She shouldn’t be a role model: In HBO’s “Girls,” Hannah (Lena Dunham) is foolishly free with her favors with Adam (Adam Driver) (©HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection)
The week before Sandy hit, a 15-year-old Staten Island girl threw herself in front of a train, after a video of her having sex with four football players was passed around her school.
Two students got suspended for mocking her. But apparently the football players weren’t disciplined — because, according to police, the sex was “consensual.”
We can’t go back and ask Felicia Garcia what she was thinking, but let’s be serious: There’s no such thing as consensual sex between a 15-year-old girl and four football players.
Fine, there’s a legal standard for consent. If the boys were minors as well and didn’t physically force her into the act, we can’t charge them. But there’s more than enough blame to go around.
Felicia was a victim of a culture that tells 15-year-olds that sex is fun at any age, that being a virgin is uncool, that sex is the same for boys and for girls and that casual sex can be “empowering.”
What’s the right age to have sex? A few years back, I attended a session for mentors in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. When the “bigs” pressed the Planned Parenthood representative on when we should tell our “littles” that sex was OK, the woman told us we should say they that sex is best when you’re “in love.” Had this woman ever looked at a 12-year-old’s notebook doodles?
In fact, it’s clear that too-early sex can cause long-term emotional problems. In their research for the book “Premarital Sex in America,” Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker found that among women 18-23, those who’d had sex before age 16 were 10-plus percentage points more likely to be diagnosed with depression than those who’d waited, and also less likely to feel satisfied with their lives.
At 15 or 25, though, women have gotten the message that saving oneself for marriage (or at least a mature, long-lasting relationship) is . . . weird. As Lena Dunham explained in her ad for the Obama campaign (in which she compared voting for the first time to losing one’s virginity), “Also, it’s super uncool to be out and about and someone says, ‘Did you vote,’ and ‘No, I didn’t vote, I wasn’t ready.’” Yeah, super uncool for your friends to discover you’re a virgin.
Of course, Dunham, the creator of the HBO hit “Girls,” will say it’s all a big joke. But the fact is that having sex earlier or with more boys just doesn’t make girls happier.
Having a higher number of lifetime partners, Regnerus reports, also increased “depressive symptomology” for women aged 18-23. “For women, being in a [long-term] relationship was more emotionally satisfying than not being in one.”
Jessica Massa and Rebecca Wiegand, the authors of the hot dating book “The Gaggle: How the Guys You Know Will Help You Find the Love You Want,” encourage young women to explore their sexuality. Doing so, they claim, can be “empowering.” “Hooking up is one of many types of connections,” Massa tells me.
Wiegand says women ask her all the time if it’s OK that they slept with a guy that they just met. “It is frustrating that women have been taught to think this way. . . Sometimes the connection at the beginning can just be passionate.”
Sometimes, sure. But then those “passionate” encounters tend to be much more fun for men than for women. As Regnerus notes, it is “apparent that having more numerous sexual partners is associated with poorer emotional states in women but not in men.”
Women are generally happier in significant relationships, Massa and Wiegand admit. And while they’re big fans of “Girls,” they don’t see Dunham’s character as a good example of a fun hookup: She has sex repeatedly with a guy who seems to care little for her. Massa tells me, “She seems like what guys think of as a sort of a ‘last resort’ girl.”
The thing is, their advice is pretty much guaranteed to steer most girls into the “last resort” as their first.