"It's like doing homework": Academic achievement discourse in adolescent women's fellatio narratives

“It’s Like Doing Homework” April Burns, Valerie A. Futch & Deborah L. Tolman Sexuality Research and Social Policy ISSN 1868-9884 Sex Res Soc Policy DOI 10.1007/s13178-011-0062-1 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science + Business Media, LLC. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your work, please use the accepted author’s version for posting to your own website or your institution’s repository. You may further deposit the accepted author’s version on a funder’s repository at a funder’s request, provided it is not made publicly available until 12 months after publication. 1 23 Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy DOI 10.1007/s13178-011-0062-1 “It’s Like Doing Homework” Academic Achievement Discourse in Adolescent Girls’ Fellatio Narratives April Burns & Valerie A. Futch & Deborah L. Tolman # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Young women’s narratives of their sexual experiences occur amid conflicting cultural discourses of risk, abstinence, and moral panic. Yet young women, as social actors, find ways to make meaning of their experiences through narrative. In this study, we focused on adolescent girls’ (N=98, age 12–17 years) narratives of their first experiences with oral sex. We document our unexpected findings of persistent discourses of performance which echo newly emergent academic achievement discourses. Burns and Torre (Feminism & Psychology 15 (1):21–26, 2005) argue that an extreme and high stakes focus on individual academic achievement in schools impoverishes young minds through the “hollowing” of their sexualities. We present evidence that such influence also works in the opposite direction, with an achievement orientation invading girls’ discourses of sexuality, “crowding out” possible narratives of pleasure, choice, and mutuality with narratives of competence and skill usually associated with achievement and schooling. We conclude with policy implications for the future development of “positive” sexuality narratives. Keywords Sexuality narratives . Adolescent sexuality . Fellatio . Academic achievement Introduction Sexuality occupies a contradictory position in our society as simultaneously elusive and pervasive. What is acceptable in terms of sexuality is often so narrowly conceived that many become cut off from “condoned” access to information, knowledge, and behavior. Narratives of sexuality are thus always layered (Plummer 1995; Phillips 2000; Tolman 2002) — fraught not only with what is difficult to say, but also what is often not consciously known. Narratives, and narrative analyses, provide windows into such laden human experiences, offering another avenue for understanding complex phenomena, as has been increasingly the case in the study of female sexuality in the last part of the twentieth century (i.e., Allen and Roberto 2009; Bay-Cheng et al. 2009; Fine 1988; Hollway 1984a, b; Phillips 2000). Narrative approaches hold particular promise for understanding the experiences of adolescent girls, who have an even less “allowable” sexuality than do adult women, in that the socially available discourses for organizing their experiences are highly limited to ones of risk, control, and compulsory heterosexuality (Butler 1990; Rich 1980; Tolman 2006). The adolescent sexuality literature is still primarily focused on identifying patterns of sexual behavior rather than meanings per se, in order to assess and intervene in risks associated with engaging in A. Burns (*) Program in Social-Personality Psychology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA e-mail: aburns@gc.cuny.edu V A. Futch . Youth-Nex, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, 405 Emmet Street So., PO Box 400281, Charlottesville, V 22904-4281, USA A email: vfutch@virginia.edu D. L. Tolman Hunter College School of Social Work and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 129 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075, USA email: dtolman@hunter.cuny.edu Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy behaviors (physical and psychological). However, a new line of research on sexuality as a normative aspect of adolescent development has emerged in the last decade (Tolman and McClelland 2011). As society is more willing or resigned to acknowledge that teens do engage in a variety of sexual behaviors (Levy 2005; Tolman and McClelland 2011), a body of research on oral sex has also developed (Tolman and McClelland 2011; Hensel et al. 2008; Halpern-Felsher et al. 2005; McKay 2004). While rarely making it into a school curriculum, which retains a discourse of penile–vaginal intercourse as definitive of “sex,” researchers have begun studying a wider array of sexual behaviors, including oral sex and other non-coital practices (i.e., anal sex) (Tolman and McClelland 2011; Lescano et al. 2009; DiClemente et al. 2009). The anxieties associated with fallout from abstinence-only education included fears that teen girls were turning to oral sex as a way to avoid “sex,” and risks of STIs and HIV/AIDS associated with oral sex have also forced researchers’ hands from a public health perspective (Gillison 2011; Remez 2000). On the normative side, the ways in which oral sex factors into young women’s developing sexual repertoires have been identified. Fortenberry and colleagues have established that oral sex is an expected behavior among adolescent girls (Hensel et al. 2008). Adolescents’ perceptions of oral sex, especially whether they consider it sex, have been a target of recent studies (McKay 2004; Prinstein et al. 2003; Remez 2000). For instance, in a survey of early adolescents, Brady and Halpern-Felsher (2007) found that relative to vaginal sex, young people perceived oral sex to be less risky, more acceptable, less of a threat to their beliefs, and were more likely to believe that a greater number of their peers have had it than vaginal sex. This body of research justifies the present phenomenological study of girls’ giving oral sex to boys (fellatio), and what oral sex accomplishes for and means to girls. In this article, we are interested in the unique and mostly unheard narrative perspectives of girls’ fellatio experiences; rather than identifying patterns of risk behaviors, we were interested in discerning the larger social milieu in which girls’ talk about oral sex takes place. While we expected to hear the familiar narratives of coercion, shame, guilt, and ignorance — which were indeed audible in the narratives girls told (see Sorsoli et al. 2011), we were surprised to hear another discourse in these narratives. Many girls in this study narrated their sexual experiences through a discourse of academic achievement, which emphasizes punitive assessment, and frames the primary purpose of education in terms of the achievement of high grades and standardized test scores, rather than preparation for college, employment or civic participation. While the theme of sexual performance or achievement is not a new one in sexuality research or therapy (i.e., Masters and Johnson 1966), it has been only as a direct way to understand adult sexuality and dysfunction per se. In previous analyses addressing both desire and achievement, girls explained the necessity of strategically trading the expression of sexual desire and sexual