In my other life as a reader of pretentious literary fiction, I came across a Paris interview with the poet and memoirist Mary Karr that you might find interesting. It’s not fully available online, but here is the excerpt I find particularly a propos:
KARR: When I started Cherry [her memoir of her adolescence and sexual awakening], I realized there were no words to describe an awakening female libido. Boys have these childlike words like chubby and woody, but the parlance for female genitalia and female desires is too porno.
Looking at an early draft of Cherry, I said to myself, Oh my God, you’re superimposing a forty-year-old woman’s libido on a twelve-year-old girl. It seemed perverse. Like it’d inspire pedophiles to think that every young girl was Lolita. Eventually I realized I’d misrepresented the experience. A twelve-year-old writing a boy’s name on her notebook over and over doesn’t want to get boffed into guacamole. She wants the boy to bring her a valentine and put it in her lunchbox.
INTERVIEWER: It’s a different kind of longing.
KARR: It’s as powerful as a sexual urge but it’s not so genital. It’s somewhat about being seen – what feminist critics might call a longing for the male gaze. Being looked at in this culture invents you as a woman long before you’re getting laid. It was about love more than sex – about beauty, desire.
This last bit of hers was an epiphany for me, though I wonder if it won’t be controversial, considering how many feminist women I know will disclaim ever having Cared About Men, even as teenagers.
Que pensez-vous, commentariat?
“It’s somewhat about being seen.” – This really struck me. To this day (and I’m 34), this is (unfortunately) important to me. I get a thrill when I know men look at me. It’s sad really and can surely be traced back to my abusive childhood. I long for the “male gaze” and work on this issue in therapy a lot.
By the time a girl is 12 years old, unless she’s been living under a rock, she’s fully aware that girls and women are valued for her looks. So obviously, she’ll want to be beautiful and desirable–she’s been taught that’s what counts.
As for this feminist, I always Cared About Men as a teenager. I had raging hormones–like most of the teen population–and I’m heterosexual, so, yeah, I wanted the attention of my male peers, for the exact same reason teenage boys want female attention. Also, I had a lot of platonic male friends, so non-sexual male attention had a big role in my life as well.
The statement that women’s desire is a broader (as it were) phenomenon than a simple physical reaction seems pretty non-debatable to me. There are no simple words for it because it’s not a simple physical event, like an erection.
The “being seen” idea seems pretty valid to me. Remember when you’re a little kid and boys and girls avoid hanging out with each other and call each other names and all that stuff? So then when you hit adolescence, you want them to stop ignoring you and start seeing you. And then you figure out that maybe you can get them to look at you, and it goes on from there. All of this is assuming you’re sexually interested in boys. With girl/girl relationships, I’d guess it’s more complicated.
I just feel like a fail as a feminist that this stupid male gaze is STILL so important to me, I guess.
@theorchidthief: I don’t think you should feel that way. All human beings, male and female, want the desire and approval of others. That desire perpetuates our species and in many ways, helps keep human society running (if we didn’t seek each other’s approval, we wouldn’t have functioning communities.)
Feminism doesn’t mean you have to ignore or scorn other people’s approval or desire, or that you shouldn’t want it. It just means you’re aware of the way the Patriarchy privileges men’s attention and desire above women’s, and in particular, the wrong kind of desire.
I was thinking about this during the porn conversation that happened yesterday and Sunday. I’m sure it’s a problem that predates online porn, but I do think porn has exacerbated it: I know some women who have a hard time really enjoying sex because their primary concern is Looking Hot Doing It. They don’t want this to be their primary concern, but they can’t escape it.
That is SO true, SarahMC.
One of the commenters in that thread also mentioned that in 70s and 80s porn, the actresses looked, well, like normal women–full bushes, breasts of all shapes and sizes, cellulite–compared to today’s porn, where the actresses all look like interchangeable blow-up dolls.
It’s definitely changed society’s notion of what’s desirable and put additional pressure on women to live up to a mostly unattainable, idealized image.
I think she’s hit the nail on the head. Looking back at my middle school days, I wasn’t really thinking about or longing to have sex with the boys I had crushes on. I wanted them to pay attention to me, to think I was special, that I was different from all the other girls. And it *was* an all-consuming desire.
