Full text of DOI:10.1111/1540-4560.t01-1-00010

Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 59, No. 1, 2003, pp. 159--178
Sowing the Seeds of Violence in Heterosexual
Relationships: Early Adolescents Narrate
Compulsory Heterosexuality
∗
Deborah L. Tolman , Rene´e Spencer, Myra Rosen-Reynoso,
and Michelle V. Porche
Center for Research on Women, Wellesley College
In this paper, we explore how early adolescents’ descriptions of their romantic
relationships produce evidence of how precursors to violence are woven into the
fabric of such relationships from the very beginning of their experiences of “het-
erosociality.” We identified Rich’s (1983) concept of compulsory heterosexuality
as an interpretive framework for analyzing these relationship narratives, exam-
ining qualitative data from two samples (combined n = 100) diverse in ethnicity
and income to form a dialogue between youth perspectives and theory. We offer
adolescents’ descriptions, and our interpretations, of several themes, including
the conceptualization of boys as sexual predators which normalizes such behav-
iors, girls’ behavior in response to assumed male aggression, and boys’ narration
of their participation in relational processes which reproduce these beliefs and
behaviors.
The acknowledgment of violence in adolescent dating relationships has been
a focus of growing concern among researchers, youth workers, and educators. This
concern is justified by the rates of reported violence of various forms in adolescent
dating relationships (e.g., experiencing verbal and/or physical abuse by a partner),
ranging from 8.8% (Kann et al., 2000) to 40% (Sousa, 1999). Much of the research
∗
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Deborah L. Tolman, Center
for Research on Women, Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481 [e-mail:
dtolman@wellesley.edu]. This research was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation. We would
like to thank Judy Chu for many contributions to the project, Kate Collins and Marta Allyson White
for their assistance with preparation of the data, and Mary Harris for her assistance with preparation of
this manuscript. Special thanks also to the teens who participated in these studies and to the staff and
administrators at the research sites for their commitment and collaboration.
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Tolman, Spencer, Rosen-Reynoso, and Porche
investigating this form of violence has targeted primarily college-aged adolescents,
yet teens begin having romantic relationships much earlier, primarily in middle
school during their early adolescent years (Furman & Wehner, 1997). In this paper,
we explore how early adolescent girls’ and boys’ ordinary descriptions of their
early romantic heterosexual relationships, obtained through qualitative inquiry,
produce evidence of how violence, and the antecedents to violence, can weave
into the fabric of such relationships from the very beginning of their experiences
of “heterosociality” (Phillips, 2000). Through an iterative process of oscillation
between theory and data (Maxwell, 1996), we identified Rich’s (1983) conception
of the institution of compulsory heterosexuality as an interpretive framework for
analyzing youth’s relationship narratives.
Neither of the two studies drawn upon in this paper was specifically about
violence in these relationships. In inviting adolescents to describe both positive and
negative aspects of their early heterosexual relationships, we noticed discomfiting
intimations of expectations and experiences of male aggression and dominance
punctuating the many tales of juggling peers, parents and boyfriends/girlfriends,
hope and heartbreak, and emotional and sexual exploration. To expose possible
roots of relational violence, we focus on these intimations in this paper.
Coming to the Lens of Compulsory Heterosexuality
In this feminist analysis of early adolescent romantic relationships, we exam-
ine and incorporate their sociopolitical context. Starting from a query about health
and risk in these relationships, we began first to recognize and then to document
recurrent scripted behavior which we identified analytically as enactments of com-
pulsory heterosexuality. Rich conceived of heterosexuality as a universally perva-
sive institution organizing male and female relationships, not simply as attraction
to and engaging in sexual behavior with the opposite gender. This institution of
heterosexuality is comprised of unwritten but clearly codified and compulsory con-
ventions by which males and females join in romantic relationships. Rich posited
that heterosexuality is political in nature, rather than natural, functioning to serve
the needs and desires of men within patriarchy, and therefore requiring various
forms of male coercion of women for its production. She outlined how seemingly
discrete social processes actually work synergistically to oppress women, includ-
ing the socialization of women and men to feel that male sexual “drive” amounts
to a right, the denial and denigration of female sexual pleasure or agency, and the
objectification of women. Violence against women and the constant threat of it
(including sexual harassment and rape), coupled with incitements for women to de-
value their relationships with other women, sustain and perpetuate this institution
to insure that it functions unconsciously and imperceptibly for most individuals.
