Dirty Little Secrets

"Dirty Little Secrets" subtitled "Breaking the Silence of Teenage Girls and Promiscuity" is a book by Kerry Cohen, whose previous work on the same subject was a memoir entitled "Loose Girl", and the she uses the term "loose girl" throughout this book, in a piece of insistent terminology, which as we know, is usually a bad sign. I purchased this book at The Dollar Tree, and I have to admit it was a bit of an embarrassing purchase, but luckily I bought four other books with it. The cover of the book showcases a teenage girl in a tight t-shirt, and a misty-faced pose, in black and white, and while it might be trying to make a statement about the many forms of stress that today's teens face, it does seem to me somewhat prurient. My own interest was perhaps emotionally prurient.

This book says on the cover: "It's not about when girls are having sex. It's about why.", and before we get to that part, let me talk about some basics of this book. Cohen is not a monster and the book is in general, reasonable. She is not an advocate for virginity until marriage, she questions whether the idea of "promiscuity" makes sense at all, and she talks about the general creepiness of purity balls, and in her own way she deconstructs notions that women being sexually active is always linked to abuse. The book has a few minor problems, such as her using the insistent terminology of "loose girl", which is the type of thing I would roll my eyes at if my grandmother used. Also, dating back to 2011, it barely mentions the idea of non-heterosexual girls, and the fact that there was other gender identities was not even mentioned. And, of course, the book was written before the #metoo movement.

Anyway, all of that is not important, because the book's major problem is something else entirely. As mentioned the book tries to answer the question of why girls might have risky or promiscuous sex, and the answer is: women are desperate to have their worth validated through male sexual attention. This is an answer the author seems to take for granted as a given, even though it runs totally counter to my experience. I am a man who has had at least semi-successful relationships with women, and I am not some type of bitter incel or something, but as a man, here are some things that I might encounter when trying to interact with women: annoyance, irritation, boredom, "busyness", disdain, disinterest, wariness, weariness, cageyness, offense, eye rolling, evasiveness... the book seems to posit a world where women are constantly crestfallen that men aren't paying enough attention to them, and this world is so totally at odds with my experience that I couldn't even wrap my head around where the author was coming from. Writing a book about how women are desperate for male attention is like writing a book about trying to get more salt and sugar in your diet. Pretty much every communication I have had for women for the past few decades has seemed to suggest that men are something to be avoided, if not for personal safety, for preserving their mental tranquility. And the book doesn't seem to address that at all, and just keeps repeating that women want to be validated by men. But of course, maybe that is the point: that the real shame for women is not in having sex, but in viewing men as sources of approval, instead of targets of disapproval.