Kind of unrelated but I think that’s part of the reason why the ‘Twilight’ books have been so popular.
As I mentioned in the other thread, the way I reacted to this in my adolescence was by, in a way, making men the subject of the male gaze with slash fic (which is a type of writing I still find really interesting from a feminist perspective). It’s not that I didn’t care about men, but rather that all the men I cared about were fictional and therefore completely unaccessible in any way for looking at me. But I could indulge in looking at them to my heart’s delight. However, this (and probably other aspects of my adolescence) have conspired to give me an odd sense of invisibility, in contrast to what Karr is saying. I never felt “looked at” when I was younger and even now it’s rare. Even in a literal sense, someone has to be very, very obvious about leering at me before I catch on.
Hmm. Very thought-provoking.
To be honest, that last little comment of hers kind of gives me the creeps since it seems to be supporting the old pernicious stereotype that guys just care about doin’ it and girls just care about flowery things. Of course it varies from person to person, but I think that just seems to ignore a whole lot of variations for both females and males—we can’t be put in neat little boxes! I mean, throughout high school I did have some rather flowery daydreams (and still do, even though I’m now in a relationship) but I also thought about sex quite a lot. I’m not really getting defensive here, but I just sort of have an automatic negative reaction to these kinds of Mars-Venus blanket statements.
I do not want to be gazed at. At all. I want to be *seen*. Big difference.
Now, as a younger person–JH/HS–I thought being looked at was pretty awesome. It was a kind of power (a stupid, weak, meaningless kind of power) for girls who weren’t given other means. But that didn’t mean I didn’t do some gazing myself. I have always liked the lads–certain lads, anyway–and I freely engaged in spectacular enjoyment. And sometimes that lead to genital enjoyment, too (though not necessarily w/ the one I was spectating). A valentine for my lunchbox? Are you fucking kidding me with this? As early as 4th grade, my attention was directed towards Making Contact.
In any case, my gazing does/did not carry the cultural power that the gazes directed at me do/did.
it seems to be supporting the old pernicious stereotype that guys just care about doin’ it and girls just care about flowery things.
Right on, Cat. The whole “oh teenage girls are delicate flowers and teenage boys are lust machines” trope is straight from the Patriarchy playbook.
Like PhDork, I engaged in a LOT of gazing myself as a teen, and it was because I wanted to Make Contact, not because I wanted a guy to pass me a romantic note (although that would have been nice, as well).
@BeckyS and Ph.Dork: Yes, but I’m betting that you wanted particular individuals to respond to you, not that you were looking at body parts with a person inside. That’s not to say, as Cat suggests, that girls don’t have explicit sexual feelings. But I think it’s a lot less common for girls to be focused on pleasuring themselves as on sharing pleasure with a desirable boy.
@mischiefmanager: I dunno…I definitely wanted emotional connection with some of those boys in high school, but I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t objectifying them in a masturbatory fantasy kind of way, because they had great lips or strong shoulders or whatever.
It’s funny–I recently had coffee with a guy I went to h.s. with who was the object of some pretty intense objectification on my part in my teen years, and I found myself falling right back into the same pattern. Oh well. FWIW, he still has wonderfully strong chest and shoulders, and big blue eyes.
This might be vaguely OT, but I think I’d need to have a discussion about this with other traumatized ex-Catholics, because my experiences were pretty different from all of yours. As soon as I knew what sex was – before I had experienced desire myself – I was also told in no uncertain terms that if I had sex before marriage I would get pregnant and ruin my life, and so the whole awakening of desire thing was much more fraught than it should have been.
That was in the 1990s. Shocking, no?
God, I wish there were an edit function here, because I realized I forgot to say how I experienced things differently. Basically, for me, for too long, desire was something that was automatically associated with shame and couldn’t be enjoyed. And I *certainly* didn’t have a vocabulary for it.
Hmm, maybe the lack of vocabulary is actually a vestige of the pre-sexual revolution shame about female sexuality that I unfortunately managed to get, big-time, so late in the century?
I had bfs in HS, and yes, emotional connection blah blah romantic notes blee bloo, but really, I knew it wasn’t twoo wuv fowevah. It was “you’re funny and cute and not dumb and let’s go do something fun and maybe find some place private.”
