Adolescent Sexuality: Deborah L. Tolman
1. How did you become interested in child development and adolescent sexuality?
> People do ask me a lot how I became interested in child development and, in particular, sexuality. And part of me just isn't really sure, but I was a camp counselor and I had the same group of kids. They were all girls and they were ages 11, 12, and 13 years old, and I think watching those girls develop and being part of their lives always intrigued me. It was always in the back of my mind. My interest in sexuality, I think, comes from the observation that I had as a teen that sexuality seemed really important and kind of everywhere, and no one would talk about it. And I think I was always drawn to talk about things I wasn't supposed to talk about, so.
2. What is your current area of research?
> The work I did on adolescent girls' experiences of their own sexual desire led me to a different set of questions about girls' experiences. And, in particular, I noticed that girls were describing the ways that conceptions of femininity seemed to really become barriers to their being able to feel comfortable as sexual people, as developing sexual people. And, so, I wanted to understand that more, and I started doing different kinds of research, more mixed methods research, both survey and qualitative interview research, including developing a measure of femininity ideology. And if you told me in graduate school that I was going to develop a measure, I would have collapsed laughing in the aisles, but, you know, it wasn't available, so that's what you do. And began to see associations between the extent to which girls are buying into two particular areas of femininity that we were measuring: one is being authentic in relationships, and the other is being connected or disconnected from your own body --essentially learning how to treat your body as an object -- or as the way you go through the world gaining experience through physical feelings. And we did find associations with the extent to which girls were kind of buying into conventional femininity ideology and their self esteem and their depression, and their making safer sexual choices or choices that reflected what they wanted to be doing. As I was doing this study before we got to any findings, with adolescents you have to negotiate entre, which is why a lot of people don't do research on adolescents. They were sort of right under our nose and impossible to talk to at the same time, and not just because they're curmudgeonly, and most of them aren't. I was working with a school that was unusually very interested in trying to understand more about eighth grade girls, and they essentially said, "You can't just come in and talk to the girls and ignore the boys. You've got to do something with the boys." So we started to develop a similar questionnaire and set up survey interview questions for boys, more thinking about boys as the people with whom girls were relating than thinking about boys themselves. But as we began to look at these data from boys, I was drawn more and more into first how boys were talking about their experiences with masculinity and how that was shaping and framing their early relationships, their early experiences with sexuality; not just about them and a girl in relationship for heterosexual boys, but even the way that the peer group seemed to have a big role to play in boys having to establish masculinity. And we found that the more conventional boys were about masculinity ideology, much lower self-esteem. And, at first, that didn't make any sense at all. And the more we listened to what they said in interviews, which is why mixed methods is so fantastic because you always have the questions with the quantitative procedures-- Why? Why? How do we understand this? -- and if you have interviews, you have a good chance of finding out how to understand it. And we heard boys describing the pressure they felt to establish themselves as appropriately masculine. And these activities very much to be witnessed by peers, so kissing a girl not because of a personal feeling of desire, but so that other boys could see, which establishes that they are heterosexual, which is the most important thing for boys in early adolescence, and also that they run the show in interacting with girls. So even at the very early stage, we were seeing how this was an important part, this establishment of masculinity ideology, even more so than there being any sexual experience. And, in fact, they're gaining sexual experience, their desire to do so, seemed less and less about their sexuality and more and more about performing masculinity. Then I started hearing the boys and girls interviews in harmony. I wish I could say it was cacophony, but it's a very troubling harmony such that the pressures that the boys are under to be masculine in particular ways, in a dominant cultural conception of masculinity, fit with an eerie kind of complimentarity with what girls were supposed to be doing and feeling in order to be appropriately feminine. And we could really see how these two processes, particularly as played out in their early romantic and sexual relationships. And by sexual, I don't mean having sex. Most early adolescents are not, in fact, having sex. In this particular study, 91% were not having sex, sexual intercourse, but they were having sexual experiences. And that we were seeing essentially the production of particular forms of heterosexual relationships that were disturbing. In fact, we published this in an article called, "Sewing the Seeds of Violence," and we didn't hear about a lot of violence in early adolescents, but we could really see how without questioning some of these norms that girls and boys were acting out, it could very easily happen that violence could start to be a normative part of a kid's experience.
