Women Health

With the advent of menstruation, childhood ends, adolescence begins. We are suddenly thrown into a larger world than we feel prepared for, given more choices than childhood ever offered. Much as we longed to be thought mature and adult, now that it has begun at last, we suffer role and identity confusions. “What are you going to be when you grow up?” – the question throws us into despair. We wanted to do one thing yesterday, but that’s no longer true today, and we suspect we will change our minds again tomorrow. Above all, we want to say, “I don’t know. I’m too young to make up my mind.” But that’s not allowed. Only kids can say that. Instead, we lapse into sulky silence or give top-of-the-head answers. The pressures of family and society, the mandates of an educational system that rushes us on express rails into the future seem to give us no pause to rest and think about who we are.
It is at this age that we begin to fall in love – over and over again. While this is obviously an expression of our growing sexual maturation, it is also an expression of our search for identity: one of the great wonders of first love is how each new man seems to help us find a new person within ourselves.
For this reason, I think it is unfortunate that contemporary mores demand that love be certified by sex. It may not really be what the young girl wants yet. Sex itself can become one more force pushing her ahead too far, too fast, in a direction she is not yet sure she wants to take. “I love you,” she wants to say to him, but is afraid: it may be the final signal he needs to open the door to the bedroom. Put up or shut up. She may or may not want sex right now, but what, she does want, desperately, is for him to speak. She wants him to say he loves her too so that she can ask him to describe this woman he loves. Who is she? What is so wonderful about her? Is she really me? She has a sense of unreality about herself; she needs to find herself reflected in someone else’s affectionate eye, shaped and formed there into an image of herself she can see and understand. She has been looking into mirrors too long. “Tell me the kind of girls you like,” we ask the young men we know. Tell me how to be. A little shiver runs through me every time I hear that request in a young woman’s voice, no matter what the actual words are. It is the ontological question, a search for a base upon which to build our being. We look to each other for clues, but it is a question we all must answer in our own time, in our own way. What makes “plastic people” not ring true is that they have not listened within for an answer; they have built their conforming, counterfeit selves out of the meretricious junk that society has handed them. Dr. R. D. Laing (The Divided Self) finds this question at the very heart of schizophrenia – or perhaps, the lack of an answer to it. The job of creating our authentic identity is one of the great tasks of adolescence.
It is why teenagers spend so much of their emotional energy and time in talk: it is all work toward definition. In their endless speculations about eternity, truth, beauty, good, and evil – just as in their giggly bits of gossip – they are uncovering layers of personality, assaying for the gold of their true selves. One of the most hopeful developments of our time, I feel, is that young women no longer listen only to young men for clues of who they are. We ask that question today of other women too, each one of us strengthening every other in our determination to define our sex for ourselves – and not merely in terms of what it is supposed men want. The Great Male Buyer’s Market is over; we will no longer sell ourselves out.
Fantasies that arise out of the crises of adolescence are characterized by trying on different personalities, testing various likes and dislikes, rehearsing our sexuality for events that are yet to come. Sis proudly tells us in her letter that she is an A-student in school. But immediately she feels she must fight the goody-goody definition this seems to bestow upon her by telling us she has “a very strong sex drive and wants to make love.” Does she? Or is this merely one of the okay things girls of her age feel they must say? (Just as their mothers, a generation earlier, felt they had to say the opposite.) When the opportunity for sex is actually presented to Sis by a boy she knows well and who promises to be “very gentle” with her, she literally jumps up in alarm and cries, “I won’t!”
I am very sympathetic to young women like Sis. Despite all their brave talk, something deep within them knows they aren’t ready for sex. Sis doesn’t know why this is true. She is not reinforced by her peers – everyone around her seems to take sex for granted. She is alone with only her feelings to guide her – but they are enough. She doesn’t have to know why she is not yet ready for sex; she only has to be in touch with her feelings: her body informs her mind, and her answer is no. I applaud her for going along with her gut reaction, particularly so because it is a self-determined response at odds with what seem to be the accepted slogans and ideas of her friends. Our lifelong struggle is to teach our reason and emotions to move in tandem on the same tides. Just as I believe every woman has the right to say yes if she feels like it – and is willing to take the responsibility for her actions – so has she the perfect right to refuse, if the mysterious ebb and flow of desire is not yet upon her.
In the fantasies that Sis sends us, we see that she is getting ready for the truly sexual time she knows lies ahead. But that time is not yet.
For Beth Anne, too, fantasies are exciting strategies for getting used to an idea about which she is still ambivalent. She tells us she is a virgin, and too shy to buy My Secret Garden at the bookshop where she works, even though she could get it there at a discount. In her fantasies, we see her other side: she is a woman who would like to have sex with “a customer, a stranger in the street, someone I don’t know too well.” And then she adds a sentence that reminds us how much she is like Sis. “Boy,” writes Beth Anne, “when it does happen, I’ll be really ready after all these rehearsals in my head.”
Penelope’s letter shows us another exploration of sexual identity through fantasy. The child of intelligent, permissive parents, she felt free enough with her mother to ask to be taught how to masturbate, after reading Masters and Johnson brought the idea to mind. In her letter, we see that she has grown into the kind of young woman we would expect from such a family: she is sexually knowing, sophisticated, one who feels free and secure enough to ask men out herself “occasionally,” instead of always waiting passively to be asked. But in her fantasies, she explores a totally opposite identity, “the woman I can’t let myself be (dumb, naive, unaware of my sexuality) … .”
Even if we had parents like Penelope’s, something in us still wants to establish ourselves as people in our own right by rebelling against them. But when the parents are decent, reasonable, and intelligent people, rebellion itself becomes unreasonable; their very permissiveness is frustrating, giving us no firm base to push off against. But our negative emotions want to be expressed anyway. In fantasies like Penelope’s, the problem is solved. She is the woman she “can’t let myself be.” That is, she is the dumb broad that her parents’ training has made it impossible for her to be. She has circumvented them in her imagination: rebellion at last.

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