Last week, the Centers for Disease Control released what many Americans believed to be shocking estimates of the numbers of American women who have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted or abused. This past fall, many Americans were appalled and confused by the multiplying revelations of pedophiliac rapes perpetrated by men involved with outreach university sports programs.
All this brings to mind a blog I wanted to post last spring, throughout the summer, and again as fall brought children and young adults back to campuses; however, it was a very difficult blog to compose, and I put it off. Current events make me feel, once again, that I should try to say something about this, and I have resolved to do my best.
As a young teen African American who had to walk or catch the bus to go to and from school and part-time work at a local library, I very quickly discovered that there were many men out there of all races who barely grasped the concept that I might have the right to say, “No, I do not want a ride from you, nor do I want you as my ‘boyfriend.’ Thank you.” Even if some of these resistant men grasped the idea that I could elect to say no, many of them did not seem to feel obligated to accept the fact that I had declined their invitation. Refusing a ride, a boyfriend, a man, or any number of creative offers all too often earned me a barrage of foul and often frightening verbal abuse, right there on public streets in Los Angeles, in broad daylight, in front of other strangers who went on about their business.
More startling than this verbal punishment and gunning of engines in response to, “No, thank you,” was the equally foul-mouthed barrage of insults I received if my response did not come loudly enough or fast enough for some men—meaning if, as far as the man making the offer could tell, I hadn’t said anything to him, at all. A fourteen-year-old girl verbally assaulted in public by total strangers for saying nothing at all in response to their sexual come-ons? As a part of daily life, waiting at a bus stop, reading a book? What does this repeated experience say about our American culture? No, it hasn’t changed, as far as I can tell, because the last time I was shouted down for not accepting a sexual come-on was in my own office, by a student of mine, one semester ago. And this was not the first time that a student, professor or administrator has assumed that his or her access to me on campus obligates my sexual surrender to bullying.
Everyone in my family, as I grew up, knew the cautionary tale about the distant aunt who had been accosted and beaten by a total stranger when she got off a Los Angeles bus. Her screams to passersby that she didn’t know her assailant, please help her, did not inspire even one witness to step into a shop or phone booth and place an anonymous call to the police. I was told that, when she came to on the ground, she had to drag herself into a shop and call a family member to come collect her and take her to a hospital. What might she have done to inspire such behavior? I was reminded, by way of explanation, that she was a particularly beautiful “Negro” woman. Her beauty, her race and her gender “caused” the assault. And I assume they “caused” the passersby to neglect to alert the police to help her.
By the time I entered young womanhood, I understood that being an African American woman meant that men of many races sincerely believed my sexuality was not mine to own but theirs to demand. Not even growing old enough to have young adult children of my own has ended this kind of experience; I still find my progress down the street or through the semester blocked by a truck, a car, a man or woman determined to get access to my body, no matter how I feel about the proposed sexual encounter. It only becomes really frightening, now, when I see a silent group of men watching such an interaction. The general American expectation seems to be that, if some man hasn’t claimed a woman’s (or girl’s) sexuality, she doesn’t have the right to say no to other men (or women) who are interested in it. In short, to my shock, I have grown up and older in an America where a girl or single woman is increasingly up for sexual grabs. Feminism has not stemmed this tsunami tide.
It seems to me that most African-descent women in America are still expected to surrender their bodies to whoever demands them, for whatever reason. As an African American woman who has spent the past ten years, since separation and divorce, voluntarily abstinent, I can attest to the shock and rage with which many men beyond the age of twenty-five have responded to—no, nothing as dramatic as rejection; we don’t get far enough for me to explain to them my values or choices—a third private telephone call or a second dinner together (not necessarily alone) with no sexual activity in sight. Men under twenty-five, especially the tough-looking ones, are the men I’ve met since becoming single who are often patient enough to give me an opportunity to explain that they are too young for me, according to my ethics, and who even let me describe to them the kinds of committed and considerate relationships I hope they will wait to develop with some other cherished future partner, someday.
Let me be clear. There is an astonishingly widespread unspoken expectation of a woman’s obligation to surrender herself to uncommitted sexual activity, out here in unmarried adult America. The situation seems very little different for girls, boys and men. The right to sexual predation seems to have become America’s social norm. Membership in a religious community, such as Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Baha’i, for example, does not necessarily protect one from this widespread social expectation of sexual surrender upon brief acquaintance and with no commitment.
When I first began to teach at St. Mary’s College for women, Notre Dame’s sister school, I soon encountered in my students’ journal entries the familiar grievance of being sexually preyed upon and trapped. Many of our intensely searching class discussions led to verbalization of the idea that the liberation young women and girls need in the early twenty-first century is not the freedom to have hetero- or homoerotic sex but the freedom to decline it. Many of these young predominantly European American women, whose families generally had enough money to put them into a costly private college, wrote with passion and shocking pain about wanting the right and the autonomy to say “No” to sexual demands and invitations to “date,” without being forced to give explanations, apologies or excuses, and without compromising their friendships.
