What We Consent To

The Weird Contradictions of Being a Teenage Girl

When I was in college, I spent summers in New Orleans with my dad, where I’d also catch up with select friends from high school. Far flung as they were, they always came home on long breaks, and the summer after my freshman year, when I was 18, I met up with one of my closest friends at PJ’s Coffee on Maple. We were bursting with stories — she had just finished her first year at Bard and had scintillating tales of her artistic peers and their erotic dalliances, I had raptures to dispense about all my crushes in the Iowa City theater scene. Our conversation was giggly and full of ecstatic shrieks, but neither of us conceived of ourselves as Teenage Girls or thought about what that meant. Since we were close and hadn’t seen each other in over a year, we’d grab each other’s hands over the table as excitement overflowed.

During a particularly juicy story, a man in our sight line placed his order at the counter. “Would you like any cookies or pastries with that?” the barista asked.

The man turned and looked pointedly at us. “I wasn’t even thinking about sweets,” he said. “But there they are.”

I’m always a little surprised, on reflection, that the guy could be that shameless. But what’s come into sharper relief over the years is how clearly he saw us as Teenage Girls. He was, of course, decades older.

That guy was, in my memory, comically unattractive, so I don’t remember any superficial validation of my sensuous appeal coursing through me at that moment. We just thought it was funny, and a little hard to believe.

But there were other moments, earlier on, when what felt like validation of my sensuous spirit was actually exploitation. I’ve had to ask uncomfortable questions about what consent means when you’re old enough to want want you think you want and for sexual desire to be a powerful force, but hormones and cultural conditioning combine to blot out any clear vision of the full picture.

When I was 16, my thoroughly badass best friend introduced me to a friend of hers — a 28-year-old rock musician. He wasn’t a name you’d know, but an act that his band had initially opened for went on to crazy success, so they had enough chops to make local waves.

On a seemingly unassuming night, hanging out at his house, I don’t remember what inspired him to do my makeup. But as a quintessential goth-prettyboy lead singer, he knew makeup, and by the time he was done I had wild designs around my eyes and everything about my face and skin had been idealed. I spent the whole makeover stunned that anyone’s face could look as perfect up close as his did. When he was finished, he inched back a bit to observe.

“Damn,” he said. “You’re fucking gorgeous.”

No one had ever said anything like that to me before, not yet, and I had cried over unrequited crushes that were far less remarkable than he was. “Could you say that again?” I asked.

He repeated the compliment with dramatic emphasis, and we made out for a while after that. Then he got out a video camera. He asked to see my breasts, and I — sick of being the girl on the sidelines that wrote and imagined erotic adventures but had never had any of my own — did as directed. The shots didn’t show my face, but They were in full view, and he later edited it into a music video for the Soup Dragons’ “Mother Universe,” a casual homemade affair on a lark, not for mass consumption.

At the time, I was elated: he had film-making skills and the piece of art was cool. The “wow there they are” moment was funny. I had absolutely no conception that what this guy had done was illegal. Didn’t even occur to me until I related the story to a friend over a decade later.

The 28-year-old had another musician friend who was 32 and considered bracingly sexy by everyone (including himself). I met him once, very briefly. But a couple weeks after that, my friend told me she ran into him and had mentioned me. “Sarah?” he’d said, and she imitated a lovestruck sigh. “I love that girl,” mused this near-stranger. “She’s got amazing tits.”

Teenage-me was ecstatic to be a sex symbol. That’s how I saw it. I was Janet or Madonna. I had power. I wasn’t a minor being exploited by grown men. Except I was, obviously I was, but my “consent” couldn’t have been more passionate. The age of consent is 16 in a disproportionate number of US states, but not in Illinois, where this all played out. And nothing else happened between us — no physical intimacy beyond that first series of kisses, and he saw nothing of my body other than, um, what he filmed, which definitely feels weird to say.

I have no idea what happened to that video or how many people saw it. This is my first time writing about the experience: ever since the revelation that it was beyond the bounds of the law, I’ve kept that story under wraps. Being exploited does nothing for the ego. Early admission to the adventures beyond adolescence does everything. It’s such a draw, in fact, that it’s common for those of us who’ve spent our youth as teenage girls to spin our narratives for years, only to realize their implications when they’re observed from the outside.

Ultimately, anyone who has a way they want to see themselves will shape their stories to fit that image. In my youthful consciousness, sexual desirability went beyond desirability: it was strength, excitement, a level of fulfillment in its own class. Getting validated by a rock star, for every quality I’d doubted I had — that seemed like a dream come true. There was a surreal electricity coursing through my memory of it for a very long time.

