Please Stop Protecting Me
Irradiated by LabRat
Look, I agree that the creeping sexualization of younger and younger girls is creepy and damaging and bad and wrong and I would like to see it stopped. My reaction to coming around a corner only to come face to face with Baby Bratz, the adorable infant dolls that look like they’re ready for a gang-bang, once nearly got me thrown out of Sears. I fully acknowledge and recognize the pressure that girls and women are under to be sexual and edgy in order to be seen as any sort of prospect for boys, and I acknowledge again that it’s bad and damaging.
That said, human women have sex drives. Some of them are on the right and left tail of the bell curve regarding this, but even a doe-eyed teenage girl has hormones just like the teenage boy does. Sure, she might be sexting that cad of a boy because she wants to be loved and feel valued, but she might also be doing it because it’s exciting and sexy and on some level she wants to do him. It’s bad for society that girls feel pressured to be overtly sexual in order to be worth interest at all, but at the same time it’s also equally bad for both the girls and for their future mates if they’re told that women (real women, good women, proper women) don’t really have sexual feelings like boys do, and that if she feels otherwise she’s just sick in the head because of cultural pressures. It tells her both that she doesn’t and can’t know and understand herself- and that those real feelings are things she should reject, whether shoving them entirely aside (most can’t, welcome to life as a sexually reproducing species), or constructing elaborate rationalizations and denial games so that, to her, it doesn’t really count if she was drunk at the time or it was otherwise spontaneous. (And unprotected, and ill-advised.)
Being a teenager is a messy stage of figuring out your identity and your place in the world and what you’re going to do with all the things that go into that. So teenage girls do silly, stupid things, and screw up, and so forth- but the catch is that this includes sexuality, whether we like it or it’s good for us or not. You don’t know who you are yet, so you flip through goth and nerd and band and jock identities looking for one that fits. You don’t know how to manage your emotions without your parents telling you how yet, but something inside you tells you to break from them, so you go through big emotional storms about little things because that’s still new ground. And, likewise, you don’t know how to cope with your own genitals yet- so you have weird fantasies you feel ashamed and excited about and do things that, in the eyes of any adult, are just as foolish as having a complete meltdown because having blue hair was banned by school/your parents. But they’re about sex, so the consequences are much bigger- not that this makes a bit of difference to the necessity of the phase.
We treat boys as though they’re infected with this massive, explosive power, but we acknowledge it’s not really their fault- wanting sex is just part of being male, after all- so we don’t, as a culture, treat it like that big of a deal, we just impress upon them that the consequences can be huge as best we can and move on. With girls, on the other hand, we talk as though parents failed when they set toe in the exact same territory, as though it’s up to them to keep that cache of explosives safe, and to impress upon the girls that it will be their responsibility to protect civilization by keeping the out-of-control filthy male beasts… that she wants to be important to, that she’s probably irresistibly drawn to if heterosexual, and whose basic drives she shares… at bay. Meanwhile the boys get the message that the girls are prey to be caught, or a challenge to be cracked, rather than being confused much like themselves. And, well, if they indulge the “beast”… well, boys are like that, it’s not their fault really. (But it might be hers, she didn’t try hard enough to get away.)
Sex and love create enough problems just by their very nature without culturally front-loading even more frustration, self-loathing, and false dichotomies into it. When you’re setting up a societal expectation that even wives must basically want jewelery, chores, or something else in exchange for doing her brutish, carnal husband the favor of having sex with him… that creates its own problems. Reacting in the opposite direction from over-sexualization of women and girls and trying to stuff them in cultural burqas won’t solve more problems than it creates- but normalization might.
January 25th, 2010 at 8:20 am
Wait, what? Are you saying that girls have a sex drive too? Blasphemy!
January 25th, 2010 at 10:04 am
I am lazy, so please find a website with a .wav file of applause, and credit me for sending you to it.
This is a brilliant insight into the unknown that is female sexuality, and it appears that society is at least partially to blame for the mystery. Very, very well said.
I’m going to share this with my wife, and I’m going to remember it when my daughter hits “that age.”
Then I’m going to clean my guns anyway, and there’s nothing you can do about it;)
tweaker
January 25th, 2010 at 10:27 am
I can definitely agree with you about the over-sexualization of young girls, and agree that women need to be able to express their sexuality, but I think it all must come down to context, and appropriate ages. As the father of two young girls, I certainly don’t want either of them exploring their ‘sexual identity’ in grade school, middle school, or even high school. I hope that when they’re old enough to have the conversation, that they’ll feel comfortable enough to talk with me, or their mother, and we can instill in them that their self-worth does not revolve around someone elses crotch cravings.