St. Mary’s women were my first encounter with whole groups of students intensely, self-sacrificing-ly determined to share their most introspective writings in response to literature assigned to the class, no matter how insistently I reminded them that they did not have to read such personal journal entries aloud. Individuals and whole classes consistently brushed this reminder aside in an effort, I think, to get to the deepest meanings of their own experiences. And so we learned together that there is a lot of unnecessary sexual pain and entrapment being generated out here in American society, in the guise of sexual freedom.
I still remember one hardworking young woman’s intensely vivid journal entry describing how she’d worn out her computer’s back arrow key rewriting her journal entries for my class. She’d come to that particular class wild-eyed and shaky and immediately raised her hand to read her journal entry aloud. She read very affectingly about ethnic minority women’s assaults, and then she almost screamed, “What about me?” What followed was a list of sexual atrocities she had survived, since childhood. She shrieked her way through the reading of this, clearly determined to have her classmates and me hear her out. She seemed to me to be oblivious to all efforts to offer her support and praise for the courage she’d mustered to read this aloud to everyone.
I have since St. Mary’s encountered, here at Texas Southern University, another group of students immersed in their learning experience to the point of self-annihilation. My TSU students tend, as a group, to write directly from their viscera and read aloud straight through the pain of un-anesthetized self-revelation. So I now know that it is not only women students who have suffered from the inability to say “No” and nevertheless retain their social standing, their relationships, even their friendships. Young men and boys are trapped and stigmatized into participating in unwanted sexual activity, too.
Some of those trapped into pretending that they are not virgins, or pretending they are glad they gave up their virginity and emotional innocence to an acquaintance on his or her way to other partners, or pretending that they enjoy “sleeping around” or “hooking up,” or that they prefer sex to affection and commitment are, in fact, my toughest-looking male students.
I have had to interrupt fiery class discussions over literature about love and hatred to point out to young women that they are speaking to young men who have chosen to read women’s books rather than men’s, every time they had a choice, and who are constantly writing very sensitive journal entries about why women seem to choose pushy, sexually demanding, disrespectful, or abandoning men. Young men who spend time with women without attempting to take sexual advantage of them may find themselves insulted and verbally abused by those women, assumed to have rejected the women’s (or girls’) advances, when in fact the men thought they were respecting themselves and the young women in their company. I have had to search my soul to write small notes on young men’s journal entries, praising their earnest questioning about what women want and their candor in revealing their own history of blunders and broken hearts, supporting their dedication to the values their grandmothers taught them in the face of the social and personal rejections they feel their old-fashioned values have earned them.
Now, we live in an age when a young man who has not had sex with a string of abandoned young women or girls may be accused of being gay, perhaps beaten up by males or shunned by females, or even raped to “teach him a lesson,” as punishment for his abstinence. We live in an age when privileged young women at St. Mary’s and ethnic minority women at Texas Southern University have written to me astonishingly similar journal entries confessing that they have had to endure sexual activity when all they wanted was a hug. Or that they had to stay with their date rapists and try to make relationships out of assaults. Or that they wished they could say no to unwanted sex without losing everything: home, car, income, family support, college tuition, small children, jobs. And I’ve had students write about being sexually and physically assaulted by any or all of the people who should have tried to protect them: not only brothers, coaches, teachers, and fathers, but their biological mothers, too.
Not that it is easy to protect an American child or youth from sexual assault. Single women who try to expose a child’s rapist or defend a raped or otherwise assaulted child or youth may soon find themselves verbally, psychologically and emotionally assaulted in court, as well as financially ruined, paying for attorneys and “expert witnesses” for the next several years, to defend them both. American court systems are structured to make it easy for sexual bullies to intimidate or exhaust the resources of young, female and/or poor victims.
One problem with America’s relationship with abstinence is its historical hypocrisy. Autonomy of any kind, including control over one’s sexuality, was not allowed most girls and women of African descent in the Americas, by the time the colonies that became the United States declared their independence from England. So, such girls and women were not, for the most part, historically expected or even permitted to practice abstinence, in the United States. This degenerating trend, in which the societal member lowest on the hierarchical power scale becomes a prototype for what will happen to everyone else, eventually, has played out with America’s issue about the right to rape—specifically, whom the rapist has the right to target. (See Lani Guernier’s The Miner’s Canary.) In the twenty-first century, most women of all races and many men seem to have lost the right to decline sexual activity. The age at which America as a larger society now expects its citizens to begin taking part in sexual activity seems to have plummeted to puberty. If this is so, then the only line today’s pedophiles are crossing is the one that bars those hypothetically sexually active pre-teens from sexual activity with adults.
Is this the society that we meant to create when we claimed to be giving young women and men (and teenaged children) sexual freedom in the second half of the twentieth century? Is a society that promotes sexual entrapment really better for our children and youth than a society that respects those who practice abstinence, and upholds their right to say no? Do we really believe that sexual abstinence is unhealthy or impossible, past the age of puberty? And if we think abstinence is unhealthy, does it follow that we are teaching our children that sexual activity or acting out—or victimization—is healthier?
