Ms. D: I was staying at this guy’s house. He tried to make me have oral sex with him. He said he’d seen far-out stuff in movies, and that it would be fun to mentally and physically torture a woman.
Ms. F: He’d read something in a pornographic book, and then he wanted to live it out. It was too violent for me to do something like that. It was basically getting dressed up and spanking. Him spanking me. I refused to do it.
Ms. H: This couple who had just read a porno book wanted to try the groupie number with four people. They tried to persuade my boyfriend to persuade me. They were running around naked, and I felt really uncomfortable.
Ms. I: It was S & M stuff. I was asked if I would participate in being beaten up. It was a proposition, it never happened. I didn’t like the idea of it.
Interviewer: Did anything else upset you?
Ms. I: Anal intercourse. I have been asked to do that, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. I have had to do it, very occasionally.
Ms. M: Anal sex. First he attempted gentle persuasion, I guess. He was somebody I’d been dating a while and we’d gone to bed a few times. Once he tried to persuade me to go along with anal sex, first verbally, then by touching me. When I said “No,” he did it anyway—much to my pain. It hurt like hell.15
In their early 1980s study of 12,000 heterosexual and homosexual couples, sociologists Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz found that married people were having more sex and more regularly. While sexual activity was increasing in the home, sexualities have configured around gender rather than sexual preference/orientation. Sexually speaking, “husbands and male cohabitors are more like gay men than they are like wives or female cohabitors. Lesbians are more like heterosexual women than either is like gay or heterosexual men.”16 Their conclusion was based in significant part on preferences for sexual practices in relation to power and control. In the gendering of sexuality, often men consider their genitals the main focus of the sex act. Generally, more sex has led to more sexual objectification that dissociates sex from an interactive experience with another. This is the sexuality that was set in motion by pornography, particularly Deep Throat, made by Linda Lovelace while she was sexually enslaved by the pimp/pornographer Chuck Traynor.
Sex that is not mutually interactive and is dissociated from one’s partner will eventually invoke women in disengagement, dissociation, and disembodiment. It is not surprising then that for women reciprocity was important in their sexual relations. In the couples study, heterosexual women expressed preference for intercourse because it involves mutual participation; it was more central to their sexual satisfaction. But, as Andrea Dworkin points out:
women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too; and women want the human in men including in the act of intercourse. Even without the dignity of equal power, women have believed in the redeeming potential of love.17
Women and men have arrived at different places to participate in the sexualization of society and the intensification of sexual exploitation in private life. Continuing with Dworkin, “these visions of a humane sensuality based in equality are in the aspirations of women; and even the nightmare of sexual inferiority does not seem to kill them.”18 By choice and desire, male sexuality configures around disengaged sex, sex for the sake of itself, separate from the human experience and interaction that it actually is, thereby destroying sexual interaction in favor of sex that is objectifying, the origins of the prostitution of sexuality. This is socially constructed sex, the conditions that prevail when sexuality is made an element of power relations of sexism.
If the prostitution of sexuality, the reduction of oneself to sexual object, is increasingly demanded of adult women, it is an even more pressing requirement of teenagers. With the sexualization of society, first sex is occurring at earlier ages, in the teenage years. Sexual norms in high school and college dating are expressed now in the language of prostitution: “hooking up” identifies dating for the purposes of having sex. In 1981, 19% of unmarried girls had had intercourse by the age of 15. By 1988 that figure increased to 27%. In 1991, 50% of unmarried females and 60% of unmarried males between the ages of 15 and 19 have had sexual intercourse. Not surprisingly, 1 in 5 girls age 15 to 19 who are sexually active become pregnant.19
The fear of AIDS and the crisis in teenage pregnancy has led to new programs in the mid 1990s that promote sexual abstinence among teenagers. Their approach teaches girls how to resist pressure for sex and “hooking up.” It is similar to drug prevention programs that teach young people how to resist pressure to take drugs. They are taught to turn away from pressures to have sex by asserting their own goals. These initiatives are being promoted especially by the African-American communities and by organizations such as the Urban League. These programs may lead teenagers to increased sexual autonomy and sexual self-determination. But they do not directly confront the harm of early sex to human development. Abstinence or virginity projects are frequently dismissed as moralistic, representative of repressive “family values” promoted under the Bush-Quayle administration. And indeed some of them use the fear of AIDS and the crisis in teenage pregnancy to reinvoke sexual repression. However, programs focused on sexual and personal autonomy through controlling sexual activity until developmentally mature hold the potential of challenging sexual power relations that frequently undermine teenage female development.
While there have been racial differences in frequency of early sexual intercourse, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, “most of the increase in female sexual activity in the 1980s was among white teenagers and those in higher income families.”20This trend reflects the normalization of early sexual behavior by the bourgeois and upper classes in their exploitation of women and girls, which sets the standards that eventually produce that exploitation among the working classes and the poor. In a 1993 survey of high school seniors in a private girls preparatory school on the East Coast, (with a total of 67 from 108 responding) 40.3% had had sexual intercourse, 92.5% of them having had first intercourse between ages 15 and 17. The pattern of sexual behavior in 1993 for high- and middle-income, mostly white teenage girls in this school follows the pattern that Blumstein and Schwartz found in 1983 among adults. The study found that 63.2% had stimulated a boy to orgasm while 50.7% had been stimulated to orgasm by a boy; 45.6% had performed fellatio on boys while 36.8% had experienced cunnilingus.
Research is beginning to make the connections that feminists established a long time ago. “A substantial proportion of young adolescents who are sexually active are active only because they have been coerced,” according to Bruce Ambuel and Julian Rap-paport who cite research that reports that “although 7% of White and 9% of African-American 14-year-old girls have experienced intercourse, only 2% of White and 6% of African-American 14-year-olds participated voluntarily.”21 This is the sexual socialization into the prostitution of sexuality where coercion becomes a normalized dimension of sexual life. These are the conditions under which coerced sex becomes chosen sex. As a recent study conducted by the American Association of University Women establishes, these are the conditions for producing educational, economic, and political subordination because these are the conditions that diminish achievement far beyond the experience of sex. In the AAUW study, 81% of all students in grades 8-11 say they have experienced unwelcome sexual behavior at school. Seventy-six percent of the girls and 56% of the boys in the study reported receiving sexual comments or looks while 65% of the girls and 42% of the boys were touched, grabbed, or pinched in a sexual way. These figures