behavior for the possibility of academic success (Burns and Torre 2004, 2005; Fine 1988; Tolman 2002). Since this discourse has not previously been identified or studied systematically specifically within girls’ narrations of their sexual experiences, it is the focus of this paper. Like McClelland and Fine (2008), we strive to “thread the sexual experiences and wants of young people to the ideologies, policies, power relations, institutions, families and school in which they live and develop” (p. 244). We use narrative methods to mark the path between school and educational policy and girls’ sexual lives as we understand their complexity in terms of experiences, desires, fears, expressions, consciousness, and embodiment. Schools continue to position girls discursively first and foremost as potential sexual victims through the policies of abstinence-only-until-marriage education (AOUM) (Fields 2008; Fields and Hirschman 2007). During the same decade and within the same institutional walls, in what many people think of as a parallel process, schools have increasingly categorized and positioned young people by test scores as a direct result of the 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation.1 Y oung people’s “numbers” are understood to reflect their personal worth and value, as well as the worth/value of their family, school, community, and nation within an ostensibly value-neutral hierarchy of merit (Burns 2004). Fine and McClelland (2006) have traced and underscored the overlapping and mutually supportive relationship between the discourses that these two policies, AOUM & NCLB, have wrought, particularly in the common deployment of scare tactics foregrounding the consequences of failure, the relentless individualizing of blame, and the disproportionate distribution of support and punishments by race/ethnicity, gender, and social class. In this paper, we argue that the (ostensibly nonsexual) discourse of academic achievement emanating from NCLB policies and practices, has “crossed over” into the (ostensibly nonacademic) discourses of female sexuality, shaping young women’s developing identities, meaning-making, and psychosocial development of sexuality. This analysis provides evidence of how the most extensive socializing institution that boys and girls encounter beyond the family, the State-sponsored school system, is constitutive of distinct dimensions of the self beyond school 1 Initially legislated for 5 years and subsequently extended, the NCLB act is expected to be reauthorized with modifications by the Obama administration. For text of the act, see: http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/ landing.jhtml For a summary of NCLB, see: http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/ no-child-left-behind/. Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy achievement. We present narrative data illustrating the ways in which girls take up and apply this achievement discourse to describe and make meaning of their oral sexual experiences. In order to contextualize this unexpected finding and subsequent analysis of girls’ fellatio narratives, we begin with a brief review of academic achievement discourse and its intensified power within secondary education around its defining characteristics and relevance to youth sexuality, girls and social policy. We then explain our approach to narrative research on sexuality, the specific methods we used with this study sample, and how we found academic achievement discourse “operating” in these girls’ fellatio narratives. We conclude with a reflection of the importance of narrative research in contributing to a complex, unexpected and nuanced phenomenology of this aspect of girls’ sexuality and both formal and informal policy implications for education and the support of healthy adolescent sexuality development. The Academic Achievement Discourse Schools, as fundamental sites of social reproduction and socialization (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977/1990), make the self and world intelligible for the young people who inhabit them. Students are not blank slates coming in, but they leave fluent in the language and maintenance of hierarchy, and conditioned to locate themselves and others within them. Educational researchers and social scientists present compelling evidence detailing the pervasiveness of the achievement discourse on cultural, symbolic and discursive levels. A link between adolescent sexuality and achievement discourse is not entirely new; in her comparative research with Danish and American adolescents, Susan Rose found that “Danish teens tended to talk about sex in terms of mutual pleasure and responsibility whereas the American teens tended to speak in terms of performance and achievement (as in ‘feeling inadequate if they didn’t achieve orgasm’)” (Rose 2005, p. 1219). However, the ways that educational contexts may provide access to discourse of academic achievement (vs. sexual pleasure) for negotiating sexuality is a unique perspective. Going back a century, Armstrong (2006) outlines the historical events representing, he argues, an “increasing engagement by U.S. educators in academic achievement discourse” (p. 16), defined as “…the totality of speech acts and written communications that view the purpose of education primarily as supporting, encouraging, and facilitating a student’s ability to obtain high grades and standardized test scores in school courses” (p. 10). Armstrong lays out specific embedded assumptions of this achievement discourse, including the view that academic content and skills are the most important things to be learned and that achievement is best measured by grades and standardized tests (pp. 9–16). Twenty years ago, Airasian (1988) anticipated an intensification of the symbolic importance, or ideological value, of high-stakes testing ushered in by NCLB, arguing that such tests “are socially valid, highly respected symbols of a broad range of administrative, academic, and moral virtues in our society. When tests have the added features of central control and sanctions for poor performance, we can expect that their symbolic importance will be heightened” (p. 311). In a recent sociological study, Booher-Jennings (2008) found this achievement discourse seeping into young people’s psychosocial development and acquisition of societal values beyond classroom lesson plans. She notes that the achievement ideology — operationalized as the notion of meritocracy and instantiated in discourse of high stakes testing — is a core component of the “hidden curriculum” of schools. She reminds us that “…this curriculum does not exist a priori. It is forged in the dayto-day interactions between students, their teachers, and their peers” (p. 150) and, we are arguing, reenacted and reinterpreted outside of schools as well. Students apply the achievement ideology interpersonally, wherein “the social categories of ‘passers’ and ‘failers’ made available through high-stakes tests constituted new identities, and shaped and reconstructed students’ own relationships” (p. 159). She traced the ways that the identification/identity of achiever or passer is disproportionately made available to, and increasingly associated with girls: “In teachers discourse, girls were constructed as already working hard. Teachers worried about the girls’ self-esteem and, as a result, made special efforts to tell them ‘how smart they were.’ In short, the achievement ideology was modified and fit the gender of the student. While boys were coached to work harder in order to pass the test, girls were advised to do their best as an end in itself” (BooherJennings 2008, 152). Moreover, Booher-Jennings presents evidence suggesting the affective power of this achievement discourse on girls: “Girls internalized their teachers’ criterion of ‘doing one’s best’ and applied this criterion to their own behavior, other girls’ behavior […] the girls described the adoption of affective behaviors that demonstrated their commitment to their teachers’ gender-specific achievement ideology” (p. 154). Taking into account the recent intensification, and gendered nature of the achievement discourse informing young people’s understanding of themselves and their experiences, we now highlight the role this achievement discourse plays in organizing some girls’ fellatio narratives. We want to make clear that while we use narrative analysis to document an aspect of social reproduction as it relates to girls’ intimate and sexual lives, we are not suggesting there is a causal relationship between the rise of an achievement Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy discourse within our culture and an associated shift in girls’ sexuality or sexual practices. Rather, we argue that the larger cultural shift in sociocultural values epitomized by the high stakes testing phenomena has a significant impact on the available discursive and ideological resources that girls have access to, which in turn shapes their lives and identities, including their sexuality. This data presents a cautionary warning of what may happen when an abundantly present discourse (one of academic achievement) fills the discursive gap in schools for young women to positively discuss, understand and negotiate their sexuality. discourses of young women’s sexuality. The cumulative effect of these three aspects brought to light the presence of an achievement discourse that we explore here. A Phenomenological Study of Adolescent Girls’ Fellatio Experience Data were collected as part of a phenomenological study of heterosexual oral intercourse performed by early and middle adolescent girls of diverse ethnic backgrounds (Sorsoli et al. 2011; Tolman et al. 2009). A total of 476 young women at local health clinics in the San Francisco Bay area completed an initial survey determining their eligibility for a purposive sample of girls with any oral sex experience — that they had performed fellatio at least one time. Young women were asked in the waiting rooms if they would be interested in participating in a study of girls’ sexuality and if so, to fill out a short questionnaire on a laptop computer that included their sexual experience and willingness to be interviewed. Of these young women, 274 indicated they had engaged in performing oral sex, and 98 of those who agreed to be contacted participated in followup semistructured interviews lasting approximately 1 hour in a private room at several clinic sites. The interviews were taped, transcribed and verified prior to analysis. Almost all of the 98 interviewees also reported penile–vaginal intercourse, and a large majority had also received oral sex at least once.2 Their mean age was 16.2 years (SD=0.91). The sample was fairly evenly distributed by race: with about a quarter identifying as African-American/Black, Asian/ Pacific Islander/Asian-American, Latina/Hispanic, and White. Socioeconomically, just over half had received any form of public assistance. In the context of individual interviews with a trained female interviewer, each participant was asked a wide range of questions about their backgrounds, current lives, sexual and relationship biographies. Beyond investigative method, McClelland and Fine (2008) also frame the use of “counterintuitive” and/or “obvious” questions as potential methodological release points — unexpected moments in which desire or other taboo or marginalized thoughts and feelings might “escape” in the context of a more mainstream or expected recollection or description of experience (p. 234). Thus, young women were also asked a set of unexpected or “interruptive” questions (i.e., “Can you tell me about a time when you performed fellatio with a boyfriend?,” “How did you know you wanted to engage in oral sex?”), which invited them to consider their own choices, pleasure, and desire in a nonjudgmental social 2 Not all interviewees necessarily completed both surveys. For those who completed both surveys (N=83), 94% (N=78) had had sexual intercourse and 90% (N=75) had received oral sex. Method Using Narrative Methods Drawing from Audre Lorde’s (1984) image of erotic release, McClelland and Fine (2008) “…reflect on methods that function as release points. We imagine release as ways of making potential openings in the ‘assumed’ and the ‘common sense’ — even that of feminist research” (p. 242). We similarly find narrative methods to be such a release point in the investigation of girls’ sexuality development, where offering adolescents the opportunity to tell their story in a minimally directed and interpersonal context affords us as researchers and practitioners the opportunity to be challenged, inspired and ultimately enlightened by young people who tell us or narrate things we never thought to ask about — in this case, performance anxieties. The use of qualitative, as opposed to survey methods in adolescent sexuality research is a relatively recent phenomenon (Tolman 1994; Pascoe 2007; Tolman et al. 2005). The methods that constitute narrative research are uniquely adept at unpacking how social contexts shape young people’s experiences, thoughts, feelings and decisions (Dimitriadis 2008; Hammack 2008). The value of employing narrative methods in understanding lives has been established (Lieblich et al. 1998; Tolman and Brydon-Miller 2001; Chase 2005; Riessman 2008), and the value of using narrative methods specifically to understand the sexual experiences of young adolescent women is known to be at least threefold: (1) qualitative interviewing enables the interviewee, through story-telling, to articulate the nuances of intimate situations and enables the interviewer to ask about context, embodied feelings, and other dimensions of the experience that are not customarily included in such narratives (Tolman 2002); (2) narrative methods allow for a systematic way of understanding the person-in-context (Hammack 2008); and (3) narrative analysis allows for the emergence of unexpected and/or unsolicited ways of being or understanding the self and relationships that can further our understanding of dominant, multiple and countervailing Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy environment, with an “invitation” to violate norms of what is appropriate to know and speak in describing their sexual experiences and telling their sexual stories (Kinsey et al. 1948; Tolman 2002). From a perspective of narrative as a co-construction (Riessman and Quinney 2005), follow-up questions to their stories included, “What did you like about oral sex?” and “What did you feel in your body?” (see Tolman 2002). The semistructured clinical interviewing method employed here relies on psychodynamic processes of listening, responding, and “listening under” the surface of what participants say to encourage multiple