Citing Black feminist theorists and novelists, Collins (1990) further illumi-
natedthisinstitutionbyidentifyinghowseveralinterlockingsystemsofoppression,

Sowing the Seeds of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships
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specifically race, class, and gender, function so that compulsory heterosexuality
is not merely the monolithic privileging of all men at the same kind of expense
for all women. That is, race and class intersect with gender to generate hierarchies
and concomitant horizontal processes of privilege and oppression within compul-
sory heterosexuality. For instance, Collins noted that within the United States,
African American men encounter barriers to some of the privileges of power and
dominance associated with norms of masculinity that compulsory heterosexual-
ity confers on White men, while White women may take up positions of power
and dominance over African American women. Other feminist writers, both of
color (i.e., Asian United Women of California, 1989; Crenshaw, 1995; Hurtado,
1996) and White (i.e., Caraway, 1991; Furstenberg, 1996), have elaborated Collins’
theory of how gender, race and ethnicity, and class function together to produce
compulsory heterosexuality.
A cornerstone of Rich’s analysis is the contested notion of a “lesbian contin-
uum,” which references and resists the prevention, disruption and generation of
antagonism in relationships between women. We extend Rich’s analysis by iden-
tifying how this institution also denigrates and encourages the erasure of men’s
strong feelings of emotional closeness to others, both women and men. Thus, an-
other key component of the institution of compulsory heterosexuality is that male
homosexuality, whether overt or suspected, be met with derision, humiliation, and
violence, inlinewiththeprincipleofdenigratinganythingfeminine. Thatis, itisnot
only women for whom heterosexuality is “compulsory” but men as well (Connell,
1995). While it has been more and more frequently noted that boys police one an-
other to conform to masculine norms (Connell, 2000; Dowsett, 1998), it is the com-
plementarity to conceptions of women’s behavior and treatment within compulsory
heterosexuality to which we draw attention. Obviously, both men and women can
and do resist participation in the institution of compulsory heterosexuality, creating
alternative forms of being in heterosexual relationships or claiming identities and
lives as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or single. However, such departures
incite significant and not infrequently severe ramifications and retribution.
A Revised View of Teen Dating Violence: Through the Lens
of Compulsory Heterosexuality
We are particularly struck by how little research on teen dating violence in-
quires why there is so much violence. The lens of compulsory heterosexuality
highlights the ways in which conventional norms of heterosexual relational dy-
namics produce and require male dominance and female subordination. Efforts to
understand the phenomenon of teen dating violence have tended to conceptualize
and research the problem as if it were only about girls and their individual pathol-
ogy, for instance, as the result of girls’ rejection sensitivity (Purdie & Downey,
2000) or history of child maltreatment (Smith & Williams, 1992). While the

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questions of gender differences and the gender of the perpetrator have consumed
much of this research (i.e., Molidor & Tolman, 1998), there is a marked absence of
a gendered analysis in research questions, designs, methods and interpretations.
The lens of compulsory heterosexuality also encourages us to examine various
forms of male aggression and dominance as related and systematic. However, the
teen dating violence literature does not acknowledge or recognize that the context
in which much of teen dating occurs is school, and in so doing has not made or
explored a possible link between sexual harassment in schools and teen dating
violence. The pervasiveness of sexual harassment in schools has now been well-
documented, with about 80% of girls in secondary schools reporting that they have
been the victims of sexual harassment, naming both verbal and physical abuse from
boys. While 60% of boys report sexual harassment, they cite more verbal than
physical abuse, naming other boys as the more frequent harasser (Hatred in the
Hallways, 2001; AAUW, 1993; Lee, Croninger, Linn, & Chen, 1996; Stein, 1999).
