The 'Right' Sexuality for Girls

Setting up an elusive ideal can lead to false empowerment and isolation

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By SHARON LAMB

Pity the pre-teen girl, one day riding her bike down the road at top speed, the next day shaped by marketers into a party diva. Close behind are a cadre of researchers interested in studying her sexual development and behavior. The change is because of a little event called puberty, which transforms young girls into objects of adults' invasive attention. Throughout history, societies have attempted to control the bodies of girls as they became women, for reasons ranging from protection to exploitation. And although we're not locking chastity belts, binding feet, or corseting waists any longer, our interest in what we see as girls' new sexuality is as intense as ever.

Some journalists try to create panic among their readers by asking whether little girls have become too sexy too soon, or whether teenage girls have gone wild. Public-health researchers trot out statistics based on large-scale studies of teenage birthrates and who is "doing it" at what age. They are concerned with issues such as HIV transmission, condom use, and pregnancy, but they rarely ask what kind of sex girls or boys should be having. To be fair, statistics aren't meant to answer the big questions in life, and we need to pay attention to public health and safety.

Feminist researchers in psychology and education, however, have been theorizing about the kind of sexuality girls ought to have. They're not afraid to investigate morality and what makes a good life. But while they — and I include myself in this group — explore the meaning and cultural context of girls' sexual development, the good sexual life they describe may be an elusive ideal that, in the end, is not very helpful to girls in the real world.

Feminist scholars often write about pleasure, voice, and desire, words that evoke a preciousness about girls' sexuality — as if it were a hidden jewel, to be uncovered and treasured by a savvy interviewer, or otherwise exploited by boys and men. Unlike boys' sexuality, generally ignored by researchers because it seems simple and straightforward, girls' sexuality is viewed by feminist scholars as a suppressed story that needs airing. But what is the story that emerges? And what happy ending do researchers imagine? What we seem to hope for most — after our public-health hopes for safe sex — is that girls will learn to be subjects, not objects; to recognize feelings of desire; and to experience sexual pleasure.

That somewhat idealized version of sexual health may have been created in reaction to the rampant sexual objectification of girls and women. Acknowledging women's subjectivity and pleasure seems like a pretty good antidote to that objectification, which years of empirical and qualitative studies suggest is harmful to girls and women. For instance, the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, on which I served, reported that exposure to and endorsement of sexually objectifying images can affect self-esteem and body image, and can lead to depression and eating disorders.

Women of college and high-school age were the subjects of most of the research on sexual objectification that was reviewed for the APA's report, but if exposure to something is harmful to older girls and women, it's probably not so hot for younger girls either. And although we know very little about how objectification affects the sex lives of teens and college students, we can bet that if they hate their bodies, have low self-esteem, and are depressed, as adults they're probably not going to have the kind of sex that we wish them to have.

The ideal version of sexual health that feminist researchers describe may be an antidote not only to objectification, but also to victimization. More than any other act, sexual violence makes a woman into an object for someone else's use. Thus objectification — even in its most frivolous forms, like fashion advertising — can seem linked to sexual violence. To experience desire and sexual pleasure, on the other hand, seems to counter objectification. To desire involves being a subject rather than an object, and it requires a sturdy self that feels entitled and can stand up to the harmful effects of sexual violence and life in a society that seems to tolerate such violence.

Another way that the concept of desire seems to undo the wrongs done to girls and women is its working against a stereotyped notion of sexual passivity. In Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (Harvard University Press, 2002), Deborah L. Tolman complained that we've "desexualized girls' sexuality, substituting the desire for relationship and emotional connection for sexual feelings in their bodies." Recognizing that fact, theorists have used the concept of desire as a way to undo the double standard that applauds a guy for his lust, calling him a player, and shames a girl for hers, calling her a slut.

Healthy sexuality for a woman thus got defined as an alternative to objectification, victimization, and female passivity. And healthy sexuality for a teenage girl has come to mean that she is knowledgeable about her own desires; uses her full reasoning ability in making choices; is uninfluenced by TV, books, or movies; pursues her own pleasure as much as her partner's; and is a subject, not an object. She is never passive but always responsible, and she knows how to consent to and how to refuse sex. Even more important, she knows if she wants to consent to sex or refuse it.

But that is such an idealized notion of how to be sexual that no girl could achieve it. Do we really want to set girls off on yet another path to perfection?

