There are three major assumptions that underlie the majority of em pirical research on adolescent sexuality and shape the nature of the ques tions researchers ask, the design of the studies, and, thus, the state of our knowledge base about adolescent sexuality. We feel it is important to ex amine these assumptions and their implications for our literature base re garding adolescent girls’ sexuality.
Girls’ Sexuality as a Psychological and Social Problem
One underlying assumption that has guided the vast majority of empirical and political discourse on adolescent girls’ sexuality over the past 30 years is that sexuality in girls is a dangerous social problem indicative of pathology and in need of prevention or at least control. This approach, which views adolescent girls’ sexuality as a social problem, is constructed in the context of a climate of national panic from both the political left and right.
The politically liberal position is invested in the maintenance of this pathology perspective to advance an agenda of intervention programs, and has thus focused discourse and research on the negative consequences of sexual activity including teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, poverty, and, most recently, AIDS. The political right has similarly em phasized the social problem of adolescent girls’ sexuality, although in efforts to advance an agenda emphasizing the immorality of premarital sexuality. This agenda is typified by recent “Just Say No” campaigns and other pro grams aimed at abstinence education for adolescents. As a result of these two forces stemming from vastly divergent motivations, the body of re search on adolescent girls’ sexuality has focused on questions aimed at identifying when girls begin to engage in sexual behaviors, specifically sex ual intercourse, and what factors precipitate or put an adolescent girl at risk for engaging in sexual intercourse (Irvine, 1994). The ultimate purpose
of this path of research is to prevent, or at least control, adolescent girls’ expressions of sexuality (Foucoult, 1978; Irvine, 1994; Nathanson, 1991).
Constance Nathanson (1991) provides a fascinating sociohistorical analysis of the emergence of adolescent girls’ sexuality as a social problem. Although adolescent pregnancy, the most visible aspect of girls’ sexuality, has emerged as one of the most controversial and politicized topics currently on our national table of social issues, it has only been on that table since about the mid-1970s. Although the sexual transgressions of adolescent girls have been problematic in this country for about 150 years, prior to the past two decades they were considered individual problems of individual girls rather than a national social problem. Something has happened over the past two decades that has suddenly made adolescent girls’ sexuality a national emergency and put it at the top of our list of national social problems.
Nathanson (1991) provides compelling data to support her contention that the current construction of adolescent girls’ sexuality as a social problem is not related to the magnitude of the problem but is rather a result of a variety of political forces advancing several moral and philosophical agendas. For example, adolescent pregnancy did not emerge as a national concern until almost a decade after the birth rate (the number of births per 1,000 women) for teenage girls had declined rapidly. Nathanson argues that the problem of adolescent girls’ sexuality has been largely constructed over the past 25 years as a consequence of a variety of social forces.
Historically, adolescent girls’ sexual transgressions were considered within the domain of morality and, addressing it was the property of religion. With the relatively recent invention of the birth control pill and later, legalized abortion, the sexuality of women in general became increasingly redistributed from the domain of the church to the medical community. Almost overnight, sexuality was transformed from a moral problem to a health problem that carried with it serious economic implications to women and society at large.
In the 1960s the birth control movement, led by Planned Parenthood, became prominent and powerful in setting national policy. The mission of this movement focused on providing birth control services to poor married adult women. The population explosion and need for population control was a prominent national agenda item at that time. The political left advanced the argument that poor married minority women were kept in a cycle of poverty by not having access to control their fertility and having child after child. The polical right was concerned with the economic cost to the country in social welfare programs. Thus, both the political left and right were invested in providing birth control to poor, primarily African American, adult women.
By the 1970s, the birth control movement had pretty much accomplished its goal, the birth rate had dropped to replacement level. In addition, there was widespread publicity surrounding the forced sterilizations of minority women that occurred in state-funded birth control clinics. The success of the movement, along with the political incorrectness of the eugenic implications highlighted by the sterilization incidents which were too distasteful to the politically liberal members of the Planned Parent hood, resulted in a redefining of the mission of this powerful and large organization. Specifically, the problem of women’s sexuality was redefined on the basis of age rather than socioeconomic status. The racist undertones of focusing on controlling the fertility of primarily African American adult women were not as distasteful as controlling the fertility of still primarily African American adolescent girls.