What does consent mean when you KNOW what you want but you can’t possibly understand the whole picture? And the guys we all know about — the public figures in their 4th decades and beyond who have a yen for teenage girls — what does it mean to be them? When I think back on this musician I remember someone deeply immature. (A part of me was dimly aware even then that the boys who made 7th and 8th grade impossible had senses of humor a lot like his.) I imagine that most self-respecting women in their 30’s require a lot more from even a one-night-stand than he was willing to give. He could be a very sweet person, but he was not a giving person. Which was fine with me, because I had everything I wanted.

I knew, even before we entered the house, that this was a man who’d messed around to varying degrees with a number of my peers. I took this as a given, as the province of a rock musician, and was just thrilled to spend a few hours crackling with forbidden allure. He was not boyfriend material, and therefore, no one got hurt.

Right?

I have no reason to believe that that video survives. But it’s terrifying to think that had that all happened today, he could’ve easily put it online. He might have had to set it to original music, because the Soup Dragons would have grounds to demand that the video be taken down for copyright reasons. It was a digital video, though, made with the earlier versions of the same video editing programs that are most popular today. I don’t actually have proof that he doesn’t have that video and I therefore only have “oh come now, he wouldn’t do that!” as my assurance that it’s never been posted anywhere. (A quick google search says he’s married now, and, from the looks of things, to someone in the range of his age bracket, so I have that as reassurance, too.)

We can’t consent to the future. We can’t consent to how we’ll understand an event when we’re no longer the person we were when it took place. If I found his contact information and had any angry words to say, he would be shocked. If he remembers that night at all he’d say we’d all had an amazing time, that I was floating on air throughout, that he never did anything I didn’t want him to do. And he’d be right. Mostly. Except that I went along with the video camera. It wasn’t my idea. And, youthful-insecurity-driven feelings of flattery aside, I certainly never told him to show it to his friends.

I didn’t get hurt, but I’m disgusted, and I do feel like my body was used in a way that he understood and I didn’t. That feels bad. Teenagers are supposed to make mistakes, but they need to make mistakes together. No one on the edge of 30, let alone older, should be making mischief with them. But since so many teenagers are convinced that they’re adults or near enough, it often takes us a long time to understand how young those ages are.

I’ve long wondered if the pervasive ease with which teenage girls can be exploited is a driving force behind Hollywood’s love for teenage girls who are dangerous — is that a way of balancing out guilt? In The Crush, Alicia Silverstone, age 15, plays a brilliant girl who’s also the unhinged stalker of an older male writer that lives in the house on her parents’ property. (The screenwriter said it was based on his experience. Hmm.)

In The Craft, a group of teenage girls form a witches’ coven and wreak havoc on everyone around them through the force of their own desires, including the desire to be beautiful and the desire for the obsessive devotion of the school’s most popular boy. Ultimately, The Craft is a story about how hungry teenage girls are for power and what chaos ensues when they get it.

(Both films were directed by Andrew Fleming, for whom I have questions.)

One of the accusers in the ongoing case involving allegations against Neil Gaiman said that she chose to come forward when she did because, the older she’s gotten, the younger she realized 18 actually is. I was 18 when it hit me that I could leave my dorm room at 10 pm, walk to the record store that was open til 11, and buy an album I’d been waiting for that had been released that day. No one could stop me. I was convinced that this unfettered personal agency rendered me an adult.

I now realize that, by most metrics, adulthood is defined by what it’s your responsibility not to do, rather than by an absence of rules to hold you in. Teenagers have a habit of making rules up as they go along, and maybe it’s this perceived lawlessness that makes them appealing to a certain kind of pathological adult who identifies as free-spirited but is clearly looking from an escape. When I read that one of Neil Gaiman’s personal assistants allegedly had to “peel him off a 15-year-old fan” at a comic convention (an anonymous report, of course) I remembered how badly I wanted to be seen as fully womanly at that age. It felt more important than anything.

Feelings are dangerous, there’s no way around that. And we can’t force the teenage brain — or any brain, for that matter — into a level of rationality it’s not yet formed for. Rational distance requires distance. I know that the aforementioned musician struggled with addiction when I knew him; I hope that’s not the case now. (Photos look promising. He looks, if anything, less visibly hardened than he was all those years ago.) Using people as escapes is one of the most destructive and irresistible freedoms we’ve got. I’m not sure how to draw a conclusion as I think about vulnerability and fantasy and executive functioning and confidence and insecurity and self-image. It’s complicated out there.

I do think “why does this feel good?” is an important question. It’s not a very popular one in America, where individualistic notions of what one needs or likes rules the day. But I have nothing enlightening to say about attachment, not without being hypocritical. I just find it crazy that ideas of who we are or who we’re not or who someone else could be to us or what we could be to them have such pull, when an idea is something you can’t even touch. But maybe that’s not entirely true. Maybe ideas leave their mark.

Fairuza Balk as Nancy Downs in The Craft