“Are You Clean?”

Before I learned that kissing a girl was not a provisional and thus inferior form of makeout, this question perplexed me to no end: Who was your first kiss?

Now I understand it was Deborah, on a summer night, by the swimming pool, but that didn’t sink in exactly until I was 18 or so—well past the ages my straight friends, recalling their 13-year-old makeout stories as party tricks, cited. Before that, every time this came up in truth or dare or casual let’s-share-our-feelings, I was hesitant. Was it Henry, who kissed the very side of my mouth during spin the bottle on Becky’s trampoline in eighth grade? Or George, whose cheek kiss turned into a brief mouth peck because I turned my head the wrong way? Or was it the elderly man I met one summer in high school who forced his tongue in my mouth and whose hand squeezed my breast, representing “the furthest I’d ever gone” with a boy?

There’s a broader trend in my adolescent confusion: the notion that sexuality is and can always be a form of self-expression; that it is and can always be something chosen; and that there are some more-or-less legitimate forms of it separated from the axis of consent. For me the question of a first kiss, a first “makeout,” was never as straightforward as it seemed to be to my straight peers, and it was even more complicated by experience with sexualized force. Countless others feel similar dissonance—a more involved, perhaps more hurtful, set of happenings than the linear narrative we are taught.

At first, identifying with these standardized narratives of sexual development might appear daring, cool, feminist, even. For women, sharing sexual exploits and adventures can indicate that we have moved beyond the prudery of past generations. For queers, so often excluded from viewing our sex as “real,” there can be a swaggering assertion of LGBT identity—we, too, have a body that counts. Of course, conversations about sexual experience, if conducted with frankness and sensitivity to a wide range of possibilities, can be helpful.

Yet when we replicate models of sexual linearity, we reinforce the idea that sexual activity happens on a trajectory from “purity” to “experience.” This logic implies that when sexuality isn’t chosen or enjoyed, or when, as in the “first kiss” story, there is no clear-cut transition from innocence to experience, we are in a state of deviance, one for which we are partly responsible.

We are taught in sexual education courses, for example, that the choice of abstinence is the only guaranteed way to avoid pregnancy and sexually-transmitted infections. Yet for an overwhelming number of young people, this choice is not available. Indeed, about one in four students in the American public school system receive abstinence only sexual education. But according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, 44 percent of sexual assault or rape victims are under the age of 18. Similar studies reveal that 7 percent of girls from grades five to eight, along with 12 percent of female high-schoolers, report sexual abuse. RAINN also estimates that among victims of rape in 2012, 17,342 experienced unwanted pregnancies.

For these students, abstinence-only models may well prove especially alienating. And even for those educated in the 77 percent of public schools that do teach contraceptive methods, a message of choice that neglects to consider the topic of consent is inadequate. While sexual education programs are vitally necessary, despite their embattled status in America’s public schools, care must be taken that curricula do not reinforce the dichotomy between “purity” and “experience”: that discussion of STIs, for example, does not equate infection with physical or moral “dirtiness,” and that programs acknowledge a whole range of consensual sexual activity.

Rather than approach sex ed in a manner prone to alienate those most vulnerable, educational models that acknowledge that choice is sometimes limited can in fact reinforce a fuller sense of agency in a sometimes hostile world (approaches called “trauma-informed”). And we ourselves can alter the way we talk about sexuality on a daily basis, shifting the emphasis to the complexities of sometimes-devastating, sometimes-wonderful personal experience and away from the myth of the first kiss.

Reina A.E. Gattuso ’15 is a joint literature and studies of women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.