When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I read Cosmo, I saw girls my age modeling in Seventeen magazine, and I knew that having breasts and being slender were important and made boys look at you. Getting positive acknowledgement from boys was important. We girls were on our way to becoming women and we all seemed to feel the need to be chosen by a boy, and importantly, to keep the other boys and girls from rumoring about us if we failed to conform in some way. Sometimes we were supposed to be naïve and virginal, sometimes sexy and provocative. It was exhausting. I can’t imagine what life would have been like had we had social media and phones. Thank god we didn’t. It was complicated enough having magazines tell us how to look and behave to attract boys.
I didn’t know about Roe vs. Wade when it was decided during my sophomore year. I went from having no idea what abortion even was to joining the ranks of those who opposed it in my Catholic high school and it was not a topic discussed at home because there was no reason to bring it up. My mom told us how desperate she was to have children that not wanting them was not a conversation starter; it never occurred to me. Anyway, I had two adopted siblings and my parents reminded us that had abortion been easily available and legal at the end of the 1950s, neither sibling would likely be mine. The discussion was over until my younger (adopted) sister got pregnant at 16 in 1976. Then it was not an option because my sister was convinced by my parents about the sanctity of adoption that had made her a part of our family. She went to an old-fashioned home for unwed mothers and gave her baby up for adoption.
I didn’t ask for the sex talk; my mom just gave it to me when I started my period at my 13th birthday. She offered me books which I read, including Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex. That was quite a book for a 14-year-old. I kissed my first boy at 14. I graduated to making out just a few months later. I didn’t mention that at home. But I wasn’t prepared for sexual violence or assault that happened that same year. No one talked about sexual assault around me. I didn’t even know to ask. I don’t think date pressures such as I experienced would have been considered out of the ordinary. And I never told anyone about my sexual activities, wanted or unwanted. It was at once exciting and dreadful; the dread being not knowing when to stop and how. I was already learning it was up to me to do so.
But one thing never occurred to me: that I could say no to boys. It wasn’t polite, friendly or nice. Saying no didn’t pave the way to having a boyfriend. I would be talked about and made fun of. I would not be asked out on dates. So, I got to be resilient, as we now say, in this boy-eat-girl world. And I was nice. I had a good figure and was probably asked out because of it and my capacity to flirt. But no one ever talked about the bad stuff, the wrestling matches in a car, the forceful pushing away of mouths, fingers, and hands, the risk of being called a tease or a bad date. Girls never told. If most of the actively dating girls in my school were pawed over, pressured, and ultimately forced as often as I was, they didn’t say. I often wondered if their experiences were like mine but didn’t know how to ask. It felt humiliating that I didn’t know things I thought I should have known. I never learned what other girls did and the magazines I read didn’t offer any ideas; I guess they were too full of stories about getting the boy, not resisting.
I never told anyone about the adult man who forced me into performing oral sex. I had summer job at a donut shop when I was 14 before my sophomore year. There were many regulars who came in for a 75-cent cup of coffee and left a quarter for a tip. One was a well-known DJ of about 35 with a sports car who started to come in when I was working. He chatted me up, and being a polite and well-brought up girl, I made conversation and smiled. One day he offered me a ride home from work in his sports car. I took him up on it. I felt so grown up and so cool getting into a snazzy convertible with a grown man, wearing my little pink form-fitting work uniform. But first, he said, we needed to stop at his house just slightly out of the way for something he needed. When we got there, he invited me in to wait. I did not think anything of it and went in. It was probably 3 o’clock in the afternoon. I don’t remember everything, but what I do remember was that, in his living room, he pushed me down to my knees in front of him and unzipped his pants. He took his penis and stuck it in my mouth. I honestly had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. I gagged and choked and he grabbed my head and held it. I wanted to bite, but I was afraid he would hit me; he was none too kind at this point already. He just kept telling me to suck it. I stared at a framed school photo on the end table I was facing and let the tears run down. It was of a 7 or 8-year-old girl. Finally, he stopped. I don’t recall what else happened. But when I was on my feet again, hiding my humiliation and embarrassment, he told me the photo was of his daughter. I felt sick, so alone. Tears still on my face, he ushered me back to the car, and drove me home. Just in time for me to make dinner for the family, my regular chore. He never came back to the donut shop; I was horrified that he would. But hearing him on the radio gave me the creeps ever after.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s I was a mother to three teenaged daughters. It pained me to see how little anything regarding sex information or education at the teenage level had changed. But I didn’t hold back when it came time to talk to my girls about sex. All I knew was that times had not changed. I was now living and working in a world where men were expected to have a constant sex drive and women were expected to meet them where they were. Harassment, being talked into a corner, jokes, flirtations, innuendo at work were all in good fun.
When my oldest daughter had her first boyfriend and she asked me some questions about sex, I went all in. I told them all together, first of all, that I was not going to raise any babies of theirs. They were not going to get pregnant. So, we made appointments at the women’s hospital’s teen clinic for their four-hour forum on sex. They brought home a small paper bag with condoms and pamphlets. I told them that if they were going to be sexually active, then they needed to get on the Pill. I made sure that happened. I was also the mom who made sure that my daughters’ friends (whose parents would never admit to having sexually-active daughters) would not get pregnant either by allowing my kids to leave school with my car to take their friends to the teen clinic, too. And, I told them, if they got pregnant before they were 18, we were going together to get abortions. That problem was not going to derail their adolescence. If they were eighteen and it happened, we would discuss that then.
Then I told my daughters the truth—that boys are encouraged to have as much sex as they can get with no accountability, and girls have to tell the boys how far they could go. Of course, it wasn’t fair, I agreed, but we could fight the fairness fight another time – meanwhile, they had to feel confident that they would not have to do anything they didn’t want to do, and they could and should say no loud enough for there to be no mistaking it. I also told them that, at least for the first time, sex wasn’t as it appeared to be in the movies, to keep their expectations low because of their lack of experience. I did all I could to take the softness and romance out of it until they “thanked” me for reducing it to an awkward wrestling match of sorts. I also promised I would come get them anytime, anywhere without questions or lectures if they needed help with a drunken date, a threatening boy, were left without a ride, or for any reason whatsoever. Other than that, I was kind of hands off, not an overinvolved, overprotective or overindulgent mom – ask them, they will concur.
But I’ll tell you what: not one of them has ever said they felt forced or pressured into doing something they did not want to do or assaulted. I’ve asked. To this day we talk about it occasionally, and they still do not feel they didn’t have a voice and the autonomy to decide for themselves. I suspect that their sex lives are not riven with the complicated feelings I’ve had. They are even a bit bewildered that someone like me felt so constrained, so cornered, so forced as a teenager. So am I. I haven’t dealt with all this yet, but I am working on it.
Although I said in the title that little has changed, some things have. What has changed is the ability to allow one’s daughters (or sons) to start their quasi-adult lives as sexual beings with much less fear and uncertainty, more self-knowledge and self-determination, and fewer outmoded beliefs about who is dominant and who’d better be submissive.
Parents: Talk and listen. Demand that sex education is offered so that we don’t have another generation of lawmakers who have no idea how female bodies work, how women get pregnant or what an embryo looks like in all its natural fragility, or how women are at more risk for death, harm, and long-lasting effects of pregnancy and childbirth than they are in a non-pregnant state. Demand that no teenaged girl is forced to bear a child. And that men should be held accountable for the havoc they can wreak on girls and women.