narrative dimensions and threads that constitute identity, relationships, cultural norms and practices in order to produce appropriate narratives for a specific form of narrative analysis (Brown and Gilligan 1990; Brown et al. 1989; Gilligan et al. 1991). Data Analysis: Hearing an Achievement Discourse In this discussion of our analytic method, we explain how we originally oriented ourselves to the texts, our process of listening, and the eventual “a-ha” moment of insight so characteristic of narrative inquiry in which we heard the unexpected discourse of academic achievement. We offer this explanation to provide one possible roadmap for the reader who may be immersed in their own data. Our analysis was framed by two standard narrative analytic techniques: thematic analysis (Chase 2005) and the Listening Guide (LG), which we explain briefly below (Brown 1991; Brown et al. 1989; Sorsoli and Tolman 2008; Way 1995). For efficiency in sifting through the large amount of data, we used the qualitative data analytic application NVIVO8 which enabled us to quickly identify themes across the transcripts (Lewins and Silver 2007) and, as our listening progressed, to codify academic achievement discourse writ large and in its particular dimensions in the LG analysis. We used these approaches first to listen for what themes emerged in how the young women were talking specifically about their oral sex experiences, and secondly to identify and interrogate how one of the themes that signified a larger discourse, an academic achievement discourse, appeared in fellatio narratives. Given that oral sex narratives are so rarely engaged, we initially used an emic or organic approach to conduct the thematic analysis of girls’ oral sex narratives — an approach that would allow for a fair amount of open exploration — in order to identify both themes and relevant discourses utilized by girls in the telling of their stories. Several themes, indicative of larger dominant discourses became evident in this analysis, including coercion, gender and power, and femininity, among others. It was also in this phase of the analysis that we began to notice the academic achievement discourse. In our subsequent “listening,” we identified a subset of narratives that contained any references that were potentially part of this academic achievement discourse in order to characterize and follow a “voice” of academic achievement. In the LG method, researchers listen separately for multiple but distinct narrative voices, which is how discourse is operationalized in conducting this specific discursive analysis. The use of “voice” has its own history within the development of this method, but in essence it reflects a person-based instantiation of a larger social discourse and is the convention for the psychological and individualgrounded LG method (Brown and Gilligan 1990). All LG analysts listen for a “voice of the self” and then salient topicspecific voices — for example, voices of care and justice or voices of desire and the body — in order to understand how these voices exist in relation to one another and how larger social forces are discursively constituting individual experiences. As we heard frequent references to academic nomenclature — concepts and practices such as “doing homework,” “not knowing what to do,” “doing it [oral sex] wrong” — we began to populate, recognize, and then follow an academic achievement voice in these narratives. Initially surprised by this discourse, we remembered Harré et al.’s (2009) argument that “narratological analysis reveals the normative constraints on the unfolding of a storyline, constraints which are expressible in the alternative language of locally valid patterns of rights and duties.” In the cyclical manner typical of most narrative research, we moved dialectically between the literature and the data. To expand our understanding of this academic achievement voice, we turned to literature (presented above) on the achievement discourse to better understand sociocultural factors contributing to the relevance of this discourse for girls’ experiences with oral sex. Our use of the LG was the methodological window into how we came to see the academic achievement discourse as one of these “alternative language[s]” that these young women actively employ. Results Academic Achievement Echoed in Oral Sex Narratives Of the 98 interviewees, we identified 44 who told narratives with academic achievement discourse(s); these 44 interviews constitute the body of data in the present analysis. Having identified a discourse of academic achievement in our initial thematic analysis, we now present the narratives from a variety of adolescent women, reflecting on their oral sex experiences with long- and short-term boyfriends, casual acquaintances and “friends with benefits,” good and bad experiences, idealized and “room for improvement” stories. We encourage readers to “listen in stereo,” so to speak, for both the ways that girls strategically “use” an Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy achievement discourse and the ways in which they are also discursively backed into corners of a discourse that can be characterized by a focus on ends/outcomes over process/ experience, that is comparative rather than reflective, that naturalizes punitive assessment, and which ascribes responsibility to the “performing” individual only. Sexual Practices Vis-a-Vis School Practices Some participants, like Julia (below), made surprisingly explicit connections between their school practices and their sexual behaviors. In the following excerpt, Julia (16, Latina) compares her first oral sex experience to “doing homework” and “taking tests”: Julia: […] we were outside my house in his car, and like I was saying goodbye to [my boy friend], he’s like, and I’m like, and he’s like, “just like kiss it” or something “please” and I was like, and I knew he was like joking cause like he didn’t even have his like pants off, and then I was like, I dunno, I was actually kinda thinking about it cause I was like maybe I’ll just like, I like, so my friends said, if you do it, just get through with it, like, it’ll be over and then whatever. Then you’re done. Not whatever, like, then you’ve gotten over like the first hump, like when you’re doing homework, you know, just do it. Um, like, you’ll get over like the first hump, and then you’re just like done, then you can do, you can finish it. So like, that’s kinda how I thought about a lot of things, like taking tests. I’m like, just do it, just do it, just keep going, just like don’t like hold back, or like, when I’m like about to like jump off a cliff into the water. Like, I’m just like, just jump, just go and it’ll be done. So that’s kinda how I thought about it. I was like, “Okay, well, if I just do this now, I’ll be okay with it later” which I guess I am now[…] Julia seems to be having a difficult time occupying the “I” position, as she flips back and forth between who initiated this oral sex experience, and then locates the responsibility for initiation to her peers’ urgings. She then frames the act in explicitly academic performance terms. Oral sex is compared to homework (a daily chore) and test-taking, characteristics of the current educational experience of young people today. There is a certain internal resistance, difficulty or fear/anxiety associated with the act, indicated by her