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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
In this remarkable memoir, a former '70s teen "slut" looks back on the mysteries of adolescent sex and the female quest for freedom.
Mar 19, 2003 | One of the great misfortunes of female sexuality is that nature's gifts come too soon and then they don't stick around long enough. Not only do women who want children have to settle on mates and start families earlier than men must, but the prime of a girl's allure usually arrives before she has the faintest idea how to handle it. By the time she's swept the gobbledygook of conventional romance out of her head and realized that the terrible bodily "flaws" she once obsessed over are actually pretty trivial, she's over the hill. The very rare young woman who understands her nubile sexual power and knows how to use it is a force to be reckoned with, indeed.
Kathy Dobie was not such a girl. The centerpiece of her new memoir, "The Only Girl in the Car," describes a brief period -- about a year -- during her teens when she stumbled into an archetypal role among a group of adolescents in her suburban Connecticut town: She was the slut. Her precocious exploits culminated in an awful night during which, as the titular only girl in a carful of boys, she was bullied (by the guy she considered her boyfriend) into having sex with all four of them. She'd just turned 15. Anyone who's ever been a teenager can imagine how quickly the news of that night spread among her cohort, and how brutally she was treated by them afterward.
Dobie isn't stupid -- she isn't now, and she wasn't then. But "The Only Girl in the Car" offers a perfect refresher course in how the naiveté and heedlessness of teenagers combines to make something very much like stupidity. Some girls get slapped with the "slut" label unfairly -- because of their class background, say, or because their breasts develop before anyone else's. Dobie earned her epithet fair and square. At 14 she became intoxicated with her sudden power to attract men and boys with provocative words or a look. After a few nervous false starts, she set about losing her virginity by arranging herself artfully in her family's front yard, dressed in a candy-striped halter top and platform shoes. (Well, it was the '70s.)
With this strategy, she landed a pockmarked, ponytailed 33-year-old who lived with his mother -- a "loser," she realized even at the time, but he served her purpose all the same. Dobie was thereby launched on a campaign of sexual adventure, proceeding through a couple of trysts with a man in his 40s and finally arriving at her nirvana, the local teen center, where she found an abundance of what she really wanted: boys, "the confident, aggressive, dirty-minded ones ... No cathedral could have filled a true believer with as much awe" as the Hamden Teen Center inspired in the 14-year-old Dobie.
The first half of "The Only Girl in the Car" makes an oblique attempt to explain how Dobie wound up in that teen center, nearly swooning in the miasma of fresh testosterone. Hers is not the background you might expect: no divorce, no neglect, no abuse. She was the third child of six, the oldest girl in a cheerful, wholesome clan that inhabited a big house with a swing set in the backyard, a basketball hoop over the garage door and a friendly sheepdog on the lawn, right next to the 14-year-old girl fishing for a deflowerer. The Dobie family was well organized, but not to the point of rigidity, and it was infused with her father's philosophy of self-reliance and personal responsibility. Except for being Catholic, the Dobies resembled the pop culture icon that one of Kathy's friends compared them to, the Brady Bunch.
Forget the obligatory dirty jokes about Catholic girls, the notion that when they go astray they do so with a vengeance, their passions fueled by the guilt they're defying. Dobie maintains that it took the ordeal of her night with those four boys and her subsequent ostracism by her former friends to instill her with any significant measure of sexual shame. You could even say that the lack of such shame -- the lack of any sexual education at all, of whatever moral orientation -- may have led in part to her mistakes.
Perhaps the adults around her, raising kids at a confusing time when the sexual revolution was assailing the conservative mores they were raised with, simply gave up. They tried, she writes, "to act like nothing was going on ... We understood. When it came to sex, we were on our own. The adults had left the scene, tiptoeing away, hoping, no doubt, that we would follow. Not a chance."
If it wasn't some obvious dysfunction that provoked Dobie to seek out the furtive, inexpert caresses of the "boy-men" of the Hamden Teen Center at a painfully early age, then what did? Her answer to this question is intimated rather than baldly stated, and it's complicated. Partly, she wanted to feel, as she did during her brief teen center heyday, "as alive, as bold, as free" as the bad boys around her.
When she began her career of seduction, her own exhilaration reminded her of a boy she once saw at a fair, a volunteer who stepped onstage when a man displaying a python asked if anyone wanted to come up and hold it. The boy, she writes, seemed "motherless, fatherless, a boy out of Mark Twain, a boy who joins circuses or travels west with a pistol and a dog ... That's how I felt at 14."
