Girls & Desire

“I don’t want my daughters to enter the dating scene with false expectations. For the most part, the boys who will ask them out are mainly thinking of one subject (and it’s not to bake cookies with them).” I heard many comments like this while talking with fathers of girls about dating and sexuality for my book, Dads & Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand, and Support Your Daughter.

This “boys will be boys” attitude about young men is pervasive among fathers of daughters. They believe that boys want little more than instant sexual gratification from girls. But this belief creates a huge barrier in our obligation to nurture our daughters’ healthy sexuality and desire.

Granted, because we were once boys, we know how much pressure there is to “score,” and how hard it can be to resist those cultural and peer expectations. So how do we sort it all out in a way that helps our daughters?
The first step is to think back to our own boyhood. For example, listen to a dad quoted in my book:

On a tenth-grade field trip, the guys I hung out with gave me grief because I refused to engage in the debate they were having about (the sexual desirability of) every female within eyesight.

Anyway, after a few hours of my nonparticipation, one guy wondered why I was so aloof when they were talking . . . I felt very self-conscious and somewhat foolish being a 15-year-old romantic, but managed to let them know it was because I wanted ‘to be in love.’ I was quite surprised when they told me they could relate! I wish I’d always had the guts to be that honest.

Share stories like this with your kids, and you show them that it is possible for boys to want something other than sexual interaction—a vital lesson for both daughters and sons.

The other step is to consciously change our expectations for our kids around sexuality. Here’s how another dad reflected on this instinct:

First, to think that teen girls don’t experience at least as strong a sex drive as boys do is a bit naive. They do experience it and if we listen to them, we will discover its interesting manifestations. Second, our human love contains all shades of spirituality and physicality mixed inseparably.

The poet John Donne says that the role of sex is to induce the communication between souls. I asked my daughter and three of her college roommates, ‘What is love for you?’ It started two hours of discussion, after which they concluded that love and sex are simply a very, very intense communication!

Are there more beautiful moments than being in love, feeling the sexual tension in between, the affection in the eyes, and just everything? Isn’t it better to focus on this incredible gift that we have—the gift of human love? Human love has its problems, difficulties and hurt, yet it’s so incredible, so powerful and beautiful and connecting.

We can’t ignore the ways that our daughters are vulnerable to danger and abuse, and that some boys are jerks. But neither can we ignore the fact that most adolescents have a range of desires, including those for emotional and spiritual connection.

When you get right down to it, this desire to experiment with being in love is an incredible gift. It’s a gift that should be equally available to both daughters and sons—and one that we parents ought to expect both our daughters and sons to unwrap and enjoy.

Adapted from Dads & Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand, and Support Your Daughter by Joe Kelly.