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

something [laughs], I was all hyper and stuff, I guess. I guess you could say it was a sexual feeling, you feel it all over.

    In answering questions about how her body feels, Laura gets a little more specific: She feels “hyper,” “jumpy,” like she “was takin’ drugs or something.” She “guess[es]” that this feeling was sexual. While she is describing some kind of arousal, there is no indication that it has a sexual quality. It is just as possible that she is describing an experience of anxiety. When I ask whether Laura’s “jumpy” feel- ings feel good to her, she describes them as “strange.” Her body is sending her signals that are confusing—she is physically aroused in the presence of this boy, and this bodily feeling occurs in con- junction with a sense of “want” in relation to him. But this ex- perience has an unpleasant quality about it. Later she calls the feeling “an unwanted visitor.”
    What is at stake for Laura in having clarity about her desire? Laura’s confusion about whether or not these feelings are sexual
    desire stands in counterpoint to, and may be explained by, having been sexually abused as a child. Her story is not only about sexual violation but also about women not hearing her or responding to her—a story about betrayed relationships. Laura tells me that when she was seven years old, a neighborhood teenage boy “did unspeakable things to me.” She says that, despite threats from him, she “eventually did tell someone, but nothin’ ever happened to him, I mean, he went on with his life like nothin’ happened. I don’t think that’s right.” When I asked her if she’d ever talked to a coun- selor about it, she said that the “therapy I had didn’t really help. She just wanted to know what happened, and I was supposed to see another therapist, but my mother never took me, I don’t know why.” In fact, her mother acted as if this violation had never happened:
    She talks to me about him like I care, you know, because it was her friend’s son, it was her best friend’s son, that’s what made it even worse, so it’s like, I don’t know, it’s like they can’t accept the fact . . . she doesn’t talk about it anymore, she clammed up about it. And we went to visit her [friend] in [another state], and like my mother acted like nothin’ happened, I mean, it’s not like he ever apologized for anything or nothin’ like that, so why does he get to walk off free?
    As Laura tells me what happened, she gets increasingly angry. Not only does Laura’s mother not talk to her about sexuality, she “acted like nothin’ happened” when something “horrible” did happen, and she did not respond to Laura’s need to talk about a frightening violation or have it resolved by either adult woman confronting the boy. Laura understands that this boy was not held responsible for his actions; she is angry not only at his lack of apology or acknowl- edgment that he had done something that required his apology, but also at his “getting to walk off free.” Laura’s adolescent sexual-
    ity may be tainted by the possibility that she experienced pleasure in this exploitative situation; therefore pleasure may be confusing or painful, a difficult experience she may wish to avoid, from which she may dissociate (Kaplan, 1991; Young, 1992). A connection between pleasure and violation may also limit Laura’s psychic motivation to clarify the messages that her body is sending her.
    I tell her I notice it still bothers her a lot and ask her if it affects the rest of her life now; she replies, “I don’t know. Like if I wanna do something, like with that guy, you know, it might stop me. I don’t know.” Laura considers making an uncertain connection between this sexual violation and her lack of clarity about her own sexual desire. The framing of girls’ sexuality into simplistic and dualistic good and bad categories, which suggests that the desire- less girl is normal and safe,