Hungry for Love : Girls Are Getting Bolder, but What’s Often on Their Minds Is Affection, Not Sex

The letter was only two pages long, but it was full of sexually explicit references.The author was a 14-year-old girl. The recipient was a boy one year her senior, and his older sister--his guardian--was not amused.

“I’m embarrassed to say what the girl wrote,” said the sister, a university professor. The letter, which she found on a table, “talked about all of his attributes.

“This letter was incredibly bold. When I discussed it with my brother, he told me that the girls at his school write letters like this to boys all the time.”

And that’s not all: Girls have called her brother at all hours of the night, some of them swearing because she refused to wake him up.

Blame it on rap music, MTV, the disintegration of the family, a lack of parental supervision. Whatever the reasons, experts agree that the incidence of sexually aggressive behavior among teen-age girls is increasing.

This behavior includes:

* Phoning boys at all hours with propositions of sex and leaving suggestive messages on answering machines.

* Sending explicit letters.

* Giving expensive gifts, such as watches.

* Trailing boys at malls and sneaking out at night to meet them.

Although experts are quick to point out that the majority of teen-age girls don’t fall into this pattern, that does little to ease the concerns of educators and parents when boys are confronted with calls, notes and propositions.

A recent Ann Landers column on the subject prompted more than 20,000 letters. The column included a letter from a mother whose 17-year-old son “was disgusted with super-aggressive, sex-crazy girls.” Another mother revealed that she had changed the family’s phone number three times “to get rid of the girls who pester the daylights” out of her 15- and 16-year-old sons.

Then there was this letter from a parent with a 15-year-old son: “Aggressive girls? You better believe it. I can’t bring myself to repeat the messages they leave on our answering machine--imitations of orgasms!”

“The parents of boys are blaming the girls, and girls are blaming the boys,” Landers said, referring to bags of mail that arrived after her column was published. “The girls are upset that I pictured them to be so sexually aggressive and made them look like tramps,” while most of the boys said they were glad Landers “ratted on the girls.”

Some of the girls who admit to being sexually aggressive say “it makes the guys feel important.” Blanca, a 14-year-old who lives in Atwater Village, said she wrote letters to a 17-year-old boy and phoned him constantly, sometimes at 3 a.m. Eventually, she had sex with him; she said she didn’t want to lose him to another girl.

One of her friends, Linda, 15, said she’s sneaked out of her home at night a few times to meet boys. Sometimes the meeting was initiated by the boy, but other times, said Linda, “I wanted to see him.” She said her mother has never found out about the liaisons, which have never lasted more than an hour and usually consisted of talking and kissing.

And that’s the great irony: Although sexually aggressive behavior may very well lead to sex, many girls are simply looking for affection.

Irma Zandl, president of Xtreme Inc., a New York-based youth market consulting and research firm, said her company’s recent survey of 1,600 12- to 18-year-olds found that the biggest thrill for girls was to have a boyfriend “and make out.” Boys, however, while certainly interested in sex are just as interested in sports and cars.

“For the boys, having sex for the first time by age 16 is a real rite of passage. However, for most of them it is a physical relief--as opposed to the girls, for whom it is emotional. So once satisfied, the boys would much rather go out and play football with their pals than they would whisper sweet nothings,” Zandl said.

“Girls are initiating more relationships with boys because girls are much more aggressive now, but not necessarily for sex,” said Faye Banton, assistant principal in charge of counseling services at Belvedere Junior High School in East Los Angeles. “They’re looking for hand-holding and hugging.”

Sharon Swonger, a nurse at Taft High School in Woodland Hills, often counsels teen-agers about sexuality. The letter writing, phone calling and other types of aggressive behavior result, she said, “from a lack of affection and attention from many parents who are too busy working and have little time to devote to their children.”

(There’s no doubt that families are changing. In the mid-1950s, 60% of U.S. families with children consisted of a biological father who worked and a biological mother who remained at home. Today, less than 11% of the nation’s families fall into that “nuclear family” category, according to a study by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

(Another study, conducted by the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, indicates that nearly 25% of children today live in single-parent families, compared to 9% in 1960.)