And re: straight-up objectifying lust, I must mention the role late 80s MTV played in my erotic imagination. I didn’t want George Michael to send me flowers or tell me I wasn’t like all the other girls. I wanted to grab his ass and kiss that pretty, pretty mouth.
@Ph.Dork and BeckyS: As Cole Porter said, times have changed. Or maybe all my girlfriends were lying to me.
On the whole, I think your experiences were probably healthier than the idea that all sexual attraction has to have romance involved.
Oh, and Dorkie? Sorry about George Michael. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?
I’ve been staying out of this discussion for a number of reasons, including that I think whatever view I had of my burgeoning sexuality was informed by something I experienced at 12 or 13 that I’m not really sure I’m ready to write about in this space. Suffice to say my introduction to “genital feelings” did not feel like a natural evolution.
I say even that much only because that was true for Karr as well – you’d have to read her first memoir, The Liar’s Club, to get a sense of what her experience was – and I feel like you guys are lacking that context in your criticism of her remarks. Granted I didn’t provide it above, I am doing so now, because I do think it’s relevant.
I also think that as she has just finished saying that she doesn’t know that there’s a vocabulary for the desire she felt, I can forgive her for making a clumsy metaphor in trying to convey it, since she seems to me to be assuming her language will be improper anyway.
I know I’m the one who offered this up for parsing without context, but the direction of this discussion into the “reifying patriarchy” realm has made me uncomfortable as a result. Perhaps I’m just more forgiving to writers who seem, as she does, to have a genuine interest in articulating female desire. They’re at a disadvantage from the get-go, it seems to me.
“I do not want to be gazed at. At all. I want to be *seen*. Big difference.”
I like this a lot. My problem is that What I Want is actually more like The Many Whats That I Want, Many Of Which Are Mutually Exclusive.
At the beginning of my current relationship–my first sexual relationship with a man, and also my first healthy sexual relationship (those two things are not, I think, related)–I found myself doing strange things in order to test my partner’s sexual interest in me. Like, I wanted him to not be sexually attracted to me, because so much masculine sexual attraction is objectifying and gaze-y, and I detest that. But then I also desperately wanted him to be attracted to me, in a way that was entirely everything that I detest about heterosexual attraction as constituted in a patriarchy–I wanted to him Look at me and Want Me, with all of the inevitable and creepy implications of what “Want Me” means. I felt uninterested in sex unless I thought he Wanted Me, but then I was also creeped out by having sex with someone who Wanted Me because it implied a sort of consumption of me, or of sex with me, that made me uncomfortable.
Still, I almost never directly initiate sex because for me, an essential part of sexual attraction is knowing that the person I’m having sex with is attracted to me in such a way as to be the initiator of sex. It’s not that I don’t want to be sexually active, but that for me to enjoy sex I have to be “pursued.” But once the pursuit is announced to me, in whatever way (someone saying “I want to have sex with you” or “I am attracted to you” or “let’s go on a date” or kissing me or whatever) I am distrustful of intention, because pursuit and sexual attraction are so close to pressure, objectification, and sexual violence.
As for vocabulary, one of the hardest things about talking about sex for me, in a critical sense, is the words that mean desire, like “desire” and “want.” I mean, almost every use of the verb “want” in this post has been seriously problematic, because I don’t actually want to invite the male gaze, any more than I want to be the object of the male gaze. In fact, I spend lots of time telling people about how much I hate the male gaze. I want the male gaze to disappear. But whatever part of my (fucked up) brain controls my horniness is entirely contrary to what my conscious, feminist consciousness wants, demands.
It’s hard enough dealing with this stuff in my own head–trying to communicate with a sexual partner is practically impossible. I told my partner that I didn’t want to hear about how he thought I was physically attractive, because it distracted me when we were having sex because it seemed to me to reduce me to a set of body parts. But of course that’s ridiculous and in fact believing that my sexual partner is attracted to me is an essential part of an enjoyable sexual experience for me. It’s all very confusing.