Stein (1995) noted that the impact of adults failing to interrupt, or even respond
to, harassment is to implicitly permit and silently encourage boys to engage in,
and girls to accept, harassing behaviors. She leapfrogs over adolescent romance
to the implications for adulthood in suggesting that this setup provides “training
grounds for the insidious cycle of domestic violence” (p. 148).
Given the greater likelihood of sexual harassment among teens happening
between students known to each other rather than among strangers (Fineran &
Bennett, 1999), there may be a slippery slope from incidents of sexual harass-
ment, which are normalized, to violence in simultaneously occurring early teen
dating experiences. At a time when teens are just beginning to explore relationships
and intimacy, girls and boys may have difficulty distinguishing between flirting
and dominance and aggression. Sexual harassment may inadvertently function as
a kind of dress rehearsal for heterosexual relationships. Our point about this theo-
rized connection between sexual harassment and dating violence is its role in girls’
and boys’ psychosocial development in early adolescence. Fineran and Bennett’s
(1999) research provides evidence of a link between sexual harassment and be-
liefs about male power embedded in compulsory heterosexuality, which allows,
even encourages, developing boys and girls to be socialized into the established
hierarchy of males over females and to learn to grow comfortable with it.
Youth Perspectives on Early Romantic Relationships:
Foreshadows of Dating Violence
Description of Study 1
The 72 students (46 girls and 26 boys) we interviewed were chosen from
among the participants in a longitudinal study in a Northeastern sub/urban mid-
dle school. This study of adolescent sexual health included both a survey and

Sowing the Seeds of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships
163
individual, semi-structured clinical interviews in which we asked early adoles-
cents to share narratives about and descriptions of their experiences with romantic
relationships and sexuality. The 72 students interviewed were part of a larger sur-
vey sample (n = 244) which included White (52%), Latina/o (23%) and bi-racial
(17%) early adolescents from poor, working class, and middle class families (26%
reported their families currently receiving public assistance) and who were all in
the 8th grade. Of the entire sample, 78% of the girls and 85% of the boys re-
ported having had some dating experience by the 8th grade and that their dating
relationships lasted, on average, over two months.
The students we interviewed were chosen from among the students who ex-
pressed interest in being interviewed, reported having had some dating experience,
and represented a range of beliefs about masculinity and femininity ideologies.
Interviews were conducted at the school during school hours in a private space.
They lasted from 1 to 112 hours and were tape-recorded and transcribed. Whenever
possible, there was a match between the interviewer and interviewee in gender
and race/ethnicity (as was the case for Study 2, see below). Spanish-speaking stu-
dents who preferred to be interviewed in their native language were interviewed
by a Spanish-speaking interviewer. The interviewers were guided by a protocol
of open-ended questions such as “Could you tell me a story about something
that’s happened in your relationship, or about how it started or about a special
time, which can help me understand what it’s like for you?” They asked follow-up
questions in response to the stories told, yielding co-constructed narratives about
their experiences with romantic relationships (Silverman, 2000). Several questions
about sexual harassment and dating violence were also included at the school’s
request.
We began our analysis by using the theoretical lens of compulsory hetero-
sexuality to generate a list of scripted beliefs and behaviors that were narrated
by the adolescents in the interview data (Simon & Gagnon, 1987), such as boys
want sex while girls want relationships or girls need to protect themselves from
boys’ unstoppable sexual desire. First, a content analysis of participants’ rela-
tionship narratives was performed to (a) verify that these scripted features were
present throughout the database, i.e., not idiosyncratic and (b) collect a full range
of examples of each of these features that appeared throughout the database. This
process enabled us to choose quotes that were representative of the sample and also
to cull out statements that were unusual, divergent or provocative, which invited
complexity into the dialogue between theory and youth perspectives that is at the
heart of this project. Several members of the research team looked at the same
interview and independently identified themes reflecting scripted beliefs and be-
haviors present in that interview. We then met as a group and came to a consensus
about the scripted features present in each interview, identified the most recurrent
similarities and most notable departures from these features across all of the in-
terviews. We then selected representative quotes for reporting findings. (Quotes

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are identified by pseudonyms chosen by the students themselves, including cases
where girls selected boys’ names.)
