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

negotiations and shifting outcomes... Sexual stories flow through this power. The power to tell a story, or indeed not to tell a story, under the conditions of one’s own choosing, is part of the politi- cal process ” (p. 26). Before moving on to the girls’ stories of desire, I
    want to emphasize that their personal stories serve to refract the larger societal denial of and ambivalence about female sexuality. Most girls were not conscious of this political dimension of their desire, but the ones who were embraced what they realized was their hard-won sexual subjectivity defiantly and fiercely. All of their stories reflect their difficult and, for the most part, isolated juggling of multiple and often contradictory mandates, deeply important relationships, and real and layered difficulties and wor- ries that are part of their experiences of sexuality.
SOUNDS OF SILENCE

    It was heartbreaking to see, on [the girls’ return from having had their clitorises removed], how passive Tashi had become. No longer cheerful, or impish. Her move- ments, which had always been graceful, and quick with the liveliness of her personality, now became merely graceful. Slow. Studied. This was true even of her smile, which she never seemed to offer you without consid- ering it first. That her soul had been dealt a mortal blow was plain to anyone who dared look into her eyes.
    —Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy

    Embodiment is the experiential sense of living in and through our bodies. It is premised on the ability to feel our bodily sensations, one of which is sexual desire. While the body is the site for the experience of, though not necessarily the incitement of, sexual desire, no one lives in a vacuum. Sexual desire may be in part a bodily process regulated by hormones, but being embodied—feeling and knowing the information that comes to us from the world in which we live through the sensations and reac- tions that occur in our bodies—is in part a social process that shapes our experience of sexual desire (Basson, 2000; Tolman, 2000; Heiman, 2001). In this sense, sexual desire is socially con- structed. As Gayle Rubin (1984) has so eloquently explained, “this does not mean the biological capacities are not prerequisites for

    50
    human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not com- prehensible in purely biological terms” (p. 276).
    It was a relatively small proportion of the girls in this study who said that they had never recognized sexual feelings in themselves. If we start with the assumption that embodied sexual desire is a nor- mative and anticipated part of adolescent development, that we live in bodies that are and need to be sentient, then an explanation is required for the absence of these feelings in girls’ descriptions of their romantic and sexual relationships and experiences. Why would a girl report that she does not feel sexual desire, or that she may be unsure about it? Although it is possible that girls might be reluctant to relay such sensitive, even forbidden, thoughts to a stranger, an adult woman who is different from or similar to them, the complexity of the stories these girls tell strongly suggests their veracity. They truly have not felt or consciously ever recognized or acknowledged feelings in their bodies that they associate with or call sexual desire. They are dissociated from their desire.

    disembodiment and disconnection:
    hallmarks of femininity
    Dissociation—the psychoanalytic concept of a loss of knowledge, memory, or physical or emotional feelings—is an outcome, as well as a psychological red flag, of trauma (Herman, 1992). One form of dissociation is disembodiment, a disconnection or splitting off of the body and its feelings from the apprehension of the psyche. In describing how victims of sexual abuse become disembodied, Leslie Young (1992) considered how disembodiment may serve as a form of protection: “Whether by choice or blind necessity, the survivor [of sexual