Doing the Nasty: Teases & Sluts

"[N]o boy, not even her steady boyfriend, would ever respect her again, and no decent man would marry her, because she wasn't a virgin" (p. 63).

So since this post is about sex, I feel it's essential to mention how Seattle's education system emotionally scarred me before I get into the bulk of it so any intermittent sarcastic comments aren't misconstrued as genuine affirmation. There may be some personal information disclosed here that will make you wildly uncomfortable. You'll love it.

I don't know if my parents figured my sisters and Cosmo had already beaten them to it, but I never got that "sex is when people bump uglies" talk. Fortunately going to a public school took care of that when my 200 lb 2nd grade (well, 2nd-4th multi-age class) teacher found one of my 9-year-old classmates with a condom. She then decided to explain every horrifying detail about doing the nasty. I mean every horrifying detail, from positions to locations of anatomical parts I didn't even know existed. Why does a 7-year-old need to know what or where a cervix or a prostate is located? I mean, by the time I was 11 I had diagrams of every form of birth control out there, where to get it, how to use it, if it was effective against STIs, for his or her pleasure, what makes it ineffective, so on and so forth. Ugh, scarring stuff, let me tell you. I didn't even know a chick and a dick could do that, let alone just two dicks--but that's another, much happier story.

Now that we have that out of the way, after coming to college I learned my unpleasant and painfully detailed introduction to sex wasn't an American thing, but instead just seemed to be a Seattle thing. Instead every girl I talked to on this side of the continental divide seemed to have been fed the same thing that only abstinence is 100% effective, thought the pill blocked STIs, and seemed to think the more condoms merrier the blockade. They definitely needed those diagrams I had at age 11 much more than I did. Consequently, the moment they hit their pale, pasty, nerdy school they had a similar experience to that explained by Douglas: suddenly mommy and daddy were far away and they could go hump whatever they wanted, and damn the consequences. After all, come college the expectation seemed to switch from "all nice girls are virgins" to something closer to that in Grease's "There are Worse Things I Could Do" where "nice girls aren't teases". The latter seemed to have been the prevailing moral code in my junior high and high school though, while this change didn't seem to hit a good number of people I've talked to from the East Coast until they bumped into college.

This shift in morality is even evident in films very similar to the "whoops I got knocked up" flicks from the 1960s described by Douglas and more modern ones as well. In a manner similar A Summer Place and Love with the Proper Stranger, modern films like Saved and Juno both ended with the guys being happy with their knocked-up friend. In Juno, the two main characters end up happily making out afterwards, and while in Saved it didn't end with a romantic relationship seeing as to how the guy had a hot boyfriend, he still seemed pretty ecstatic about having a baby with his Christian friend while being a teenager. In both cases, the female characters "acknowledged the contradictions pulling them in different directions" (p. 74) in just the same way the characters in these earlier films seemed to be, so I'm inclined to agree with Douglas's readings of those films. The fact that we continued to have similar films with messages that "every girl must decide for herself" (p. 79) makes it obvious that the double standard about sex still exists to some degree, at least amongst high school students like in the films. After all, men screwing around are pimps, and women screwing around are either cougars if they're 30+ or sluts if their 30-.

Now for how much I happily downed every word Douglas said from the constant contradictions to the visual crack Cosmo's shoves down women's throats, mixing that odd dichotomy of "I want to be beautiful" with "you're all stupid for spending 2 hours every morning to look like a Castro Street tranny", there is one thing that has certainly seems to have changed from the 1960s to current times. At least in my experience, there isn't this idea that guys want to marry virgins anymore, while that was the idea parents shoved down their children's throats back in the day. Hell, most guys I know don't even want to date virgins anymore. After talking to a few of them while procrastinating writing this blog post, there seemed to be an agreement that dating a virgin meant you wouldn't get laid any time soon, while most college girls tend to put out fairly quickly. One friend even went so far as saying that he was interested in a girl who turned out being a virgin for about two years, but never ended up actually going out with her since she seemed more than happy to stay a virgin. Instead he dated a girl he knew would put out almost immediately and has been with her for a year now even though he says he doesn't like her as much. My friends are jackasses.