Then, using the Listening Guide method of narrative analysis (see Brown
& Gilligan, 1992; Gilligan, Spencer, Weinberg, & Bertsch, in press; Tolman &
Szalacha, 1999), we examined the ways these girls and boys were negotiating
compulsory heterosexuality by listening specifically for their compliance with,
neutrality towards, and open resistance to these scripts. The Listening Guide
method involves a series of sequential readings of the same narrative in which
the researcher “listens” for one specific perspective each time through. For this
analysis, several members of the team read each interview five times, “listening”
for (a) how the adolescents represented themselves in the interview, (b) how they
experienced their own sexuality, and the ways in which they (c) enacted (d) did not
enact, and (e) actively resisted compulsory heterosexuality. We then met together
to come to a consensus about the interpretations we had developed on the basis of
these “listenings” and then composed case summaries of how each of these adoles-
cents managed compulsory heterosexuality. This work was done by an interpretive
community (Fish, 1980) of a group of feminist women, diverse in their ethnic and
economic backgrounds and sexualities. While our sample for Study 1 was diverse
as described above, we chose to privilege gender in this analysis because there
was not a sufficient number of cases of each racial/ethnic group to explore the
multidimensionality of compulsory heterosexuality. In our discussion of Study 2,
we will speak to evidence of how race and class oppression interplay with gender
to produce variations in compulsory heterosexuality.
What We Learned From Study 1
Boys will be boys. One of the central tenets of compulsory heterosexuality that
pervaded these young teens’ descriptions of their romantic relationships was the
belief that most boys are, by nature, sexual predators. This belief is exemplified by
14-year-old Juliana’s statement “I think all relationships are like, like that. I think
boys just get one thing and then they’ll leave, ya know?” Such characterizations
of boys and their interest in relationships as mainly a means to “get” sex were
common in the girls’ (and boys’) interviews. Given this expectation of male sexual
aggression, a priority for girls was learning to read and respond to it in ways that
would allow them to participate in this new form of social relationship—while at
the same time hedging to protect themselves from harm. Girls described the myriad
ways in which they armored themselves against this anticipated sexual aggression,
such as breaking up with boys in anticipation of being pressured for sex and setting
firm limits with every boy around sexuality regardless of their experience with any
particular boy. Will Smith, a 13-year-old girl, narrated how she set limits with her
boyfriend before they ever even went out: “I was like, I was like ‘Do you want to
go out with me?’ And then I was like, ‘But, listen to this . . . so you can go out with

Sowing the Seeds of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships
165
me you have to realize that you’re not going to have sex with me. The kissing is
going to be done whether I like it, and if I don’t like it, well then it’s off.’” Her
strategy to set firm limits up front leaves no space within which she can experience
and explore her own pleasure and passion, suggesting that she does not feel the
luxury of identifying or privileging her own need for space to explore a physically
intimate relationship.
While girls’ general statements about boys’ dominance and aggression in
dating relationships were exemplified by tough-sounding talk, such as Mallory’s
(a 13-year-old girl) declaration, “[t]hat would be like the first clue to get out
of the relationship with someone—when they’re mad all they do is hit,” their
actual descriptions of their own experiences highlight the complexities girls face.
Several of these girls described boyfriends yelling at them, calling them names,
and policing their social behaviors such as what clothes they could wear and when
and with whom they could go out. While hitting might have been considered to be
behavior that should not be tolerated, for some girls, other aggressive, and even
abusive, behaviors seemed more acceptable.
Lisa, a 13-year-old girl, described frequent fights with her boyfriend in which
he called her names. She labeled him “violent,” giving an example from an incident
just the day before—“I mean, yesterday he threw, he tried to throw a table at my
friend because she was talking about me and we broke up”—and detailed how he
yelled at her when they fight: “He calls me like, like, he says it so like, he says it like
he means it, like, ‘Oh, you’re such a whore. You slut. You skank. Oh, you’re such
a fucking bitch.’” After relaying these experiences, she qualified her reports by
explaining that he is not “real violent.” She also reported his insistence on knowing
her whereabouts at all times and his expectation that she be at home when not with
him. Lisa’s vacillation between viewing her boyfriend’s behaviors as violent and
not “real violent” seemed to hinge on whether the violence was physical or verbal.
