A Day In The Sun: How Horny Teenage Girls Are Finally Getting The Attention They Deserve

Me at 16, thinking my Pokemutt shirt and using a tie as a belt made me cool.

Female sexuality is considered an enigma in pop culture, cloaked in mystery, a hypnotizing elixir that a woman oozes. It’s the thing that makes the world go ‘round, a prize men are eager to win, fondle, and own as a personal achievement. Sometimes it is coveted, but it’s mostly tossed aside for something better. When the word “sex appeal” comes to mind, often times an image of a woman with “more curves than the Grand Prix” pops up. Maybe she’s in a slinky dress, dolled up with bedroom eyes and a ga—okay let’s all just admit we’re thinking of Jessica Rabbit. That’s what we think about when we think of sex, sex appeal, a sexy woman—a cartoon woman that is drawn in a borderline pornographic way in a 1980’s children’s film.

A woman’s sex appeal is considered to be something that is magically obtained overnight, as if fairies came into a little girl’s room, sprinkled fairy dust into the air and POOF! A girl is now a woman. This narrative is societal based misogyny that when a girl starts to develop breasts and hips, she has complete control of her sexuality, which is why when you hear about statutory rape cases from men in their thirties or forties, it’s always “She looked older!”, “She didn’t act like she was underage!”, “She seduced me!” and any other excuse predatory men love to throw around when they have been nabbed for being a sex pest to a little girl that is barely going through the early phases of puberty. Meanwhile, male sexuality is seen as something as fumbly, awkward, gross, and fodder for comedy. It’s a process when a boy becomes a man. Remember the hit “Not A Girl, Not Yet Woman” (2001)? It’s the same process, except most of us didn’t look like Britney Spears with six-pack abs, perfectly coifed hair, and dating the hottest member of N’SYNC.

My days of going through puberty still plague my nightmares as I recollect on how stupid, awkward, and obscenely horny I was at that age. When I first started developing breasts at age 10, I remember wearing a sports bra religiously to flatten myself out. I felt weird being the only girl in school wearing “Big Girl” brassieres when all of my other classmates were barely buying their first training bras. I ditched the sports bra when I discovered I was a 36C, without a clue on what I was supposed to do with the sacks of fat hanging off my chest whilst being hypnotized by the fact that I had sacks of fat hanging off my chest. I lived in band t-shirts that were two sizes too big and flannel jackets because I thought I was fat and hardly proportional (7th grade was when I was at my ugliest and my body was going through the adjustment period). Eighth grade was the year where I was in a perpetually aroused state—anything and everything could be viewed as sexual in nature. Before social media, there were chatrooms and message boards. My first experience in the world of self-pleasure was guided by a 16 year old dude I met on the Deftonesworld message board. He resided in West Virginia, or so he claimed. His hobbies included reading Chuck Palahniuk, listening to nu metal, drinking beer, and teaching 14 year old girls how to masturbate. I remember feeling as if I really did kill kittens each time I put my hand down my pants.

The realization that my body was no longer the same coupled with discovering masturbation gave me enough confidence to feel like I could attract the opposite sex. In ninth grade, my friends and I were enamored with a cool group of juniors we thought were insanely hot (They weren’t). We would spend hours talking about going on dates with them, as if we were just as cool and attractive to catch any of their eyes. Anytime we would talk about “the plan”, we referred to it as Project: Orgy (I was a Chuck Palahniuk fan, too). Often times we would chicken out in asking them out. The one time we got the courage to organize a group date, they flaked out on us at the last minute. My friends and I strolled to Carl’s Jr., where we wallowed in our hamburgers and did the saddest sing along to BB MAK’s “Back Here”. With no release valve in sight, my friends and I spent the majority of our high school days talking about sex, daydreaming about men that were unattainable, and discovering the grey areas of our own sexuality in the most embarrassing of ways until we were finally able to find guys that wanted to date us.