3. What is the biggest myth about adolescent sexuality?
> We could do a whole video about that. And part of the reason there are so many myths -- and I have to say I didn't discover them in my research -- but what my research enables us and me to do is to empirically investigate our conceptual ideas in this society about boys and girls sexuality. And also as that sexuality enters sex with race and class, my argument in sexuality for adolescence is there's no such thing as adolescent sexuality; because it is so different for boys, it is so different for girls, it is so different for white kids, it is so different for Latino kids, it is so different for poor kids and very well off kids; that the notion of a monolithic adolescent sexuality really does not hold up to scrutiny if you're going to take seriously how young people are describing what they are going through and how they are thinking about it and experiencing it. So I'd say the number one biggest myth that everybody is operating around, I mean the thing about myths that's really remarkable is how powerful they are in people making decisions and sort of moving through their lives, is the idea that boys have raging hormones and they're completely unable to control themselves and so we cannot hold them responsible or accountable nor can they hold themselves responsible or accountable. And I think the place that this came home to me strongest was in a project I was doing with at group of girls. I met with them weekly for what ended up being almost two years and we would eat pizza and talk about sexuality and it took us months to get to a point where this group of girls, who went to high school together and some of them were friends but mostly they didn't know each other, could talk with any kind of openness about their experiences with sexuality. And then, for about a year they could only talk about negative things. Like that was okay to talk about the bad things that had happened to you. So it took us 15 months to talk about their own sexual feelings and desire, which is more testament to my original findings about how girls have a lot of a struggle in dealing with their own desire, because they’re not supposed to have it. And so we were doing a small group discussion and one of the girls raised the question, her question was “What about blue balls?” And another girl says, “Well what are blue balls anyway?” And the other girl replied, “Well that's when a guy has to have an ejaculation, he has to come or he'll die.” Girls don't want to kill their boyfriends, they want to be nice and they want to make their boyfriends happy, and so each girl had a story to tell about a situation where a boy had, in one way or another, complained that if the girl was going to leave them before they had had some sexual satisfaction, they were going to be left in this mortally challenging condition of blue balls. And it was a moment of satisfaction for me when I could explain to girls why that was just not the case. That boys were not going to die from not receiving sexual satisfaction from the girls. So the first discussion and level of critique that we had after we dismissed the possibility that there was a physiologically threat of death, was why it required the girls at all. If this was such an imminent threat and how the girls were feeling, and in fact being coerced, having embraced being nice and good girls who wanted to treat people well, having that manipulated in ways that really were not genuine either. And that was another important part of our discussion, what does it mean to be in a genuine relationship, in an authentic relationship, and what does it mean if boys are trying to manipulate them in terms of sexuality? What does it mean for their own sexuality? What does it mean for the boys’ sexuality? What does it mean for the possibility of developing a relationship? And that was yet another rather extreme example of how these ideas really get in the way of young people's ability to explore and really experiment with genuine relationships with people they care about.
4. What are some broad implications of this myth?
> Aside from the, you know, the very easily dismissed myth that because testosterone is increasing in adolescents among boys -- it is among girls too by the way, not at the same rate and not in the same proportions -- but that does not mean that boys are unable to control their own sexuality. Are they experiencing their sexuality? Absolutely. Are boys trying to negotiate erections in pleasant places like school? Absolutely. That is a part of adolescence for boys. What is not an assumed truth is that this is girls’ responsibility to take care of. And so what the topic really would be for sex education is about gender and power as part of developing sexuality in adolescence, and how boys and girls do negotiate that, can negotiate that, and why boys in particular would be motivated not to use that kind of structural power that current frames of heterosexual relationships can give to them. And so I would argue that that should be a part of a comprehensive program of sexuality education. Yet another reason why abstinence only sexuality education, or sex education, really is so impoverished because there are so many more dimensions of sexuality that young people need to have a chance to learn about.
5. Describe your findings about homosexual relationships in adolescence.
> My studies have been school-based, so inevitably there are young people who are identifying as lesbian, gay or bi-sexual or questioning or queer. They tend to be not a lot of young people, because it is a school-based sample. So in terms of statistical analyses, I'm not able to do those kinds of analyses. But certainly in particular from adolescent girls who are bi-sexual and lesbian, I have heard them talk about their experience, and understanding, and negotiating of their desire for other girls as being extremely dangerous. They’re very aware that there are threats of recrimination that might be social, and it could even be physical, physical violence and the way that many young people find it so difficult to be able to be themselves. And that's a big part of what adolescence is about is figuring out being yourself. And when that's really curtailed because you have real concerns about consequences around your sexuality,it makes that difficult part of one’s development anyway, more difficult. And certainly we know among adolescent boys it's an enormous issue and an enormous problem. And in part it's because our culture is so predicated on a certain form of masculinity that is defined as being not gay. And so gay boys are a real threat in a way to that element of how our society is organized. I think it seems as if it's played out because boys are afraid of their own sexuality. Yes, that might be part of it, but I think it's bigger than that. And we do know that adolescent boys in particular tend to struggle to the point of killing themselves successfully. So there's an enormous rate of suicide among adolescent boys that is attributable to boys having to deal with being gay or having sexual feelings for other boys or men, and knowing that there were serious consequences that could be material, that could be familial, relational, and physical.
