This is what too many people fail to understand about adolescent girls when it comes to sex, rape and personal agency: The experience of being alive in their bodies makes them sometimes sexual, sometimes curious, sometimes desirous, sometimes totally innocent — and at all times vulnerable to other people’s interpretations of their behavior, of their decisions, of their very existence in bodies equipped with brand-new womanly features. And all they have to counter those interpretations are their own voices — voices that are routinely ignored, dismissed and silenced. What does a kid that age know, after all? At least until an older man says, she knew damn well what she was doing.Five minutes after we ended the interview, Kampmeier called me back to say she wanted to add one more thought: “When you rape a girl, the problem is not that you’re taking away her purity — which is what gets the religious right up in arms — it’s that you’re taking away her wholeness. And trying to keep her ‘pure,’ repressing her sexuality, silencing her voice, also takes away wholeness. It’s two sides of the same coin.”I don’t want my daughter to grow up pure,” she said. “I want her to grow up whole.”
via Polanski, “Hounddog” and 13-year-old voices – Broadsheet – Salon.com.
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Sex was never discussed in the house where I grew up. If asked directly, my mother would send me to the towering front room bookcase where The Life Cycle Library waited politely on the topmost shelf, respectable and rich with answers. My parents worked in education all of their professional lives yet neither of them ever spoke to their children about love, sex, relationships, our bodies or self-esteem. My first exposure to sexual behaviour was being compelled to watch my brother and sister engage in various kinds of sex play. They were young adolescents (I was very young) and were adopted children from different mothers so, they explained to me, it wasn’t against the law. I was required to sit naked in my brother’s locked room where I’d look at “dirty” magazines and pretend to get the cartoons; waiting anxiously for them to finish so i could get out of that room, get dressed and do anything else. Occasionally, I was instructed to participate. I never told. Finally my brother snuck into my room one night, sexually assaulted me and broke that silence. I told my mother about that one incident. She told me that it had all been a dream, it had never happened and that ladies didn’t talk like that. That was right about the time i decided being a lady was bullshit, especially if they couldn’t say what was true. When I was younger, it was all over the news that a local woman had been tied to a tree, raped, and murdered. I asked my mother what rape was, and I don’t remember what her answer was – just that I wasn’t satisfied with it, and went and looked it up in the dictionary, like they had trained me to do with every other word I didn’t know the meaning of. It wasn’t in my children’s dictionary, but it was in the big red regular one. As were words like sodomy and masturbation. The definitions of which intrigued and excited me – they didn’t sound bad or scary at all, so what was the big deal? I couldn’t have been even ten, and for a long time, I had known that rubbing parts of my body felt very, very good. Masturbating has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Then, when I was twelve, a girl I knew asked me if I fingered myself. What? No…why would I do that? Wait…guys? YOUR DAD??? She had explained that her dad taught her how to do it, and it was how men could tell if a girl was ready to have sex. I knew I wasn’t, so I didn’t pay her much mind. That year, I’d been molested, and it proved to be the match that set many other issues on fire. After that, everything came from the internet. Freshman year of high school, I had lots of internet access. Netscape was awful, but it helped me find much more about sodomy than the dictionary ever did. And I learned that all my rape fantasies were okay, and not a sign of something wrong with me – even if my teenage self, with the complete lack of self-esteem, had rationalized them by thinking “Well, that’s the only way someone will ever want to have sex with ME.” I never got the birds and the bees talk. All my knowledge came in the form of books, abuse, and zeros and ones through the tubes. I have no idea how I’ll educate my kids…but educate them, I will. I’ve always been good at doing well, with or without a plan. |
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