I think that one of the reasons why budding sexuality and hormones is treated differently with boys and girls is the whole aspect of consequences and responsibility. If that boy gets stupid, he can, and will most likely, walk away and leave the problem for someone else to deal with. The girl, on the other hand, if she gets pregnant, it’s her consequence to deal with, regardless of whether she wants to or not. She is forced to take responsibility, at least minimally.
I see a lot of this in my line of work. Guys won’t take responsibility for their actions until years later, when they’re being hounded for child support, and by this time, have multiple children by multiple girls/women. Does it suck that we place the majority of pressure on the girls not to have sex? Yes, I would say it does. However, it’s the girls that will have to live with the consequences, not the boys, unless and until such time has they’re arrested and brought before a family court judge for non-payment of child support.
We can exhort the boys not to have sex until we’re blue in the face, and no doubt some parents do, however, in the end, it will be the girls who get stuck with the consequences, which is why I think we focus on pressuring the girls.
Hmm, can’t find a nice way to wrap this up, so I’ll just let it go as is.
Casey
January 25th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
My point is that regardless of whether a girl’s parents want her to explore her sexuality when biology presses the issue, she will. By that I don’t mean “go out and fuck the first appropriate target”, but in some fashion face up to it and yes, do some forms of exploring behind closed doors. It’s not really something you can just put on hold until some magical age of responsibility, and even if you could it wouldn’t exactly be healthy to be at a pre-adolescent level of self-understanding at an age where sex is expected to be part of dating unless she has some pretty powerful religious convictions that held out through childhood into adulthood. (Which is something else that must be hers and hers alone, as a parent cannot force real faith.)
Regardless of whether there are real practical reasons why we put more pressure on the girls, the fact remains that it’s far from healthy for them- especially when “pressure” takes the form of instilling major psychological framework for denial and shame games over being heterosexual.
January 25th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Casey: Just be prepared to buy them “toys”, then. Cheaper than child support.
January 25th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
wait! sex drive in women is normal?
but- but- but- I want to be dirty!
January 25th, 2010 at 10:00 pm
LR- Excellent post! One more ‘thing’ to throw in the mix… Puberty is occurring at earlier ages than in the past. My neighbor’s daughters both went through puberty at ages 9 and 10… That is NOT an age where they should be worried about boys, much less be getting hit on by boys; they should still be playing with dolls!!! Having said that, when they were 12 and 13, they looked 18-19 and were ‘confused’ to say the least. Thankfully they both made it to college and graduated before having kids… I don’t have a good answer, as you can beat it into a boy’s head time and time again, and the hormones will rule in the end (along with peer pressure). Girls get a similar peer pressure but I’m not sure it’s as prevalent.
January 26th, 2010 at 9:05 am
All good points. There are an enormous number of bad effects of teaching that girls have no sex drive and just use sex as a means to nonsexual ends, too many to list; something that LabRat points out briefly is that it distorts male perception of women’s sex drive with ugly consequences for both after marriage. If she’s not going to enjoy it anyway, the man tries to provide minimal inconvenience instead of pleasure, which is pretty much a guarantee that there will be no pleasure. Another is that if women only use sex to gain nonsexual goods, then they are basically all prostitutes who vary only in the type of coin and number of clients. Old virgin spinsters are the only ones who go through life without ever “selling their bodies”, which is not most parent’s ambition for their daughters.
Casey_in_Carolina accurately points out that girls bear most of the consequences of having sex before they’re ready. I think the primary source of the myth of female nonsexuality is that when encouraging girls not to have sex, it’s easier not to have to mention that it feels great. Kind of like when encouraging people not to use drugs, there is usually no mention that the high feels good. The bad effects of this myth are too serious for that kind of laziness. BTW, I am a Christian and would encourage men and women both to marry as virgins; but if you’re a man please don’t marry a woman who is not looking forward to sex, and if as a woman you think that you shouldn’t or won’t enjoy sex, do not ruin some poor man’s life by marrying him. Stay single until you find a way to get over it.
January 26th, 2010 at 10:19 pm
Casey,
I don’t know how old your daughters are but I’ve been having that conversation with my son and three daughters (with varying degrees of specificity) since they were 5 or 6.
As soon as they ask, “Where do babies come from?”