Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom

Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom

Leslie C. Bell

Language: English

Pages: 274

ISBN: 0520261496

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Hard to Get is a powerful and intimate examination of the sex and love lives of the most liberated women in history—twenty-something American women who have had more opportunities, more positive role models, and more information than any previous generation. Drawing from her years of experience as a researcher and a psychotherapist, Leslie C. Bell takes us directly into the lives of young women who struggle to negotiate the complexities of sexual desire and pleasure, and to make sense of their historically unique but contradictory constellation of opportunities and challenges. In candid interviews, Bell’s subjects reveal that, despite having more choices than ever, they face great uncertainty about desire, sexuality, and relationships. Ground-breaking and highly readable, Hard to Get offers fascinating insights into the many ways that sex, love, and satisfying relationships prove surprisingly elusive to these young women as they navigate the new emotional landscape of the 21st century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I can’t no more.” . . . So I’ve chosen not to speak to him, chosen not to deal with him. However, when I go to my grandparents’ house, because the parasite still lives there, I see him. He’ll walk out of the room, he’ll go in the backyard, he’ll go in the bedroom and close the door. We don’t talk. As a preadolescent child, Alicia was kissed and touched sexually by her father. She was loathe to discuss his behavior’s impact on her development, although she knew it to be profound. She sought to

between sex in a relationship versus sex in a one-night stand, Maria responded: It doesn’t depend on the relationship, it depended on where I was in life. So even when in a relationship, when I was younger, sex sucked. I hated it. I had to get motivated for it. I started to like it a little bit more. I convinced myself, “Yeah, this is great.” I think it was the type of people I was with, too, not giving. I got older and started to think, “I deserve to have good sexual interactions like 136 /

experimented with masturbation. For Susan, developmental readiness had to do with an increasing tolerance of vulnerability—of knowing her own desire, and of mutual expression of that desire with an 150 / The Desiring Woman equal partner. And as with Maria, it also had to do with learning about her own desires through masturbation. Maria and Susan both also developed new understandings of mature relationships involving both independence and needs. They had previously thought of independence

twenty-something women adrift. 171 172 / The Desiring Woman Young women want help with learning to fulfill their desires in relationships, sex, and careers. I was five to ten years older than the women I interviewed for this book and was surprised by the intense interest they expressed in how I’d succeeded in building a relationship and a career at the same time. I was also surprised, as I ended each interview series, at the degree to which many women were grateful to me for talking with them

being a working parent often clashes with the overwhelming financial and logistical realities of doing so. As a result of these freedoms and economic realities, women are developing relationships and families more slowly than did previous generations of women. College-educated women now marry, on average, at twenty-seven, and women in general have their first child at age twenty-five, in contrast to 1970, when they did both, on average, at twenty-one.30 Particularly striking are the findings that,

Download sample

Download