As for the girl being held and kissed in the moonlight, how is she to know that part of what she is feeling is sexual? Nothing has ever happened to her to help her single out, isolate the sexual feeling from all the other emotions and sensations racing through her adolescent mind and body. She has never had an erection. Her body has never signaled to her that this is sex and has nothing to do with the other emotion, romantic oneness.
Perhaps when she was little, nine or ten years old, she felt something wonderful when she put her pillow between her legs and rocked back and forth. Women often trace their first fantasies back to this time, fantasies of being captured by bad pirates, fantasies invariably rooted in ideas of wicked people making them feel the already known forbidden feelings. But no one called these feelings sexual. No one wants to think that a nine-year-old is sexual, God forbid a four-year-old, the other age to which women trace their first sexual stirrings.
The girl has no words for what she is feeling, indeed doesn’t want to know the “dirty” words, since by now she has been rewarded for being the custodian of goodness, wagging her little finger at her naughty brother. By adolescence the girl is convinced that all the sensations “down there” have to do with love.
Now when the boy kisses her, he awakens these feelings she has grown to associate with soft music, passages in romantic novels, love scenes in films. For years she and the other girls have been sitting in dark cinemas sharing a group feeling closer to a communal swoon than to sex. While the boy has been learning to be brave and independent outdoors, the girl has
been inside practicing togetherness, learning to dance with other girls, rolling up one another’s hair, exploring the warm closeness of sleepovers. In these tight friendships, girls retain the symbiotic oneness they had with mother, keeping it warm, rehearsing it over and over again until boys are ready for them. And should one of these best friendships flounder, the pain of betrayal is not unlike what a child feels when abandoned by its mother.
Betrayal doesn’t teach a much-needed lesson in independence, that it is good to have a self to fall back on. What does the girl know of a separate self? All her life she has been rewarded for staying in, preserving relationships.
So there they are in the moonlight, the boy and the girl. He assumes, poor innocent, that she feels what he does, that she has been touching herself as he has. What do young boys know of girls? With one arm around her, his other hand tentatively reaches between her legs. She recoils. She tells him he is vile. She weeps. How could he take her for that kind of girl? After all she’s sacrificed to abide by the Nice Girl Rules, doesn’t he respect her? He is supposed to be her reward, not her persecutor. Furthermore, he has broken the romantic bubble, the lovely sense of oneness she was feeling in his arms.
He will have to pay for what he has done. If he is ever to get his arm around her again, it will be on her terms. It is the girl’s first lesson in deal making, the first inkling that the withholding of sex may be her greatest power.
On his side, the boy acknowledges that she will now decide whether or not there will be any sex. It is an abrupt reminder of the total power a woman once had over him, and while he still wants the girl, he resents the bargain bitterly. And so the groundwork is laid for the unspoken deal. Thus begins the War Between the Men and the Women.
Would any of this change if a woman grew up learning from her own body that she is a sexual person unto herself? Masturbation may not solve everything, but what better way to learn the all-important lesson in the separation and equal importance of love and sex?
Unless she was allowed to pursue the sense of ownership of her body when she was little, by the time the girl reaches adolescence she may no longer want to explore the solitary pleasure of masturbation. She is by now besotted with love/yearning/dying/sighing feelings which encompass the sexual but to her are one indistinguishable high. The idea of having sex all by herself goes against her whole life as a partner in a relationship, a role she identifies with mother, who would never masturbate. Be sexual all by herself? She’d rather die! No, it’s the boy’s role to make her sexual, bring her to life. But first, first he must make her feel loved, in love, as one with him. She wants to be Swept Away.