Last Friday I flew 6 hours to be on TV for 4 minutes, and then flew 6 hours back the next day. Apparently, 4 minutes is about double the time one should usually expect for TV interviews, so this was exciting. But, also, I was having a hard time trying to come up with how to get across the ideas of Loose Girl in such a short time. I was told before I came that I would be on a panel discussion of teenage girls and sex. With me on the panel would be the authors of a new book coming out about how casual sex affects the brain, another doctor-author who wrote a book about adolescence, and three teenage girls.
The morning I arrived to the green room, I was given a run down of the show, and was told that one girl was advocating abstinence; one had been having casual sex, wound up pregnant, and now is swearing off boys; and one believed she was emotionally and physically prepared to have casual sex. The show clearly aimed to present a balanced view–to show all sides of a complex situation–but there’s no way that you can get three women to represent three disparate points of view without having them come off as something as stereotypes.
I sat down for makeup, and one of the girls sat beside me.
“Are you one of the teens?” I asked.
“Yes. I’m the virginal one,” she said in a crispy voice. “I advocate abstinence.”
I nodded. Not much to say to that.
My publicist, who had come along to support me, and to help me formulate one-liners that would convey the true message in my book, said, “The loose girl and the virgin, side by side.”
We laughed uncomfortably, but Abstinence Girl, I noticed, didn’t find that funny. I thought but didn’t say, “Honey, you need to get laid.”
The woman doing my makeup, who I sensed…something from, asked Abstinence Girl, “So, you’re not going to have sex until you’re married?”
“That’s right!” Abstinence Girl said, clearly proud. A few moments later she got up and left the room.
“That girl,” the makeup woman said to me, “is in for a rude awakening. I made the same mistake.”
Soon, it was time for them to go on, and in each girl’s 4 minutes I watched them give their soundbites, the basics of their stories: I don’t have sex, and this is for my future husband and my future children (translated: the rest of you harm the people you supposedly love); I had sex, it harmed me, and now I’ve learned my lesson; I have sex, and it’s always great.
And then it was my turn. How, I wondered, would I ever say what I needed to say in 4 minutes? What was my soundbite? They asked me a few straightforward questions: when did you first become sexually active, when did you lose your virginity, what were you after? Then one spoke about how the authors of Hooked claimed my brain might be screwed up from all the casual sex. Did I think I was permanently screwed up? Um, how to answer that? I mean, I am permanently screwed up, yes, but was that because of the sex? I don’t know. I honestly doubt it. So I said, “I don’t have a straight answer for that,” and then I went on to try to explain that I’m still the loose girl and I’m well aware of that but I make the choice every day not to screw up my marriage.
When my 4 minutes was up, they were desperate for someone with straight answers, so they asked Abstinence Girl to give a response to what I said. She gave a soundbite alright, although it had nothing to do with what I had said. Something about how everyone’s talking about maturity, well she’s mature and everyone’s looking for a man’s love in a boy. Huh? For a girl who’s never had sex she sure seemed to think she knew a lot about it.
But, I digress.
The point is, the things all of us had to say about sex - except perhaps Abstinence Girl – couldn’t quite be expressed in our 4 minute slotted time, even when 4 minutes is a generous amount of time. And perhaps only Abstinence Girl could get her full point across because, well, she had never had sex. There is no soundbite for girls and sex. The ones that exist – like the ones on this panel – are mostly inaccurate. Not to knock TV or panels like this one. The producers are doing everything they can to get the issue on the table, and I appreciate that. But unfortunately, it will rarely get at the many stories beneath the archetypes, such as the story I’m sure that makeup woman had to tell.
Here it is. Judge yourself. (Sorry – video is long gone…)