6. How does the media influence adolescent sexuality?
> The influence of the media, as any good psychologist will tell you, is an extremely difficult finding to talk about. So for example, I've been involved in a study of the impact of television programming for kids watching TV, consuming TV, and their adolescent sexuality and it's development. So to really be able to attribute what is happening with their sexuality to specific media exposure, would mean that I would have to take a group of adolescents and put them in a closet, and say, "Okay, no sex and no TV for five years, and then we'll compare you to this other group of adolescents who have been living an adolescent life where media, TV, and sexuality have been part of it." So we can't do that; it's unethical. And really, ultimately, that is the only way to conclusively attribute findings to the media; however, there is a second choice. It's not a bad choice. And that is longitudinal correlational research, and we have been doing that. We're actually among a group of researchers across the country who've been trying to understand the impact of seeing sex on television on adolescent sexuality. In my group, we've been looking at this question in a very different way. And the first thing that we've done that is different is to conceptualize what sex on TV is differently. There is a standard way to look at how much sexual talk and how much sexual behavior there is, and a number of people have shown that you can find a predictive association between boys and girls seeing TV sex and, or hearing TV sex, and their initiation of sexual intercourse. We are looking at something we call the "heterosexual script," reflecting a kind of dominant, almost iconic, idea of exactly how boys and girls create heterosexual relationships and how sexual decisions and experiences occur within those relationships. So we've developed a way of coding television programming for those different scripts. And we have identified several complementary scripts. And for me and my work, this is the essence of how this work on gender is moving us forward. We always think about gender in terms of differences. And I think we do that for a number of reasons. One is because as a culture, we're very married to the notion of gender differences. We're also very married to dualities and binaries. But I also think that we can find differences statistically speaking; however, when you use mixed methodologies, including qualitative methods, you have a lot more questions that you can begin to answer. And so using those different methods, I have come to see from theoretical perspective that gender complementarity is a really useful direction to go in, in terms of researching adolescent sexuality. And that includes, for example, looking at different outcomes for boys and girls, because different areas are salient for boys and girls. So for girls, for example, we've looked at romantic relationships. What do they believe about romantic relationships? For boys, the comparable construct is coercion in relationships. What do they believe about coercion in heterosexual relationships? So what we have found in developing this heterosexual script coding is a set of three different sets -- actually four -- but three that we've been using in analyses of complementary codes, that we do find work together in predicting different aspects of adolescent sexuality. Media findings tend to be very small findings so they are not enormous betas or enormous, explaining enormous amounts of the variability, or how much we can know about kids' sexuality, but they are significant. And in media studies, that's the kind of thing we're looking for. Is it part of the picture? Is it part of the pie? Is it part of the puzzle? The other thing that we are doing in our study that is somewhat different and is a departure from other studies is operationalizing sexuality differently. So we are concerned with a number of different dimensions of sexuality that we consider to be part of sexual health, and the dimensions along which we expect development in adolescence. So rather than looking at initiation of intercourse, which I've always thought of as, you know, sexual activation, right. So if you're sexually active, you're counted as a sexually active adolescent if you've had sexual intercourse one time. So I think activation is a better concept because often kids have sex one time and then they don't have it again for ten years, but they still count as sexually active. So for various reasons, one of our goals is to challenge or dislodge this notion that that's the only thing we should be thinking about as developmentalists when it comes to kids' sexuality. So we're looking at sexual agency, the ability to know yourself as a sexual person, to make decisions based on your own perspective, your own feelings and concerns. We're looking at condom use. So rather than looking at whether or not kids have had sexual intercourse, we're more interested in whether or not they've had protected intercourse. And we're looking at sexual self-concept -- that's an identity development measure -- and several other measures along those lines. We are looking at sexual behavior also. And we're finding that gender matters; that the impacts of the heterosexual script on these outcomes is different for boys and for girls. That's sort of the short story, the short take on the story.