Even more depressing is that I have one of the healthiest sexual relationships of any of my friends (I tend to be a receptacle for many of my friends’ sexual woes, and spent a lot of time listening to them talk about their sex lives.) This is because my partner and I are unusually talky and open about everything, and he’s one of those super empathic people who likes to talk about every emotion and clearly once I get going you can’t shut me up. Most of my friends aren’t as comfortable dissecting all this shit with their SOs, because their boyfriends are douchey or because they want to ignore the implications and impact the patriarchy has had on their lives. Also because most of their boyfriends aren’t really willing to listen to their girlfriends talk about the patriarchy etc as often as I do.
I say even that much only because that was true for Karr as well – you’d have to read her first memoir, The Liar’s Club, to get a sense of what her experience was – and I feel like you guys are lacking that context in your criticism of her remarks. Granted I didn’t provide it above, I am doing so now, because I do think it’s relevant.
So what is the context that we’re missing? The fact that she was raped and sexually assaulted?
Ok. Apparently I’m the odd one out but I ABSOLUTELY did not have “genital” type feelings about boys/men until I was well into high school. Certainly not when I was 12,13,14. I remember liking to flirt with guys and blushing when they paid attention to me or looked at me, but thinking critically about the root of that and from a benefit of hindsight I would NOT put that into the same category of “desire” that I felt later as a sexually mature woman. Obviously that’s just my experience, but based on myself I would say that at least at a younger age female desire does take a somewhat different shape.
That she was abused and raped as a child. And so I think she might have had a different experience vis-a-vis genital desire that might be informing her remarks here.
Ah–I assumed you deliberately omitted that because you didn’t want it to be part of the discussion or didn’t want to reveal a spoiler for people who hadn’t read the book.
Endora, you are certainly not alone. Lots and lots of women were raised the same way, and unfortunately, the “Purity” movement is making sure many more girls are being raised that way today.
Yeah I don’t know if such a thing as a memoir spoiler really exists, considering how dependent memoir is on voice as opposed to plot. (She talks about that too in another part of the interview. I am a nerd!)
In any event I guess I was uncomfortable with the notion that we were discussing a survivor’s observations about her experience of desire as reifying patriarchy. Which felt… icky.
Now I feel left out.
I went into a phase where I DIDNT want to be seen and my lack of body image still troubles me. Maybe I was what people call a “late bloomer” or it could be my troubled childhood.
As a matter of fact feelings of lust of any sort or the desire for a “male gaze” didn’t happen to me even after sex. This is probably TMI but that happened after the discovery that I didn’t NEED a penis for pleasure. I just needed me because ultimately I knew myself better than any partner ever did. It’s almost like something was missing or broken and still is. I think a therapist would have a field day with me.
mm: Thanks. My relationship with George was far less troubling than the one I had with a real live gay-boy-in-the-closet.
PSoul: I haven’t read Karr at all, and I don’t dispute her claim that language is difficult. I’m putting my 34-year old words on experiences from 20 years ago. Women/girls aren’t given words. We’re given (as Endora points out) shame and silence about our bodies. Boys have words, sure, but I doubt their “understanding” is terribly sophisticated.
Karr is probably right that juvenile desire for females is a lot about “being looked at,” being an object. I remember reading that “Man’s desire is for the woman, but woman’s desire is for the desire of the man” very early in my life. It confused the hell out of me. Was that how it really was, or just how it “should be”?
Was this the end of the conversation re: female desire, though? Because if it ends there, whether its prescriptive or descriptive, it’s pretty reifying.
Oh dear, I wasn’t aware of the author’s background. I’m sorry if I made anyone here feel ill at ease! (I don’t know whether it’s customary to apologize when in the company of Harpies, but in my n00bishness I always like to err on the side of caution.)
Let me rephrase: whatever Karr’s background, her discussion (as reprinted here) seems to be about “girls,” not about her.
@Cat: I don’t think you made anyone ill at ease. The sexual abuse aspect of Karr’s experience wasn’t presented in the post or as part of the conversation, so there’s no way you could have known that it would make PSoul uncomfortable.
Regardless, Karr was generalizing about girls and their experience of desire and I don’t think the fact that she was abused changes the substance of what she said or meant.