self-urging to “just do it,” and her likening it to jumping off of a cliff — a sacrificial, dangerous yet also exciting event, but also one with perceived high stakes attached. Julia narrates how she has extended her test-taking and homework strategies to manage her resistance and pushes herself to “just jump and it’ll be done” to overcome the difficulty and challenge of the task, just as she does in the classroom. Her emphasis on being done, or finishing, is a privileging of product/outcome over process, another characteristic of an academic achievement discourse (Armstrong 2006). For Julia, the behavior comes first, and the psychological reckoning comes later (“if I just do this now, I’ll be okay with it later”). Competence allows her to discursively skirt traditional morality issues around sexual excess, toward a more modern version of morality as effort and success. Oral Sex as a Context for Adolescent Girls’ Anxiety: High Stakes Nature of the Act Girls’ performance concerns and anxieties emerged in discussions of their romantic and sexual relationships. When girls were asked about the motivation of other girls for engaging in oral sex, we heard the more familiar femininity discourses around reputation and social propriety. However, when asked about their actual personal oral sex experiences, many narrated performance-based fears. Julia’s references to testing hint at anxiety not unlike test anxieties that undergird the perceived high stakes of girls’ sexual performance. McClelland and Fine (2008) argue that “[d]esire, for young women, materializes into risk the moment it is enacted … once young women’s desires are performed or named, they sour potentially into risk and danger” (p. 92). Implicit in the narratives of these young women is a desire to engage in oral sex, from a fleeting curiosity to an explicit readiness. But we found that the moment the possibility of their own desire was brought into the room (even in veiled utterances), it was quickly masked or displaced by a fear or risk of not doing it correctly. Rather than the usual consequences narrated by adolescent girls — risk of STIs, pregnancy, rape, or getting a bad reputation — the stakes we heard sounded like performance risks, the parlance of academic achievement discourse. A pattern of fear that girls expressed around oral sex was related to “not knowing what to do,” and even more worrisome to them, as potentially being deemed unskilled or “bad” at it: Interviewer: What was that like? Can you tell me your first time doing that [oral sex]? Diamond (17, Latina): [laughs] Oral sex, I was scared of oral sex. I was so scared for some reason I’m like “what if I’m not gonna do it right?” you know I was scared like that’s the main thing that goes through girls’ heads before they do it like what if I don’t do it right, you know? Diamond expresses strong fears about engaging in oral sex (saying she is “scared” three times) which she directly relates to performance anxieties (she refers twice to worries about not doing it right). She also generalizes from her own Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy fears about her performance, in relation to “not [gonna] do [ing] it right” to the experiences of all girls, contextualizing and framing her own thoughts as what “everyone” thinks and worries about, part of the “normal” course of what happens to girls when they are in this situation, underscored by her repeated reference to common knowledge, “you know” (Brown 1991; Tolman 1994, 2002). Jamie Bright (below) also worries about her performance: Jamie Bright (17, African-American): Y eah, it was like, it was like I wanted to but I’m nervous and scared cause I don’t want to do it wrong so– Interviewer: Uh-huh and what is it about doing it wrong that’s so important? Jamie Bright: I don’t know just like cause I knew he’d, cause I was still a virgin at the time and he wasn’t so I didn’t want to like — I didn’t want it to be like, “Oh I’m not doing it right and I don’t want it to not be right,”/Uhhuh/That would be bad — that would just be bad. [chuckles] Both Diamond and Jamie describe their fears around not doing it “right” or doing it “wrong,” indicating a perceived standard of performing fellatio against which they believe they will be evaluated. Being “still a virgin,” a sign of a lack of knowledge about sex in relation to her partner, makes Jamie feel compared to other (potentially more sexually sophisticated) girls and at risk for being judged inadequate. What could easily get lost or drowned out is Jamie’s indication that she wanted to engage in oral sex. Jamie’s desire to have oral sex is quietly clouded over by her anxiety regarding the stakes of a bad performance, seemingly to foreclose the potential for an embodied experience of pleasure. In the excerpt below, Julia goes on to similarly describe a fear of evaluation: Interviewer: Were you afraid? Julia: [pause] Um, a little bit because like I didn’t want to be like, a horr-, like horrible at giving head or something. I don’t know how, like you could be good or bad, I don’t know the difference. Like, so I was like, what if I’m bad at it? Like I don’t want him to think because I’m like a loser like person or something. So. And I kind of did, like, that was something that also crossed my mind. Interviewer: And how did you feel about that after? Julia: Well, he said I was really good, but I wasn’t doing anything like interesting, so I don’t know how that’s like possible, so. I was just like, kinda made me feel better but then I was like he might just be saying that, but I don’t know, cause he’s never gotten head either so, he has nothing to compare it to. In the last two excerpts, social comparisons figure prominently as both Jamie and Julia highlight their fears of male evaluation in relation to others. For Julia, identity and personhood are at stake. She equates being judged “bad” at oral sex as equivalent to being a “loser person.” Julia’s sense of self then is intimately tied to her boyfriend’s assessment of her and her performance, despite the fact that her boyfriend’s evaluation is not anchored anywhere and does not reflect his own experiential knowledge and thus is not a reliable assessment for her. Positioning herself within an achievement discourse leaves little room for self-evaluation of her experience, or even a relational consensus. This example of an “other” orientation echoes the top–down mandates and benchmarks of an achievement discourse that attaches high stakes to performance outcomes that are not necessarily indicative of any meaningful measure or standard but organizes individuals within zero-sum models of success. As Remez (2000) suggests, there is something about the difference between oral sex being something girls “do to” boys and penile–vaginal intercourse as something boys “do to” adolescent girls. Several girls said that they knew how to “do nothing” during penile–vaginal intercourse, which was what made oral sex more anxiety provoking — the idea that there is one right way to do it and that their active performance will be evaluated. The high stakes that girls intimately associate with the act of oral sex seem qualitatively different from those attached to penile–vaginal intercourse for girls: Interviewer: Um, going back to this, uh, experience of giving head, I’m wondering if drugs or alcohol were involved that night?