His violence seemed to be expected and was not itself problematic; it was when
he went out of bounds of a “normal” range of expected aggression and domination
that Lisa had a negative reaction. Lisa has already learned that she should be able
to identify abusive men and “choose” normal men (Philips, 2000) and is having to
hold the opposing realities that she is not supposed to tolerate mistreatment from
boys and men while at the same time know and accept that “boys will be boys.”
Sexual Harassment: A Pervasive and Normalized
Form of Gendered Violence
The acceptance of aggressive and dominating behaviors from boys was partic-
ularly noticeable in both the girls’ and boys’ descriptions of sexual harassment at
school. While the school had clear policies, both girls and boys described regular
occurrencesofverbalandphysicalsexualharassment, primarilybutnotexclusively
directed at girls by boys. They also indicated that this form of sexual harassment

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is expected and accepted by both boys and girls as simply a part of the school day.
For example Ace Eagle, a 15-year-old boy, talked about boys making comments
about girls in the hallways. He recited the names easily, “Gang, chickenhead, all
you—all the above. All of it, everything.” When asked about the reverse, girls
making like comments about boys, he says “sometimes” and, like virtually all of
the other interviewees, had difficulty coming up with any specific comments he
remembered hearing, “Sometimes—I—I hear ‘em, but I can’t remember ‘em right
now.” Dominique, a 13-year-old girl, told her interviewer “I mean, girls get called
more names than guys do . . . . Cuz there’s more names for girls.” When asked why
she thinks that is, she replies, “I don’t know. I don’t know. They were all invented
before we were born, so, you know.”
The most common way to deal with sexual harassment described by these
girls was to decide not to care about it or to simply ignore it. Nicole, 13-years-old,
said that she was frequently harassed by boys in school: “They just say stuff and
stuff . . . . I don’t know, they just irritate me like little bothering things like if you
say something they will start mocking you and they never shut up and they bother
me so bad . . . . Like when they grab my butt and stuff, that bothers me.” While at
first she “just wondered why they were doing it” and talked with a school counselor
about it, at the time of the interview she said, “it’s like no big deal . . . ’cause they
always do it, I’m so used to it.”
As other research has demonstrated, even when sexual harassment occurs in
full view of adults in authority, intervention is far from assured (Stein, 1999).
Mariah, a 13-year-old girl, indicated that she had been sexually harassed quite
a bit in middle school, not only in the hallway but also in one of her classes in
full view of the teacher. She said that when boys in her class made comments to
her like “Oooh you look so fine. I wanta get [some of] this,” the teacher merely
responded by saying to the boys, “Oh guys, better stop saying that cuz you guys
can get in trouble. If Mariah talks to someone here, you guys can get in trouble.”
Mariah quickly pointed out that this response, placing the responsibility on her to
take action, did not make the harassment stop; in fact, she said, “They just start
laughing and they don’t pay attention to nobody.” When asked why she did not
report these boys, Mariah replied, “I don’t know sometimes it’s like I wanted to
but sometimes I went like, oh, I can get them in trouble and they can’t graduate
for that.” The teacher’s response communicated to Mariah and the other students
in the class that such behavior on the part of boys did not warrant further action
on the part of the teacher (and therefore would continue), and that it is up to the
individual girl to take action. She did, but she took action where she had the most
immediate control—she changed her own behavior. She said that she tried to not
get up in class and asked a friend to go to her locker to get things for her. While
aware that her teacher’s intervention was at best ineffective and at worst actually
inappropriate in shifting the responsibility to her, her only other alternative was to
file a formal report against these boys, action that she worried, perhaps induced or
sustained by her teacher’s response, was too severe.

