Dirty Little Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page B

rectify this, let’s examine the role of the girl more closely. After all, as boys are boxed into being owners of their sexual identity, girls are given very few options about who they can be when it comes to sex.

Chapter 3
    THE UNHOLY TRINITY
    The Virgin, the Slut, and the Empowered Girl
    I am still desperate for male attention, and I feel unwanted, ugly, and needy. Sometimes, I don’t like aspects of my personality. Why am I so selfish? So loud? So unfocused?
    THE VIRGIN
    Winnie told me she was never “that girl” in high school. She was a virgin. She promised herself she would wait until she fell in love because, she knows now, her culture had promised her that this would get her what she wanted. She’d be loved. She’d be valued. She’d be good.
    When she got to college, though, she decided one night she didn’t want to wait anymore. She wanted finally to be “put on a pedestal,” something she had ironically been promised she would get if she stayed a virgin. But what she really got as a virgin was invisibility. The girls around her who were putting out were the ones getting talked about and pursued. All this time had passed, and she had hung on to her virginity and still didn’t feel loved, or valued, or even necessarily good. What she felt was empty.
    So one night she drank tequila and lost her virginity to a random guy. After that, as the weeks and months passed, she moved on to the next guy—and the next, and the next. Winnie says that she had underestimated the intensity of the high that she would get from the attention. She never had guessed how easily promiscuity would become a sort of addiction for her. Today, she says, she’s still a loose girl, and she’s so deep in it, she doesn’t have a clue how to get out: “I still haven’t been loved. I still give it away. I still feel empty when it’s over.”
    While promoting Loose Girl , I was invited to appear on a morning show with three teens. They embodied the three sexual paths that girls can follow in our culture today: the virgin, the slut, and the empowered girl. In other words, girls can choose not to have sex; have sex but be shamed for it because it’s too much, or the wrong kind, or because it harms them; or have sex because they are trying to claim it as their own choice.
    Believe it or not, the virgin was the girl who interested me most. The conviction behind her virginity drove her to tell fellow teen girls to retain their virginity. She was 100 percent sure that she was right. And she had proof! Most everyone in the audience lauded her. Her mother was so proud. Sex education—funded by abstinence-only programs—supported her. In fact those programs sent her to talk at other schools. The churches let her know she was doing the right thing. She was a good girl.
    The virgin owns a mythic narrative that goes like this: She is more desirable to our culture in every way than the girl who has sex. She is lovable. She is girlfriend and wife material. She is prettier, cleaner, holier, and just all-around better than the girl who has sex. We say that virgins “respect their bodies.” (Although this is a concept that always has seemed misguided: Why does not sharing oneself intimately and physically with a partner mean respecting oneself? Why does respect equal denying one’s own physical pleasures?)
    The virgin myth also assumes that girls have a much lower sex drive than boys, that they don’t want sex. It assumes, in fact, that girls are responsible for fending off boys’ out-of-control, aggressive libidos. (You can see how easily this notion leads to the deduction that girls can be responsible for their own rapes: “If you dress in sexy clothes, boys can’t control themselves,” or “If you let a boy kiss you or get sexually excited in any way, you shouldn’t be surprised when he can’t help himself, even as you say ‘no’”).
    In this way, virgins are assigned a false strength. The virgin teen who was to be on television