Researchers Newlyn Moore and J. Kenneth Davidson recently questioned hundreds of young women about their sexual experiences and feelings of guilt. Shock of all shocks. Girls with the most negative attitudes about their sexuality are doing it younger, with more partners and in less committed relationships than girls who feel the most positive about their bodies and their sexuality.
Also, the guilt girls are the most likely to have their first intercourse with an "occasional dating partner" or with a "person just met," a pattern they continue to repeat as they get older. They tend to have their first intercourse when drinking or stoned.
The girls who feel the best about their bodies tend to masturbate more. And the girls who masturbate the most and feel the best about sex actually wait the longest before having their first intercourse and they have it with more committed partners. Most importantly, when they do have sex, it's part of a conscious decision. Not so with the girls who feel bad about sex and their bodies. More often than not, they just let sex happen to them, without thinking it through first.
So who are these high-guilt, more-promiscuous girls? High-guilt girls tend to grow up in families where the mother and father are less affectionate toward each other. They tend to regard their dads as being overly strict and they are from homes that are more religious, rather than less religious, than girls who don't sleep around as much.
Perhaps the girls who have the least sexual acceptance at home go searching for it elsewhere. The trouble is, they go about it in such a destructive way that they end up reinforcing the bad feelings about themselves that they grew up with, and they end up with partners who are just as constricted as their dads.
Who knew that the daughters of the self-righteous would be more likely to sleep around and do it drunk than daughters of parents who have a more open, honest approach to sex and sexual feelings. It's certainly not what the self-described moral majority would have us believe. Perhaps there's more to waiting longer than the abstinence-only proponents want us to think.
For a boy, puberty usually brings freedom. It also leaves a young man feeling more positive about his body, more independent and more masculine. Not so for girls. Menstruation itself often leaves a girl with a feeling that her body is out of control.
According to Karin Martin, who studied teens and puberty: "The girls whom I interviewed gave only negative descriptions of their menstruating bodies. Their bodies made them feel 'yuck' or 'sick,' or as if they had 'shit their pants'.... While plenty of girls look forward to having their first period, a lot become ambivalent after the first couple of periods have come and gone."
Teenage boys may struggle with wet dreams and unwanted erections, but not many would equate these with shitting in their pants. On the contrary, a boy's growing body often makes him feel more grown-up and effective in the world, while a girl's growing body brings parental warnings about the evil intentions of men and restrictions on everything from climbing trees to learning to sit like a lady. These warnings can make the world seem scary.
For a girl, her growing body represents loss as much as it represents gain.
(This chapter is continued in the book.)
