Going all the Way

There are four girls at the table, sharing. The five smoked-chicken minipizzas. The six Caesar salads. An unfathomable number of diet Cokes, plus the contents of three breadbaskets. They share cigarettes, lighters, breath mints, and it seems that they share a basic style: the homage hippie hair (long, brown, center part), the bracelet-size hoop earrings, the baseball caps, the many layers of black mesh and denim.

They also share one basic story, the lengthy guy diatribes that begin, with variations: "At first he was cute."

Cara Goldstein, 19 (the names of interviewed subjects have been changed), is, like the others, a freshman at New York University. She gives the breathlessly definitive guy diatribe: "So he came to my high school. And he liked me and I was so excited, but I was nervous because I found out he had drug problems. No needles. But cocaine, whatever. He'd been with sluts, this and that, and I was freaking out. I made him get a blood test. I liked him so much, but I was paranoid. Who knows where he had been? So I broke up with him and he knew: I thought he was a diseased guy. Even if he was cute."

It seems impossible to discuss sex with those in the 15-to-22-year-old age range without first stating one essential fact: Sex is the primary subject in life, "the thing you spend your time wondering about and watching others about and figuring out," as one girl at the table put it. For girls in particular, the whole sex experience, as it's known, or the sex situation, seems to require an ongoing critical "figuring out." They speak quickly as they review every aspect, so thrilled for the chance to explain and dissect that, by the tenth cigarette, their voices are a blur. Their sentences clot with "like" and "so I said" and "fuck him." They speak so fast, and so loudly, it seems that talking about sex is as good as doing it. That's until you realize that you've heard "disease" more often than "kissing," "needles" more than "penis" and you begin to understand that all the speedy excitement is really fear.

I first heard this nervous sex talk in 1988. At the time I was interviewing girls in New York City about sex and men, and Jennifer Levin, the 18-year-old who had been killed during so-called rough sex in Central Park. I (continued on page 150)Going All The Way (continued from page 120) wanted to know what it was like to grow up in a place where casual sex, or any sex, could seem so dangerous--a world in which 16-year-olds could discourse knowledgeably on rape, abortion or emergent sexually transmitted diseases. But after the initial impassioned rants (on bad boys, bad drugs and bad abortions), the conclusions, circa 1988, were surprisingly calm: You're young. Have fun. It won't get to you.

Asking the same questions recently, I found few New York-area girls who were calm about anything. There were 45 this time--the daughters of friends; neighbors; girls I had interviewed for previous stories--and, for balance, ten guys. They met me at restaurants in groups and went to the bathroom in pairs. They smoked a great deal and drank cappuccino (with chocolate) as they explained that 1988 seems like the deep, oddly innocent past. "Herpes is kind of corny," explains one 16-year-old girl. "I mean, as a thing to worry about." Denial these days is for the very stoned or else the hugely conceited. Leaning across the restaurant table, the girls would state that "the whole sex thing" now can and will get to you. "You know the deal: no lying. It's your honeymoon or your funeral," says one NYU girl as she casually scoops guacamole with her fingers.

For girls in New York--or girls anywhere these days--AIDS is no longer a horror story that happened to some guy's roommate's brother. It is officially there in life, a malevolent and permanent presence, as one 16-year-old says, "like Bosnia." In 1988 I found many 15-year-olds who had had sex and felt OK about it. Today's 15-year-olds have received basic AIDS education by the seventh grade. By the eighth grade, they have written papers with titles such as AIDS and Its Impact on West Africa. By tenth, at least, they will have made some personal connection to the disease: "Like this one speaker was going over symptoms," says Gennie Germaine, 17, of Dobbs Ferry, New York. "And I sat next to my friend and we were, like, Oh my God! It was at the time I found out I was lactose intolerant. One of the symptoms was diarrhea. I freaked."

And if the guys feigned a certain cool, few got through the mandatory AIDS lectures unscathed. "Like, at first, when you're 12, you're, like, Oh, this is Scarsdale. Who gets AIDS in Scarsdale?" says 17-year-old Michael Hewitt, a virgin who lives in the affluent New York City suburb. "By ninth, it was, Oh shit. You're going to die for some girl?"