My personal view is that I’d rather we sat around and talked about what Karr raises as an aspect of female sexual experience. Obviously I can only speak for myself in that vein, and I think that’s true of the rest of us. Given that she’s speaking about writing her memoir and that was provided as context, I do think she’s not being as universalizing as I see people saying she is. YMMV on that point for sure, but I think like most memoir writers she’s only finding the universal in the particular, so I’m okay with it. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I’m more interested, when I think the writer is in good faith as I think Karr is here, in talking about what’s useful about the observation.
Another way of putting this is that I think simply dismissing this observation as “reifying” isn’t helpful because frankly, I could say the same thing about comments above arguing that girls do totally think about sex in a genital way and that to suggest that some don’t is somehow patriarchal in either intent or effect. I think that critique goes too far. I think some people will report living what Karr reports, and I think that if you are interested in talking about what feminine desire is and might be, you have to admit them to the conversation and not be so dismissive.
I’m sorry we are not having the conversation you hoped we would.
I think it has less to do with the expected response and more with the way my thinking is developing, Becky, that’s all.
Oh for cripes sake. It is clear, from all kinds of comments, that some girls do conform to Karr’s model and some don’t. No one is being dismissive of that.
I was talking about female desire and how we can’t say “what it is,” because it is all too often crippled by those invested in maintaining Patriarchy. I don’t include Karr in that group.
Other people’s responses are still valid and worth sharing/addressing even if your thinking is developing differently.
I didn’t say they weren’t worth sharing, Becky, I said I disagreed with them. I still do.
PhDork, I am not saying I disagree with you there. I am saying I think we get really dismissive sometimes when we talk about “reifying the Patriarchy.”
I’m sure I’m an idiot for continuing this, but dismissive of what? If X seems to be saying “all girls are Y” and I think that’s a big bunch of shite, I’m going to call it out as such. If you would like to discuss how many girls are Y, and how do you feel about Y? and so forth, do that, rather than reprimanding me for disagreeing with the original contention.
PhDork, (1) I don’t agree with your interpretation, so I won’t agree with your call-out either; (2) no reprimand was issued. I have disagreed with the objection; I’m sorry if my disagreement causes offence.
PSoul, I’m sorry to hear that you had such a terrible thing happen to you. It’s brave of you to share it with us. I hope that you have been able to heal and that you continue to do so.
Beh, mm, I made it sound more dramatic than it is, and it’s certainly not the point of this thread. I said it to provide context as to why the direction of the discussion was bothering me, not to say I felt triggered or anything close to it.
I remember reading an Anais Nin quote, which I can’t find now, of course, about how desire must be practiced before it can be felt. And that is how I felt when I was twelve or thirteen.
I knew that I was full of a very strong desire for something that I didn’t have a name for, and I had no idea what was available to want. Also, I knew that boys were the ones with the answers I was looking for, not other girls or women. I’m sure that is not completely true, but the women in my life were all telling me that I had a special jewel that I should wait to unwrap and that was not the advice I was looking for.
I’m somewhere between camps here: I had “genital” desire, but that was mostly personal, brought on by bodice-rippers, and handled at home by myself. As for what I wanted from boys, that was most certainly attention. Focused attention that proved I was special and different and pretty and smart. Attention that said I was better and more deserving than the other girls around me (thanks Patriarchy!). I didn’t start wanting the boys for sex until 16 or so, and even to this day when I fantasize it’s not about actual men in my life, it’s vague faceless archetypes.
Typing that out makes me feel very weird and kind of childish and also like I might actually like Twilight if I gave it a chance.
@ Cimorene – You perfectly articulated the discomfort I feel about my own need to be pursued while being uncomfortable to be thought of as prey (a prize? an accomplishment? bait?).
“Women/girls aren’t given words. We’re given (as Endora points out) shame and silence about our bodies. Boys have words, sure, but I doubt their “understanding” is terribly sophisticated.”
So, I don’t think it’s too far off to say that boys and girls experience the beginning of sexual desire differently. Even if the physical desire for genital sex is the same (which it is for some, not for others), then the results of those desires are different. Most girls don’t talk about their desire the way boys do; many girls feel shame about their physical desire in a way that most boys don’t. As of 8th grade, the boys at my school talked incessantly about masturbation–both because they were newly obsessed, and because they knew talking about it made all the girls uncomfortable (assholes). No girl I know talked about masturbation until after our first semester of college–until then, admitting that we masturbated was socially verboten, and would have ended up with horrible taunting and whispers and all the harassment that high school can bring.
