Free Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality by Deborah L. Tolman

accept or validate, their own sexual feelings. What came through all of their stories of desire was how their acute and astute
    awareness of the dangers associated with their sexuality, the deni- gration of their sexual feelings, and their expectations about boys’ sexuality led most of them to consider the source of danger to be their own sexuality. In effect, these girls described how social processes and meanings that clearly originate outside the body end up incorporated into its physiological demeanor and both uncon- scious and conscious behaviors (Grosz, cited in Fausto-Sterling, 2000, p. 23). As Lynn Philips (2000) has so succinctly put it, “we do not simply live inside our cultures. In many ways our cultures live inside of us” (p. 17).
    Embedded in the stories about desire that these girls told was a multitude of strategies, more and less conscious, for negotiating the tricky terrain of their own sexual feelings. It turned out that my question about desire was often a question the girls themselves had already been struggling with in some form, always in silence and isolation, outside any relationship with other girls or adult women, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. For some, this ques- tion was like a low-grade fever, making them a little bit uncomfort- able, but not really a major problem. For other girls, the question of their desire was crucial, an important clue to their identity that remained elusive for them (Raymond, 1994). As girls tried to sort out their feelings on their own, the question of their sexual desire remained both unspoken and unresolved until we began talking about it. Sometimes the question itself had never been articulated. Instead, they essentially lived the question.
    Among this group of girls, I discerned three distinct ways of talking about the dilemmas of desire. 12 In Chapter 3, we will listen to girls who reported not feeling desire or being unsure, having what I call “silent bodies” and “confused bodies.” Since this analysis assumes that having sexual feelings is to be expected, we will con- sider why they said that they did not feel desire. In Chapters 4 and 5, we will listen to girls in the study who did say they felt desire. We
    will track how they responded to or dealt with their sexual feelings, how they understood these feelings, and in what ways these feel- ings informed their sexual experiences and romantic relationships. We will be listening especially to the interplay between their psy- ches and their bodies.
    Girls who said they felt sexual desire deal with the dilemma of that desire in two ways. Chapter 4 elaborates strategies of resisting sexual desire. One such approach is for girls to shut down their feelings, to defuse and delimit their desire, that is, to disappear desire. Another approach is to be ambivalent about desire. Neither denying themselves desire nor embracing it unequivocally, these girls err on the side of danger, without completely sacrificing plea- sure, living in constant fear that they are crossing into territory that leaves them completely vulnerable and without any recourse to protection. Chapter 5 covers girls who describe a sense of entitle- ment to their sexual desire. Some of them describe openly engag- ing in a micropolitics of their own desire. Yet with rare exception, these girls also identify and deal with their desire as a personal dilemma; their solution is to create safe spaces for sexual desire within their social and relational circumstances.

    For over a hundred years, feminist scholars have offered extensive social analysis of the politics of women’s sexuality: the powerful and persistent tension between sexual danger and sexual pleasure that, while experienced differentially by individual women, is an involuntary aspect of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Ken Plummer (1995) tells us, “Sexual stories ooze through the political stream... power is not a simple attribute or a capacity, but a flow of