Southern Girls, Pick One: Holy Prude or Redneck White Trash?
Monica Potts, writing for The Atlantic:
In Clinton, sex—and the question of whether we were allowed to have it or talk about it—was related to how people viewed girls’ futures. The idea that we might become fully realized adults, experiencing sexual freedom and fulfillment, was not fathomable. We could become helpmeets for our future husbands, or we could be ruined.
The girls who got pregnant were stigmatized—until their babies were born. Then they were revered as mothers. Our school was full of young moms who were still students, and those newly graduated would come back for ball games and other events, babies on their hips. It was an endless churn, baby after baby, raised in families that spanned five or six generations because so few years separated grandmothers and mothers and daughters—and because the girls couldn’t take care of their newborns without help. […]
The message at church was that we had to keep ourselves pure for our husbands, and the message at school was that sex would either kill us or leave us pregnant, and there was nothing we could do to prevent either scenario except abstain.
Despite the sermons, my friends were still having sex at about the same rates as teenagers elsewhere in the country. They were keenly aware that it was frowned on, and if a crisis resulted, they hesitated to seek help from an adult. In some cases, it kept them from breaking up with their boyfriend and made them vulnerable to exploitation and assault […]
When it came to liquor, there were two modes in Clinton: alcoholism or abstinence. This paralleled the bifurcated morality I saw everywhere: Girls were either virgins or whores; students were either geniuses or failures; you could go to church or you could be a sinner. The town seemed to operate in two modes—the buttoned-up propriety of the churchgoers, who held power in the county, versus the rowdy hillbillies in families like my dad’s. The rigid divide allowed no room for subtleties or missteps.
This is a truly sagacious piece; its analysis and anecdotes perfectly describe Gaston County, North Carolina, where I grew up. Except, this article was written about a place almost 500 miles away from the county I was raised in. This article was written about Clinton, a city in Van Buren County, Arkansas.
A particularly insightful anecdote:
Our friend Vanessa Allen, who was maybe the most boy crazy of us all, suffered the most. Vanessa had long, curly black hair and was the oldest of four kids. Her mom, Susie, had gotten married as a teenager and had Vanessa at 18. Vanessa wore a promise ring in middle school, but she liked attention from boys and had a reputation for being a flirt. I remember her wearing a tight-fitting bodysuit at a football game. When she walked past a group of grown men, they whistled at her, and one of them said admiringly, “Someone’s been eating her beans and cornbread!” She was 14.
Adults had taught us girls to keep boys from touching us before marriage, but no one ever told us what to do if we wanted to touch them. In that space between Vanessa’s desire and her shame, other girls smelled blood. The first time Vanessa had sex, she asked her boyfriend to stop, and he didn’t. Later, with other boys, Vanessa sometimes felt like she couldn’t say no to their advances, because she’d already lost her virginity. Only many years later did Vanessa recognize some of these incidents as sexual assaults, she told me when I visited her in 2017. She didn’t blame the boys, necessarily; they were just doing what everyone expected them to do […]
This really pulls back the curtain on the generational cycle of poor parenting by barely educated individuals reproducing in rural America, and showcases the true toxicity of the sexually regressive culture that evangelicals have imposed upon the south. It’s hard to blame the teenagers and young adults for their poor choices, because its the only thing they know and have seen demonstrated by their own too-young parents, but at some point, you have to start blaming them for perpetuating these harmful beliefs and destructive habits as adults in their mid/upper twenties, because by that point they're subjecting their own children to the same environment that failed them, and then a new generation is forced to pick between striving towards a life of nearly unattainable white-picket-fence holiness or settling for impulse driven, don’t-give-a-fuck redneckery.
This is just such a great piece of personally informed journalism. Potts’ commentaries on and summations of southern teen life and the whole culture that simultaneously shames and offhandedly excuses teen sexuality as something to be expected yet not addressed (particularly as experienced by girls and young women, in relation their young male peers, but also by those young men) as informed by the dichotomy of evangelical versus redneck social classes is just so astute.
It impresses upon me that perhaps it would be worth my time to take a stab at expounding upon the experiences of the young men raised in this environment, particularly the ones who wrestled with attractions largely aimed towards their male peers, rather than young women. Lord knows they faced similar struggles, if not often more taboo and personally detrimental. We’ll see, I think there’s an interesting story to be told there as well.