I think that the varying levels of discomfort that begin in middle school result in, generally speaking, different experiences of sexual desire and sex itself. Men are less often shamed, and are encouraged to be predatory about their desire; women are shamed, and taught that they are both prey (victim) and predator (femme fatale or whatever). I wonder how much our experience of sex–as girls, whose sexual feelings are just beginning, and women, with actual sexual experience–is determined by the lack of sexual vocabulary.
Like if I was able to say at 14 that I had a boner, rather than that I was horny, would my sexual identity be different? “Boner,” for example, disassociates the feeling (sexual arousal) from the person, whereas “feeling horny” is incredibly personal in that it’s about the state of the individual. If boys were only able to articulate their sexuality as internal (aroused, horny, wanting sex, etc) instead of external (have a boner, erection, etc) would masculine sexuality be different? I’m thinking especially of men who rape without realizing their raping, like who rape a woman who’s unconscious or a sex slave, but rationalize or ignore the reality that the experience is rape rather than sex.
How much sexual violence is, in some way, the result of language?
My kneejerk reaction was to agree with those who opposed the idea of girls just wanting to be seen and not having genital feelings, but then I remembered being about 12-ish myself.
I’d already been masturbating while fantasizing about, mostly, men, but one summer while living with my folks on a job site, a local boy who thought I was 16 rather than 12, spent several days flirting with me, and finally took me out to a secluded clearing in the woods by the swimming hole. The minute he made it clear that he wanted me to take off my swimsuit and that there would be something more intense than kissing going on, I lit out of there like my ass was on fire.
So in a lot of ways, yeah, she’s right. While we may have been dealing with genital feelings on our own, for many of us all we did really want was the focused attention someone upthread mentioned, rather than anything physically sexual.
Cimorene, I love you.
It does seem like naming the experience is integral to making it real, somehow. Which is maybe why you saw all that anxiety about the definition of sex in the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, because the second you could argue whatever happened was eligible as “sex” it became a whole different thing to discuss. (And I mean this in the sense that I would agree the entire Starr investigation was ridiculous, but I mean culturally, the way we talk about things, it became a different thing.)
Taking it back to a girl’s experience, that informs the whole “virgin” thing as well, i.e. that as long as the P doesn’t get in the V, your virginity isn’t threatened, and I definitely had friends as a young woman whose boyfriends used that word as leverage to get them to try all sorts of other sex acts that they didn’t even know if they enjoyed; they just were trading them in exchange for keeping their virginity.
@Cimorene – Your previous post spoke a lot to me as well. I’ve found it sometimes difficult to break out of cultural narratives even though I know how harmful they are. E.G. I made the first move with my boyfriend so for the first few months of our relationship, I was insecure about him “wanting” me or a relationship with me as much as I wanted a relationship with him because culturally speaking, if he was interested, he would be expected to be proactive about it. So even though I’m proud of being brave enough to put myself out there, I still felt bad that I had to in the first place. My boyfriend also likes “showing me off” sometimes (at parties and such) which I’m incredibly conflicted about. It makes me feel proud and successful that he’d want to in the first place (even though, as above, I rarely notice it working) but also really icky that that’s even a thought he would have — that his going out with me is an accomplishment to lord over other men. To be fair, however, his thinking along these lines has sharply decreased since he got into feminism and he recognizes how problematic that dynamic is as well.
With regards to your second post, yes, I think language plays a big part in sexual violence and expressions of power. I find this especially in the difference between the language men have access to to describe the people they desire (I have heard this sort of language used by men about other men as well as about women) and the language women have access to. But even just the general words used to describe the experience of sexual desire are so masculine-inflected. Somehow a guy saying that he has a boner seems so much less intimate and more commonplace than a woman saying she’s wet, which isn’t even an expression I connect to about arousal. And there is no female version of “bonerkiller” — something that wards off arousal is defined only in terms of warding off male arousal. Personally I find the word “horny” to be really masculine as well. This all just contributes to this discourse of sexual desire and arousal being a fundamentally male experience because the male version can be communicated so much more easily and publicly.