//Alcohol//Did that make, any difference in how you made your decision? Fox: I think that’s why I was so impulsive. [Oh.] Because I was like, ‘yea’ and then I had to think about it […] And then I realized that like, ‘well, I’m drunk, so if I’m bad, I can blame it on the alcohol, [*laughs*] you know, like. It was something to blame it on. It did not occur to Fox to “blame” her engaging in oral sex on intoxication as a way to strategically protect a reputation potentially damaged by a charge of promiscuity (see Tolman 2002); rather, it was a way out of the consequences of a potentially poor sexual performance, a discernable distinction between promiscuity fears and performance based ones. Relationship maintenance is an “old’ theme for girls, now wrapped in a new set of expectations; the achievement of a romantic relationship thus becomes contingent upon one’s fellatio (and other sexual) performance skills, not on access alone. However, Fox’s strategic deliberation was not about her relationship, but arguably about her ability to resuscitate a damaged identity of success. Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy Standardizing Oral Sex Our data suggest that among these young women there is an understood, standard and proper way of performing oral sex: you’re “supposed” to do lots of things in a specific way and order: Diamond: Actually I mean, there’s a way that you gotta do it, you can’t just, you gotta do something with your mouth and shit that’s not just goin’ down on a guy. I mean girls think it’s just goin’ down on a guy. It’s not, it’s way more than that, you know I mean it’s just actually things you have to do, I mean you can’t just [makes noise]. What is that goin’ to do? That’s not goin’ to do nothin’ to nobody//Uhhuh//so I mean there’s just a certain pace and everything you got to go. That’s why I had to practice. Diamond emphatically and instructively tells us about the important parameters of the correct way to engage in oral sex: you have to do something presumably active with your mouth, follow a specific pace, and practice to get it right. Some girls perceived the existence of a fellatio standard but did not feel that the content of this standard was available to them for their first experience. Some went to friends in a panic for “tips” and advice, others consulted pornography or male friends for guidance:Rachel (17, African-American): Well, because when I first did it [oral sex] I didn’t know what I was doing, so you know, I didn’t know how or anything. Just hit that spot. Usually I know how to just do nothing. Like all I knew was, all I knew was what I seen on the pornos, usually was the bob head, back and forth. That was all I knew, so that’s all I did. I know, I didn’t know there was tricks to it ‘til somebody told me. You can be like oh, man, you’re supposed to use your tongue, supposed to do this, supposed to—and like oh, really, is that right? Like you know. I didn’t know all that came with that. I thought it was just 1-2-3, as simple as 1-2-3. […] From Rachel, we hear that oral sex is not simple and requires instruction or access to information. However, the “tricks” Rachel reports learning would seem to be for the sexual benefit of her partner (using one’s tongue) rather than tips facilitating her own pleasure, while she gains material for constructing an identity of competence. Direct Instruction: Teaching to the (Oral Sex) Test Thus far, our participants have narrated stories of oral sex as a learned, acquired skill that is transferable from partner to partner and that is something on which women/girls can and are likely to be evaluated. Rather than describing an act engaged in for pleasure or an act that has potentially dire consequences (the spread of STIs, for example), oral sex is often framed in terms of students (women/girls) and teachers (men/boys). We observed a narrow focus on a discrete subset of skills (touch here, lick this, go this speed) important for an individual to acquire rather than the larger relational skills that would support healthy relational experiences such as negotiation, communication, sexual self-exploration, intimacy, health consciousness, empowerment/entitlement, assertiveness, right to sexual and other satisfaction, and desire. Our frame of academic achievement discourse helped us hear this narrowing and juxtapose it to what was absent — a “positive” discourse of sexuality in relationship. In a way that mimics the narrowing of general education curricula to privilege certain subjects (math and reading) over more critical and integrated modes of thinking and assessing the world, we see a similar phenomenon in stories of oral sex. Both Charlotte Smith (17, White) and Candace Shriver (16, White), below, narrate this aspect of “direct instruction”: Charlotte Smith: Uhm…well we’re in his room and then we’re like fooling around on his bed and then he said he’d teach me how to do that. […] and then he’s like “see, you just do this” it’s really easy! (laughs) I was like, okay. Then I like, tried to do it and then I did it. Yeah. Candace Shriver: (describing first oral sex) It wasn’t intimate at all. Interviewer: Oh yeah, it was just really — how — what was it like if it wasn’t intimate? Candace Shriver: It was more of um, like an instructional like video, [both laugh] I swear. Another aspect of direct instruction (step-by-step how-to) is the notion of “practice makes perfect.” Being good at performing oral sex becomes a task to be mastered and a sense of accomplishment is achieved when one knows she can satisfy her partner; this mastery is most readily achieved by practicing with her partner. As Diamond explains: Diamond: […] I really didn’t enjoy doin’ it [fellatio] with no other guys cause I couldn’t figure out how to do it with nobody else you know. Once I got with him now it’s like I can do it hella good and I’m on it you know- and it don’t bother me to do it. I’m not embarrassed to do it or nothin’ no more. I always do it now so I’ll be like whatever. Interviewer: Well how did you suddenly learn? Like what was the difference? Diamond: He made me—I was practicin’ with him all the time/Ahh I see/so he was like you know I got to practice with him and stuff but before him you know I really just wouldn’t do it. I’d just be like [makes noise] and be done like I’m not doin’ that shit. You know, but now, you know. Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy Diamond begins from a submissive position (she was “made” by her boyfriend to practice) but quickly shifts to an active voice (“I’d just be like [makes noise]”). His desire begins the narrative but, through practice and subsequent accomplishment, Diamond now describes herself as “hella good. I’m on it, you know, and it don’t bother me to do it.” Her previous incompetence with other partners vanishes and is replaced with a competent and confident Diamond. However, her desire is notably absent and, if present at all, is framed only in a desire for competence rather than intimacy or pleasure. Achieving Competence or Disembodiment: Consequences of Performance Discourse Based on these findings of the pervasiveness of an academic achievement discourse in the narratives of our participants, we returned to the data with a more focused lens: What are the developmental consequences of the achievement discursive frame? We have preliminarily identified two potential outcomes associated with an emphasis on performance within young women’s oral sex experiences: (1) oral sex begins as and remains a dramatically disembodied experience that fails to fully engage their sexuality; and (2) oral sex yields an opportunity to gain a sense of accomplishment and a way to experience confidence as a sexually competent person, which may be one of the few acceptable sexual identities for young women. We found that performance anxiety explicitly detracts from an embodied experience for many girls, who say that they were too preoccupied with anxieties about their oral sex performance to feel anything other than worry or fear. This preoccupation with performance carries them through the task and its relational consequences, such that even retrospectively their embodied experience is not considered relevant. Maria (16, White) and Julia, below, narrate this preoccupation: Interviewer: Um, how did you feel like in your body? What were your feelings? Maria Shriver: Um, am I doing this — like I was just kind of more thinking about it like my body — I didn’t really care, it was like whatever/Yeah/my neck kinda hurt but you know that’s to be expected,/ Uhhuh/so I was just kind of like — I was afraid of like trying to figure out — you know ‘cause my friends have given me tips on you know what to do, so I was trying to remember the tips and trying to do it right, trying not bite it [laughs]. Interviewer: It’s very cognitive. Maria Shriver: And I’m trying to like think about it and note like — figure out what I was doing/Uhhuh/ and like better techniques that I’ve heard./Yeah/ There’s more a lot of like thinking than it was in actually just doing it. It was like, am I doing this right? Can I do this any better?/Uhhuh/What’s going on? Blah, blah, blah. SoInterviewer: Okay. Um, how did you feel while you were doing it? Julia: I tried not to think, or breathe, because I didn’t know if it would like smell bad too. Like, I was like, “Okay, just up down, okay go” and I tried not to bite it, cause I knew that would be a bad idea [*laughs*]. So, like, I was like, “Okay, don’t let your teeth touch it.” Like, I was just thinking a lot of what to do, like, or what not to do Interviewer: So it sounds like you had a lot on your mind. Julia: Yeah. So like, I was like, that’s why I was like, “Are you sure it was good?” Interviewer: How about your body? Did you feel anything? […] Julia: Well, I guess cause I was like nervous, I was, I might have been shaking but I’m not really sure. Then, I like might have been just holding on, or just like breathing, kinda like breathe through it and stuff. The extent of the embodied experience for Maria and Julia is a slight concern over an aching neck and worry about teeth placement and difficulty breathing and a physical manifestation of fear or effort, shaking. Any sense of excitement felt below the neck is not even considered when asked what they felt while performing oral sex. Fellatio is not a physically embodied experience but a cerebral one — sometimes emotionally satisfying but rarely physically satisfying or a source of pleasure. While Burns and Torre (2004) argued that, “[t]he structuring of anxious achievement — via high-stakes investment in success; hyper-responsibilization for self, family, and community; and self-blame — results in a reordering of the erotic, away from an erotics of the body as a site of pleasure and the self as sexually desiring, to an erotics of achievement and material success” (p. 135), the current data represent the sexual side of this process. While specific “achievement” tactics such as practice can result in mental distraction and a disembodied desexualized experience, it can also lead to feelings of competence, empowerment, and accomplishment. Interviewer: Okay this — that second time [engaging in oral sex] then, thinking about that second time, can you say a little bit about what that felt to you like in your body […] what were you thinking … what was your experience like […]? Adia (16, Latina): Well he didn’t complain so I kind of felt relieved/Uhhuh/I was kind of proud of myself I Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy guess. [both laugh] I don’t know how that’s something to be proud of but I was proud/A low bar/yeah I was proud and I was like, “Y es!”/Uhhuh/“I did it right this time,”/Uhhuh/soWhile a sense of accomplishment and pride that is disembodied physically connotes pleasure for the psychological self, the physical sexual satisfaction was his alone. Hers was pleasure in a job done well, and correctly. When asked about her own embodied experience Adia jumps straight to the evaluation of her performance — avoiding discussing the actual act — and then locates it in his body and his words, “he didn’t complain.” This is one example of the numerous shifts from embodiment to evaluation that we heard in so many of the narratives. The salient and discussable aspects of the experience were not embodied feelings and sensations, but her reaction to her male partner’s evaluation of the experience. We suggest that this disembodied sense of sexual competence is reflective of a larger cultural emphasis on outcomes and performance, characterized by the academic achievement discourse structuring the lives of youth. We stress, however, that these parallel processes of disembodiment and accomplishment are not mutually exclusive or necessarily constitutive of one another. Discussion Sex and social science researchers have explicated the deleterious connection between current educational policy and female adolescent sexuality (Bay-Cheng 2005; Burns and Torre 2004, 2005; Fields 2008; Fine and McClelland 2006; McRobbie 2009), detailing the numerous ways that teen women’s sexuality and intellectual vibrancy are held captive by schools’ over reliance on abstinence only sex education and institutional fears attached to adolescent sex. Adding another layer of what McClelland and Fine (2008) have described as discursive “cellophane” that wraps young women’s sexuality into a literal and figurative bind, schools are further bound by the policy mandates of NCLB. There is ample empirical support for the negative individual and institutional outcomes associated with the rise of standardized testing policy and practice (Amrein and Berliner 2002), characterized as “collateral damage” by educational psychologist, R. Murray Thomas (2005). An emphasis on testing and thus test-prep displaces space for sex education in the classroom setting, yet sexuality remains a critical aspect of human development during the adolescent years that are largely spent in school. Students are expected to navigate it without explicit support, but they do have a deep knowledge and experience of achievement demands to fall back on. We considered the importation of an achievement discourse to girls’ sexuality narratives, in the absence of other viable, positive and directive sexuality discourses, to be such a form of developmental collateral damage to young women. Our findings suggested that the academic achievement discourse — the dominant and insistent discourse in public education — insinuated itself into the (un)consciousness and bodies of young people, infiltrating how they came to see, experience and express themselves sexually. We saw such evidence in girls’ readiness to use a discourse of academic achievement, including punitive assessment, to discuss and understand presumably what could or even should be intimate and embodied