The Sex Myth by Rachel Hills

Author:Rachel Hills
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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I. Not their fraternity’s real name.

6

Femininity: The Madonna/Gaga Complex

As a high school freshman in rural Illinois, one of Brit’s favorite ways to spend a Sunday afternoon was curled up in her friend Jessa’s bedroom, eating Girl Scout cookies and reading Cosmopolitan. The two would sit together on Jessa’s twin bed, surrounded by stuffed animals and Backstreet Boys posters, and flip through the pages of the magazine, exchanging notes on how the content therein stacked up to their own nascent sexual knowledge, and laughing over the illicit and sometimes outlandish nature of their reading material.

As teenage girls go, Brit was not particularly “girly,” and nor did she want to be. Introverted and bookish, with dark hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, she found the traditional femininity that was celebrated in her tiny Midwestern community left her cold. In a school where there were only fifteen girls in her grade, she felt like the odd woman out, a lone wolf in an ark full of platonic pairs.

But those evenings she spent sitting in Jessa’s bedroom, talking about sex, gave Brit a window into a world that was as intimate as it was rebellious, and as transgressive as it was conformist—what Brit describes as “that space between girlhood and womanhood that seems to be designated by sexual acts.”

Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” and one of the chief ways in which girls learn womanhood is through their engagement with sexuality. As Brit puts it, “When you had sex, you were a ‘woman,’ whether you were ready for it or not.”

“A lot of it was just reading magazines and giggling,” Brit, now twenty-three and living in New York, recalls. “But it was also about having a space to speak openly about sex—to say, Oh, I’d do that, or That’s totally nuts.”

Conversations like the ones Brit describes above are more than just a clumsy adolescent attempt at playing grown-up. They are an exercise in the learning and creation of gender, a drawing of the boundaries not only of what it means to be an adult, but of what it means to be female.

And just as men are taught that their masculinity is contingent on their sexual prowess, so too are women taught that being “feminine” means being sexual in particular ways. It is a process that begins long before puberty, manifest in everything from the plastic baby dolls and pink beauty kits that dominate the designated “girls’ aisles” at most toy stores to the inevitably heterosexual happily-ever-afters that conclude fairy tales and Disney movies. Years before we ever have sex, sexuality is as much a part of the toolbox through which we are taught to communicate and decipher gender as the clothes we wear, the amount of space we take up when we sit on the train, or the length to which the hairdresser intuitively goes to cut our hair.

The symbolic and symbiotic relationship between sex and gender was apparent in the conversations I had with young women every place I traveled.

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