Girl talk

Esther Drill describes a recent conversation that occurred in the gURL discussion boards when a confused teen posed the question "What's an orgasm?" The first response was a breezily ignorant "It's what happens to a guy when he has sex."

Pro-sex feminists hope that young women will learn to embrace their sexuality as a positive thing. Conversations like the one above show that the old puritanical belief that sex is a duty that women perform for men still persists -- especially with teenage girls who feel pressured into sex by eagerly inexperienced dates and have initial experiences with sex that aren't particularly pleasurable. Equally problematic -- as Leora Tannenbaum recently documented in her book "Slut!" -- are the lingering social mores that equate female sexual pleasure with harlotry.

Will the Net help dispel these stereotypes for teenage girls -- teaching them that sex can be something they can enjoy and not be ashamed of?

"It's made me more accepting of a teenage girl having sex and not being a slut because of it," says Kathryn. "In high school you may know that people are having sex, but it's looked down upon," she says. "Because my friends weren't having sex, in the back of my mind I thought, 'I'm kind of weird.' But when I talk to other people online I feel better about myself."

Riley says that Kathryn's sentiment is being mirrored by countless teens she sees visiting Teenwire.com. "We seem to be providing a great sense of relief to a lot of female teens who may be believing in myths or stereotypes that are placed upon them, or they were just basically in a chauvinistic environment that makes them dirty girls because they are having sex," she says. "We've helped them decide they are normal, or OK if they aren't feeling ready. They may be pressured to have sex and come to us to find out if it is the right time."

And, as the gay and lesbian community has long been aware, the Net is a haven for teenagers who are coming to terms with feelings that might not be acceptable among their peers. Maiga, for example, is an 18-year-old girl who lives in what she describes as "a white-bread suburb" near Philadelphia. Although she'd known that she was bisexual for some time, it wasn't until she spent hours conversing with older women in online communities -- women with strikingly different experiences and opinions than the teens she'd encountered in the 'burbs -- that Maiga came to understand her own sexuality.

"Meeting these people I really respect, seeing them living lives that I could see myself living, made me feel a lot more comfortable with my sexual identity. It was really helpful to learn to think of myself as a person who is sexual and enjoys exploring her sexuality a lot," she muses. More importantly, she says, talking to more-experienced women has given her a healthier perspective about relationships. "When I think about relationships now, I am focused around being into them for myself. I fell into a lot of the teenage-girl traps about trying to please someone else."

The Net can offer young girls, and guys, a place to explore their sexuality and to learn how and when to act on their desires -- but only if teenagers are permitted access to sites that host such discussions. Some libraries have had filtering software forced upon them, (or would if the Dr. Laura Schlessingers of the world had their way), and therefore block any online references to sex. And plenty of schools and parents, concerned mainly about kids viewing pornography, have installed similar filters on their computers.

But some see such filters as an overzealous attempt to shield kids from finding online what they can stumble across on any magazine rack. As Heidi Swanson, CEO of Chickclick, points out, "How hard is it to get to the 'how to give a blow job' articles in women's publications? A lot of this sexual content has been out there for a long time. We're hearing that 'ooh, the Net's bad bad bad,' when in fact sex is everywhere." But what the Net is offering that you can't find everywhere, she says, is discourse: a place where teens not only read about sex, but can exchange ideas and experiences with more knowledgeable peers and adults and, hopefully, make more informed decisions about their own sexual boundaries as a result.

"Education is such a good thing," says Razzberry's Catherine Delett unequivocally. "They may be learning things about sex, but also more about contraception and being a teen mother." gURL's Esther Drill concurs: "Just because you have good information about sex doesn't mean you are going to act on it; ultimately it's going to make you make a good, informed decision."

Perhaps the best way to gauge the wisdom that can come from kids learning about sex online is simply to listen to the knowledge that the teens themselves impart to each other. For every teenage girl who asks what an orgasm is, there's someone who will tell her the right answer. For every girl who says she is thinking about giving her boyfriend a blow job to make him happy, there is another who tells her all the reasons she shouldn't -- and that if she does it anyway, to use safety precautions.

It's certainly not easy to be a teenage girl at the turn of the millennium facing sexual decisions at increasingly younger ages. So it's inspiring to hear the words of teenagers like Taryn, a 14-year-old in Vancouver, British Columbia: "I've learned on the Internet, from the many different types of people I've talked to, that sex is a wonderful, natural thing. I've learned that you have to be ready for it and in love. I've learned that sex is not as wrong or dirty as people make it seem, as long as you don't treat it dirty."

If sex talk on the Internet can encourage a girl to reason like that, surely it can't be all that bad.

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