Needless to say, I felt seen for the first time when I caught a coming-of-age-show about two teenage girls navigating the halls of middle school in 2000 called PEN15 (2019). This show is the closest and most accurate portrayal of my own middle school life that has aired thus far. It tackles female friendships, periods, crushes, boys, masturbation, cigarette smoking, troubled family life, and raging hormones in such a way that stays true to how little girls develop into young women. Last year, an awkwardly cute film called Eighth Grade was released about a girl figuring out how to be cool, popular, and interact with boys when her body is going through so many changes she doesn’t completely understand what’s happening. In 2017 Big Mouth came on to Netflix, a raunchy animated show that illustrates what puberty is like for both boys and girls. Of course I would be remiss by not mentioning Bob’s Burgers (2011) and the eponymous character Tina Belcher (voiced by Dan Mintz)—a thirteen year old girl who loves writing erotic friend fiction, fantasizes about zombies making out with each other, and an understandable fascination with butts.

These coming-of-age shows and films are finally putting awkward, horny, 14-16 year girls on the map and it’s such a delight! It defies the original line of thinking that women just become sexy once they are old enough to ovulate while having no interest in sex. In an episode of PEN15, the two main characters steal thong panties from a popular girl because it’s a coveted underwear item. It symbolizes the stepping stone from being a girl to becoming a woman. The girls alternate days wearing the thong and delay returning the panties because it gives them a sense of empowerment. It puts swagger into their step (literally). Never do they show off the thong to other boys or make it known to anyone else they are wearing them. This is an item of clothing only they know they’re wearing. The episode beautifully and comically explores how female sexuality and empowerment has nothing to do with men—it’s something that comes from within, the idea that they are in control of their own sexuality, their own bodies, wearing something that makes them feel good about themselves when they are going through the most awkward phase in their lives, which in mainstream media is considered a massive taboo. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is an episode of Big Mouth where Jessie (voiced by Jessi Klein) needs to buy a new bra but she doesn’t want the standard white cotton training bra, she wants the VA-VA-VA-VOOM bra from a Victoria’s Secret-esque lingerie store—the red laced thingamajig that will make her newly developed breasts look fantastic in a low-cut shirt. At first, she enjoys the attention she gets from other boys but once she becomes objectified and inundated by unwanted attention, the bra no longer symbolizes female empowerment she was seeking when she originally bought the undergarment but rather the chains of oppression that have kept women from wearing certain items of clothing for fear of being attacked then blamed. So Jessie flushes the bra down the toilet. Both of these episodes highlight how female sexuality can be powerful by either uplifting women or reminding them that their sexuality needs to constantly be monitored.

One of the most taboo topics these shows explore is the mysterious concept of female sexuality—yes, women get horny too. Yes, women enjoy sex. Yes, we also masturbate. In PEN15, one of the main characters, Maya (Maya Erskine), accidentally discovers masturbation when she’s playing with her My Little Ponies. She sticks her hand down her underwear and before she knows it, she has found the magic of clitoral stimulation. The majority of the episode is spent seeing Maya furiously masturbate in her room. Things like holes, napes of other boys’ necks, even sand dunes, get Maya hot and bothered to the point where she lies to her friend Anna (Anna Konkle) about having to take a shit in the bathroom and instead flicks the bean on the toilet. Big Mouth devotes an episode to female masturbation when the goody-two-shoes character Missy (voiced by Jenny Slate) reads a romance novel that sends her into a tizzy and she ends up humping her childhood stuffed animal. Netflix’s new hit, Sex Education, has one of the main characters discover masturbation after her partner realizes she’s pretending to enjoy sex to get him off rather than enjoying sex for herself. She goes to Otis (Asa Butterfield), the designated sex therapist in school, and he advises her to masturbate to discover what she likes. At first, she scoffs because masturbating is widely considered to be icky but then she tries it and like Maya in PEN15, she goes to town on herself the second she experiences her first orgasm. While Bob’s Burgers has never gone into depth about masturbation since it has to comply with more censors, it’s easy to infer that Tina Belcher whacks off, too. I would be surprised if she didn’t.

