The Wrong Trousers: Has a Bristol school got its sex education priorities on backwards?

Posted on May 7, 2013 by sextherapybristol

g_logo_smA Bristol secondary school recently sent a letter to parents of female students regarding school uniform. The letter explains that in the last few months “an increasing number of parents” have been purchasing “tight fitting leggings/trousers or jeans” for their daughters. It then asks for the support of parents in purchasing “what the school considers to be appropriate trousers” and included an illustration (see below), indicating which trouser profiles were right and which wrong . Evidently, at least two out of five trouser profiles are now deemed to be the wrong trousers.

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The school in question has a uniform for both boys and girls (black trousers and white sweatshirt tops), and it is no surprise that teenage pupils are continually trying to subvert the uniform rules and express their individuality with a bit of trendy difference. I remember aged fourteen tying my school tie into the thinnest or fattest of knots depending on what was cool and getting the odd reprimand for not adhering to expected standards of smartness. Whatever you ask to teenagers to wear, they will do their best to subvert it; when you are young, full of creative energy and want to either fit in or assert your independence, that is what you do.

But perhaps there is more to the letter than concerns about girls pushing the boundaries on school uniforms. The giveaway may be that the letter gives no reason why “tight fitting” clothes for teenage girls might be inappropriate. I cannot think that the school would be so coy if the reason was Health & Safety. So it is likely to be the “s” word – and not just “sex”, but more specifically the growing panic among adults about the so-called “sexualisation” of teenage girls. But you have to wonder how such letters and their injunctions help teenage girls or their parents when they don’t explain a school’s concerns about girls dressing in ways considered inappropriately sexual. Surely the education of teenagers should be about inculcating good ethics and enabling right choices. But instead we have a letter to parents that relies on inference. This hardly seems to be in line with the Government’s aim to “create an honest and open culture around sex and relationships” as recently outlined by the Department of Health. Yet given that the latest changes to the UK school science curriculum are to omit any reference to genitalia, puberty or sexual health, perhaps we should not be surprised. Rather than offer parents and their children the chance to question a school uniform decision that touches on adult anxieties about teenage sexuality, this school fails to offer an explanation that might open a debate. Perhaps the same thought process is behind current Government thinking about the place of sex and relationship education in the curriculum.

But a debate about so-called sexualisation is pressing. Not because it is a national problem, but because it isn’t. As Danielle Egan points out in her new book, Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of the Sexualisation of Girls, we are witnessing another spin of the age-old whirligig of adult anxiety about the sexual corruption of children, particularly teenage girls. This time round girls are at risk from culture (sexualized media and loose sexual morals), people (paedophiles and celebrities) and products (thongs, magazines and, in Bristol, tight fitting leggings and trousers). Allow a young woman to wear inappropriate leg wear to school, and the next stop is promiscuity and pole dancing. Thanks to the school’s fashion vigilance, Bristol’s young women may now have a better chance of avoiding these risks.

Yet all the evidence indicates that young people of both sexes are in less danger of being corrupted by their trousers, or any other part of their clothing, than ever before. Teenage pregnancies are down and falling1, girls aged between 16-19 are the most likely group to use a condom during first sex2, and of the approximately 40% of 16 year old girls engaging in some sort of sexual activity, 60% were doing it with someone with whom they are in a relationship3. Frankly, their sexual behaviour looks a lot more responsible than that of mature men and women in their 40s and 50s, who now have rapidly increasing rates of sexually transmitted infections. The relative maturity of teenage girls was demonstrated in an interview this week on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Two young women, aged 15 and 16, talked eloquently about their online promotion of feminism and equality though TwitterYouthFeministArmy (www.facebook.com/TwitterYouthFeministArmy). Rather than innocents at risk of corrupting sexualisation, these two young women were ready to engage critically with the complex influences that affect their sexual maturation and make personal and political choices about where they stand. As Danielle Egan’s book makes clear, when you start talking to young people about the sexual culture they live in, you get a different picture from what is often imagined by adults.

