Teenage girls, like teenage boys, lie a lot about sex. Their bodies, subject to swift hormonal changes, are further manipulated by pop cultural expectations not always of their own making. Tom Wolfe drives this notion home in his novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," about promiscuity on the college campus. He tells of a sad conversation he overheard in a campus lounge:
" . . . a boy's voice was saying, 'What are you talking about? How could I? We've known each other since before Choate! It would be incest!' And then I heard the girl say, 'Please, come on. I can't stand the thought of having to do it with somebody I hardly know and can't trust.' It turned out that she was beseeching him, her old Platonic friend of years' standing, to please relieve her of her virginity, deflower her. That way she could honestly maintain the proper social stance as an experienced young woman in college."
Concludes Tom Wolfe: "There was a time when the worst . . . slut . . . for want of a better term . . . maintained a virginal and chaste facade. Today, the most virginal and chaste undergraduate wants to create a facade of sexual experience."
Sexually active teenage girls nevertheless frequently tell interviewers how they wish they had waited until they were older. In a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2003, more than six in 10 express that sentiment. No matter how quickly our society pushes young women to grow up, a sped up sexual clock is rarely accompanied by the brakes of self-interest. In a media-saturated culture, appeals to emotion must precede good sense. As the space between romantic innocence and sluttish experience narrows, it's the young who suffer the pangs of rue. Their creative fantasies as well as the range of complex pleasures are haunted with regret and tinged with remorse. The allure of the slut becomes loss and lamentation. The young women are entitled to better.