Of course, AIDS was not unknown in 1988. Most kids had seen the random PBS documentary. Some had dutifully fitted condoms on bananas in health class. But sex education, in school or at home, emphasized pregnancy, birth control and "real, relevant topics" such as syphilis. For teenagers, AIDS was the weird gay thing that killed Rock Hudson. It was not, as Tonya Sharazz, 15, of Brooklyn, explains, "so published like it is now. I have an older friend who died of AIDS. And he was mad at the system. He was not educated like we are now. Like, we have Philadelphia."

Back then, says Erin O'Rourke, a junior at Caldwell College in Caldwell, New Jersey, "you had that false hope. You're not gay. You're 17. There's time."

Now 20 or 21, many of these girls seem permanently nervous--stuck with what one 19-year-old calls "the scared black dot in the brain," the fear "at the back of consciousness" that can expand at any moment into a mushroom cloud: On June 6, 1989, I had unprotected sex. If younger girls seem to recite from a safe-sex manifesto, slightly older ones might confess that the boy was "like, 22" and how "proud" she was that he liked her. He said he'd had only two partners. But he lied. Or did steroids, got a tattoo, came close to needles or acted out as an abusive guy or an arrogant DJ or musician who signed "a multimillion-dollar deal in Santa Fe" and disappeared.

It's common to hear 17-year-olds such as Gennie say in all seriousness, "I have changed my lifestyle since I was 15."

Sex is out there, of course--in Gennie's case, sex in a field, at a keg party. But it is spiked with anxiety and tears, or at least with the passion-killing dynamics of "the conversation": Who, precisely, have you slept with? Why didn't you get latex? And, yes, there is a five percent chance of transmission through oral sex, meaning you must wear a condom for a blow job.

"It used to be you worried about your emotional well-being," says Sarah Tesh, a sophomore at the Dalton School in Manhattan. She smooths her hair like a bonnet or shield around her face as she says, "Do you love him? Will he respect you?"

Kelly Ann Ryan, who grew up on Long Island and now studies art in New York City, laughs when she tries to picture something so sweet. "In the Seventies and Eighties, I guess the worst was that you got left in the morning. He thought your name was Karen, but it's Joanne. So you cry and go have coffee but you're not going to get purple lesions all over you, have your lungs collapse, get pneumonia and die."

Even when speaking casually about sex, the average middle-class teen can sound apocalyptic. "Scary as shit" drugs are everywhere, they'll say. "Scary as shit" people--bisexual people--now exist, one girl told me, "in eighth grade." Talk to one of these girls for a while and she'll start to sound like a character in a Fifties science fiction film who, unlike others in town, sees the truth.

"Where I'm from, in Florida, I swear to you, everyone had sex with everyone," says Jennifer Sylvester, an NYU girl who--in "a terrible accident"--had dyed half her hair plus her fingertips pink. "And I swear to you, like, if someone gets AIDS, we all get it. All of us! Dead. We have to wake up. Because we're going to go away from home. College? It's going to get worse."

No one likes to say it. It seems so unfair. But leaving home, going out into the world, has come to seem much as it did before 1960: a big, scary risk for a girl or at least an enterprise filled with depressing questions: How can you trust any guy with your life? Will you ever, to quote one college freshman, "get into bodily fluids"? Or will you live forever with restrictions unwittingly summarized by 18-year-old Francine Lister? "It's perfectly natural to be nude, to share the sexual experience," she says. "But you can't have sex just because you feel sexual."

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It's true, of course, that all sexually active adults now confront the same issues. But those issues are far more complex for a 17-year-old. In the healthiest of times, young sex can be an uncertain, often neurotic, activity. It unfolds against the backdrop of high school or college, that era of rigid caste systems and silent punishments--in general, all the prejudices common to small landlocked countries in eastern Europe. Whether handed down "from society, maybe from your mother" or from "old religious days"--or from those forces known as "the media and TV"--there are rules.

Rule one: You are expected to fuck within the perimeters of your group. Two: You are expected to do so according to the usual guidelines. One way if you're male, another if you're female.

Guys (ask any girl) are encouraged to score. "Anything," says one of the girls from NYU. "Cow butt? He'll take it." They are permitted outbursts of male myopia. As Sarah Tesh says, "Let's say that what he sees is between her shoulders and waist." In short, guys are still applauded for getting into and out of as many girls as possible with minimal eye contact.