“boys and girls experience the beginning of sexual desire differently”
…I guess? But just because one has words (and good lord, words like “chubby”?), and one can point to one’s genitals and go “oh, that,” doesn’t mean one has any capacity to process what it (that weird tingly feeling in your pee-pee called “getting a chubby”) means.
If we believe that girls have better language skills and are more emotionally mature than boys of a similar age, I don’t think we can assume that boys, even with the cultural benefits (?) that surround their sexual development, have some magical clarity about their bodies.
That’s not to deny that most sexual language is male-centric, which is less than ideal for girls and women. But, just to clarify: I feel like we’re not quite all talking about the same thing.
I had sexual desire as early as 10 or 11. I recognized it as such. I recognized it had to do with whatever was going on down there between my legs. That doesn’t mean that all of my desires vis-a-vis boys and sex were of the “oh yeah put it in me” variety. Almost none were. I knew that babies and diseases were the result of doin’ it, and that neither of those things were options. Yes, I wanted so-and-so to make me a mix tape, and to go to the dance with such-and-such, but the entire gamut of sexual activities from holding hands to PIV, was very appealing, and registered both in my head and my loins, even as I knew that some of it was off-limits.
I meant that they experience sexual desire (and everything surrounded it) differently, because ultimately boys and girls experience the world differently once they realize that there’s a difference between boys and girls. Because their whole lives they’re told “boys are like X, should be like XY, and shouldn’t every Z” and girls are told the opposite. It would be impossible not to internalize at least some aspects of that socialization, especially around something as fraught as the beginning of sexuality.
I guess I mean that–say that there’s Boy and Girl, and they both have a single moment where their hormones turn on at the same time. Immediately from that biological moment on, their interpretation and dealing with the socio-biological phenomenon will be different. Not because boys are more genital-sexy than girls, or because girls think flowers and bubblebaths are sexy. But because from the moment they have the feelings, they will react according to their socialization, and our culture’s reaction to sex + boys is seriously different from that of sex + girls. Even if that moment of hormonal switcheroo was exactly the same (which, it couldn’t be, because they’re two different individuals with different histories, self-awarenesses, and body chemistr, not because of their gender), from that inception onwards their gender will be hugely important in their conception of their sexuality.
So even if boys are no more able to process their initial sexy feelings than girls are, as the evolution of their sexuality unfolds the language they use constitutes their sexuality. Since the language available to them is so gendered, their sexuality will be affected by their gender. And boys have a selection of words available to them with which they can articulate that unfolding sexuality, whereas girls don’t.
But of course they do, kind of. Drawing hearts on a trapper keeper, kissing your best friend at sleepovers, wordlessly fantasizing about George Michael’s butt, etc. I think what I’m interested in isn’t even the early ways of articulating sexuality and desire, but of the ramifications of that constituting vocabulary later. Very few 11 year old boys rape, but plenty of 18 year old men do–how does the way the boys were first taught to talk about sex (i.e. think about it, have it) play into their later tendency to rape?
I think I’m thinking about this because when I was in 8th grade and the boys started talking about masturbation ALL THE DAMN TIME, they weren’t doing it to make us uncomfortable. Not all of them, anyway (there was a new kid who sort of began this reign of sexual terror and taught them to talk about this stuff on the bus or whatever). Their talk in the lunchroom was effectively shaping their sexuality; it was coupled with making all their girl friends feel intensely uncomfortable, because talking about jacking off was awkward for us, and we didn’t want to think about our Ken Doll Guy Friends masturbating or whatever. The reasons for our discomfort are, for the moment, beside the point. Later, all these dudes were creepy, rapey motherfuckers in high school. I was friends with them until 8th grade, when it all changed. By 12th grade, I hated them with all my feminist soul. Because what began as “whoa masturbation I’m 13 holy shit ORGASMS AH! we need to process this by talking about it all the time!” + making the girls uncomfortable eventually became “I get off on coming on your face, grabbing your hair and shoving my dick down your throat, talking about you like you’re my thing, and generally making you uncomfortable.” Are these things related? How?
That –> “I get off on coming on your face, grabbing your hair and shoving my dick down your throat, talking about you like you’re my thing, and generally making you uncomfortable.”
Is porn talking.