Sowing the Seeds of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships
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Some girls did indicate that they did not fully accept this notion that boys
are natural harassers or that they were obliged to tolerate such treatment. Kim, a
13-year-old girl, described frequent verbal and physical sexual harassment and
while she had responded with come-back lines, such as a sarcastic “Good pickup
line! You’re good!” she said one day she just “couldn’t take it anymore,” so she
kicked a boy who made a sexual comment to her. Despite her mother’s efforts to
defend her by going to the school and telling the officials that Kim “had a total
right to do that” because the boy had been sexually harassing her, Kim did have
to serve “one detention” (40 minutes after school) “for being violent.” When Kim
finally decided to resist the submissive response expected of her, she got in trouble,
ironically being labeled violent, despite the fact she did so to counteract sexual
harassment that had been ongoing. While Kim’s resistance yielded sanctions, what
distinguished her from other girls was the participation of her mother in backing
up her story, her action and her outrage at having to tolerate violence from boys at
school.
Notes From the Other Side
Listening to the experiences of the boys we interviewed about their early
relationships, we were struck by their pervasive narration of constant and in-
tense peer pressure to behave in sexually aggressive ways, particularly in front of
other boys. Because we were inquiring about their romantic relationships, these
data came to us “sideways,” thus, the pivotal role of how they relate to girls
in their process of establishing their masculinity and policing one another to do
so became apparent. They described how dating and engaging in heterosexual
behavior increases boys’ status or popularity, and a few talked about being pres-
sured to perform sexually in front of other boys, particularly by kissing girls, and
voiced their concerns about being teased by other boys if they did not do so.
Though few boys could name it, their stories, accompanied by their observations
about their relationships, suggest that establishing oneself as heterosexual (i.e.,
not homosexual) was a crucial purpose of this behavior. Ace Eagle, a 15-year-old
boy, in response to his interviewer’s question about why he thought most boys
his age want to have a girlfriend, replied simply, “So people don’t think you’re
gay.”
Ironically, some boys described engaging in such sexual assertiveness in the
absence of their own sexual feelings. Doug, a 13-year-old boy, narrated this peer
pressure when he said, “Yeah. Because most people have like girlfriends and
boyfriends from like peer pressure. That’s like a big thing in the eighth grade . . . .
Well like the first couple of times you basically force—like you get used to it,
like you might not . . . It depends like how much you like the girl.” He described
feeling pressure to kiss girls in front of his friends: “It was like people around
me like oh, you should do that, you should do this, kiss and stuff, like in front
of everybody. You know there’ll be a group. It’s just like sometimes you’ve got

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to like kiss her or whatever.” Wayne, a 13-year-old boy, indicated that a boy
does not always have to have a girlfriend, but he does have to have had at least
one that everybody knows about, saying that “no one really cares” if you don’t
have a girlfriend, “It’s only if you’ve never ever ever had a girlfriend.” While
Wayne had no conscious awareness that the point of this condition is to prove
heterosexuality, he was keenly aware that not having a girlfriend has negative
ramifications.
Boys described both public display of aggressive behaviors towards girls and
talking about girls in a sexually explicit manner with other boys. LL Cool J, a 14-
year-old boy, spoke directly about how showing that they can do sexual things with
girls enhances boys’ masculinity and hence their status among male peers. When
asked by the interviewer why a guy would want to have a girlfriend he replied,
“ . . . to show other people . . . That he can have, let’s say several girlfriends” which
shows them “that you are macho or more of a man.” For these boys the expectation
that they should want sex all of the time with whomever they can “get it from”
contributed to their engaging in sexual behaviors, without the space to pause to
consider for themselves whether they were ready or even whether they themselves
actually desired to do so.
One 14-year-old boy, Mattla, stood out in describing his growing dissatis-
faction with this emphasis on sex as the end-all and be-all of relationships with
girls and in narrating his developing sense of the kind of emotional intimacy,
and its concomitant pleasures, that is possible in romantic relationships. Reflect-
ing on this change in himself, he said “I used to like girls that would just like
do stuff and everything [making out], just, but now I like girls that are more,
I like to have a relationship with girls.” Describing his current relationship he
said:
She kind of wanted the same thing I did for, with a relationship and . . . we started going
out, I talked to her about it. She told me up front. She says uh, “I want to be really great
friends,” she said. “Still going out and doing stuff,” she said. “But I don’t want it to be
like”—And she couldn’t, she couldn’t really find the word for it, and so I just said, “Like
toying around and stuff.” And she said, “Yeah.” Like that. She said, “I don’t want it to be
like that.” And I said, “I know I, that’s the same thing that I want.” So that was, it was
good.