Talk longer than five minutes to a guy--go beyond the rote "Yes, I believe girls are equal" declaration--and he'll confirm that it's different for girls. Carl Mosher, a tall, ponytailed senior at Riverhead High School in New York, is one of a handful of Long Island guys I met one afternoon. Carl makes the point: "Girls should really be older when they have sex. Guys should do it in high school and college. Girls shouldn't. Guys like a girl who'll give it up. But what do they really want?" He looks down at his immense, untied running shoe as if the answer were written there on the side. "The pure girl."

This much has not changed, not since 1976, when I left high school, nor since 1953, when my mother did: A girl must protect not only her body--her future--but her rep. "No matter how good the girl," says Ginger Friedman, the only virgin among the NYU crew, "it's always 'Oh my God, did you see her? She was all over him.'" She's loose, you'll hear, "wild as shit." Even if the wild and loose girl has her problems--"a fucked-up family thing," perhaps--it's still true that sluts are just sluts.

Today's slut seems remarkably similar to yesterday's. She sleeps with a variety of boys, none of whom is her boyfriend. She has sex in unappealing places, such as the bushes. And usually while wearing a dress the size of a washcloth.

"I guess it's just images we form of people. Words we learn," says Sarah Tesh. She shakes her head. Her hair doesn't move.

"Ho is one of the words," says Sandi Rattner, Tesh's best friend. "And you learn that a guy is never a ho."

Many girls attempt to point out that this double standard seems at odds with their historical epoch. "We just grew up all sex and drugs and rock and roll," says Joanne Gephart, born in 1978 in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. More accurately, they grew up with sex, drugs and rock and roll as cultural institutions. For decades, alcohol and recreational drugs--pot, coke, acid, and more recently, ecstasy--have been as common among kids as varsity football and the prom. There's along tradition of getting wasted--or at least repeatedly buzzed--on the weekends and, in some bored cases, "baked" during the school day itself. Most girls profess to love imported beer and white wine. They love cigarettes and pot, though someone is typically swearing she's been "smoke free" one week, six days, five hours. And if she is not part of the nationwide acid revival, she has done ecstasy, the "full body" drug that can serve as a sexual substitute.

If it is possible for teenagers to avoid what parents still embarrassingly refer to as the drug scene, no one older than 12 avoids the public obsession with sex. "Growing up, you got that double message," says Jenett Cohen, an NYU girl who's been piling her hair into a wispy beehive. "It was dirty, but it was appealing. It was just there, in magazines, on MTV. That's what everyone talks about. Even parents do."

Many girls say they have a parent who is "totally cool" on the subject--an older mother who overcame "Fifties sexual repressiveness," or a countercultural mom who liked the Grateful Dead, appreciated the pill and wants to share both with her daughter. For those who have more tradition-bound parents, there were older siblings and, of course, the TV, which seems to have been on constantly.

"It was, like, you witnessed all this stuff on soap operas," says Francine Lister, who grew up on Long Island. "That was the background when you were eight years old: Who was jumping into and out of bed with who?" When the soaps ended, there were the talk shows and, later at night, made-for-cable TV movies that featured, as one boy says, "sex more than acting or scenery."

By the time most of these girls were 12, sex had become a public freak show, a surreal parade of battered women, Spur Posse cretins and the ubiquitous 15-year-old incest survivor and mother of twins. "Like, now we have sex harassment," says Germaine. "Once, after a football game, we were on a bus for cheerleaders and players and some guys started chanting, 'Show us your tits.' Some of us were shocked. Some yelled, 'Show us your dick.' After, there were fights. Charges were brought." She yawns. "There was a sexual sensitivity class."

"We are very aware of the harassment-and-date-rape situation," states Friedman. "More than our mothers, like, we know that guys manipulate words and everyone is drunk. You combine that with, like, where has this guy been? What kind of drugs? And you can't ever really know anybody. They don't know you. So, you know all that, why go back with him?"

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These girls may know more about the bad probabilities than any nonmedical personnel on earth. Of all the high schools in the U.S., 93 percent offer courses in sexuality and AIDS. Many of their graduates can recite the ominous data. In 1987, there were 127 reported cases of AIDS in the U.S. among kids younger than 19, and four years later, 789. That's compared with 1145 last year in kids aged 13 to 19, and among those 20 to 24 years old, there were an alarming 12,712 cases. But for all the panic about AIDS, most girls still don't know anyone who has the disease. For them, there are more immediately threatening statistics: More than 1 million girls between the ages of 15 and 19 get pregnant each year, and some 3 million kids suffer from syphilis and other STDs.

