It reminds me of something that Susie Bright said — “There is no pride in love.” If you’re going to be a free agent, sexually, there are going to be bad choices, and awkwardness, and heartbreak. It doesn’t always make for great propaganda against the socially conservative sex police. Sometimes you’re just lonely and confused. And yet, it’s worth it.

I had exactly the opposite experience from Nona as a teenager; I was terrified of sex, ran away from boys I had crushes on, and my best friend was my #2 pencil. I found love in college. I loved the boy, loved sex, lost him through my own fault. And that, despite its monogamy, was very much a 21st century relationship, as much as hookups are — we didn’t “date,” in the formal, highly gendered sense. We were just friends, and then best friends, and then best friends who slept together. I actually preferred that to the dinner-and-a-movie kabuki that my girlfriends idealized. It leaves you more confused; but then I think there’s a tradeoff between clearly defined roles and sincere intimacy, and I’ll take sincere intimacy any day.

Now I’m in the weird position, for the first time, of having a potential sexual relationship with someone with whom I’m not going to have a long-term relationship. (Logistical reasons; I’m moving away soon.) Can BadSarah get laid without collapsing into a puddle of slut-shame? Will BadSarah ever reconcile with God? Who knows. I want it very badly — I want the wild youth I haven’t had yet — I’m still not sure if my constitution can take it, but I’ll gamble. I have a right to gamble.

You can’t present a real person’s romantic history as a feminist triumph unless you accept a certain degree of uncertainty and confusion as healthy or at least as a fair price to pay for freedom. I think that’s one thing Nona was saying, and I think it’s true.

I think my equal aversion for the “hookup culture” per se, as well as “dating” per se, is that either way a woman fulfills a formalized role, rather than just interacting with another human being. If you relate to each other as people, then whether the relationship is brief or long, monogamous or non-monogamous, it’s a good, human thing, I think.

If you don’t have good will for the other person, I think, it’s no good; “love” is a tough word to use because we don’t often talk about loving a near-stranger, or loving several people at once, but even when you don’t have Edward-and-Bella “love” you can have good will. Philia, which has connotations of liking, friendship, and love, is probably better than any English word. I couldn’t imagine enjoying sex without good will or philia. I could definitely imagine enjoying it without lifetime romantic love.

Frankly, I just wasn’t ready. I have a healthy sex life with my partner now, but for us sex is really just a small part of our relationship, and partnership seems to be so much more what we are. I fully endorse and support people who want to have as much sex as possible, but I also would prefer that the choice to have less or no sex outside emotional relationships was more accepted in feminist and sex-positive circles.

THIS. I can totally relate.

Thank you Sarah and S.L. I agree completely. Wonderful points.

I saw how a few of those 20-year-old man with a teenage girl “relationships” worked out and it was just pathetic. A friend of mine in high-school met a guy online who was around 20 and he drove over a few weekends *from Canada* (we’re in the US) to see her. Then he cheated on/dumped her for a friend of hers; this resulted in girl A deleting the Facebook account of girl B because she was a “boyfriend stealing bitch” and it started a little war of retaliation that the guy happily sat back and watched. No one in that situation was mature enough to be dating; the girls called each other names in the hall and wrote mean crap on *Facebook* for godsake, and the guy was the kind of loser who had to go to another country to find a girlfriend and who then created a lot of drama with a bunch of underage teenagers.

Teenage girls aren’t that mature, they just hide the crazy/insecurity/childishness better. The asshole guy probably thought the girls he cheated on *were* mature because they hid a great deal of the angst and backbiting from him, and tried to show each other up and act like “adults” for him, while he was allowed to play it like a dating sim and fool around and act like a childish idiot without losing his access to sex.

When young women drop everything to impress older men (the only *valuable* people in the equation) of course these men are going to pretend it’s not fucked up; it’s validation for them that nubile women (read: little girls) find them attractive (if they pretend that they aren’t taking advantage of almost-children) and it also lets them get away with crap a grown woman is less likely to put up with.

I knew, when I was fifteen, that sex and an emotional/spiritual connection were intimately linked in my mind. I felt comfortable with that. I turned down possible relationships or sexual encounters which I didn’t think would last, and grew very comfortable with my own body and sexuality. When I was 17, I met another high school senior on the net with whom I clicked on a fundamental level; he came up to be near me during college, we were a couple for those years, and we married shortly before turning 22. We had – and have continued to have – everything I knew I wanted when I was fifteen: emotional intimacy, a great connection, and kickass sex.

