The women I interviewed who did get what they wanted and needed did so through sexual and relationship experiences in which they acknowledged their contradictory feelings, desires, and fears, but took risks anyway. They didn’t work to ensure their safety above all else and sometimes they got hurt. But they survived the hurt and learned from it that they could continue to take risks, rather than learning that they needed to protect themselves from all future vulnerability.
In chapter 9, I argue for the kind of useful training that young women need to help them stop splitting, start resolving their internal conflicts about their desires for sex and relationships, and begin to have satisfying sex and relationships. The training that I advocate includes the acknowledgment that the desire for seemingly contradictory things—independence and dependence, passionate sex and stability, a strong identity and intimacy—is normal. Internal conflict about the things that matter most in life—love and work and sex—is natural and can be acknowledged as such. Of course, we have mixed feelings about the things that are important to us. Our internal conflict is, in part, what lets us know what really matters to us. Instead of being encouraged to split and disavow their desires, women who can acknowledge their desires and the conflicts that they feel about them can use such knowledge to pursue their desires in all of their complexity. This training can take place in relationships of various kinds: mentorships, romantic relationships, therapeutic relationships, and friendships. Of course, societal changes would help, too, such as changes in social representations of women, changes in the family, changes in the ways we learn about sex in schools, and changes in the ways work is structured.
In this historical moment of freer sexual mores for women, when traditional institutions no longer hold as much sway and no longer provide as much coherence as in the past, young women are left alone to do the cultural and psychological work necessary to navigate the murky waters of sex and love. Old ideals of sexual submissiveness and inhibition don’t cohere with the new black box of the twenties for women. But neither do ideals of radical independence, safety, and control help women to develop satisfying relationships and sex lives characterized by mutuality.
I argue that it is possible to want and to get love and good sex, a career and a relationship, sex and relatedness—to integrate previously split desires. Young women can have it all, not in a glib sense or according to some checklist from a magazine, but in a real sense: by not cutting themselves off from their desires. But this involves giving up some control and entails some expression of vulnerability. Because of this paradox, for women such as Katie, whom we will meet in the next chapter, love and sex and work have never felt so hard to get.
PART I
The Sexual Woman
CHAPTER TWO
The New Taboo
Katie
An increasing number of twenty-something women face a new taboo, and it’s not about sex or money or power. Instead, it’s a taboo about that traditional province of women: relationships.1 No longer is a romantic relationship the holy grail for college-educated women. Their mothers may have concerned themselves with such old-fashioned matters, but times have changed. Instead, relationships are often perceived as threatening educational attainment, career development, and personal growth. These women feel comfortable having and expressing sexual desire—that’s not the problem. The problem is relationships that threaten to impinge upon personal and professional development.
Katie, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student born in 1978, with dark brown hair and bright green eyes, had a physical presence that made her seem taller than she was, and an intense gaze that she frequently turned on me when looking for help with her dilemmas.2 She had known since high school that she wanted to be a chemist, but spent a few years after college working in labs and traveling, making sure she chose the right graduate school. Smart and accomplished, Katie landed a spot in a top graduate program. She seemed to have made all the right choices to position herself for a great career.
And the freedom that Katie felt and exhibited in her sexual development would appear to have set her up for a satisfying sex life. From a young age, Katie had felt free to explore her body—masturbating comfortably as a child and then letting her sexual curiosity and desires lead her to experimenting with various sexual practices and partners in her teens and college years. Old taboos and shame about female sexual desire seemed to have no place in Katie’s experience.
But shortly into our conversations, Katie confided that she worried that her single-minded pursuit of a PhD might limit her ability to meet a man with whom she could build a life. Being stuck in a small college town for five to six years while earning a degree felt severely restrictive to Katie. This realization—that she might want to prioritize a relationship over her career—felt shocking to Katie, and she did not admit to it easily. In fact, she felt deeply ashamed by such thoughts, worried that they signaled weakness and dependence, qualities she did not admire. To put such a high premium on relationships was frightening to Katie. She worried that it meant she wasn’t liberated and was still constrained by traditional expectations of women. Why should she, a young and highly educated woman in the twenty-first century, value relationships with men so highly?
I have heard Katie’s dilemma echoed by countless women in their twenties. They, like Katie, feel a taboo on being too relationship-oriented in their twenties. Parents warn, “Do you really want to settle down so early? We just don’t want to see you miss out on any opportunities.” Friends intone, “How will you know what you like and want if you don’t play the field? You’re only young once. Now’s the time to explore.”
This taboo is a new kind of cultural pressure, unfamiliar to women of earlier generations. Katie’s mother faced very different demands: to marry and have children early, to be sure to find a man who would support her financially. But Katie’s mom, like many women of her generation, lost out in the marriage bargain. She divorced Katie’s father soon after Katie was born because of his extramarital affairs, and thus she was cheated out of the assurances of protection that marriage had offered.
According to her mom, Katie had it made—she had a promising career ahead of her, she hadn’t abandoned her own ambitions for a partner or children, and a relationship would come easily once she was ready for it. But Katie lacked confidence about her own life decisions. She felt much more uncertain about both her career and relationships than she liked to admit. And, like other women of her generation, she deeply feared that she wouldn’t be able to have both a career and a relationship.
Katie, like many of the young women with whom I spoke, still struggled with having a relationship and a professional identity at the same time. Despite all the cultural advances we’ve made over the last century, it is still difficult to reconcile these two paths. In fact, the notion of “having it all” propagated by second-wave feminists seems like a pipe dream of yesteryear to young women such as Katie. This chapter explores why Katie feared that she couldn’t have both professional success and a relationship. Why would a professionally accomplished and ambitious woman feel so threatened by the idea of wanting a relationship?
FREEDOM AND NEW TABOOS
While Katie had unprecedented freedoms in her educational opportunities, career options, sexual experiences, and relationship patterns, she did not feel quite as