Free What You Really Really Want by Jaclyn Friedman Page A

keep
doing your daily writing and your weekly body love, and keep coming back to these exercises. We’ll get there together.
    In this chapter, we’re going to go a little deeper into some of the forces that may have shaped the way you think about your own sexuality, and others’ as well. Specifically, we’re going to explore group identities and the sexual assumptions that are attached to them. And then we’re going to see if we might want to detach ’em a little.
    It’s useful, too, to think about these issues not just in terms of how they affect you, but also in terms of how they might affect a current or future sexual partner. Not just because it will make you a better lover and friend, but because it’s sometimes easier to start by empathizing with a loved one, and then extend that same kind of empathy to ourselves. But before we do this, a reminder: There’s no way to ever be fully free of the lessons we’ve learned at a deep level about sex, and that holds for the messages that come with your identities, too. You may embrace or even embody some of the stereotypes that are unfairly applied to you, and that’s fine. Even if you act the exact opposite of how you’re expected to, you’re still behaving in some ways in response to how you’ve been taught to act. And the social forces that keep these stereotypes in place are strong—as much as we wish it could be, it’s not possible to just erase them. The goal here isn’t to wipe your slate clean, it’s to take a look at the ingredients that have brought you to where you are with your sexuality today and adjust the seasonings until you think you’re delicious.

AGE
    Age is unlike most other group identities in that it’s always fundamentally changing for everyone. And yet your age can have a lot to do with how you feel about your sexuality, how other people view your sexuality, and how you view others’ sexuality.
    Let’s take the most obvious example: Most young women are expected to be innocent virgins. That’s not redundant, because just being a virgin isn’t enough to live up to social expectations. To avoid judgment, young women shouldn’t even be curious about or desirous of sex. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing debate about whether or not insurance companies should cover a vaccine for HPV (human papillomavirus), an STD that sometimes causes cervical cancer. The vaccine is quite effective when given to girls before they become sexually active, and that’s just what gets some folks upset: They fear that even talking about STD prevention in the process of giving a girl a shot will turn her into a sex-crazed maniac. They’d prefer that girls grow up with a greater risk of dying from cervical cancer than to suggest in any way that it might be okay for girls to have a thought related to sex. 1
    The folks who push the message that girls shouldn’t be thinking about sex say it’s about teaching girls to value themselves, but if they’d rather girls die of cancer than be sexual, that doesn’t really value girls much, does it? What it really teaches is that the most important part of a girl’s character is what she does or doesn’t want to do with her body—not how good a friend she is, how hard she works in school, how honest she is, or anything else.

    What does this mean for you? Well, for one thing, if you’re a young woman, it means extra pressure to not even think about being sexual. It means that if you do think about or act on your sexuality in any way, you may feel afraid to talk with anyone about it, which is isolating and can be dangerous.
    In fact, the pressure on younger women to be “good” (that is, not sexual) can be so great that it isolates us not only from older adults, but also from other young women. Eugenia, seventeen, had promised to tell her best friend when she had sex with her boyfriend for