But the whole time, I was made to feel like shit. By peers who accused me of being a prude or not knowing anything about sex; by my doctor and my sex health instructor in high school who were worried that I wasn’t “interested” enough in boys and suggested I might be “slower to develop” than other girls (I didn’t point out I’d been masturbating since I was 12; I kept my feelings of hurt inadequacy to myself); by magazines, and television shows, and movies, which suggested that sexual relationships are a part and parcel of every highschooler’s life and only “losers” don’t have them; by relatives or, later, mentors who reminisced about the sexual revolution and said “everybody” has “urges” in high school and it’s “natural” to “experiment” with others; by people who suggested, yes, that I was not “liberated” or “empowered” by monogamy, that I was “inexperienced” and “couldn’t tell if I was having bad sex” since I’d only had one sex partner, that I was, in general, ignorant and repressed and not terribly sexual of a being (apparently enlightenment can only be found once a woman has had a certain number of other people’s body parts in her vagina).

It was damn hard for me, at times, to not temporarily call for an open relationship with my S.O. and go have a couple of flings, just so people would get off my back. So that, when having “girl talk” with friends, people wouldn’t look at me askance if it came out that I had only had one sex partner. Whenever people talked about “slut-shaming” I wanted to grit my teeth, and point out that the flip-side of the coin is true, as well, and women are “prude-shamed” just as often. I knew I wouldn’t like sex without emotional intimacy – the idea made me feel hollow, bored, and vaguely nauseated – but for a good part of my mid-twenties I was honestly convinced that there was something fundamentally wrong with me for not having wanted to hook up in high school and college. For a short while, it even affected my sex life, because I felt too shitty about myself during sex to enjoy it. I am not the only person (male and female inclusive) who I know this has happened to.

So to Jill, yes, I also hope for a future in which teenage girls can have whatever kind of safe sexual relationships they want, secure in the knowledge that they are not ruining their lives, that they are not less of a person for doing so, and that their value is not based on who or what they do or do not allow between their legs.

But I wish – wish, wish, wish – that we could stop using terms like “rushed into having” sex, as if the reason I have sex in high school was because I wasn’t mature enough to handle it, or mock those of us who wanted relationships by speaking about the desire for a “monogamous, snuggly, worshipping boyfriend”. I wish there was some acknowledgement that there have been some negative effects of the hook-up culture which aren’t just linked to us “not speaking up about what we want” or having to “use sex as currency when we want a relationship.” There have been judgmental aspects to the hook-up culture which DO pressure people into having sex, and which perceives hook-ups and casual sex as a “normal” part of life or of growing up (and, just like heteronormativity, it implies that the rest of us are “abnormal” or that there’s some fundamental part of living that we’re missing out on).

We’re here, too, you know. We exist. We link sex to emotional intimacy.

And there is nothing wrong with us, either.

There’s always social order. The project of activists and idealists is to reorganize it along more just lines. Right now, there’s a social order that says that if you don’t have sex prior to being in a committed relationship, you’re probably only going to find a willing partner in a religious or otherwise niche community (which have their own, parallel, social orders). Is that fair, and to what extent is it hurting more women than it helps (by reducing the risk of slut-shaming for “normal” levels of hooking up that previously weren’t tolerated, even though they were inevitable).

@umami:
re: the meme on girls maturing earlier– sure, a lot of it is about girls being socialized to the traits that are considered “mature” in modernity. That doesn’t come into conflict with what the OP wrote, that “I had great, pleasurable, safe sex in high school and college with guys who were nevertheless emotionally immature and noncommital and who hurt my feelings all the time.” point being that she wanted a relationship and these douchebags weren’t ready for it. For all the exceptions that exist out there, the tendency is that, yes, women are frequently ready for the obligations and commitments of an emotional relationship before men are. Admittedly, 22 was an exaggeration. maybe 19 or 20 would’ve been the right pick. That doesn’t eliminate the point, though: there are gonna be imbalances of power in a heterosexual relationship where people are at the same level of emotional development, PROBABLY BECAUSE men are socialized to amass power without focusing on emotional development, while women are socialized to focus on those “emotional development” tags, so a man and a woman who are at the same level of emotional development are going to have an asymetrical power dynamic, because she’ll have gotten to that emotional point directly, while he will have stumbled there on the side while amassing money/power.