So if schools want to help young people make mature decisions about the complex issues of fashion, sex and self-expression, their resources might be better spent organising a school debate about the issue. If you are going to set a rule about school uniform based on adult concerns about sexualisation, you might as well ask the kids if they think those fears are justified. That at least might have some educational impact. But sending out letters that impose school uniform rules based on adult anxieties not borne out by evidence is only going to get one teenage response – Whatever! In this instance, it would be justified.

  1. FPA (2010)
  2. Mercer, C H et al. (2008). “Who has sex with whom? Characteristics of heterosexual partnerships in a national probability survey and implications for STI risk”, International Journal of Epidemiology 38.1, 1-9.
  3. Hatherall, B et al. (2005). The Choreography of Condom Use, University of Southampton, Centre for Sexual Health Research.
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Anything Goes. But Keep it In Your Head. Review of “Phone Whore” by Cameryn Moore

Posted on March 15, 2013 by sextherapybristol

g_logo_smFantasy is an essential component of human sexual desire. That much was recognised by the early pioneers of psychotherapy. However, for much of the twentieth century it was our sexual behaviour rather than our sexual imaginations that occupied the attention of researchers. By revealing that men and women’s sexual experience went way beyond the missionary position, Kinsey’s groundbreaking work shocked 1950s America. But it was not until Nancy Friday’s exploration of female fantasy in The Secret Garden that what we imagined in our heads started to get as much attention as what we got up to in bed. Cameryn Moore’s “Phone Whore”, a play about a woman who plays partner in hundreds of male phone sex fantasies, adds another dimension to our understanding of sexual fantasy. This honest drama should be coming to the Edinburgh Fringe this year, and if it does, British audiences will be confronted with some disconcerting realties about the sex that goes on in our heads and how we manage it.

I saw this play recently in Montreal, Canada. While you might think it a simple, realistic one-hander (forgive the pun) about a woman who gets men off on the phone, it’s actually a series of plays within a play, with each of Moore’s invisible clients requesting and receiving a different performance. However, we never hear the client’s side of the call. The audience are at once voyeurs, eavesdroppers and participants as we imagine the other unheard half of the conversation.  Phone Whore gives a twenty-first century twist to the standard joke of English Restoration drama that all whores are actors and many actors whores. But it also challenges our assumptions and fantasies about phone sex workers and why they do what they do. Moore’s stage self respects most of her clients and hates only a few, but what she discloses of her own fantasies makes her more complex than a phone tart with a heart.

What struck me as a sex therapist was what the play says about the fantasies of men, and the limits men may or may not set on them. Cameryn’s performance is based firmly on her real experience as a phone sex worker, so the fantasies she helps men play out are, if not a scientific sample, then at least a representation of what’s out there in male heads. Kinsey’s work in the 1950s shocked America by revealing that many men had at some point in their lives had a sexual experience with another man. If Moore’s callers are any sample, then many men who see themselves as straight also enjoy gay fantasies while going to some lengths to convince themselves they don’t. The inter-racial element of some of these fantasies may be a particularly American phenomenon (a remarkable number of Cameryn’s presumably white male clientele fantasise about black guys), but it’s likely that n the UK too many more men than would admit to it fantasise regularly about having some sort of sexual experience with one or more other men. Rather than call a gay phone line, which would perhaps force them to admit their wider preferences, they opt for Moore’s services.

But why are all her clients male? Since Nancy Friday’s work highlighted the variety and ubiquity of female sexual fantasy, research data has confirmed that women fantasise just as much as men do when it comes to sex. However, recent UK research suggests that men are more likely to admit their fantasies (Brett Kahr, Sex and the Psyche, 2007), while women feel greater shame about reporting them. We could draw from this the conclusion that men are more likely to try and act them out, so perhaps it is not surprising that it is men who go the extra step from having a sex fantasy in the mind to acting it out with a stranger on the phone. Perhaps there are phone sex lines for women that are equally busy as this one, but somehow I doubt it.