I’ve heard a great deal of talk, while my children grew up in the past quarter century, about how unrealistic it is to expect abstinence of America’s youth. I expected it of mine, and they, for the most part, practiced it reasonably well and developed skills other than sexual prowess or defensive emotional numbness: swimming, soccer, basketball, wrestling, theatre arts, voice, ballet, fencing, learning to read in three languages, a lifestyle of volunteer work, excellent grades, and high ACT/SAT test scores that earned them entry into some of America’s best colleges and universities. Yet, we tolerate the removal of sex education courses from our public schools that might have taught our youngest citizens what abstinence involves and how else to get badly needed attention, affection and exertion, besides offering their bodies for sexual usage or quietly submitting themselves to misusage, in fear.
Sexual activity is not the only rigorous exertion that we can offer our young people, but it seems that, as a society, this is what we have opted to teach our youth. Not organized P.E. (physical education) at recess in elementary school, not after-school sports, music, dance, art, and drama programs in junior and high school, not regional team sports or band practice on weekends and in city-sponsored summer camps, and not required physical health and wellness courses in college. But we as a society offer nonstop the constant, ever-present message that a healthy youth or adult will (must?) engage in sexual activity; however promiscuous, experimental, degrading, humiliating, or otherwise damaging such encounters may turn out to be, other than mention of AIDS and pregnancy prevention through the religious use of condoms, seems rarely or never to get equal discussion time.
Sexual activity is not the only physically and emotionally demanding exertion to which American youth should have access, nor should they be obligated to choose sexual activity as one of their forays into growing up. They should have choices, and sexual activity lacking the emotional security of documented commitment (marriage) should not have to be one of those choices, any more than bicycle riding without a helmet or scuba diving without a partner should have to be one of their choices.
Chastity is normal and healthy. Youth should have sufficient information and the right to choose. You and I should make access to that information and the right to choose a new American priority.
I haven’t explained to many people, besides my own adult children, why I have spent this past decade, since leaving my husband, cleansing my body of everything that ever happened to it that I didn’t want to have happen. But here is the explanation, offered for this discussion: I have been reclaiming myself, and I have dedicated that reclaiming to my relationship with God and the universe; such reclaiming leads to a profoundly peaceful feeling.
When young women close the door to my office to tell me some truly horrendous personal information about what they have gone through, if they are now in a safe and self-contained, sustainable living situation, and if it seems appropriate, I gently offer self-reclaiming as a healing option. I mention it in my classes, if students’ responses to the literature under discussion has made the topic appropriate. Perhaps I am taking a chance that someone might accuse me of proselytizing my personal ethics; but I believe that we live in a society that has taken from our young people the chance to understand that chastity is a perfectly healthy lifestyle option.
So I will encapsulate a chastity option, here. If I, as a mature woman who has already raised four adults, do not attempt to help change what I have experienced as America’s unhealthy sexually predatory culture, who will?
Perhaps the best word for choosing abstinence is chastity. One cannot reclaim virginity, innocence, trust, or childhood. But one can develop a very healthy level of self-acceptance, self-confidence, and faith by courageously, politely, patiently, firmly, and repeatedly saying no. I believe many of America’s women would not end up battling weight extremes and unhealthy eating addictions, and many of our men would not end up predatory and violent, if they had not, early on, felt threatened by the loss of their bodies’ autonomy and their right to physical privacy.
There are many healthy and low-cost or cost-free ways to experience physical exertion and the mental and spiritual cleansing and uplift that come with passionate bonding, besides uncommitted sexual activity.
For example, teach yourself yoga, alone or with another person of any age. Just do it, gently and patiently, as often (or rarely) as you might have had sex, were you in a sexual relationship. Learn it as you try it. Or take up walking through a park with a child. Stay by his or her side. Push him or her on the swing, bounce him or her up and down on the teeter totter, and keep up with his or her wild run down the bike path. Again, just do it. Hang in there, like having sex. Don’t let that child feel alone. Make the child feel as loved as you would have hoped your sexual partner would make you feel. Do this once a day, once a week, once a month, or however often you think you might have partaken of sexual activity, instead. Or take up volunteering once a week or month at a hospital or zoo. Or take up shampooing and exercising shelter animals every weekend. Or take up biking, alone or with an elder who needs outings. Or learn to swim and do water aerobics alone or with a disabled friend. Or go on a juice fast with your doctor’s permission, drinking only the healthiest fluids until you bring your weight and cholesterol down to healthy levels, supplementing with vitamins, almond milk or soy milk. Or undertake to read a selected library of books you have always wanted to read. Or help an elder with his or her garden. Or master another language and correspond by email with an international pen pal in that language. Or learn to meditate. Or perfect your English so you can read to children at a hospital or local elementary school. Or study calculus so you can tutor teenagers. Or learn to go skateboarding every evening with a teenager who could use some uncomplicated company. Or do all of the above and more.
Uncommitted sexual activity and the emotional chaos it breeds drain legions of hours, energy, enthusiasm, mental and emotional wellbeing, and goodwill from American lives. Make a positive difference, choosing chastity. Make a statement. Chastity changes lives. Chastity makes a safe society. Allow it to shape your life and our society. Allow it to shape the lives of our young people and the environment in which they must grow up. Help create a new American society that gives all our children, of both genders and all races, a safe time to grow up and safe parameters to make sexual commitments someday, when they are ready.