We know boys masturbate. Whether they are jacking off into banana peels to hide the evidence, fucking pies to get an idea of what the inside of a vagina feels like or fucking peaches out of boredom, it’s just something boys do. It’s acceptable, it can be comedic but it’s usually said as a statement rather than an in-depth analysis of male sexuality, a conversation no one has nor wants to have simply because male sexuality is straight forward—guys are constantly horny. If anything, the depiction of male masturbation comes with the embarrassment of being caught or how they end up getting off. In the film Call Me By Your Name (2017), the main character Elio (Timothee Chalamet)—a seventeen year old boy who falls in love with his father’s grad school aide, Oliver (Armie Hammer), masturbates into a peach. It is supposed to symbolize Elio coming to terms with his sexuality, exploring the “forbidden fruit”, which is pivotal to the storyline, but it also depicts the idea that men will fuck anything to get off. Earlier in the film, we see Elio go into Oliver’s room where he puts Oliver’s swim trunks over his head to smell his essence as he dry humps the bed. We see a similar scene in Big Mouth when Andrew (voiced by John Mulaney) unexpectedly gets a boner while he is swimming at his friend Nick’s (voiced by Nick Kroll) house. He excuses himself to the bathroom where he sees the bathing suit that belongs to Nick’s sister, Leah (voiced by Kat Dennings), hanging from the shower rod. He sniffs Leah’s swimsuit as he fantasizes about her wearing the suit before Leah barges in and discovers Andrew in a precarious situation. While this behavior can perceived as being perverted in nature, it is accepted as part of male sexuality. There is never a discussion or after thought about any shame or guilt a man will feel after masturbating.

The same cannot be said about female masturbation. In PEN15, Maya’s mother makes a comment about how her dead grandfather watches over her all the time. She begins to get paranoid and starts seeing him everywhere, which makes her masturbate under the covers, unlike her brother who looks at explicit pornography without a care in the world while the ghost of his dead grandfather looks over his shoulder. In the episode, Maya ditches plans with her best friend Anna to masturbate but lies and says she is going to another friend’s house to help them out with homework. When Anna realizes Maya has lied to her, she asks why when Maya shamefully admits what she has been doing and was afraid her best friend would view her differently. In the midst of her confession, Anna comes clean that she herself sometimes pleasures herself. While both feel better about their admissions, there is still shame in the act and they promise each other to never tell another living soul what they do when they’re alone. Missy in Big Mouth feels an intense amount of shame and embarrassment when there is a school slumber party and she begins to hump her stuffed companion as she is sleeping and her classmates catch her. The mere idea that women pleasure themselves is considered gross and un-lady like. Women aren’t supposed to enjoy sex, and if they do enjoy sex they come after five thrusts from her partner—clitoral stimulation isn’t something that exists. She’s mainly there to look pretty and get her partner off with little effort. Female masturbation puts the kibosh on the idea that women can simply get off on just having a penis inside them, as most women stimulate their clitoris during masturbation and a majority of women need clitoral stimulation to have an orgasm.

Maybe it’s the access to streaming services or the topic of feminism entering the conversation more when we discuss pop culture or it’s 2019 and the times are a-changin’, but seeing these awkward teenage girl stories are giving life to television and shedding light to subjects no one would dream to talk about twenty years ago. These shows are now taking the idea of the male gaze and flipping it on its side—seeing the evolution of female sexuality that is hardly sexy or mysterious. The side that is bumbly, rocky, and downright unpleasant. Puberty is a bitch no matter what gender, but being expected to adhere to a standard of beauty at such a young age and treated as if you’re already an adult when you’re still a child is extra pressure added to what are supposed to be the best years of your life. Will these shows re-wire our brains on how we see teenage girls in the real world? No, probably not. My hope is that it will ignite conversations about the never-ending uncomfortable feeling everyone feels when their bodies are changing and to be as kind as possible.