It's About Time: New Times, New Talk

Venus in Blue Jeans: Why Mothers and Daughters Need to Talk About Sex
by Nathalie Bartle, Ed.D., Susan Abel Lieberman, Ph.D.

When my children were old enough to entrust with a house key, they sometimes arrived home from school before I returned from work. At least one day a week, though, I would try to be there when they rushed through the front door, hoping they'd share some end-of-the-day news. Jon, then a freshman in high school, would often return late from after-school sports and, until he unwound, was generally oblivious to my presence. Jay, the youngest, was eleven and liked to talk at bedtime. After school he blew in, searched for food, and usually blew right back out to kick around a soccer ball with his friends. The child most likely to sit and talk with me was my twelve-year-old daughter, Katherine. If I caught Katherine at the right moment, she would talk easily about school, friends, and her feelings and ask the kind of wide-ranging questions that only a twelve-year-old would dream of.

On the days when Katherine attended a voluntary after-school sex education class for eighth-grade students at her junior high school, I made a point of getting home early just in case the class led us, as it often did, into an easy talking time. On one of those afternoons, I was in the kitchen slicing tomatoes for a dinner salad when I heard the front door slam. Without a word, my daughter tossed her backpack onto the couch, came into the kitchen, and headed for the refrigerator. After grabbing an apple, she plopped down on a chair at the kitchen table and launched into her description of sex education: "That class today was so gross! I can't believe they were talking to us about masturbation. That is so disgusting." My eyes stayed carefully focused on the tomato as my thoughts raced. How best to respond? I certainly didn't agree with Katherine, but how could I present a different, that is, a positive, perspective on masturbation? I remember being surprised at how uncomfortable I suddenly felt.

"Well," I began hesitantly, "masturbation doesn't have to be thought of as something so disgusting." Katherine looked stunned. "Come on," she said, "it's disgusting—people who sit around and play with themselves?" Thankful for the lettuce I was tearing into bits so I didn't have to look at her, I said, in what I hoped was a natural and relaxed tone, "Actually, it can be very nice; of course, masturbation is a pretty private thing, and . . . it's not something you do all the time."

I could feel her gaze weighing on me, could imagine her accusing look as she followed with the question, "Do you masturbate?" That lettuce pile was growing higher and higher. Part of me was glad my daughter felt comfortable enough to discuss masturbation with me, but another part was secretly wondering why I hadn't had the foresight to stay late at work that night. "Yes," I said quietly, "sometimes."

That was it for Katherine. She jumped up from her chair, grabbed her backpack from the couch, and headed down the hallway to her bedroom without looking back, shouting, "Gross. I can't believe my mother plays with herself." The bedroom door slammed shut.

What had I just done? Would Katherine never again touch herself? Would she lock her bedroom door and masturbate for hours at a time? Or would she now feel secret relief that touching herself was not, in fact, so outrageous? What was she going to think of me, her mother, after my confession? I wondered, How does a twelve-year-old relate to a mom she has just tagged as "someone who plays with herself"?

I had looked forward to these chats with Katherine, and I had certainly thought I'd be prepared to answer her questions. At the time I was an assistant professor in the pediatrics department at the University of Texas at Galveston Medical School, and I had spent many hours evaluating and counseling adolescents in our clinic. I was one of the faculty members who taught sexuality classes to medical students and had even helped to develop the sex education curriculum that Katherine's class was following. For many years I had been a counselor in public schools and private schools, and I had engaged teenage girls in conversations about a host of issues, including sexuality. I couldn't recall any of my students asking me directly about masturbation, but if they had, I was sure I would not have been fazed by the question. But now that my own daughter was moving into adolescence, where was that professional comfort level I had relied on so often? My older son's adolescence had not caused such uneasiness. What irony, I thought. I, the self-assured professional, was at a loss for what to say or do next. Suddenly my every word seemed to carry so much more meaning.

It was true that I had never felt comfortable discussing sex with my own mother, but I very much wanted Katherine to feel at ease talking with me about sexual topics. I had begun discussing anatomy with her as early as preschool. Yet now, suddenly, I was worried about divulging too much. I didn't want her to dismiss her mother as an oddball who masturbated every chance she got, but I also didn't want her to view her body and her sexuality as, to use her word, "gross." In the most personal way, I suddenly identified with all those parents I had talked with who were struggling to find ways to discuss sex that were effective for their children yet not fraught with anxiety for them.

The discomfort I experienced that day seemed to usher in a new period in which it became more and more difficult for me to talk with Katherine. As she was moving into her teens, I was moving into my my forties. I felt a collision of emotions, which propelled me to revisit issues of my own adolescence, especially my relationship with my mother. She and I had skirted any discussions about sex in those years. In fact, the word "sex" hardly ever came up. She had great difficulty speaking this supposedly sinister word, and when she did, it sounded as though she were saying "sick." It was unimaginable that she would use the word "masturbation," let alone discuss it while slicing tomatoes.

In the 1950s in my conservative Christian community in north Texas, there were no confusing messages about sexual activity for girls because everyone simply delivered the same dictum: sex before marriage was wrong; it was a sin. If a girl felt "unnatural urges," she was supposed to sublimate them by playing sports or marching in the school band. Of course, no one discussed these urges, and watching Katherine grow up, I recalled my own feelings of adolescent confusion and loneliness.

A Legacy of Silence

Many years after my children were grown, I had a chance to discuss my memories with other women who shared this legacy of silence. In my first weeks as a graduate student in developmental psychology at Harvard, I became friends with three other women in Carol Gilligan's adolescent psychology class. All of us were middle-aged mothers of daughters, and we shared an interest in some of the recent research on the development of adolescent girls.

There at lunch was born the idea of organizing discussions with mothers of teenage girls. During the 1988-9 academic year, we conducted two focus groups (approximately eight women in each group), followed by individual interviews with forty women—single, married, and divorced—from diverse social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds who had at least one adolescent daughter.

Our purpose was to inquire generally about the relationship between mothers and their teenage daughters. We hoped to hear moms reflect on what it was like to raise an adolescent girl, what obstacles they encountered, what successes they had, and where they found support. We were interested in learning what mothers believed aided or disrupted communication with their daughters, what issues were important, and how they went about addressing those issues during the turbulent teenage years.

If our interests were general, the mothers' were more focused. They kept directing the discussion back to the specific subject of mother-daughter communication about sex and sexuality. They talked about the sudden changes that had occurred when their daughters began puberty and how their daughters' budding sexuality introduced conflicts to their relationships. They were concerned about the peer pressure on the girls to become sexually active and angry about the messages girls were receiving from friends and the media about how mature, hip, and even popular they would be if they had sex. They grappled with whether they should discuss birth control and, if so, what they should say.

We also began to notice an interesting pattern in the conversations with mothers. Often a woman would begin by telling the group a story about discussing sex with her daughter, but that story would soon segue into another vignette about a conversation or incident involving her own mother. Remembering the pull I had felt to look back, spurred by Katherine's adolescence, I was intrigued by this common impulse to turn to our relationships with our own mothers as a touchstone. The stories frequently began with these kinds of refrains: "My mother never discussed sex," "My mother could not deal with sexual issues," "My mother made sex such a dirty thing," "Sex was not discussed," "Nobody told me anything, "Menstruation was 'the curse' in my family," "My mother never had her period; she was always 'unwell."'

I was struck that even as grownups with children of our own, we still felt we had been cheated out of something important. Why did so many mature, seemingly confident women express this persistent sense of loss? This is the baggage and the history that moms today bring to their conversations with their daughters about sex. Thankfully, many of them are striving to break the legacy of silence with their own girls.

Before declaring that it is impossible to address sexual intimacy with daughters, we might ask ourselves why. If our mothers never talked, do we look back on their silence with good feelings? If we are unsure about our feelings, might it be that expressing our confusion would help our daughters understand some of their own confusions? Could talking be a growing experience for both us and our girls?

What Do We Say? When Do We Say It?

While most mothers are committed to ending the silence enveloping discussion of female sexuality, many find it more difficult than they anticipated to address sexual matters with their daughters. Part of the difficulty comes from changing community standards. Without wide spread societal agreement, many mothers are unsure just what they should communicate. Some of us, reluctant to recall our own teenage behaviors, may rely instead on those very messages we found contradictory in our youth. Mothers who were sexually active as teens may want their daughters to remain abstinent but find that discussing sexuality calls to mind stories they prefer to keep hidden from their children—and even from themselves. Women who harbor secrets they consider shameful may feel especially vulnerable in talking with teenagers who have no idea what subjects trigger painful memories. Mothers who were sexually assaulted, especially as girls, may also be drawn to silence.

Many parents are caught between their wishes and hopes for their daughters and the realities of adolescence in our culture. Most mothers with whom I spoke hoped their teenage daughters would delay sexual intimacy until after high school; a few advocated waiting until marriage. They worried about pregnancy and disease, emotional disequilibrium and loss of focus. Yet the reality is that 22 percent of fifteen-year-old girls have engaged in sexual intercourse, and some 65 percent of eighteen-year-olds have had sex. It is exceedingly difficult for most parents to imagine that their teenage daughters are ready for sex physically or emotionally, yet the evidence suggests that girls are engaging in sexual intercourse nevertheless.

But there's that larger question: When the conversation is about sex, what should we be discussing? There is the hardware information—all the body parts related to sexuality and the mechanics of how those parts work, alone and with a partner. In the preschool and early school-age years, girls are curious about the differences between girls and boys and, eventually, about where babies come from. Soon it is time to explain menstruation, contraception, and disease prevention. Whispered words and raucous jokes provoke curiosity, and kids want to know what it all means. Not a few mothers have recalled, with a mixture of humor and dread, their struggles to respond to "What is fellatio?" "How do you have sex with an animal?" "How do women have sex together? "Do men really put their penises in women's mouths?" "Can you get AIDS from French kissing?"

Such questions tend to arrive when we're least expecting them, and, as I found with Katherine, we're not always prepared, despite our best intentions. If, as one mother described, the question comes zinging from the back of the car in rush-hour traffic, we may find ourselves gripping the wheel to avoid swerving from surprise. How we respond to these unexpected questions, however, is very important. It is one thing to say to a daughter "I have to think about the right way to answer that question," and quite another to say "That is not a question you should be asking" or "What made you ask that question?"

This book is not about which "right" is more right. It does not profess to offer a set of rules to ensure that every daughter will act just as we want her to. Rather, this book draws largely from the stories of a selected group of mothers and daughters, so it offers that particular window onto communication about sexuality. My hope is that we will be able to draw from what these teenagers and their mothers have to say and discover ideas about how we might best deal with these issues in our own families. It has always been my firm belief that the narratives we tell each other are the source of some of our richest insights. Perhaps the candid views of these moms and daughters—highlighting their knowledge, hopes, frustrations, and confusions—can be a catalyst for a nationwide conversation about sex and sexuality.

After interviewing mothers and daughters, I came away feeling that it is more important to be honest about our confusions than to pretend we are sure when we're not. Our girls read our ambivalence in neon and know from the undertones of our voices when our messages are not genuine. When we deceive our daughters, even if we believe we are distorting the truth "for their own good," we confuse them. Clear, open communication is the key to helping teenagers determine their own moral stance, but we have to embrace both "clear" and "open." A one-way lecture that is clear and closed or mixed messages about sexuality that are open but confusing don't succeed.

Whether mothers speak with words or with body language—which girls usually understand as well as declarative sentences—a mother's feelings become a reference point for a daughter in her growing-up years. We now understand that girls learn to define themselves not only in individual terms but in the context of their relationships. They judge themselves by their ability to care for those relationships, they react strongly to detachment, indifference, or lack of concern from family and other loved ones. They strive to make their own voices heard and recognized, but they do not wish the cost to be abandoning either family or those they care about in relationships beyond the family. The message of this book is that we must remain connected and in a conversation that allows both daughters and mothers to be heard.

Excerpted from Venus in Blue Jeans by Nathalie Bartle Copyright © 1999 by Nathalie Bartle, Ed.D. with Susan Lieberman, Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of Dell, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Nathalie Bartle, Ed.D., received her doctorate in developmental psychology from Harvard University. She has served as a counselor for adolescents and as a consultant to the Carnegie Corporation. Currently she is an associate professor at Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, School of Public Health, in Philadelphia.

Susan Lieberman, Ph.D., is the author of The Real High School Handbook and New Traditions. She is executive director of Super Summers, Inc., in Houston.