The first chapter of Dilemmas is "Getting Beyond 'It Just Happened'", which is essentially an introduction to the book. She begins with the story of Inez who is talking about her first sexual experience. She explains that while it was occurring, her body "went limp" and it was as though she was having an out of body experience, almost like she wasn't really there. The importance of this to Deborah's study is that Inez's description of the event was that "it just happened" which is a very common way most adolescent girls define their sex lives, which could mean one of two things. It could mean that she felt victimized or forced to have sex with the guy, or it's a reflection of how society wants women to be sexy and act sexy but not have real desires of their own. The author then goes on to describe how society views sexuality, in that boys are full of raging hormones and it's all right for them to have sex every night with a different girl because they can't help it. On the other hand, if a girl were to even have sex with one guy and someone found out, she would automatically be labelled a slut. And that's completely true, that really is how society views sexuality. It happens all of the time.
The second chapter, "Voices of Desire" is basically just an explanation of the methods she used to pick the girls to interview, and the interview process itself. In total, she recruited 31 girls, which she chose from urban and suburban areas. All of the girls were between 15 and 18, and she tried to have various ethnicities as well. On page 29, there's a table called "Who the Girls Are" which shows the name, age, whether they're from urban or suburban areas, as well as "race". There is also a section saying whether they've been abused/molested, and their sexual orientation. Both of these she wouldn't know until the girls told her in the interview. What I find very interesting is how many of these girls were actually abused or molested, considering they were just picked at random without any knowledge of their past. Another thing I found very interesting in this chapter was the reaction of some of the parents toward the study itself. The girls under 18 years old had to get written parental consent. However, when some of these girls approached, or when Deborah herself approached, the parents about this, most of them freaked out and scolded her and basically said she was a pervert for asking questions about the sexual desire of their daughters. I can see their point in a way, but to me those parents seem like they are in serious denial about what really goes on in a teenager's life.
The third chapter, "Sounds of Silence", was the interviews of Janine, Jenny, Laura and Kim. Janine feels an extreme amount of pressure from her parents and sisters about being a 'good girl' and getting good grades, which has made Janine feel as though she is not allowed to have sexual desires, which in turn makes her feel like they don't exist in her body. The closest she came to having desires of that type was when she was talking to a boy she liked, but that's as far as it went. Jenny tells the story of her first sexual experience and how she wasn't ready to have sex but she just let it happen, and now she regrets it. This could be a reflection of how most girls feel pressured by guys to have sex whether they're ready for it or not. Laura's story was extremely similar to Janine's in that she's she and passive around guys, but during the interview she admits she was molested as a child by someone older than her. She told her mother, who took her to a counsellor once, then never spoke of it ever again because the boy was her mother's friend's son. This makes me so angry because her daughter reached out for help, and she turned the other way. Kim's story was really hard to read because she didn't know what to think herself. She couldn't come up with words to answer the questions with, which she assumed was because she could never speak to her mother about sexuality which has made her feel lost.
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