As Mattla began to recognize that there might be something more to roman-
tic relationships than making out, he became interested in knowing what a girl
wants from a relationship. Because he cared about her feelings as well as his own
emotional response to her, interacting with her as a person with whom he felt
connected rather than as a commodity for his sexual pleasure led to a willingness
to shift his expectations to accommodate her needs. Yet even as we heard him be-
gin to question and even reject several features of compulsory heterosexuality, we
noticed how the “new” Mattla bumped up against her protective armor, delimiting
emotional and intimate connection for them both.

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169
Intersectionality: Contours of Racism and Classism Within
Compulsory Heterosexuality
Description of Study 2
The second source of data comes from a series of six monthly workshops
and focus groups conducted with a sample of 28 girls who were enrolled in an
after-school program run by a grassroots feminist organization in the Northeast.
The majority of the girls were early adolescents, although ages ranged from 11 to
19. Most of the participants were either Latina (Puerto Rican and Dominican) or
African American, while others identified as White or Asian. All girls were from
impoverished backgrounds, living in or near a downtown urban area. Many were
referred to the program by school counselors or by parents or guardians.
The adults running this organization embrace a feminist perspective, and it is
the hope that, as the girls participate in mentoring relationships, they will develop a
critical analysis of how gender, race, and class are institutionalized to marginalize
minority groups. The mentors, mostly middle-class professional women (White,
African American, Latina), focus on teaching the girls about publishing and related
job skills, as well as providing emotional support. These girls entered the program
with an acute awareness of the effects of racism and classism, but with less concern
about sexism or about the way these three forms of oppression work together. The
goal of our workshops, conducted on site in an urban downtown setting, was to
present a feminist model of female adolescent sexual health (Tolman, 1999) to
them and listen to their thoughts, reactions, and insights.
Over the course of the workshop meetings, two facilitators covered various
discussion topics: expectations for how girls should be, act, or feel in order to
be feminine; experiences with dating and romance, including attention to sexual
agency and sexual identity; and the impact that reputations have for risky and
positive aspects of girls’ sexuality. These groups were audiotaped. Workshops
included short interactive activities; feedback from the girls to the program staff
underscored the positive aspects of this experience for participants. Given the
transitory nature of the participants, we were unable to do follow up groups with
these particular girls. Material from these sessions will be used by the mentoring
program to form the basis of a future teen publication (either printed or on-line)
on heterosexual relationships and sexual health. Mentors will guide girls in the
development of two- to four-page article on sexual health, using selections from
transcripts and current research on girls’ development.
To analyze data collected from these sessions, tapes of the focus groups were
transcribed and integrated with field notes from the sessions and activities. First,
we used an inductive method (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998) to see what would emerge
about compulsory heterosexuality. Then we constructed conceptually-clustered
matrices (Miles & Huberman, 1984) to identify examples of the most prominent

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emergent themes of male dominance and control, threat and danger, distrust of
other girls experienced in the context of interactions with boys and men (in dating
and casual relationships), and gendered behavior in relationships. An iterative
process of analysis of matrices, transcripts and field notes revealed the degree
to which these particular themes dominated the conversations across and within
focus groups. Although the questions posed for each session were not designed to
elicit these topics, these themes arose consistently in six out of the six focus group
sessions.
What We Learned From Study 2
Boys as sexual predators. Echoing the interviews in Study 1, these girls spoke
in vehement and outraged ways about how boys were primarily interested in getting
sex and were willing to stay in a relationship only until they acquired it, as well
as to utilize these sexual experiences to shore up their masculinity in the eyes of
peers: “If [a girl] wanted to go out with a boy and they actually thought she was
going to sleep with them, they’d just naturally go out with her ‘cause just to have
sex.” A substantial section of the transcripts from each focus group reflected the
consistent digression to talk about boys’ control in relationships, suggesting that
this theme was central to their experiences. While there was some dissension about
whether this behavior was endemic to all boys, no girl could identify a specific
boy who defied this norm. In one of the focus groups, where the topic was the
risks of having relationships, the majority of the girls expressed their concern that
once they had sex with their boyfriends, their boyfriends would leave them. They
shared the sense that they were being monitored physically by boys and men in
their communities who were trying to determine whether they were virgins based
on characteristics such as how they walked or stood. One teen explained that she
had a friend who was often approached by men because she stood with her legs
“wide apart” and therefore was not only seen as no longer a virgin but also as
having extensive sexual experience. The girls expressed discomfort and disgust
with this practice and its purpose: “Once you start out, and they start out like, ‘Are
you a virgin?’ And then you know, like she said, you know what they’re about.”
