong with them. They also know the other message that bears down through the schools and Christian organizations: boys don’t like girls who put out. So, loose girls shame themselves. The fact that they can’t help their neediness, their desperation to be loved, they believe, is surely why boys leave.
Many of the girls I spoke with who identified as loose girls shared with me the ways they acted out in their neediness. They called boys too much. They texted and emailed them constantly. They pushed them away with their desperation. When they tell me these stories, I can see their eyes move to the floor. I can hear their voices drop. They hesitate. The shame they feel about their neediness is much worse than any shame they might feel about their sexual behavior.
Cynthia told me that after the last guy had sex with her and never called again, she texted him five times before he finally wrote back, “Don’t contact me again, freak.” She spent the rest of the day in bed, unable to move. His words had confirmed for her exactly what she feared was true about her: there was something different about her, something different from every other girl, who seemed to be able to take or leave a guy, whereas once she got a boy’s attention, she could think of nothing else but how to make him love her.
Cynthia’s dirty little secret is not sex. Like that of all loose girls, her dirtiest secret is her need.
Loose girls come from every walk of life imaginable. They are black, white, Hispanic, Asian, poor, rich, middle class—you name it. Many had great childhoods. Others did not. For some, we can track back to what happened with their parents—mothers and fathers—to get some sense of why they headed down the paths they did.
Chapter 4
BEST FRIENDS AND ROLE MODELS
Cicely’s family fit all the stereotypes of a normal, nuclear family. She lived with her younger brother, mother, and father in a middle-class home. Cicely’s mother had prided herself on making choices for her family that included sit-down meals every night, checking their homework, and always knowing where they would be and with whom. She and Cicely were extremely close, right up until Cicely turned fourteen. That’s when things took a turn. Cicely began to want to wear clothes her mother would not allow. She began to sneak out at night to meet boys, then come home with hickeys all over her neck. Her mother tried everything: reasoning with her, grounding her, sleeping in the living room so she would hear whether Cicely tried to escape through the front door. Nothing worked. Cicely, meanwhile, grew more and more resentful of her mother’s tactics. She felt increasingly isolated from her family, but got a sense of comfort from her friends, who understood her. Mostly, though, she got comfort from boys, who made her feel special in a way she had never felt before. When they didn’t call or liked one of her friends instead of her, she felt devastated, but that initial rush, that feeling that maybe this boy would love her, was worth it all.
Cicely’s story is probably familiar to many mothers with teenage girls. Their daughters are precious, lively, compassionate kids. Their mothers know how to reach them. They enjoy their time together. And then all of a sudden something switches. The daughter goes away. She stops communicating. When the mother tries to talk to her, wanting open discussion, the teen gets angry and stomps away. She yells, “You don’t understand!” and slams the door. But of course the mother understands. She understands better than anyone.
And yet, according to studies of mothers and adolescents, mothers understand less than they think. According to studies by James Jaccard, Patricia Dittus, and Vivian Gordon in
Much research supports that a healthy mother-daughter relationship is prohibitive of promiscuity among teens. Adolescents’ perceptions of their mother’s disapproval of premarital sex and their satisfaction with the mother-daughter relationship are significantly related to abstinence for teens, less frequent sexual intercourse, and more consistent use of contraception among sexually active youths.{51}
However, in a survey of one thousand fifteen- to twenty-twoyear-old girls and one thousand mothers of teen girls conducted by
All these mixed messages for mothers don’t help the already-terrifying process of raising teenage girls. Lydia, a self-proclaimed loose girl, told me that her mother relayed those mixed messages in the home. She walked around naked saying, “We’re all girls here.” She encouraged her daughters to feel comfortable with their bodies. But she also told them they should not have sex or lead on boys, who would do anything to get into their pants.
“It was confusing,” Lydia said. “So ultimately I just did what I wanted.”
This sort of disconnect is reflected in the
A few things are at work in such numbers. One is that mothers are generally uncomfortable talking to their teens about sex. Following the dominant discourse about girls and sex, mothers talk about the issues involved— pregnancy, abortion, and STDs. Most adolescent girls claim that their mothers don’t talk to them about the aspects of sex that they deem more important—such as the emotions involved and the physical feelings. Generally, they feel like they’re receiving warnings and rules, and that the conversation is rarely much of a two-way street.{53} One of the girls I interviewed told me that her mother would never even know all the things she wasn’t saying; the girl knows that there are certain topics her mother doesn’t want to hear about from her, and one of them is definitely her desire to be with boys sexually.
Mothers are uncomfortable partially because sex is such a taboo subject for teen girls. But they’ve also adopted the social standard that if you discuss sex and sexual desire with your daughter, she’ll fall down that slippery slope into promiscuity. As a result, many tell their daughters about abstinence. They let them know that
