Hard to Get. Leslie Bell
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talk of sex and relationships in American culture, it turns out we know very little about the sex and love lives of “ordinary” women. Much of what we know about these topics comes from cultural products, memoirs by writers with a particular agenda, writings by therapists about their patients, and anecdotal knowledge from friends and acquaintances, who are not always completely frank about the conflicts and inhibitions they feel. Because in-depth knowledge about the lives of everyday women is difficult to come by, I recruited and interviewed ordinary women, many of whom commented on how surprised they were at how much they told me.
At the time of the interviews, my respondents were between twenty-four and twenty-nine years old and lived in Northern California. They had all graduated from college, and none had children. Some were in relationships, some were not, and a few were married. Half of them were women of color and half were white. Half were lesbian, bisexual, or queer, and half were straight.42
In some ways, they were not representative of the population. College-educated women currently compose 35 percent of the population of women ages twenty-five to twenty-nine in the United States. And Northern California, particularly the San Francisco Bay Area, is known for its progressive sexual values and culture, in contrast to some other regions of the country. When it comes to religion and degree of religiosity, the women I spoke with were less religious (35 percent came from nonreligious families, in contrast with 21 percent in California and 15 percent in the United States as a whole) and less Protestant (15 percent came from Protestant families, compared with 36 percent in California and 51 percent in the United States as a whole), on average, than the general population. They represent a range of class backgrounds, but, like most college graduates, they come disproportionately from upper-middle-class families: 55 percent from upper-middle-class families, which compose only 20 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.43 Current numbers on the proportion of women in the United States who identify as lesbian, bisexual, or queer hover between 3.5 and 7 percent.44 However, I chose to oversample lesbian/bisexual/queer women and women of color because of my frustration with studies of female sexuality that included predominantly straight white women and drew conclusions about all women based on the experiences of women belonging only to socially dominant groups. While the women I spoke with might not have been representative of all twenty-something women in the United States, they were representative of those most likely to benefit from the increased freedoms discussed above, and so give us a window into what many women will experience if national social trends toward more progressive sexual values continue.
In other respects, however, the women I spoke with represented the diversity of women their age. Although they lived in California at the time of the interviews, only half of them had grown up there. Half came from families in which their parents were still married, half from families in which their parents were divorced. Of those families of divorce, family formations ranged from blended families, to extended families involving grandparents, aunts, and uncles, to gay and lesbian families. And, in fact, in California in 2010, the population included only 40 percent non-Hispanic whites. More detailed information about the women I interviewed and the interview process can be found in appendix II.
I conducted a total of sixty interviews, interviewing twenty women three times in a process called clinical interviewing.45 This technique, which involved conducting multiple interviews over the course of one to two months, was particularly appropriate in this study due to the feelings of shame, inadequacy, fear, competition, and exposure frequently associated with sex and love. Furthermore, because women’s experiences of sexuality are often complicated by violence and coercion, building trust and safety over the course of a series of interviews was important to gain a full picture of young women’s lives. And the women with whom I spoke were able to develop increasing levels of comfort with me and with the topic over the course of the three interviews, discussing increasingly vulnerable and revelatory material as the interviews went on. They and I could also notice ways in which they sometimes contradicted themselves, concluding one thing about a specific experience in one interview, and another thing about the same experience in a different interview.
People have asked how I managed to get my participants to speak with me about the very private matters of sex and love. The truth is that while many of the women I spoke with found it anxiety provoking to discuss their feelings about sex and love, they also found it to be a great relief to explore a topic on which there are so many internal and external prohibitions and proscriptions. They were relieved to feel understood, to hear their experiences reflected in those of other twenty-something women, and to feel that someone was attending to the particulars of their experiences as women in their twenties in the early twenty-first century. I heard women ask over and over again whether their experiences and feelings were normal, whether the contradictory feelings they had about sex and love were true for other women, whether their ambivalence about sexual and relational desire and pleasure was shared by other women, and whether there was hope for them to feel more comfortable with their desires for sex and relationships.
In my interviews and in my experiences with patients, I heard a lot of questioning, a lot of discontent, and a lot of angst. While some women with whom I spoke were getting exactly what they wanted and felt comfortable with their desires for both sex and relationships, a little over half of the women were not getting what they wanted from sex and love, and they felt very confused about what was getting in the way, and what to do about it. These young women didn’t feel empowered or like they lived on top of the world. Instead, they felt lost.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
The book unfolds in three parts, in which I examine how nine women grappled with sexual liaisons and relationships with varying degrees of internal conflict, anxiety, and uncertainty. The chapters progress from a focus on splits reflecting an inhibition of relational desire (between relationships and career, relationships and identity, and relationships and sexual desire) to a focus on splits reflecting an inhibition of sexual desire (between sexual desire and safety and between sexual passion and stability), and finally to the experiences and strategies that made it possible for some women not to split.
Part I: The Sexual Woman
In part I, I tease out the experiences of three women struggling with their desires for relationships, successful careers, strong identities, and independence. Katie, Jayanthi, and Claudia split relationships from various aspects of independence, leading them to develop strategies of desire of the Sexual Woman. In chapter 2, I profile Katie and introduce one of the fundamental splits that I saw in the women I interviewed: between relationships and career. Katie’s sexual desires felt straightforward to her, but she felt a taboo on desiring a relationship as a successful scientist. Chapter 3 highlights Jayanthi and another important split: between relationships and a strong identity. Jayanthi enjoyed being a bad girl who “played” men and could control them sexually, but she worried that being in a relationship would mean the loss of her identity. Chapter 4 concerns Claudia and the split between relationships and strong sexual desire. Claudia was surprised at how difficult it had been to develop a relationship in her twenties, and her sexual desires sometimes felt so strong that she wishes she could “take a pill to kill” them.
Part II: The Relational Woman
In part II, I investigate the experiences of two women who grappled with their desires for sex, passion, safety, and stability. Alicia and Phoebe split sexual desire and passion from various aspects of security in relationships, leading them to develop strategies of desire of the Relational Woman. In chapter 5, I explore Alicia’s experiences and introduce the split between sexual desire and safety. Alicia was a good girl who tried to create safety and security in her relationships, but kept getting hurt by her partners. Chapter 6 focuses on Phoebe and the split between sexual passion and stability. Phoebe was on the cusp of getting engaged to someone stable with whom she didn’t have passionate and intimate sex, despite her history of good relationships with good sex.
Part III: The Desiring Woman
In part III, I explore the experiences of four women who developed productive strategies of desire that allowed them to have satisfying sex and relationships. In chapters 7 and 8, Maria, Susan, Sophia, and Jeanette demonstrate various ways of getting what they want and need.