This article by Caitlin Flanagan has been thoroughly dissected by other feminist writers, but of course I have to throw in my two cents. Flanagan, for the unfamiliar, is somewhat obsessed with the sex lives of teenage girls, and particularly with teenage blow-jobs. In her latest article, she argues that teenage girls are rebelling against the Dominant Culture by demanding… boyfriends. Neat! Original!
In case you haven’t noticed, millions of girls are in the midst of a cultural insurrection. Armed with the pocket money that has made them a powerful consumer force since the 1920s, girls have set their communal sights on a particular kind of entertainment, and when they find it, they transform it into a commercial phenomenon that leaves even the creators and marketers of that entertainment dumbfounded. What do these girls—with such different backgrounds and aspirations, foreign to one another in so many respects—demand right now? The old story, the one they were forced to abandon for a while, but will be denied no longer: the Boyfriend Story.
They find it in High School Musical and in the Twilight series; in the music of Taylor Swift, and even in Glee, which goes to the greatest lengths to prove itself a convention-defying, diversity-championing instrument of the Now, but which only proves, episode after episode, that the reason many teenyboppers and gay boys form such fast friendships is that their hearts are in the same place: in the gossamer-wrapped quest for true and perfect love. Rachel may have two daddies, but when she crushes hard on her dreamy chorus teacher and expresses it in a duet of “Endless Love” with him—and when an equally besotted guidance teacher airs her own feelings for the man in the form of “I Could Have Danced All Night”—well, when that happens, we are definitely back in Kansas. Taylor Swift’s songbook, filled with lyrics composed by the enchantingly shy 19-year-old, might have been written for Doris Day. One of her biggest hits is about unreturned love for a boy who has fallen not just for the wrong girl, but for the wrong kind of girl—a Veronica, not a Betty; a Ginger, not a Mary Ann:
She wears high heels, I wear sneakers;
She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers.
Apparently this is new.
That somehow segues into Flanagan talking about her own mother, who attempted to discuss sex with her only to have young Caitlin get squeamish. Which, you know, is often what happens when parents try to talk about sex with their kids. Except most peoples’ kids don’t spend the rest of their adult life writing about it in the Atlantic.
I grew up, I went to college and then moved on into adult life, and my mother became one of those kindly, kooky older ladies whose dedication to volunteering at Planned Parenthood bordered on the unseemly, given the distance between their age and their own need for the services provided. She was part of a generation of women who helped build an infrastructure not just of attitudes but of medical services (from birth control to abortion) rendered to teenage girls and built on a host of assumptions: that a girl is capable of great sexual desire, and that this desire should not cause her to lose her chance at an education or an independent life; that a huge number of modern mothers were committed to helping their daughters incorporate sexual lives within a normal teenage girlhood, one in which sex did not cleave the girl instantly and permanently from her home and her family. These mothers were willing to run as much interference as was needed to make these things possible—with dads, who tended not to be as enthusiastic about the prospect of a cherished daughter’s becoming sexual; with PTAs, which often balked at the kind of sex education these beliefs would require; with the long-entrenched double standard that said a boy could have sex and retain his good reputation, but a girl who went all the way was ruined.
Yes, how unseemly. Not like writing about Rainbow Parties in a major American magazine.
But no matter how forward-thinking, no matter how progressive, those long-ago women might seem to us now, they shared one unquestioned assumption about girls and sex, a premise that, if expressed today, might cast doubt on one’s commitment to girls’ sexual liberation: all of them, to a woman, believed in the Boyfriend Story. This set wasn’t in the business of providing girls and young women the necessary information and services to allow boys and men to use and discard them sexually. Their reaction to the kinds of sexual experiences that so many American girls are now having would have been horror and indignation.
And here is where we get into the Kids These Days lecture. Ready? Let’s play.
Today’s teenage girl—as much designed for closely held, romantic relationships as were the girls of every other era—is having to broker a life for herself in which she is, on the one hand, a card-carrying member of the over-parented generation, her extended girlhood made into a frantically observed and constantly commemorated possession of her parents, wrought into being with elaborate Sweet 16 parties, and heart-tugging video montages, and senior proms of mawkish, Cinderella-dream dimensions—and on the other hand she has also been forced into a sexual knowingness, brought upon her by the fact that, beginning at a relatively tender age, she has been exposed to the kind of hard-core pornography that her own mother has probably never seen; that her earliest textbooks on puberty have included, perforce, eye-opening and often upsetting information on everything from the transmission of HIV to the range and expression of sexual orientations; that she has been taught by her peer culture that hookups are what stolen, spin-the-bottle kisses were to girls a quarter century ago. She is a little girl; she is a person as wise in the ways of sexual expression as an old woman.
