Dirty Little Secrets

“It works like a charm,” she told me.

There are some real concerns about older men soliciting teenage girls via Facebook. A few cases have been reported, such as one about a thirty-four-year-old man in North Carolina who had a sexual relationship with a minor after getting to know her on Facebook, or the twenty-seven-year-old Pennsylvania man who changed his relationship status to “Engaged” to a fourteen-year-old girl (the joke in all the headlines was that there was no “statutory rape” relationship option).^{114}

But while these men are clearly predatory, simply posting sexy photos to Facebook isn’t necessarily dangerous, at least not in that way. Just like with sexting, the harm is mostly related to what the poster is hoping to get from having those photos up, and then what she actually gets. She gets attention for her body, of course. But what does that attention really mean about her? Of course, it means nothing. Having a nice body—or even just having a female body, which is all a girl really needs to get some male attention—doesn’t take a girl very far in life.

Studies have made clear that most of what teenagers do on the Web can be considered positive. Most have a “full-time intimate community” they communicate with online—whether through instant messaging, Facebook, MySpace, or other sites—and they don’t do much more than that. When they do, they seek information or experiment with digital media production, such as figuring out how to accomplish something on their own. A study done by the MacArthur Foundation determined that, although it may look like kids are wasting their time online, they are actually building technological skills and literacy, something needed to succeed in our modern world.^{115}

Researchers have also found that Internet and cell phone communication leads to greater self-disclosure, which builds closer, more intimate relationships with friends.^{116} This is another reason that websites providing real, frank information about sex—and an opportunity for questions—are so valuable. Where talking to parents is important, such a conversation can be embarrassing, for both parties. Even the most self-assured parents would be fooling themselves if they thought their teens were telling and asking them everything. We can think of resources online, and the self-disclosing conversations among peers, as bolsters to the support and education parents and schools can provide.

Parents will get nowhere, however, if their fears turn into what teenagers perceive as violations of privacy. Blocking their Internet usage, checking up on their computers, and wrangling passwords from their teens will only lead teenagers to tell even less, and the more open the lines of communication are between teenagers and adults concerning sex-related issues, the better.

Meanwhile, Johanna continues to send dirty texts, but she won’t send any more photos. She told me that at some point she realized it was degrading.

“More degrading than the words?” I emailed.

“Yeah.” She emailed back from her phone.

I asked her what she thought about other girls sending photos. “If a girl wants to do it, that’s up to her,” she said.

Her signature from the phone quoted her favorite band, Escape the Fate. “My heart’s on an auction.”

When I asked her what that meant to her, she said, “It sums me up.”

Part Two GAINING POWER

Chapter 9 GROWN-UP GIRL The Adult Loose Girl

The loose girl is still in there. Sometimes in my dreams. Sometimes in my fantasies. Sometimes in catching the eye of the hot guy in line at the grocery store. I’m fifty-one years old and have been a recovering loose girl since I was thirty-four.

Laurie has been married for eighteen years now. She is in her fifties, with two teenage boys. She and her husband make a good living. They have a beautiful house in a great neighborhood, two cars, and annual travel to other countries. She buys herself a new wardrobe every year, and on each anniversary, her husband buys her a new piece of jewelry. By anyone’s standards, she is living the good life. But if you look more closely, you will find a woman who feels like she’s still seventeen. She dresses every morning with the thought of getting male attention. She works out, not for her health, but so that a man might still find her attractive. She worries about getting older, about wrinkles and sagging. She goes to a doctor to get some things done here and there—a little tuck or plumping or whitening—all with the thought that she wants men to want her. Her husband doesn’t know this, but she’s always looking for men—when she is at the grocery store, at the bank, getting lunch when she’s at work. She’s always got her eyes open for the possibility of men.

There is, in fact, one man she works with. It was inevitable, she guesses. They flirt heavily, and she thinks about him as she puts on her clothes in the morning, wondering what he’ll think. They smile from across the room. Something is going to happen. She knows it will. More, she wants it to. She doesn’t know why. She loves her husband. They have no more problems than any other married couple. For the most part, their relationship is great. But this craving she has—she can’t control it. She wants something to happen with the man at work. It’s all she thinks about.

Laurie’s story is like that of many other women who come to me. While we are worrying about our teen girls and their desperation around boys and sex, the women who used to be those girls are still there, too—grown-up loose girls, carrying the same pain, looking to get men’s attention instead of boys’. One woman wrote me and asked, “What happens to old sluts?” It’s an important question, one I intend to explore in this chapter.

A common goal for most women—and men, but more so women—is to get married. The marriage aspiration is reflected throughout our culture. In plenty of popular songs, such as Beyonce’s “All the Single Ladies” in which she sings, “If you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it,” pointing to her finger. Marriage is portrayed as what a girl deserves. If you want to be with me, in other words, you will need to marry me, because that’s what I deserve. Many Hollywood movies and television series end with the engagement ring. It is the finale, the greatest possible attainment, the thing every girl should want above all else. Marriage means that you are chosen and wanted by someone, which is a loose girl’s greatest desire.

I ended Loose Girl with my marriage, too, but I made a point of not closing the book that way. Instead, I showed a scene of myself in a bar, catching the eye of yet another boy. I didn’t do anything more than look that evening, but I wanted to make clear to my readers that just because I was married didn’t mean my struggle was over. I still spent too much time thinking about male attention. I still could easily let any situation where I felt wanted turn into another loose-girl event. The reaction to my ending was mixed. Bloggers wrote things like, “It seems to me she hasn’t changed at all.” Others liked the ambiguity. They felt this was more honest than suggesting I was all fixed by the end. Plenty interpreted the end to mean that they, too, could have real love some day, that they’d reach the “end” of something, which is a problem, I guess, with having to have an ending to the book. And plenty were irritated by the fact that I ended with a marriage. They wanted to see me changed in a way that didn’t have anything to do with boys or men.

I stick to my intentions about ending that way because I wanted to emphasize that many loose girls marry like I did, and yet it doesn’t mean anything, not really, about how we change. In many ways, I married to simply take myself out of the market. It’s not that the man I’d met was magical, that he somehow knew how to love me in a way others couldn’t. He was a good man, but he was still human with all the imperfections and difficulties that come along with that. He did not save me from myself. He didn’t transform me into someone else. I was still me: the loose girl. The work of having intimacy had only just begun.

Being a loose girl is a lifelong process. I will always have to watch myself carefully, and I will surely always struggle. I will always make mistakes here and there. Whenever life gets hard, whenever something makes me feel