experiences perhaps at the expense of discourses of mutuality, intimacy, and embodied pleasure. Our data illustrated that young women’s deep knowledge of and experience with achievement discourse has become a social “resource” that some young women come to rely upon for guidance when navigating their developing sexuality. Like all discourses, the discourse of achievement ideologically acted upon and narratively constrained girls by designating or limiting the associated rights, responsibilities and duties that were in fact available to a specific position. This limited and limiting resource had the effect of ordering priorities, overdetermining goals, desires, anxieties, fears, etc. Y oung women’s sexuality has always come with significant physical, social and material consequences attached (safety, health, social standing, relationships, pregnancy and child rearing, livelihood). The adolescent women in this project narrated yet another set of consequences attached to their sexual behaviors. Now there are contingencies of their performance level, consequences not attached to whether they have simply engaged in sexual activity at all — consensually or under duress, with a boyfriend or casual acquaintance, at 3 months or 3 hours, liking it or hating it — but if their participation was good enough, met certain normative standards and benchmarks. The looming possibility of not being good enough, and in fact, being bad at something, perhaps even the loss of an idealized and seemingly feminist can-do, can-be-all identity (Gill 2007; Harris 2004) hangs in the balance of male evaluation of girls’ oral sex performances. The achievement concerns invoked by these girls in their descriptions of their oral sex experiences were troubling in that the performance “standards” they try to attain are inherently and explicitly “other” person based — originating outside of their own urgings, deliberations, priorities, values, desires or pleasure. This perspective is consistent with feminist psychodynamic developmental theory and research, wherein girls learn to maintain others and relationships at the expense of themselves (Brown and Gilligan 1990; Brown 1997; Tolman 2002). This “other” orientation remains particularly entrenched in the arena of sexuality and relationships and threatens girls’ identities and their sense of self and selfworth (Tolman 2011). Author's personal copy Sex Res Soc Policy Yet, while discourses are social forces of power and coercion, they are not absolute. We heard young women also deploy discourses of academic achievement for their own ends. The strategic, if not entirely conscious, decision to employ one discourse over another is an expression of girls’ power to act on the world but within the constraints of specific known discourses. High stakes testing and the achievement discourse offered a means of controlling emotionally charged experiences as some girls attempted to manage their sexual experiences with the same testingbased logic: through planning, preparation, and practice as a way to gain mastery and to understand what can easily feel out of control. Even as they legitimated and reinforced the achievement discourse in their deployment of it, they also opened the door to its subversion, as every iteration is imperfect, inviting change and innovation (Butler 1993). Though far less frequent than the achievement discourse, we heard moments of desire and pleasure in these young women’s fellatio narratives. They described wanting knowledge about and experience with oral sex; they very often initiated the first experience — for curiosity, for fun, to get what is understood as an “inevitability” over with, to please and appease boys, to do well in a relationship and be well thought of (Sorsoli et al. 2011). For some, mastery of a new and relationally valuable skill that oral sex was understood to be in itself a source of pleasure for girls. They enjoyed exercising power and reveled in their ability to actively affect their male partners, to “show what [they’re] made of” and make him “scream like a girl.3” Although these moments of desire and curiosity were often short-lived, we saw them as moments of “release” and opportunities for engaging young women in a discourse of sexuality and intimacy that gives them the discursive tools necessary to fully feel and convey their experiences and desires. We suggest that social policy researchers and practitioners be cognizant of the discourses they employ and how discourses can quickly become intertwined with cultural institutions (high-stakes testing and schooling, in this case). As a discourse becomes dominant it is simultaneously reified through policy (Tolman et al. 2005), limiting the availability of other discourses to exist in relation to it. Our findings speak to a need for alternative discourses and a need for social-policy researchers and practitioners to recognize the powerful and rapid snowball effect a single discourse can have when invoked by major policy legislation (NCLB in this instance). These moments also emphasized the importance of polyphonic listening in narrative analysis exemplified by 3 methods such as the LG (Brown and Gilligan 1990). By providing an open-ended forum and asking “interruptive” questions, we solicited stories that, after hearing them across many transcripts, began to echo one another in distinct ways. By using at first a more organic approach through thematic analysis and then a more guided method in the LG with an ear to academic achievement, we were able to further understand what we were hearing. This process provided a “bigger picture” of how policies can influence the lives and psyches of individuals while presumably influencing the presence of a targeted behavior/ disease/risk factor, as well as how policies can become implicated in social institutions. Conclusion We continue to recognize that adolescent girls’ desire exists, but it remains diverted, changed by the availability and insistence of achievement discourses. These achievement discourses position girls as learners not yearners, male partners as teachers and evaluators, and impose a standardized model of sexual behavior. While AOUM policies and discourses attempt to stop the occurrence of adolescent sexual activity, the academic achievement discourse likely has a routinizing and banalizing effect on teen sexual behavior and sexuality development. Sexual desire and/or satisfaction has been understood as a potential precursor to and catalyst of what Fine and McClelland (2006) call “thick desire,” that is, the entitlement and demand for larger sociopolitical, economic, and relational equality (p. 244). By transforming female adolescent’s sexuality into an extension of her school performance — a performance evaluated within compulsory heterosexuality (Rich 1980; Tolman 2006) — the deployment of the academic achievement discourse has the potential to drain sex of its passionate productivity and revolutionary potential. A move toward greater embodied pleasure could help to destabilize gender inequities (see Tolman 2002, 2006, 2011) and disrupt this hegemonic achievement discourse as well. References Airasian, P W. (1988). Symbolic validation: the case of state. mandated, high-stakes testing. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 10(4), 301–313. Allen, K. R., & Roberto, K. A. (2009). 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