And what is so ideal about nonstop empowerment? The idealized teenager with her "grrl" power is ironically similar in some ways to the sexualized female marketed today, a figure well described in Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Free Press, 2005). In that version of sexuality, a teenage girl can feel empowered because she chooses to lap dance, striptease, strut it, flash it, flaunt it, and give it away. She feels in charge, as an autonomous agent who is having fun. Because she thinks she is choosing, and because what she does is fun, voyeurs seem like admirers instead of exploiters.

Feminist researchers, again myself included, have understood in two ways the powerful-seeming wild girl who seems to be choosing to pole dance for boys' attention. The first is a social-psychological perspective that looks at the rewards she gets for her behavior and describes her choices as heavily influenced by those rewards. The second is a Marxist perspective that describes her self-sexualization as stemming from a false consciousness, and not really the act of an agent. As Lyn Mikel Brown and I wrote in Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers' Schemes (St. Martin's Press, 2006), the girl is encouraged to believe that she is exercising power by choosing to be the kind of sexual object that has been defined as sexy by men. But in fact she is more a victim of marketers, who have been feeding her a steady stream of messages that equate porn with power.

Perhaps, though, there are forms of objectification that are more positive. Women and men alike long to be admired for their beauty and sexuality, so in a sense, everyone wants to be both an object and a subject.

In the useful essay "Objectification," the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum describes several forms of objectification. She notes that it is possible in an equitable relationship for one person to sexually objectify another without being exploitative or demeaning. She suggests that longing to be admired, wanted, and looked at as an object of desire is part of human nature, and it is possible to admire, want, and look fairly. In a just society, all people — male and female; heterosexual, gay, bisexual, transgender — should be able to have a sexual life in which they are both subjects and objects of desire, without exploitation.

Some feminists write about another antidote for objectification: authenticity. What they generally mean is that a girl is acting authentically if she is in touch with her own sexual feelings, understands how her body works, and is not performing acts simply because they please men.

But the idea of authenticity is tied to a Western belief that people — in this case, teenage girls — can construct their own identities, as if they could do so in a vacuum, uninfluenced by the culture around them. In that view, which is certainly one that marketers support, even children are agents who choose from an array of options in a free market. Making choices becomes an act of liberation for a girl who is a desiring subject but who lives in a society that sees desire and subjectivity as unnatural for girls. She looks inside herself and chooses what to do based on her own desires.

The problem is that frequently when a girl looks inside, she finds a packaged version of teenage sexuality. For example, she can end up concluding that she wants to be swept away by love. Replacing the image of the powerful, sexually active female (the "bad" girl) with the image of the old-fashioned female longing for romance (the "good" girl) does not show more authenticity. Rather, it shows that our culture presents just a few ways for women to be sexual. The opposition between the two images reinforces age-old sexism and even suggests that shame about sexuality is connected with wild-girl bravado. Thus seeking romance has problems, but so does empowerment as a wild girl: Teenage girls behave in all sorts of self-destructive ways in the name of love as well as desire.

An additional difficulty with empowerment is that it is self-centered for girls to look within to discover themselves and their true desires. Once a partner is no longer needed to look, approve, admire, or sexualize, a girl's sexuality is disconnected from her interpersonal relationships. Instead of urging girls to look within, researchers might do better to recommend the goal of mutuality with a partner: mutual respect, pleasure, excitement, and interest. Choosing to give as well as to receive, to please someone else as well as being pleased, is not only a realistic aim; it would also reinforce the idea that a good sexual relationship should meet the same standards as other good relationships.

When we tell teens about the kind of sexuality we hope will be theirs, we ought to be careful to guide them toward something that is achievable. For instance, turning away from the subject/object dichotomy and the notion of authentic desire might lead teens and adults to develop ways of being sexual that are more individualized and satisfying than simply accepting what the culture and the media think is sexy, or an idealized alternative. And an emphasis on mutuality could redefine shame, attaching it to the mistreatment of others rather than to the violation of social expectations.

Teenagers will always have their own definitions — both idealized and realistic — of good sex. But if researchers can show them achievable goals that include fairness and mutuality, we may be able to help young people form relationships that help them and their partners flourish.

Sharon Lamb is a professor of psychology at Saint Michael's College and author of Sex, Therapy, and Kids (W.W. Norton, 2006). She was a member of the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls.