Object Lessons: Romance, Violation, and Adolescent Sexual Desire

Deborah L. Tolman
Wellesley College

This article was my favorite so far. I have always had a keen interest in sexual desires and where they originate from. I understood how she incorporated her closing statement into this piece and by giving the two examples of the girls she interviewed. I understood completely her intent of this research :"By speaking to boys and girls about girls' entitlement to their sexual desire, we demand a rewrite of the romance narrative in which girls Will be sexual subject rather than sexual objects." Here she takes a whole new approach, one of which has never been brought to my attention. I always knew that a woman's sexual desire can be changed by past childhood negative sexual abuse such as molestation, rape, etc. However, by educating young women on the importance of their bodies and the actual ways in which their bodies are "supposed" to be used, and the feelings that they are holding back to experience are normal, we can possibly make some progress. We tend to teach society so much as to how sex is bad, don't do it. Then society contradicts this by things displayed to our youth through the media. But teenagers out there are going to go ahead and do it anyways. We need to explain to them that they can be loved for their inner beauty as well as their outer. They need to be informed on how it is natural and that they need to love themselves before anyone else can love them back. This quote was perfect for the issue. "Following a social constructivist perspective (Gergen,1985) the ways in which we do and do not "story" sexuality into being are definitive in how we make meaning out of our bodies and our relationships, and so the ways in which we do and do not speak about sexuality are crucial."

I understood Tolman's new approach on how speaking up more about sexual desire will enable us to teach these adolescents to speak up when making the right decisions. This will make them more comfortable with themselves to where they can say no at the right times. Helping educate these women and why they may not be connecting to themselves may help these adolescents and young women to change. They can come to realization that they may have been used as a sexual object in the past but they are not a sexual object they are who they are and thats someone who is beautiful. Sexual desire is also beautiful so we need to somehow get therapy to these young girls to let them know they are in charge now but they need to do it with respect because they deserve it. We need to show them the beauty of sexual desire. I always was interested in the statistics on prostitution and how a huge percentage of them were sexually abused as children. At first I thought to myself, wouldn't they hate men and not want to be touched? Some, yes. However most of them who prostitute if not for drugs which can ease their past pain and frustrations but to be in control. Its not for themselves of their own sexual desire, they ignore this, instead they do it for control purposes. They want to be able to control who touches them because in the past they were not able to, there is some kind of void being filled but it is not a healthy one and it sure isnt for sexual desire. I think Tolman has found a new intervention to teach our you on sexual desire, wonderful.

I understood her point made but I think there may be some difficulty in trying to get all teens to actually get through their past and move onto their true selves. I think it is something that lives with a person forever but it is a first step in helping these teens to reteach them what someone else has taken away. Possibly through some psychoanalysis and some long term intense therapy sessions it is a good approach for those who were victims to possibly change their views of themselves. However this is sort of out of the reach for most youths financially and medically. Prevention would be the key word here, motivational speakers, guidance counselors, support systems. I dont know if the media will ever change its capitalistic ways so that may be out of our control but there are other ways to prevent and fix future damage.

I would have to say it is hard to relate this article to most articles we have read. However I could see the connection between society and the media in general. Our class is all about teen media, media playing a role in almost every article we have read. The media shows these young adults off as sexual objects. We see this in rap videos, clothing commercials, etc. It is rare we see the brain and the beauty all in one and rarely if so its the "cool thing". And we wonder why these young adults lost this connection between sexual desire and sexual objectivity.