Many of those who counsel teen-agers and their families agree with Swonger’s assessment. So do some of the teen-agers. Blanca, for example, said her mother, a single parent, is too busy making ends meet to guide her daughter through the maze of growing up: “I can basically do what I want and no one knows.”

Kennia Torres, an 18-year-old mother of a 3-year-old son, said her “boy-craziness had to do with a lot of cultural stuff.” The high school senior, who will graduate this month from continuation school, was bounced around between her mother and grandmother as a child.

“I kept hearing, ‘Girls don’t do this, girls don’t do that,’ ” she said about her sexual aggressiveness and activity, which began at age 12. “I was confused and frustrated and nobody would listen to me, so I could do whatever I wanted. I made my own rules. Basically, I raised myself.”

According to psychologist Joyce Brothers, “many teens act like psychologists to each other because they have no adult supervision or parents laying down the rules.” Teen-age girls are “so hungry for love” that it’s no wonder they have become “pushier in their behavior in order to get the attention of boys.”

Sadly, said Brothers, “girls are (trading) cuddling and kissing for sex because they are too young to know about any other road to intimacy other than a sexual one.”

Coree Vanbebber, 15, a 10th-grader at Hoover High School in Glendale, said that sometimes when a girl pursues a boy with sexually suggestive phone calls and notes, it begins as a playful joke that turns into a relationship that neither party--because of their inexperience and lack of communication skills--knows how to handle.

“Sometimes after a girl does the chasing, she gets pressured into having sex because the guy says, ‘We’ve been going together for two months now and it’s time to ‘give it up,’ ” said Vanbebber.

“But then the girl gets pregnant, has a kid and the guy dumps her,” she continued, adding that she and her friends know several girls who have been through that experience.

And what do the guys think of all this?

Jesus Tellechea, an 18-year-old Huntington Park High School senior, said he has been the recipient of many phone calls from girls--which upsets his parents--and flagrant letters that have suggested “that we make love” or “let’s go out one of these nights so I can see your sexy body, so I can see you naked.”

Recently, he and a male teen-age cousin were driving through a mall parking lot when two girls followed them in another car, throwing kisses at them and yelling: “ ‘Come here! Come here! Oooooooh, baby!’ ”

Tellechea said he and other teen-age boys label aggressive girls “easy.”

“It really turns me off. You’re thinking, ‘What a tramp,’ ” Tellechea said, adding that girls are third on his list of priorities. Getting an education and sports rank tops.

But not all boys find the letters, calls and chasing a turn-off.

“My brother finds the attention extremely flattering,” says the guardian of the 15-year-old who receives letters and late-night phone calls.

“He and his friends believe if they don’t listen to this kind of talk and if they are not receptive to what these teen-age girls are proposing to them, then it would make them feel square and unhip,” she said.

Carolyn Powell, a counselor at Jordan High School in Watts, said “many of the girls don’t realize what kind of picture they present” with their sexually suggestive notes and calls.

Parents can help, Powell said, by “taking time out and communicating with their kids about their goals, feelings, concerns. Bring those young people into the family. Give them attention and affection. Teen-agers need to be part of the family, not apart from the family.

“It’s OK to talk about affection, about words in songs, about the scene on TV where you have very explicit sexual things going on,” said Powell. “You can move from that to a very personal conversation with your teen-ager about what he or she considers acceptable behavior.”

Joyce Brothers said boys, like girls, also crave affection from their parents: “Both boys and girls want reassurances and attention, but often they don’t know how to go about getting it. They think it would be uncool to ask for it.”

Brothers said parents should tell their sons that there is no harm in being chased by girls. “The harm is if a boy uses the calls and letters as a way to exploit a girl,” she said. “Ignoring a girl’s calls and letters is a very minor hurt for that girl. Having sex with that girl and then counting it as a conquest is a real hurt.”

She added that parents should tell their daughters that even though it is OK to call a boy, “girls can make pests of themselves” when a boy isn’t interested and that their sexually aggressive behavior “will lead boys to labeling them as bad girls.”