Dirty Little Secrets

Dirty Little Secrets: Breaking the Silence on Teenage Girls and Promiscuity is a 2011 work of popular psychology by American therapist Kerry Cohen. The book draws on seventy-five anonymous interviews to paint an anecdotal picture of the sex lives of teenage girls in America. Cohen diagnoses cultural problems that prevent young women from owning or expressing their sexuality. She argues that this situation gives rise to “loose girls”: teenage girls who engage in harmful, self-destructive sexual behavior. In the second part of the book, Cohen explores how cultural and personal change might help girls caught in this trap.

Cohen’s introduction summarizes her argument and sets out the stakes by referencing a range of research that suggests promiscuous sexual behavior can be dangerous for teenagers. The remainder of the book is divided into two parts. Part one “identif[ies] the loose girl experience,” while part two “helps girls gain power over their sexual lives.”

Cohen is concerned with “girlhood, from puberty on.” She traces three aspects of girls’ experiences which she sees as essential: girls’ identities become bound up with how boys see them; a key part of this process involves measuring themselves against a cultural standard of physical beauty; social and cultural factors make it impossible for a girl ever to feel that she measures up. Cohen draws on scientific research to argue that adolescent developmental factors prime girls to fall into this trap. She notes that the experience she describes has remained relatively constant throughout history, despite the advances of feminism.



From here, Cohen moves on to discuss boys, showing how our culture represents boys as “so beautiful, so free, and always so unattainable” to teenage girls, arguing that this fantasy encourages girls to believe that boys will rescue them from the feelings of inadequacy engendered by the trap described above.

Drawing heavily on her interviews with American teenagers, Cohen attempts to describe the reality of girls’ sexual desire and experience, in the face of the “long-standing taboo” surrounding the subject. She argues that girls are given a very limited set of archetypes through which to understand their sexual desires, curiosities, experiments, and fantasies. Girls are “virgins,” “sluts,” or “empowered.” Through interviews, Cohen finds that girls whose experiences don’t fit these archetypes often feel ashamed and alone.

Cohen discusses the mother-daughter relationship. She explores how a lack of maternal intimacy sometimes creates—and sometimes doesn’t create—patterns of promiscuous behavior. She also considers how girls learn to seek male attention from their mothers. She then turns to fathers, examining how fathers’ behavior can directly or indirectly sexualize their daughters, or model the sexualization of women for them.



Seeing promiscuity as a form of self-harming behavior, Cohen discusses how it interacts with other forms of self-harm: cutting, drug and alcohol abuse, and eating disorders. She also dives deeper into the evidence that promiscuity causes mood disorders including depression.

Discussing girls’ experience of sex, rape, and losing virginity, Cohen tackles these three subjects together in order to show how the lines of consent are blurred by the restrictive archetypes available to women. For instance, she asks, what kind of consent is in play when a girl chooses to lose her virginity while drunk in order to escape the stigma of being a girl who “chooses sex”?

Cohen tackles a topic which she admits is a “brave new world” for her: the online dating scene. She argues that online technology provides complex and dangerous new forums in which girls play out the drama of seeking male attention. She leans heavily on interviews, for instance with “Amelia,” who uses “sexting and cyber sex to pick up boys she likes whom she meets in school, but is too shy to speak to in person.”



Part 2 begins by debunking the assumption that teenage girls who “act out sexually” learn a healthier attitude to sexuality as they age. Cohen draws on interviews with women who have carried the obsessive search for male attention into adult life and suffered for it.

Turning to solutions, Cohen first outlines the ways that girls can and have overcome the psychological trap of promiscuity, and sets out some ways that adults can help other girls follow suit. She also considers whether change is always possible, and what circumstances facilitate change.

Cohen focuses on broader cultural change, arguing for a comprehensive reform of sex education to break the status quo in which girls are always sex objects, “sluts,” “virgins,” or “empowered.”



While Dirty Little Secrets did not garner the acclaim of Cohen’s 2009 memoir, Loose Girl, reviewers found that the book achieved its status purpose of serving as an “engaging catalyst for discussions about a taboo issue” (Kirkus Reviews).