In Dilemmas of Desire,
Deborah Tolman discusses themes that emerged from her interviews with teenage
girls about their experience of sexual desire and agency. She started her project with the aim to
uncover how these girls talked about their sexual desires, because she thought
that this component of their experience was missing from contemporary
discussions of the sexual behavior of young people. However, as her research progressed, she realized that young
women nearly always found barriers to their experiences of desire. Tolman argues that their stories show “how a
patriarchal society tries to keep girls and women at bay by forcing, or
attempting to force, a wedge between their psyches and their bodies and how
girls deal with these forces” (p. 24). 
Our society gives these girls “a choice between their sexual feelings
and their safety” (p. 44), making it very difficult for them to acknowledge
their own desires or enjoy themselves as sexual agents.

The fears Tolman’s interviewees
have will not surprise most readers. 
They are worried about being labeled as sluts, getting pregnant,
catching sexually transmitted diseases, and being the victim of assault and
rape. The were 31 girls included in
Tolman’s interviews, from ages 15 to 18, and of those, one had been raped, one
had experienced attempted rape, and another may have experienced rape. Another three had experienced physical
violence from boyfriends or friends, and six reported childhood sexual abuse or
molestation. While her sample was not
necessarily representative of all girls, since it was limited to those who were
willing to be interviewed on a somewhat sensitive topic and whose parents would
also give permission for their daughters to be interviewed, there have been
many other surveys that have shown that physical and sexual abuse is a common
experience for girls. The idea that
women in most western societies have to face the choice of being seen as
virgins or whores has long been a central feature of feminist analyses of
patriarchy.

Nevertheless, Dilemmas of Desire
is an interesting work because of the author’s determination to find out how
girls talk about their own sexual desires and actions. Girls are interested in sex and they are
engaging sexual activity, but they often find it hard to talk about. Each chapter has its own theme, and that
theme is illustrated with some of the interviews. Tolman starts off with an interview with Inez, a 17-year-old young
woman at an urban school who says of the first time she had sex “everything just
happened.” She does not describe the
event as an outcome of her decision, and she does not discuss her own pleasure
or excitement. Other girls also have
great difficulty in identifying their desires and even knowing whether they
want to have sex or not, and this leads them to be in sexual situations where,
even if it is not rape, it is not clear even to themselves whether they have
consented. Some girls seem to welcome
the opportunity to engage in sexual behavior while they are drunk so that they
can disclaim responsibility for their actions later on. This is a high price to pay for the supposed
safety of disowning sexual desire. 
Other girls who are more able to experience their own desire and to know
when they do not want to have sex still live in fear of being used by
boys. Many of the girls would not
identify with any feminist agenda, and talk in positive terms about their
sexual lives, yet they show clear awareness of the fragility of their status as
“good girls” and the danger of their status changing to that of “bad
girls.” Even those who are well aware
that a double standard is applied to boys and girls concerning sexual behavior
find it very hard to fight against that standard. Tolman says that the girls who took an explicitly political stance
against the ways girls are treated were the most successful at overcoming the
dilemmas of desire.

A few girls in the survey discuss
sexual feelings they have towards other girls, but they are keenly aware of the
disapproval they risk if they are open in their feelings. This makes it harder for them to own these
desires, and Tolman describes this as part of what Adrienne Rich has termed
compulsory heterosexuality. Rich’s analysis
first appeared twenty years ago in 1983, and built on older analyses such as
Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and Simone De Beauvoir’s The
Second Sex. Tolman refers somewhat
nostalgically to women’s consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and ‘70s,
and she notes that many of the girls she talked with said that they had never
discussed their desire with anyone previously. 
Often she found that girls felt more in fear of judgment by other girls
than they did by boys. Clearly, Tolman
believes that women would do better to unite in their struggle for equality and
hopes that work such as her own might start a dialog among women to help them
do away with the double standard that creates so many difficulties for girls.

Dilemmas of Desire is a work
on feminist scholarship very much in the tradition of Carol Gilligan’s In a
Different Voice. It does not build
a strong empirical case for the author’s claims, but rather sets out a point of
view for readers’ consideration and further investigation by researchers. It aims to make us more aware of the lived
experience of teenage girls, and to help us understand how they make their
decisions. Tolman says very little
about the experience of boys or how they talk about their sexuality, and one
real concern about her approach is that it is radically incomplete without an
equally complex investigation of boys. 
It may well turn out that boys have difficulty in talking about many
aspects of their sexuality, and other recent books have suggested that boys
experience uncertainty and vulnerability in ways comparable to girls. Nevertheless, this is an impressive and
fascinating book, written in clear language without jargon, and it deserves a
wide readership.

© 2003 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Chair
of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor of Metapsychology
Online Review. His main research is
on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Sexuality, ChildhoodDisorders