Customer Reviews

Going All the Way: Teenage Girls' Tales of Sex, Romance, and Pregnancy

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There are a lot of new books out now (March 2002) on teenage girls and sex. This one, I hope will remain the classic. Thompson is an exceptional researcher and not just another journalist with an interesting idea. Her analysis is provocative but also very useful. I write about her work in my book, The Secret Lives of Girls, which is about 6-12 year old girls, not teens, and agree with her that a teenager girl's as well as a pre-teen girl's view of love and romance make her especially vulnerable today.

I think the most interesting observation made by Sharon Thompson in Going All the Way is the class-based diversity among teenaged girls. At one extreme we find the poor girls whose prospects for the future are quite limited with regard to education, occupation, and income. These are the girls who are looking for love, for meaning in the form of a man who will care for them, father their children, and be a life-long soul mate. Given that their options are few, they are vulnerable, open to sexual usury, and often become single mothers when their lover moves on. Young women such as this are indirectly victimized by a social system that prompts prospective husbands and fathers to prove themselves faithless and unreliable because they can't find work which provides adequate compensation to support a family.

At the other extreme, we find the affluent, upper middle class girls. Their futures are replete with educational opportunity, and their occupational and income prospects are excellent. They don't need love and caring with the desperation of the poor girl. They know how to use sex and love to satisfy their needs and enhance their prospects. They are in charge of the intimacy in their lives. Are they users? Perhaps. But at least they won't be used, left on their own with a child to support.

Interestingly, the reader has to go half way through the book before someone experiences an orgasm. It comes in response to a lesbian encounter. Nothing wrong with this, but the author off-handedly,attributes this first instance of sexual release to the absence of fear of pregnancy. Surely there are other ways to accomplish this. In any case, it's an interesting book.

I've read a lot of book on human sexuality and how teens are affected by today's culture. I enjoyed this book. It touched on a lot of the same topics that other similar books do, but it also brings with it its own stories and information. I got a lot of great quotes from the book including "It can take years to discover or develop a sexual identity, and it's hard enough to survive the pressure toward conformity in such relatively straight forward matters as dress or speech in high school." (page 178) and "Popular narrators [the girls interviewed for the book] didn't report much sexual pleasure but that may have been just one sign, from the group of girls that understood the social riles better than any other, that though it may have become acceptable to acknowledge having sex, it still wasn't cool to talk about liking it." (page 76)

This book is the author's complex discussion after interviewing over 400 young women on the topics of sex, romance, and pregnancy. To get the girls to agree to share their intimate coming of age narratives, she made sure each woman knew they "could decide whether or not to let me include what she had said in the study and she could call me later and change her mind" - a beautifully feminine approach to respecting their confidences.

"I asked each narrator to think about whether she wanted to release what she'd said. One teenager changed her mind so often about what she would release that I eliminated her interview to stay on the safe side. Everyone else said yes, many observing they'd been moved to participate by the promise that I was going to pass their stories on for them. Even the most antifeminist felt obligated to give other girls the advantage of their experiences. They wished they had had that advantage themselves. Neither the literature of the past nor the contemporary novels and reports had given them a sense of what was going to happen to them, many said - how they would feel, what they would want, what would worry them, what the odds for or against their dreams coming true were - and they didn't think that was right." The next sentence in the book is the quote I used above to title this review.

"While almost all the teenage girls who narrated this book probably once dreamed of a true first love that would last forever (Walt Disney productions alone ensure the survival of this idea), by the time I met them they had very different views of what love is and what it means."

It's been said, "You are judged by the company you keep." Morgan Freeman has a new movie, titled with a twist on that cliche, "You are who you meet." Ms. Thompson might synthesize those two concepts. Her book might provide persuasive support, through her interpretation & conclusions of what might be better, more compassionate, & more intelligent ethical standards to use in evaluating women, for an idea like: "You are who you have the uncommon good fortune to meet, who you interpret more accurately, who you choose to emulate in part, and with whom you each bring the best out of each other."

Oprah is famous for saying, "Luck is preparation meeting opportunity." Some people consider themselves unlucky, thinking fate repeatedly avoids giving them opportunities to succeed or surpass their cycles of problems. Many people are unlucky because they haven't known how to recognize good opportunities as they've encountered them. The best opportunities we often miss are those that are already near us, but unrecognized. Unrecognized opportunities are often discovered through learning better social mining skills, interpreting women more accurately, giving them the benefit of the doubt, and bringing to fruition the jewels of human resources that already surround us.

In an overly simplifed (but I think accurate) sense, Ms. Thompson doesn't want women disabled by misidentifying "good and desirous" actions as "bad and immoral" actions, either in themselves or in the community of women that support them.

Good comparative reading, on the young (and older) women's issues discussed in this book, includes: "The Body Project" by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, "Appetites: Why Women Want" by Caroline Knapp (deceased), "Dilemmas of Desire" by Deborah L. Tolman, and "Promiscuities" by Naomi Wolf. If you are personally struggling with any issues discussed in these books, simple web searches can sometimes give you contact information for the authors. They may be too busy to respond, but they may also respond and be able to possibly point you toward books or resources to assist you further with any personal questions. For example, I had some comments of gratitude for Deborah L. Tolman and she was kind enough to write a kind, brief note back. Women who have spent years writing these types of books, often have active compassion.

Sharon Thompson genuinely cares about young women, and she does not want them disabling themselves by blindly following demographers who are "fixated on locating the 'cause' of" problems that are not necessarily problems. (p. 9) Some authors write so mistakes they made won't be made by others. Some write so that bad things that happened to people they care about don't happen to others. Ms. Thompson writes for both those reasons and for yet another reason: She writes so new understandings might enable new & beautiful environments for woman to prosper in.

"'There's an irreducible risk in loving,' as . . . Ellen Willis once wrote. Short of living without love, the best girls can do, their own accounts suggest, is to act with realism and courage; condition consent on desire and protection; continue interests and associations other than romance no matter how much in love or in need of love they are; and refuse to accept love as a reason to endanger themselves or foreclose the future." (p. 285)