Posted on 05/13/2003 8:19:00 AM PDT by Mister Magoo
Naked City
Covering The Bases
Some shockingly savvy private-school girls on the sexual politics of hooking up, getting and giving pleasure, and parents who are too hip.
By Amy Sohn
Nell and Cara are 14-year-old freshmen at a private Manhattan high school, and as I sit down for coffee with them, I am chagrined to find we are wearing exactly the same brands. “Is your watch Red Monkey?” asks Cara, who has a goofy smile and silky brown hair, grabbing my wrist. “So’s mine!” She raises her arm next to mine like we’re Wonder Twins. I notice that Cara’s best friend, Nell, is dressed in terry Juicy Couture sweats; my V-neck is Juicy, too.
“Are you guys into fashion?” I ask.
“Not really,” says Nell, a pixieish blonde with a round face and red cheeks. “There was this article in W about these Upper East Side girls who are horrible obnoxious adults in training and accessorize with Gucci mules. But everyone at our school wears Pumas.”
“I do have one friend who wore Christian Dior couture to a bat mitzvah,” Cara says.
We’re in a café on Lexington Avenue in the Eighties, and over hot chocolates (them) and cappuccino (me), the talk quickly moves from clothing to their other favorite topic, boys. Although they’ve both “hooked up,” they’re both virgins, and their concerns tend more toward “Why won’t my mom let me go on Acutane?” than “What if I get AIDS?” In fact, their heads are screwed on so firmly that they believe the media gives teens no credit for being intelligent, hardworking, and even ethical. If I’d known girls like this when I was in high school, I’d never have wound up a sex columnist.
“So is there any such thing as dating at your school?” I ask, because there wasn’t at the high school I went to a stone’s throw from theirs.
“That is not a word in my vocabulary,” says Cara. “We hang out in groups, and sometimes hookups happen, but you only go out one-on-one if you’re in a serious relationship.”
“What’s hooking up?”
“Anything except for actual coitus,” says Nell.
“What are the bases? I’ve heard they’ve changed.”
Cara lays it out for me. “First base is kissing, second base is up the shirt, sloppy second is mouth to boob, third is fingering or hand job, and sloppy third is oral.”
“So a home run’s still . . . ”
“Yep.” She nods. I’m happy to hear there’s no new fifth base, like “entering the dugout.” When I ask them about their own slugging percentages, they say they’ve gone to sloppy second and hooked up with only a handful of guys. I wipe my brow, relieved, until they tell me they once hooked up with the same guy, the same night, which made it sloppy-second sloppy seconds.
“And are girls who go far considered slutty?” I ask.
“That girl’s a slut!” cries Cara, pointing out the window at a prim-looking girl in a blue knee-length skirt across the street.
“She’s new this year,” Nell explains. “She moved from England. She gave a guy head in the bathroom and the library and the boiler room. Two students walked in on them.”
“We don’t have high esteem for her,” Cara says. As though reading my thoughts, she adds, “If you don’t like a girl and she happens to be promiscuous, you can use the term slut as an insult.” I nod, understanding all too well. Guys never call girls sluts; only girls do. To a boy, after all, a slut is a gift from God.
“How many of your friends have lost their virginity?” I ask.
“Only two people in our grade have had sex,” Nell says. “And they’re both boys. Our grade is extraordinarily prudish. There’s much more sex at all-guys schools. At ours, boys and girls are friends, since we’ve known each other forever.”
“Our friends hook up with kids from other schools,” Cara explains, “or in other grades. That’s because guys see us first thing in the morning, when we look like complete crap. They think girls from single-sex schools are so hot—but that’s because they only see those girls when they’re dressed up!”
Hookups usually happen at no-alcohol teen nights at Upper West Side nightclubs like Crane and Cream. “There are a lot of dirty boys there,” says Cara, “who will prey on girls.”
They also hook up in kids’ rooms when parents are there but unaware. “At our friend Maddy’s birthday, we did some crazy stuff,” Nell says. “Her mom was home, but she had no idea. We wanted ice cream, so we asked the guys to go out and get it, and they said, ‘You have to do something for us.’ They came back with whipped cream, and we turned around and put it on our nipples. They asked us to give them lap dances, but we wouldn’t. Later on, when we were dressed, Maddy’s mom came in and asked, ‘Does anyone want cookies?’ ”
Cara’s and Nell’s own parents are a little savvier about sex and drugs, because they’re honest with them.