The transformation of the problem from poor women’s fertility to adolescent girls’ fertility also came in the context of several other forces including the decreased tendency for adolescent mothers to be married, the public’s perceived fear of youth generated by the counterculture movement of the late 1960s, and, more recently, the political power in the voice of the conservative religious right. Together, this hodge podge of diverse forces propelled the issue of adolescent girls’ sexuality into the forefront of social, political, and academic discourse (see Nathanson, 1991, for more compre hensive analysis of these forces).
The public conception of adolescent girls’ sexuality as an area of so cial concern, and as medically pathological and in need of treatment (or better, prevention), also served as the context for empirical investigators and funding agencies. No research occurs in a vacuum. Thus, as researchers are part of the culture in which they live, the conception of adolescent sexuality as pathological also forms the metaphor for the nature of the questions that scholars ask and agencies fund. For example, if one perceived adolescent girls’ sexuality as an illness, one may wonder about the ways in which people with this illness differ from those who do not have it. Or, one may wonder whether this illness relates in meaningful ways to other illnesses. Indeed, researchers have found differences between adolescent girls who engage in sexual intercourse (the most prominent symptom of the illness) compared with adolescent girls who have never had sexual intercourse (see Katchadourian, 1990; Miller & Moore, 1990, for reviews). Additionally, researchers have found engaging in sexual intercourse to be associated with a constellation of problem behaviors including smoking, drinking alcohol, and using drugs (Donovan & Jessor, 1985; Elliott & Morse, 1989; Jessor, Costa, Jessor, & Donovan, 1983; Jessor & Jessor, 1975; Mott & Haurin, 1988; Rodgers & Rowe, 1990).
As with the early psychological research on ethnic minority groups in this country, these types of questions operate from a deficit model. That is, they assume that sexually active adolescent girls have a deficit (or ill ness), and they document this deficit by comparing them with girls without the deficit. This model does not capture the diversity within the construct being examined (e. g., sexuality or ethnicity). Thus, it may be that sexual intercourse in some adolescent girls may reflect some underlying psychological disturbance, but not in others.
Shedler and Block (1990), in an extremely important publication that won awards for its policy implications, applied this questioning to another controversial domain of adolescent behavior: drug usage. Numerous previous studies operating from the prevailing cultural assumptions regarding the pathology of adolescent drug usage had found drug use to be associated with many deleterious qualities in adolescents. Shedler and Block, however, differentiated different patterns of drug usage in adolescents, and found that adolescents who experimented with drugs but did not abuse them in fact were the psychologically most healthy, even compared with adolescents who did not use drugs. The authors believed that the same behavior, drug usage, might have very different meanings and serve different functions for different adolescents. In this instance, the willingness of these developmental researchers to move beyond deficit, illness models, to asking questions that can capture the diversity of our psychological constructs was fruitful. Researchers interested in adolescent sexuality are only beginning to take this step.
The assumption that adolescent girls’ sexuality is pathological has implications for the empirical literature base on adolescent sexuality by influencing the targets of research interest. In most developmental domains (e. g., cognitive development, ego development, moral development, social development) the pioneering studies investigating the developmental phenomena were conducted with middle-class, European American male adolescents. The field of psychology in general has historically meant the psychology of middle-class, European American men. However, most research on adolescents’ sexuality has focused on the sexuality of adolescent girls, and most often, economically disadvantaged, ethnic minority girls. Although this observation may initially seem peculiar, it makes sense in the context of understanding adolescent sexuality as pathology rather than as a normal developmental process, and given our cultural notions about gender and sexuality. When normal developmental processes are studied, it is the majority (White), powerful (male) population who is the standard (Bleier, 1986; Crawford &. Marecek, 1989; Jacklin, 1981). When pathology or social problems are studied, it is the minority populations who are examined. That the overwhelming majority of empirical research on adolescent sexuality is being focused on girls, primarily poor minority girls, implies that only their sexuality is problematic and necessitates study (Tolman, 1994).
By their lack of attention to men, empirical investigators reinforce the cultural belief that male sexuality is biologically determined and uncontrollable. Therefore, to socially control adolescent sexuality, emphasis must be placed on the control of the female adolescent. This biological double standard is based on cultural scripts that designate the female as gatekeeper or final arbitrator of sexual behavior (Strouse & Fabes, 1987). That is, men are to pursue and women are to resist sexual behavior. It follows that contraception, pregnancy, and childbearing are the concerns of the woman (Chilman, 1990). One result is a large body of literature on adolescent girls’ sexual behavior in regard to contraception, pregnancy, and intercourse with little or no empirical work on girls’ sexual desire, sexual feelings, or sense of self as a sexual being or on any aspect of boys’ sexuality.