Swimming not Drowning: Reimagining Body and Desire
in Heterosexual Cultural Scripts for Teen Girls.
Summary of argument This is a sociological examination of how contemporary cultural scripts are based on
shared cultural ideals and social norms and are learned from and reinforced by our families,
friends, and mass media. Formed by sociocultural processes, these sexual cultural scripts
provide the framework and context for the study. are shaped by sociocultural processes. It
examines how these internalized sexual scripts shape understanding of sexual meanings and what
are and are not acceptable sexual behaviors and interactions (Gagnon 1990, Wiederman 2005).
As Wiederman (2005) notes, sexual scripts provide guidance for the individual and lend a sense
of predictability and decreases a sense of uncertainty.
American popular culture is further shown to be grounded in consumption and
materialism where a teen girl’s body becomes a marketable commodity. In effect, she becomes
an object of male desire. This has a profound impact on girl’s emerging spirituality and sense of
self.
Popular culture with its magazines, advertisements, television shows promotes distorted
and ultimately harmful images of female sexuality. Popular culture promotes heterosexuality
script that is an invisible, embedded and dichotomous scenario of how men and women are
supposed to treat each other involving their interactions. Wiederman states that male and
female sexes follow separate but overlapping (and often complementary) sexual scripts in our
Western culture. Sexual activity is supposed to be spontaneous, casual, and romantic. There is a
great emphasis on girl’s sexual attractiveness – preferable having light skin and thin and slender
body (McMinn 2004). Since she is young, girl’s body is commodified and turned into an idol or
trophy. According to heterosexuality script, male is the active pursuer of sex, whereas female is
the object and act as the “gate-keeper” of male sexual desire (Borysenko 1999, Daniluk 1998).
Boys are conditioned to work hard to outwit a girl’s defenses and to achieve sexual activity. This
script also encourages girls to view their sexuality as potentially dangerous to their body and
reputation (Wiederman 2005, Joshi 2011). Joshi indicates that girls’ experience of sexual desire
and pleasure is often considered deviant behavior because of the presence of risks and negative
consequences of sex such as transmitted diseases and possible pregnancy.
The metaphors of swimming and drowning hint at the urgency of this topic. Having
worked extensively with teen girls, the author has observed some are drowning in a turbulent sea
and need real-life coaching on how to more effectively “swim” through this stormy time of their
lives. The waters of our contemporary culture are marked by increasing levels of consumerism,
materialism, and often toxic messages concerning female sexuality and morality. If these teens
do not learn these crucial skills, they risk allowing their bodies to be objectified and their deepest
desires warped, even highjacked. Their deeper desire for the sense of her genuine self, for love,
belonging and connection ends up being distorted into a desire for romance, fame, glamour,
fame, superficial beauty and wealth. If teen girls are going to develop healthy and integrated
spirituality and sense of her identity, the concepts of body and desire have to be refashioned and
re-imagined in both Church tradition and American popular culture. The doctrines of Incarnation
and Trinity will help to re-affirm the essential goodness of a girl’s body and the deeper
understanding of Eros will reaffirm the deeper meaning of a girl’s desire.
Doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity as well as deeper understanding of eros can act as
forms of prophetic protest, a set opposition to contemporary postmodern consumer culture. The
forces of value drift, relational fragmentation, consumer-driven superficiality, apparent
individualism, conformist mimicry, and counterfeit existences strongly impact prevailing views
of self and sexuality in the postmodern culture in a negative way (Finnegan 2008, 357). When
these tendencies are contrasted with a countercultural Trinitarian dynamic movement of
mutuality, loving availability, reciprocal love, and compassionate self-giving, such a Trinitarian
spirituality can provide a liberating potential to generate a different way of awareness and
being/living in the world for teen girls.
Methodology This essay is a humanistic and theoretical study, and employs philosophic and feminist
hermeneutical research tools. While a philosophical methodology is used to give the research the
necessary overall intellectual frame, the primary methodological approach is a critical feminist
hermeneutic. These methodologies are further supported by contemporary scholarship in
theology, spirituality, and religious education.
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