“My mom fancies herself very hep to the jive,” Cara says. “She went to private school too, hung out at Studio 54, and told me she did drugs. I thought it was bizarre for her to tell me that and then say ‘Don’t drink. Don’t smoke pot.’ ”
Nell’s mom is up-front about sex, Nell says, but clueless as to what actually goes on. “My mom asked if I had ever given head before, and I said no. She said, ‘Well, I just want to let you know you can get aids from it. You have to use a condom.’ I said, ‘Nobody actually uses a condom for that.’ Teenagers think about the here and now.”
Of course, there’s an upside to all the parent-child communication. Two years ago, Cara’s mom bought her Deal With It, gURL.com’s growing-up guide for teen girls, and Nell and Cara learned how to masturbate. “We did our research,” says Nell.
But as for translating their self-knowledge into hookups with boys, they’re not in any rush. “I don’t feel a guy would do a very good job on me,” says Nell. “I’m much better off doing it myself. Besides, guys underestimate how horny girls are. They don’t think a girl would ever want that.”
“They just don’t admit it,” Cara says. “I feel like they’re so far behind us, not in terms of what we’re doing, but what we know.” I smile sympathetically, and for a moment I forget I’m with 14-year-olds.
I wan't talking about the word itself. At 14 I didn't even know that particular word for it.
I understand. But the precise use of "coitus" was exactly my point. I'm sure I'm being too cynical, but much of the language used by these 14-year-old girls really seems phony. Perhaps it's their immaturity and inexperience. But I truly flashed on Jayson Blair and asked myself, "Do these girls exist?"
But they probably do.
What is amazing to me is how people will have sex with someone to whom they wouldn't loan $200.
Of course, in the end, it is the girls that really suffer. They keep on doing the same thing, and expect different results every time. When I was in college, I lived in an all-female co-op. Every weekend night, a girl or, more commonly, several girls would come back to the house, describe in minute detail the sexual acts she performed to impress the guy she just met, and then sit by the phone, waiting for the call the never came.
I got into several fights with these girls, because they were shattering my feminist illusions. They did what they did because they were under the impression it gave them power, but they couldn't see that they were being used. I remember one conversation where I completely let my disgust shine through. This one girl had talked about how she and this guy she just met had had sex 6 times that night, once for each room of his house. She was very proud of the fact that she had excited him so much that he had been able to reach orgasm this many times (no one was tactless enough to point out that he was a young man, and it was probably not a feat of inhuman prowess). I asked her how many orgasms she had had, and she just stared at me blankly.
The one thing I learned from my 2 years in this situation is that the women don't get much from it. The behavior they engage in makes them feel powerful, but they don't "get off" from it. I would have some measure of respect and understanding of it if in fact these girls had walked in and said, "Whew! He made me come 12 times tonight! That was better than chocolate!" But they don't. They do what they do in hopes that they guys will want to be around them more due to their bedroom skills. They haven't figured out the ecomonic reality, which is that their skills don't get them very far when every girl a guy meets puts out like that.
Insanity is the only word to describe it.
Your first assessment was correct, this article is very depressing.
It puts me in the mind of Eliot's hollow men. These girls are hollow beings who will have nearly nothing to look forward to in their years ahead because they will have done it all.
I'm glad I'm not of this generation.
You and me both.
According to the Bubba Clinton dictionary.
Actually, if these girls parents would 'scowl' a bit at sexual immorality instead of just going about with the attitude 'Well, they're going to do it anyway,' these girls might have a bit more self-control.
And there are more of those out there than you think.
I grew up in an oppressive Catholic environment. No sex, not even touches till age 17, my first dance!!!
Yep, it is an odd situation that the male mind can't really grasp. Men go after sex for the sex. It never occurs to girls that sex can be an end unto itself and it never occurs to men that it isn't. As women acquire what they want, they lose their apparent appetite for sex.
Part of it is Victorian perversion that women think they are somehow more righteous for not enjoying sex. Even in our sex-adled culture, the message for women is still that they aren't supposed to actually enjoy sex, just act like it when the need arises (and quickly disavow it later.)
It is hard for the male mind to grasp this, but it is nearly impossible to convince women they are supposed to truly like sex and have an appetite for it for their own enjoyment of the act itself.
That's horrible! Hopefully you've shaken off those artificial social constructs by this time?
Hmmm, how many 14-year-olds say "actual coitus"? This article sounds pretty fake to me.
His mommy took him to appointments because of his DUIs, and, I came to find out, still did his laundry, fixed all his meals, etc.
I don't know who I wanted to smack more, him or the widow.
I've seen girls do it, and some married people regress to it. I call 'em the "wah, wah Moooooooommmmy" crowd.
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