I share Moore’s view that it is far more honest and potentially more creative and rewarding to admit your fantasies and enjoy them for what they are. As her character says, desires are some of the most personal thoughts we can have, and if you can imagine and articulate them in a way that doesn’t endanger you or anyone else, then “you are way luckier than the other 95% of the people who are walking around with it in their heads and holding it in”.

But what if imagining something develops towards acting it out outside of a copper phone wire? Many rapists and child abusers, again almost exclusively men, began their criminal careers with fantasy that developed, through some form of behaviour, into a devastating assault on another person. The most challenging portion of Phone Whore for any audience is the telephone fantasy that involves parental incest with a child. On Moore’s own admission, this is the point where some in the audience may walk out and it is always a point of intense discussion in the Q&A that Moore has with all her audiences when the play is done. Given the tendency of the UK public to become hysterical on this issue, there will be some in this country who will question whether this is an appropriate topic for a stage play. I hope no one among the Edinburgh Fringe selectors draws that conclusion, for the strength of this play is that it encourages the discussion of taboo. Sexual fantasies can be among our greatest private pleasures, but, if unmanaged, they can undoubtedly damage the bodies and minds of innocent victims, often for life. Phone Whore makes clear that for Moore, as for all of us, there has to be a dividing line; anything goes as long as you keep it in your head. The problem is behaviour.

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Phone Sex and the Imagination

Posted on February 22, 2013 by sextherapybristol

g_logo_smMontreal: February 2013 – When I was a kid in 1960s London, my father insisted on installing our first house phone in the unheated downstairs hall. The choice of location was to prevent my mother getting so comfortable she ran up a bill.

The benefit for me was that I got to hear, through my half-open bedroom door, any late night phone call that the grownups made. As the late 60s sexual revolution got underway, I had a window on the goings-on among my extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles. I may have only heard half the story, but I soon got adept at imagining the rest. I don’t know whether this somehow influenced my choice of sex therapy as a career, but I do know that eavesdropping has generally got less exciting. These days, when even a trip on the bus requires you to listen to half of someone else’s mobile conversation, I am more likely to  lament silently the decline of public manners than to wonder if I might hear one side of a juicy personal story.

But the other day I heard one half of a phone call that took me back to that experience. Having taken a break in Montreal to see an old film maker friend, we went to see Phone Whore, a stage play by telephone sex worker Cameryn Moore that my friend is adapting for film. I would highly recommend this honest, funny, thought-provoking, and – if you are not a sex therapist who thinks he’s heard everything before – occasionally shocking play. But it was less the play than having coffee with Cameryn in her kitchen a few days later that took me back forty plus years.

Cameryn had explained that she was on call and might have to excuse herself. So there we were, my friend and I, sitting self-consciously at her kitchen table while Cameryn took one of her regulars through his sexual fantasy du jour next door. I was impressed, as in the theatre, by how quickly she moved into the desired character, set the scene with what he wanted her to be wearing and then proceeded to simulate having her bra and pants ripped off (I think it was thick paper she was tearing to get the sound effect). Then back she came and we resumed our coffee talk.

What struck me most about this experience was my intense curiosity about the guy on the other end of the line. Cameryn’s delivery was realistically sexy, but it wasn’t half as interesting as the imagined sounds and words of her client. Who was this guy? Was this his main kink or just some light relief on a Monday morning? Just as Cameryn’s callers project their visual fantasies onto her voice, I was imagining what excited pleas and requests had been the hooks for her creativity. It was less Cameryn than the unheard words of her client that got my attention. It’s a cliché of sex therapy that the brain is the most powerful human sex organ, but I was reminded once again of the power of our sexual imaginations in an otherwise everyday Canadian kitchen.

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