Earlier, when she had been focused on sexual and personal exploration during college and for a few years afterward, these injunctions did not feel so much like taboos, and in fact facilitated Katie’s pursuit of what she wanted. She could enjoy her sexual freedom and explore sexual experiences with men and women. And she could do this all without feeling as though she were compromising either her academic and professional development or her chances of developing a relationship in the future. She could pursue her academic ambitions unfettered by the emotional and time commitments of a relationship.4 And she didn’t fear any derogatory sexual labels that would mark her as “nonrelationship material” in the future.
But in her midtwenties, Katie found herself in a bind. She professed to want a relationship in which she could develop emotional intimacy and so explore herself and her sexuality more deeply. But she felt the influence of the social and psychological taboo of being relationship focused, and she worried about the potential loss of independence and her focus on her career. As she grew older and wanted more emotional contact with a sexual partner, but also wanted to advance her career, Katie was in a terrible dilemma.
We see this age-old conflict between relationships and careers played out on television shows such as Mad Men, in which one of the ambitious female characters, Midge Daniels, the bohemian art illustrator who had an affair with Don Draper in season 1, insists on having only affairs and not relationships so that she can stay free. For Midge, this seems the only solution open to her, given the restrictions of marriage in the 1960s. She’s reconciled herself to not having it all. It is striking, then, that in the new millennium Katie resolved the dilemma similarly: by having long-term affairs with men who already had girlfriends. This way, she enjoyed some emotional involvement in an ongoing sexual relationship, but there was no threat to her ambition and career because the relationship couldn’t go anywhere. At the time that I spoke with her, however, this did not feel like a solution to Katie, and instead was the problem she most desperately wanted to solve.
Katie’s solution to the dilemma of wanting an emotionally intimate sexual relationship at the same time that she wanted a career, although a particular manifestation of Katie’s individual psychology and history, also came precisely from the freedoms that Katie’s mother so envied.
SEXUAL FREEDOM
If having it all seemed elusive to Katie, then her sexual freedom would leave her feminist foremothers profoundly pleased. Rather than being consigned to “lie back and think of England,” Katie felt free to explore her body and its pleasures without shame and to be sexually experimental with men and women. And unlike the limited freedoms advocated by the sexual revolution, which often privileged men’s desires for unfettered access to women over women’s prerogative to follow their own desires, Katie felt free to let her own sexual desires be her guide.
Unlike many young girls, Katie seemed to feel that her body really belonged to her and to no one else. She began masturbating when she was eleven, and figured out how to climax from masturbation a few years later. An early vivid memory involved sitting on the floor of her bedroom, leaning against her bed with no clothes on and looking at her reflection in her pet snake’s aquarium. She felt curious about her body and sex and puzzled by how it all worked.
Although Katie felt her own desires strongly and clearly and was curious about sex, she felt generally unrecognized as a sexual being in high school. As an average-size white girl who judged herself to be “overweight and with small breasts,” she felt desexualized by most boys around her, not someone anyone would pay attention to or whose body would interest boys. These experiences and insecurities left Katie in the curious position of knowing her sexual desires but being unconvinced that her body could arouse the same level of desire in others.
These insecurities make it all the more remarkable that in high school, Katie developed an impressive capacity, rare in teenage girls—as documented in scholarly research such as Deborah Tolman’s Dilemmas of Desire—to know what she did and didn’t want.5 Katie felt curious and interested and was happy to make out with the first two boys she kissed. But with the boy she took to her prom, she felt turned off because he was so forceful. She recalled: “He was just awful. He was pushing my head down into his lap in the back of his car on the way there, and on the way to afterprom. Wanting to make me give him head. . . . I was curious and wanted to do things, but was feeling bad about how it was happening.” She pushed him away and spent the rest of the night and weekend avoiding him. Rather than acceding to his demands, Katie pushed back. She wasn’t confused about whether she was entitled to say no, or whether her reaction was reasonable. It was clear to her that his behavior was unacceptable and unappealing, but she also remained aware of her own desires. She recalled: “I was attracted to him and had a crush on him, and had he not been so aggressive, I probably would have been more sexually open with him and had some more experiences with him. But as soon as he sort of was forceful and I felt like meat instead of like he was actually interested or thought I was attractive or anything, I was just turned off.” While Katie felt turned off by the boy’s behavior, she still acknowledged the presence of her own desire. She didn’t polarize sexual desire into something that only men possess, and that women must remain wary of.6
In college, Katie finally was able to do more sexual exploration with both men and women. She reveled in her ability to go to parties and, as she put it, “randomly make out” with people. Katie limited most of these encounters to sexual contact that didn’t include intercourse. Because Katie had such clear knowledge of what she did and didn’t want and was so comfortable expressing her desires, she never feared that things would go too far or get out of control, and they didn’t.
Katie applied the same qualities that made her a good scientist—curiosity, perseverance, and objectivity—to sex while she was in college. She actively tried to learn about both women’s and men’s bodies, seeking to figure them out. She wanted to understand the mechanics of men’s bodies, since she felt that she didn’t really have a handle on how they worked. As a junior, she and a guy and a girlfriend were “talking about sex down on the porch, and our confusion, our mutual confusion, about the opposite sex’s bodies.” They then
sat around in his apartment, naked, talking about our bodies and sexuality. And he was explaining to us, like, how a hand job is supposed to be done and how a good blowjob works. . . . We both wanted to know how to please. And so that was kind of a helpful lesson, but really asexual . . . it was very clinical . . . we were kind of showing him what feels good and, and it was very—it was not graphic. It was kind of like we were sitting there and pointing, kind of like, “This is the area that you should touch; this doesn’t matter.” And he was kind of like, he had his penis is his hands and was kind of lifting it up, and it was really, um, kind of the first time that I had been in daylight with a naked man and really gotten to see what it was all about. And I was, I remember being kind of struck by how testicles, how a scrotum, look like labia.
As Katie described this exchange, I pictured “circle time” in my mind—it sounded as straightforward as sharing in kindergarten. Only the content being shared was “This feels good when you stroke me here” and “This is what you touch and do to get me aroused” instead of stories of trips to the zoo. At this stage of her life, Katie was determined to gather sexual data as she would for an experiment run in the lab—methodically, purposefully, and without the intrusion of messy feelings.
Katie had sex for the first time with a good friend who lived in her dorm, but here things started to get complicated. She described her first time, as do many women, as somewhat underwhelming, more as something to be gotten out of the way than as something memorable. Katie was hoping they could work up to “good” sex. Before this time, she really had had no emotional expectations from sexual partners. But now she was interested in developing, maybe not a full-fledged relationship, but at least an ongoing sexual exploration in which she could learn how things worked with someone