It is not surprising, therefore, to hear a young woman say she gets "a massive body headache" just thinking about the sex act. Some say they'll wait for college. Others threaten to quit until they meet someone who's older, trustworthy and tested. If this guy fails to show, many say they'll marry "someone decent" at 25. Until then, determined virgins, whether the actual or born-again variety, support their decision with spirited platitudes. They are waiting to give themselves to "the right one." Or to "experience trusting, intimate joy with someone committed." Sometimes, like cheerleaders trying to perk up team spirit, they engage in a kind of virgin bonding.

"They called us the V-crowd," says Kelly Ann Ryan. "There were 11 of us and we stayed together, virgins, for all of high school. We got all the attention. Every guy was, like, Oh, we've got to get the V-crowd! Yeah, we were curious. Tempted. We fooled around, but we drew the line at intercourse."

Most girls will admit, however, that it gets harder and harder to draw the line--to control what Ryan calls that "unbelievable 'go' feeling." Nervous, guilty V-girls would call me at ten P.M. and say: "Don't tell anyone that I'm telling you this," or, "He said it was OK for oral sex this time." Cohen is more direct: "We're young. We want to do it. And there is this kind of pressure."

Eventually, the point is, you just do it. Or plan to. Or plan to plan.

Of course, the setting has to be right. This could mean a dorm room or a furnished basement with a wide-screen TV, or a conveniently empty parental bedroom. In an emergency, there is the car. And it is conceded that even a "nice" girl might, in a stable relationship situation, consider the beach.

Then there's the matter of contraception or what is now universally known as "protection." One recent study by the Centers for Disease Control indicates that 55 percent of all sexually active high school students did not use condoms the last time they had sex. But it's a rare high school student who will admit to it. They know the stats so well they sound like bumper stickers. And guys know that educated girls won't say yes unless they show up prepared, as one 16-year-old puts it, "like fucking Boy Scouts."

The girls will tell you, without actually saying so, that this arrangement--guys being responsible--suits them fine. Even at the age of 17, many seem to feel a kind of contraceptive exhaustion. Some are still on the pill (for menstrual regularity or "extra confidence"). A few older girls may even have struggled with strange and ancient methods such as the diaphragm. And many seem to think--even if they don't admit it--that there is something off about a girl who carries condoms, "like she is just waiting or looking for it," as Carl Mosher says.

What the girls handle these days is the now-essential pre-sex interview.

"You have to be entirely straightforward," Tesh says somberly. "Honest. No dancing around the subject. Take a deep breath and say it: Who were you with? And could I please have blood and urine samples before we proceed?"

After all the talking, that first time unfolds in one of two ways: Either they do it in a blast of passion, "a heat-of-the-moment" thing, and then freak out afterward, or they calculate and freak out before, during and after.

"I was scared to death the first time," says Ryan, so worked up by the memory that she's pushing lettuce off her plate. "I was, like, Oh my God, what if the condom breaks? I'm so scared of finding out I have AIDS. I was, like, Please, God! You cannot look into a computer, like, punch someone's name up and find out everything. Like, sex Nexis! Too bad. Because the confession--'Who's he been with?'--doesn't mean anything."

A few girls confide that they like massages or scented candles, or that a certain guy has a "humongous cock" or a "fuck-me-jam-it-in-the-back-door" approach. But there are many more who say nothing whatsoever about the sex. They did it "for the guy." They had their eyes closed. They don't even know if they've had orgasms. "We're just trying to get through the thing itself," says Cohen. A younger girl adds, "We're not sure of the technology."

But weed out all the awkward preambles, the freak-outs and the hopeful exaggerations, and the most typical sex encounters seem neither disastrous nor blissful. They are merely short-circuited. A long while after "the diseased guy," Cara Goldstein went back to a dorm room with "this guy I knew, sort of. And we were just kissing and stuff and it was nice. But he was, like, 'Can we make love?' I'm, like, love? Excuse me? I don't even know you." She taps some ice into her mouth, then says, "He got weird. And so I'm, like, Oh my God, you know, I thought I was over the panic--that I'm so scared of guys. It's a problem. The guys all want it, like, 'bi,' like in Basic Instinct. Sharon Stone. Madonna. They think it's fun. I left."

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If many of my interviewees end up in confused, hair-flicking rants, there are those that start out speedy and upset and just stay that way.

