Dirty Little Secrets by Kerry Cohen Read Free Book Online Page B

GIRLS
    Let’s imagine what empowerment might look like regarding females and sex. Girls and women who wanted casual sex, not love, would be accepted and respected. In fact, girls and women would want casual sex because it would be understood that wanting sex without strings is a perfectly honorable thing for a girl to want on the basis of where she is in her life. It makes sense for a teenager or young woman in her twenties, for instance, to not want the intensity and sometimes burden of a relationship because she wants to focus on other, more important things: personal exploration, travel, career building, and more. Likewise, if she wants to have sex only with someone she loves, then that’s honorable as well, just not more so than the other choice. An empowered girl wears what she wants—she can show off her breasts if she wants to, but she certainly doesn’t have to for her to be sexy. She doesn’t need to lift her shirt or participate in wet T-shirt contests to be sexually powerful. She doesn’t need to have a long list of conquests.
    Empowerment has nothing to do with these things. Sexual power is always about a woman’s—and a girl’s—core sense of herself as a desiring, desirable being whom she is entirely in control of. She decides who touches her and when. She decides how much to share her body or not. And no one else has the right to dictate what that says about her, or to shame her, or to silence her. No one else gets to say, “I’m good at this, but because you do it differently, you aren’t.” That, my friends, is empowerment.
    THE LOOSE GIRL
    A loose girl is not empowered. She doesn’t secretly want to be a virgin. And she’s not just a slut, although she probably embodies some truths behind the slut myth. She falls between and beneath these archetypes, the ones our culture has told girls they can be as sexual creatures. The loose girl has so completely lost herself and her desire in her other wants that sex has become a way to control others, to try to make them want her. And because that authenticity in her relationship to her own desire is so skewed, she almost never gets what she really wants.
    For many, many years, I knew that I had a relationship to boys in my life that I didn’t understand. I knew there was something about the way I felt about them, how they made me feel, something about how I had used them in my life, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Nothing in the world spoke directly to what I felt, to the particular way in which I struggled. Yet at the same time, almost every girl who came into my therapy office, almost every grown woman I knew, had those exact same feelings. We had spent our lives desperately pursuing boys or believing entirely that a boy would save us from whatever pain we felt. We searched each room, each party, each sidewalk, each store and bank and post office, for boys who might give us attention. We made the possibility of our sexiness, our attractiveness to males, a project. We could not work out at the gym without the idea that doing so would get us male attention and, therefore, meaning in the world. We could not try on clothes in a dressing room and not imagine what a boy would see. We cultivated our tastes in music, in politics, in religion, all with the idea that this would make us more pleasing to men. And more often than not, that need for attention had turned into sex, usually sex we wanted, but sometimes not.
    More important, we lost our connection to our own desires. In fact, our natural sexual desires had morphed with our desire to be wanted, to be chosen, and—yes—to be loved. We gave up more desires than just sexual ones—traveling, friends, career paths, so many opportunities to be more whole.
    Why did it take me so long to understand what had happened to me and to so many others? I read as much as I could, I talked to friends, and I listened to their stories. I wrote and wrote and wrote, trying to find what it was I wanted to say. In