GEORGIE BINKS:
What happened to girl power? Are teenage girls blowing it?
CBC News Viewpoint | February 17, 2004 | More from Georgie Binks
Forty years ago, teenage girls knew the rules: if you slept with a guy you were a slut – nice girls didn't do it. It was a sad world, one with a double standard that the women's movement wanted to change. And it did – initially. There was that period from the advent of the pill in the 1960s to the pre-AIDS early-'80s during which women started to enjoy sex without guilt and fear.
Then came AIDS and all of the fear that had just disappeared emerged in a new, more frightening way. Now, even worse than unwanted pregnancy, intercourse could mean death.
Educators and parents hurried to get the message across to their children about the new risks of sex. But in doing so, they missed passing on a couple of other messages, like when it's appropriate to have sex, age-wise, and at what stage of emotional development.
What's become evident in the past couple of years is a frightening new trend: teenage girls are being pressured at an earlier age than ever to have sex – more particularly oral sex (which by the way can be just as risky for many sexually transmitted diseases) – and when they do, the double standard of the 50s still applies.
Recently The Globe and Mail published an article entitled Good Girls Do, detailing how young girls are providing oral sex to their young boyfriends. It was something baseball player Cass Rhynes, 19, knew all about. He was sentenced to 45 days in jail for inciting two girls, aged 12 and 13, to perform oral sex.
At his trial, the girls involved testified that their friends routinely performed oral sex on boys. Rhynes seemed to be puzzled by the kafuffle, and sex educators might say that's no surprise since it's not uncommon at all for younger girls to be providing oral sex to males.
But it certainly is a depressing new phenomenon.
Saleema Noon, a B.C. sexual health educator says, "I got a call the other day from a ninth grade school counsellor, who was freaking out because parents had called her about a list discovered in a boy's bedroom of girls who gave good head in his class."
The sad thing, says Noon, is that there are a lot of teenaged girls who are having sex and not enjoying it. They often do it to keep a boyfriend. Noon says, "They feel they have to provide something, so we tell them 'No you don't, and that anyone who would force you to isn't right for you.'"
Noon tells kids to make a list of activities they would feel comfortable with and ones they wouldn't. "Then I tell them to have that clear in their heads, so that when you find yourself in a back bedroom, you'll be more likely to make a decision you feel good about."
Noon also talks to the boys. She says most of them find the idea of providing oral sex to a girl disgusting, so she challenges them about why they would expect a girl to do it for them. As well, she asks them how they would feel about their sister being asked to provide it.
She feels that boys aren't directly telling females to do this, but rather that girls feel an indirect pressure, that they must provide oral sex to keep a guy. It seems the old attitudes are still alive.
How sad that a generation of little girls raised with Girl Power are being treated as nothing more than "snap-on" tools. Wasn't Girl Power about letting young females know they could be anything they wanted to be when they grew up, that science and math could be tackled successfully by girls, that hockey was a sport for girls and that a career and family was do-able? Where did everyone go wrong on this one?
Author John Ince, who wrote The Politics of Lust, says much of the problem starts with pornography, which is so accessible to teenagers these days. Ince says, "The problem is that the proliferation of sexually explicit media is all from the male viewers' point of view, because they are the market. It shows them moving instantly from arousal to genital contact."
Ince blames educators for not taking a more positive approach to the teaching of sex. And certainly, it is the type of thing that frightens educators. For instance, the board of education in the Strait school district in Nova Scotia has just banned a book they deemed too explicit, too racy for 12- and 13-year-olds. Strangely, the same age as those girls servicing the young baseball player.
Noon says that hopefully young girls will be brought up with a healthier attitude towards sex than perhaps their mothers were stuck with, where guilt and deception played a large part. The fact that statistics show as many as 70 per cent of women haven't experienced an orgasm during intercourse and nearly 30 per cent have never had one indicates there are problems.
But it's important that when young girls learn about sex, they learn that sex is good when it's on their terms. It's not good when it involves simply providing pleasure to someone else.
Bianca Rucker, a sex and relationship therapist in Vancouver says, "A lot of that negative stuff can stick in your psyche and it can cause problems later on. Associations develop about what sex is supposed to be about and it's hard to get over those. My hope would be that the message get across that girls need to take ownership of their own bodies and their own sexual pleasure and to grow up to be more assertive."
If girls learn at a young age that sex is simply about servicing males, they have little hope of improving those statistics on their enjoyment of sex as they get older. Girl Power means getting what YOU want, when YOU want it.
And for the boys, take a look at the book Portnoy's Complaint or the movie American Pie. It's got some great ideas of things you can do with food.
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GEORGIE BINKS
FREELANCE WRITER
Georgie Binks is a freelance writer living in Toronto. She writes for the Toronto Star and National Post, and has written for Chatelaine, Homemakers, Elle, Glow and Style at Home, as well as salon.com. Georgie is a former CBC radio and television reporter and editor. She has been a feminist since she wrote an essay in high school on "The Changing Role of Women in Society" at her mother's suggestion.
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