For instance, Linn Chen of Brooklyn is the "only girl child" in a Chinese family that has strong views about virginity. "My mother said 'It is your most powerful possession. The Chinese woman is like a jewel.' Some people, in the heat of the moment, they feel 'Get it over with,' but I can't. I can't," she shouts. "I can't! I would be gypped. Low-down, as if I had lost my most valuable possession and where is my security? ... Also, if I got AIDS, I would be dead. My parents would think, Our little girl let us down."

Tonya Sharazz tries to sound casual about sex and her friends: "A lot of girls from my school are pregnant. Out of 20, about half. Some are 15. And I know of 13-year-olds and a 17-year-old."

But she very quickly starts to sound angry. At the friend "who did it out of spite to bring her boyfriend and her closer together, but it just drew him away." Or the 13-year-old who told her she had a child because "she has no brothers or sisters" and needed "someone to take care of."

Tonya, an adamant virgin with "high expectations" of herself, sounds furious about having to consider sex at all. "I would have to be emotionally stable to do it. And be able to support my child. Even if it had seven arms or, like, a birth defect, I would still go through with it. Every action has its consequence," she says, emphasizing each word. "If there were no disease, there would be something else. Sex is associated with something bad."

Most of the girls I interviewed would denounce this sort of assessment as melodramatic. They would then return to talking about AIDS, pregnancy scares, abortions and how everything is made worse by untrustworthy guys. If guys are always slightly suspect--likely at best to discuss your body parts with their friends--they are now potentially life-threatening. Thus the usual complaints have taken on a paranoid twist: "He said he'd call me, but he didn't" now seems to mean, "Is he afraid to tell me something bad? Like about AIDS?"

"He seemed distant during sex" silently translates as, "Did the condom break and he didn't say?" When one 17-year-old says, "He was an animal, like, he bit," it's clear she wants to know, "Can you get AIDS from a hickey?"

But they are just as suspicious of--and hard on--one another. They critique their own sexual histories. They police their best friends, assessing behavior, attitudes and outfits for potential sluttiness. Some girl, somewhere, is always bemoaning what Ryan calls "that la-la-la damn dizzy attitude. The thing is, guys have their way. You've got to know how to handle them. You can't sleep with a guy on the first date, no matter what he says. Have some respect! Have a brain!"

In my own view, it's the rare girl now who seems flighty, ditzy, unaware that sex or AIDS could get to her. Jenett Cohen lets her improvised beehive slowly collapse and tries to summarize: "It's, like, if you're not tough, you're dead meat. End of story."

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After polishing off the last flat diet Coke and stabbing that final cigarette into the cappuccino cup, the girls will look at one another and start to laugh. Because, like, it all sounds so extreme. And because they do have fun. And all the AIDS propaganda--the gym class talk--does get so tiring.

A few try to imagine something hopeful emerging from this mess. "I think we're going to see a return to feeling," says Victoria Jackson, a 20-year-old peer counselor on Long Island. "Kids are going to want to make love and not just fuck. That's what all this has led to--the therapy, the rehab. Even with AIDS. They want it to mean something."

Of course, there are kids who wish they had lived in the legendary free-love Seventies and Eighties, which seem to have blurred with the Sixties or, as Carl Mosher says, "in the Fifties. Just because of the way it was. Like, guys taking Miss Innocent Daughter out on a date."

"Our parents had it lucky," says Ginger Friedman, back at the NYU table. "It was the whole free-love time. You could experiment and not have to worry."

Cara Goldstein isn't so sure. "I think it's easy to imagine that it was so much better. Like, to be in the Sixties. What did you get then? The Grateful Dead? You can still like the Grateful Dead."

"Yeah, and the drugs," says Jenett Cohen.

Jennifer with the pink hair points out that living now has its advantages, except, of course, for sex--the fact that you can't, as she says, "just have a real live body when you feel like it."

"Hey, what are you going to do?" says Jenett. She pokes around to see what food remains on the plates. Cara hands her a half-smoked cigarette. She inhales and holds in the smoke as she says, "The fact that it sucks? You deal. You can't go around feeling doomed. You're going to die. I'm not even 19! I can't live saying, Oh, when I was 17, boy, then I was wild!"

"Sex is out there--in Gennie's case, sex in a field, at a keg party. But it is spiked with anxiety and tears."