Forced into sexual knowingness by textbooks! With actual pictures of the human body! How awful that must have been. How scarring to know that some people are attracted to those of the same sex (those “some people,” obviously, not including any teenage girls). How horrible to know how to best protect oneself from contracting diseases and infections.
Two divergent cultural tracks regarding girls and sexuality have developed in this country. At one extreme, in not-insignificant numbers, you have evangelical Christians who have decided to demand that their children—and in particular their daughters—remain virgins until marriage. Until very recently, this would not have even needed to be put into words; it was the shared assumption of most Americans, and everything in the culture—from mainstream entertainment to religious doctrine to the most casual remarks passed from mother to daughter—supported it. But by now it is a minority opinion, and so the evangelicals have created a vast, explicit, and (from the outside, anyway) somewhat unseemly culture to communicate the goal to the teenagers of the community. At Purity Balls, fathers pledge themselves to the protection of their daughters’ virginity; True Love Waits campaigns carry the message from teens to teens; abstinence-only education programs flourish in parts of the country where there are high numbers of evangelicals, because of the value they place on virginity.
At the other extreme—with very little middle ground—are girls growing up with scant direction or guidance about their sexual lives, other than the most clinical. Is it any wonder that so many girls are binge-drinking and reporting, quite candidly, that this kind of drinking is a necessary part of their preparation for sexual activity? Unlike the girls of my era, who looked forward to sex, not as a physical pleasure (although it would—eventually—become that for most of us), but as a way of becoming ever closer to our boyfriends, these girls are preparing themselves for acts and experiences that are frightening, embarrassing, uncomfortable at best, painful at worst. These girls aren’t embracing sex, all evidence to the contrary. They’re terrified of it.
Really, though? Those two paths are what teenage girls have to go down?
I do agree with Flanagan that a lot of teenage girls (and older-than-teenage girls) do prepare themselves for sex not as a pleasure but as something that they do to please their boyfriends. But how is that fundamentally different from Flanagan’s era, where girls and women had sex to be closer to their boyfriends? Sex is still structured as something women do for men; it can still feel humiliating either because the dude you’re with wants you to do something that doesn’t feel right (what happens to Kids Today, apparently), or because you know that if you have sex you’ll be socially shunned (what happened to Kids Yesterday, apparently).
What Flanagan gets wrong, though, is the idea that girls today are faced with two choices, and now they are rebelling in choosing… monogamous relationships. I’m not a teenager, but I was one not so long ago — and yes, Kids In Those Days did “hook up,” and I’m pretty sure there was a Larry King special on it that set off all of our mothers. But we also dated and fell in puppy-love and sometimes real love, and we made mistakes that we regretted and mistakes that we suspected were maybe not such mistakes after all. Sometimes we wanted boyfriends and sometimes we didn’t; sometimes we got what we wanted and sometimes we didn’t. We had boyfriends, we got our hearts broken, we broke hearts, we kissed boys at parties, we drank too much, and sometimes we did more than kiss. We experimented, and we judged and gossiped about other girls who did the same things. We tried to figure out where the line was between “getting boys to like us” and “being slutty” (and we never really did figure out, at least in high school, that the line doesn’t stay in one place). I personally took a virginity pledge, and later I taught peer sex education classes — the latter informed my sexual decision-making (including the decision to wait until well after high school to have sex) in much healthier ways than the former. But, like most teenagers, I figured it out. And sometimes I didn’t. As a grizzled old 26-year-old, I still sometimes don’t figure it out.
The need to stuff The Teenage Girl Experience into a neat box erases the varied and complicated lives that actual, real teenage girls lead. I’m all for criticizing the ways in which teenage girls are sexually pressured — whether the pressure is to have sex or to not have sex (or both, as the case seems to be). But adding a new kind of pressure, as Flanagan does here — the idea that the really good teenage girls want boyfriends — doesn’t seem like it would actually help very many teenage girls.
It might also put a dent in Flanagan’s career, what with her having cornered the market on teenage girl blow-job stories. Caitlin, maybe you should reconsider this call to arms.