Unbecoming Sexual Desires for Women Becoming Sexual Subjects: Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Catherine Breillat (1999)

Car une des contraintes qui pèsent le plus odieusement sur elles [les jeunes filles], c'est celle de l'hypocrisie. La jeune fille est vouée à la "pureté" à l'innocence précisément au moment où elle découvre en elle les troubles mystères de la vie et du sexe. . . . Oppressée, submergée, elle devient étrangère à elle-même du fait qu'elle est étrangère au reste du monde.

(Beauvoir, 2: 74.)

I know why I make films—partly because I want to describe female shame—but beyond that, cinema is a mode of expression that allows you to express all the nuances of a thing while including its opposites. These are things that can't be quantified mentally; yet they can exist and be juxtaposed. That may seem very contradictory. Cinema allows you to film these contradictions.

(Breillat, "A Woman's Vision.")

I.

In the United States today, the range of magazines addressed to teenage girls that offer them relationship advice and guidance about how to respond to their emerging sexuality makes it easy to infer that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, adolescent girls benefit from transformative social changes in attitudes about young women and sex¹ . Our society would seem to have opened up understandings of sexual subjectivity, and generated accompanying discourses of desire, for teenage girls. And it certainly looks as if there now exists, for adolescent girls, a much needed middle space of cultural representations of sexual intimacy combining pleasure and responsibility, where, for decades, the polarized and distorting images of the slut (hedonistic, yet irresponsible) and the prude (joyless, but responsible) rushed in from the edges to fill the empty representational space and stymied potential change. The range of references to adolescent girls and sex in the media gives the impression that teenage girls today benefit from what feminist psychologist Michelle Fine had described in 1988 as a necessary societal change, one that would produce "a genuine discourse of desire [that] would invite adolescents to explore what feels good and bad, desirable and undesirable, grounded in experience, needs and limits. . . [that] would pose female adolescents as subjects of sexuality" (Fine, 33).

If only. As Deborah L. Tolman recounts, in Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality (2002), her fellow psychologist Michelle Fine's words in 1988 describe a societal transformation that has yet to take place in any significant way at least here in the United States. Tolman listened to accounts of sexual experiences and romantic relationships in a series of one-on-one interviews conducted with 30 girls aged between 15 and 18, for the most part, high school junior from an urban and a surburban high school, who represent a range of races and ethnicities, socio-educational and familial backgrounds and religions. As she recounts, rather than speaking about desire, teenage girls spoke primarily about what Tolman defines instead as "dilemmas of desire," a term whose significance I will return to below. Although these adolescent girls talked about relationships, both "good" and "bad" sexual experiences, the risks of romantic involvement, sexual predation, crushes and crushed hopes, they rarely talked about their sexual desire unless directly asked to do so. And once invited to talk about their desire and their sexual feelings, in the very area where Tolman hypothesized at the outset that her research would sound out young women's perspectives on sexual desire, her interviews instead produced evidence of just how much more frequently girls focused primarily on their insecurities, confusion, anxieties and inner conflicts around desire.

Understanding the reasons for this surprising silence today amongst adolescent girls on the topic of sexual desire and pleasure motivates Tolman's carefully documented analysis of explanatory factors for this absent voice. She reviews discourses addressing young women about sex from journalistic...