"Yes" and "no" don't happen in a vaccum

Sometimes I think Hugo is trying to provoke me with posts like this. The boiled down premise is that now that women have the right to say "yes" to sex that they want, they have lost a lot of their right to say "no" to sex they don't want. Hugo is specifically refering to teenage girls and the immense pressure on them to engage in sex acts they are uncomfortable with to garner the approval of teenage boys, which pains us all in no small part because as adults we cannot imagine whose approval could be less important than that of teenage boys. So the whole thing just seems like a set-up for humiliation.

Hugo explains that he' s never heard anyone say that they wish they had sex at a younger age. Well, I'm going to go ahead and just address that really quickly. Sometimes I wish I had started having sex younger. Looking back, I was mature enough and I had a good enough relationship that it wouldn't have been as big an issue as I thought it was at the time. I am reluctant to write that, in part because it's not unlikely that a reader or two of this blog tried to convince me of that at the time, albeit for selfish reasons. But mostly because it's considered unseemly for women to wish that they had sex that they didn't have. And that's because the double standard is alive and kicking.

Contrary to what a lot of people would like to believe, the messages out there aren't all telling girls that they have to say yes to everything. Certainly, those messages are all over the place, as they were when I was a teenager not all that long ago. And having younger sisters, I definitely see how the pressure to make yourself a compliant toy to be used by your male peers for sexual gratification can be overwhelming. And it's much worse than any stupid small thing like having your boyfriend leave you if you don't put out.

The pressures that really got to me and that I see getting to younger women now aren't as simple as just the pressures to have sex. It's the pressure to mold their desires and needs completely to the terms set by younger men. I didn't have sex when I was younger because from what I saw it was an exercise in humiliation--it seemed once you went there then people felt free to make a spectacle out of you and you had no choice but to go along with it and fake good humor about it. I wasn't afraid that my boyfriend would or wouldn't leave me, but I was very much afraid that he would start calling me clingy if I wanted him to call me or he would brag about what happened to his friends and I would have to laugh along as they laughed at me. (The former did happen, the latter not.)

But, as it turned out, saying no to sex didn't really do much to relieve the pressures that I conform to a litany of standards regarding what is "cool" for teenage girls to do if they want the boys to like them, some of those standards being contradictory indeed. (Most girls I know get completely flummoxed by trying to both refrain from being clingy and yet also be completely available to your boyfriend.) And of course teenage girls are often called on to make spectacles of themselves for the boys and then are laughed at when they do so, such as the really ridiculous trend of encouraging girls to make out with each other for everyone's entertainment. The hardest thing is feeling like you can't win.

On top of all this is the pressure to fetishize teenage virginity, which I find to be just as perverse and appalling as all the tongue-cluckers find teenage kids who experiment sexually with each other to be, if not more so because those who are fetishizing teenage virgins are adults who should know better. I know people think they are protecting girls, but these virginity pledges and whatnot are just as much about requiring girls to put their sexuality on display if they want social approval.

The whole virgin thing is just as much about obtaining male approval as anything else, anyway. Whenever someone who is enthusiastic about it is asked why waiting for marriage is so great anyway, the answer is usually something along the lines of saving it up for your husband or some other beautiful-sounding euphemism. No matter how you put it, I suspect that the main thing is that it's still a big thrill to be a woman's "first" and certainly there's something flattering about being someone's "only", not to mention that a man whose wife/girlfriend has "waited" for him and him only has the confidence that she's not comparing him to anyone else. I know these are all unreasonable feelings, but the funny thing is that sex brings out unreasonable feelings all over the place.

To my mind, the real issue is not whether or not girls feel comfortable saying "yes" or "no" to specific situations, but whether or not we're making it possible for them to say "yes" or "no" to a culture that insists that their sexuality belongs to everyone but themselves--be it a bunch of frat boys at a party or to some nebulous future husband. Start by teaching girls that your sexuality belongs to you and you only and it will become much easier for them to negotiate what sexual experiences they wish to have or not.