Spotlight on SRSP: Deborah Tolman 

By high school, Deborah Tolman had already mastered the key sexuality books of the day (Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, The Joy of Sex) and was a frequently sought source for dependable sex advice. Alternating between honors classes and illicit cigarette breaks in the girls’ bathroom, Tolman served as the “Dr. Ruth” of her suburban high school—an unlikely bastion of good information delivered frankly and without judgment.



Learning about sexual pleasure and sexual responsibility seemed like normal parts of being a teenage girl in the late 1970s. She grew up in a Reform Jewish family that viewed sexuality as a positive part of development. “I remember asking my mother about sex, and when she answered me she would tell the truth,” Tolman says. “Years later, she told me how freaked out she was but how she was determined to listen to me and to communicate that asking questions and getting answers was perfectly fine.”



Tolman is still studying sexuality and listening to young women. She is the author of Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality (Harvard University Press), in which she reports that when she asked girls to talk about their own sexual feelings, she discovered how girls struggled in different ways to acknowledge their sexuality and to accept themselves—and have others accept them—as appropriate and normal. She argues in her latest paper that research which is premised on collecting and analyzing the real-life stories told by teenage girls—using rigorous qualitative methodologies—could, and should, inform policymakers and influence policy regarding adolescent sexuality. The article, co-authored by Celeste Hirschman and Emily Impett (research assistant and postdoctoral fellow at the CRGS, respectively), is published in Sexuality Research and Social Policy.



Tolman worked with Carol Gilligan while she was a doctoral student at Harvard Graduate School of Education in the late 1980s and early ’ 90s, and was also influenced by feminist social psychologist Michelle Fine. Gilligan’s feminist approach to psychological research relied on taking the voices of women seriously rather than relying solely on quantitative data. As Gilligan pointed out, quantitative approaches had failed to identify a morality of care that women described in their stories (and which is also audible in many men’s stories, once one tries to listen for it). Qualitative research, though, is much different from individual testimonials, which are personal anecdotes that tend to be compelling but one-sided and lacking in complexity. More and more, conservative lobbyists are bringing people to the witness stand who are chosen because they tell stories that boost a specific side of a cause and sway other politicians. 


The tactic seems to be working. “Scientific evidence is increasingly being ignored in favor of such testimonials,” Tolman, Hirschman, and Impett write in their article, “There is More to the Story: The Place of Qualitative Research on Female Adolescent Sexuality Policy Making."



The researchers say that social scientists can see the current approach to persuasion as an opportunity rather than solely turning to hand-wringing. Qualitative research that elicits personal narratives that are complex, diverse, and uncensored are indeed evidence that counters some of the unscientific claims being made or offers new and unexpected directions for policies. To demonstrate their point, they first looked at four qualitative studies on young women’s sexual development. In reviewing the four distinct and unrelated studies, they found common themes or distinct patterns among the young women’s narratives that were collected and analyzed in these studies. One was that young women are dealing with a contradiction: They are supposed to avoid doing anything that would get them labeled a slut, but if they do not engage in “the right” sexual experiences, they risk getting labeled a prude. The problem is that no one seems to know what exactly the “right” choices are. Since girls aren’t supposed to be (too) sexually forward and are supposed to respond to boys, their sexual experiences are prompted by their partners, who use a range of tactics, from pressure to coercion. In addition, they don’t develop what Tolman and others call sexual subjectivity—“the ability to know and express oneself as a sexual person with desires, rights, and boundaries…” (p. 11). 



Examples of these themes demonstrate how compelling qualitative evidence can be. The difference between exemplifying a theme that is found in four different studies and one girl telling one story is that it is representative of what a lot of girls have reported. So qualitative research makes it possible to link science with stories, to keep the compelling quality of people’s actual experiences in a scientific way. Consider how legislators might respond to what a girl from one of the studies says: 

“If a girl sleeps with him and if she consents quickly to the boy saying, “Yeah, I’ll have sex with you,” then he’ll think she’s slack whereas if a girl says, “No,” sometimes he’ll say to her “Oh, you’re frigid,” but in his mind he’ll be thinking, “She’s a bit sensible. She knows what she’s thinking.” But he’ll try and make her feel bad. Whereas a girl, if she goes to bed with him, he’ll say, “Oh yeah, you’re lovely” then the next day he’ll be calling her a slag behind her back. (Holland et al., p. 169)”



What is important about this and the other stories is that they represent the experiences of a lot of girls. The way that girls accommodate boys sexually without regard for their own feelings is evident in the story of another girl from Tolman’s book:  


“He was almost like hurting me [with his fingers in my vagina], I just faked like loud and I just like make him come so the whole thing would stop…I was just getting almost bored, nothing was happening, I would just rather have been watching TV, I wasn’t really attracted to him, I just didn’t have the energy to put off his come-ons, so I just gave him a hand job and so he came and then it like ended. (Tolman, p. 105)”



These combined findings suggest that the abstinence-only vs. comprehensive sex education debate misses a crucial point: that students (boys as well as girls) need to learn to think critically about gender inequality.



Tolman emphasizes, both in conversation and in her writing, that gender inequality is woven into the fabric of everyday life. She recalls a man she met at a dinner party who bragged that his son was “playing the field” but lamented that his daughter was starting to date; he tried to keep her from going out and made sure someone was always watching out for her. 

“I finally went, ‘Whoa!’ No wonder this man was so wound up about his daughter—look at the way he was raising his son!” Tolman says. “It took me a long time to put that together—and I study adolescent sexuality for a living. That shows you how deep our ideas about gender are.”



Without sexual subjectivity, girls cannot make clear decisions about their sexual behavior, Tolman and others have argued. Tolman writes, “A dangerous implication of this lack of awareness and agency is that some girls are unable to tell the difference between consenting and being coerced.” (p. 11) Girls, she says, must be taught that they are entitled to sexual pleasure, that their job is not only to meet other people’s needs, that it is OK to walk away, that being in a relationship is not everything. She offers a seemingly contradictory thought:  “If we encouraged girls to include their own sexual desire and pleasure in how they think about sexual decisions, they would probably have less sexual intercourse,” she says.



Tolman is now studying adolescent male sexuality as well—and she is listening to the stories that boys are telling her. While certainly giving boys numerous advantages, gender inequality can have negative consequences for them, too. “There is pressure for boys to perform a certain masculinity, to be seen as the boss in the relationship,” she says. “There is a belief that boys are sexually uncontrollable. We expect them to have ‘raging hormones’ and believe that they cannot be held accountable for their actions. As I tell girls, no boy has ever expired from not having his sexual urges satisfied. And I am sure that boys are able to choose to be responsible for themselves. What is true is that any girl has the right to consider what she wants to do, what is best for her—and that boys who want to hang out and not make themselves seem like sexual predators are normal, too. ”