Girls acknowledged the double bind of boys’ interest in their status as virgins. On
the one hand, “Dudes are mostly lookin’ out for girls who are virgins, so they can
take it,” and on the other hand, “It’s an issue for girls who are with dudes who are
virgins too. Because they don’t want to do it with someone with no experience.”
While many of the girls reported that boys viewed girls in predominantly
negative (i.e., disrespectful, exploitative) and sexual ways, it was also made clear
to us that any attention from boys or men—however disrespectful or controlling or
potentially dangerous—was better than no attention at all. These behaviors were
accepted by the girls as a given hazard or gamble a girl has to take if she wants
to have heterosexual romantic relationships. For instance, the girls described the

Sowing the Seeds of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships
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way that boys would be “sweating” them, that is, being particularly attentive in
the early phases of their relationships, until they “got them.” It was apparent that
the girls were savvy about the need of boys to establish their masculinity in front
of peers, even if it meant disrespecting girlfriends. They recounted experiences at
school where boyfriends would ignore them in front of other boys, then quietly
slip over to say “hi.” While the girls could reprimand their boyfriends “What, you
know me now? You didn’t know me 10 minutes ago!”—and critique this approach
in the focus groups, they were shocked when we asked if that was a reason to
break up with a boy, suggesting that it was an anticipated and normalized part of
a romantic relationship.
Girls as Threats—Disconnection From the (Perceived) Enemy
A noticeable proportion of the focus group sessions were devoted to dealing
with the consistent distrust among the girls. As often as not, the girls would criticize
each other, engage in name calling including racial epithets, or outright refuse to
work in small groups with particular girls. From our discussions with staff and
our own observations, we determined that conflict within the group had multiple
origins: racial/ethnic tensions, neighborhood affiliation and school loyalties, age
disparities, and life experiences that fostered suspicion. These tensions contributed
to a reluctance and even unwillingness to share their thoughts and experiences
openly in the groups, in contrast to girls and boys in the context of individual
interviews with adults in Study 1.
The girls ascribed this ubiquitous threat of wrongdoing and even violence from
other girls, including girls they considered their friends, to perceived trespass into
their heterosexual relationships. The boys were viewed in part as a commodity
that provided certain resources (i.e., gifts, food) which the girls wanted or needed.
Girls recounted stories about losing friends when they started a relationship with a
boyfriend, because of other girls’ jealousy. For instance, one girl explained: “Okay,
let’s say, ya’ll are all cool and then someone gets a boyfriend. And then they’re
like, ‘Yeah, my boyfriend does this for me.’ And then they’re like, ‘Damn,’ you
know. ‘Why can’t I find somebody like that?’ And then they start hating. Girls start
hating.” They also noted that girls called other girls the same derogatory names
that boys use to refer to girls, such as “ho,” in the service of competition for boys’
attention: “I just had this girl call me a ho, because I had been out with this dude
that she wanted to go out with. So she sittin’ up here making up rules, calling me a
ho.” This moniker did not keep her from dating the boy; it was an anticipated part
of a familiar process of engaging in a relationship with a desirable “dude.”
On the other hand, some girls explained that if they saw their boyfriend being
unfaithful and then they proceeded to fight with the “other” girl, they ran the risk of
the boy concluding that he could control them, because they cared enough to fight
over him: “If you fight a girl, okay, say I see my boyfriend kissing or whatever, and

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I fight her—that’s just going to let him know, ‘Well, I got her like that.’” In this
Catch-22, the girls have to wrestle with the dilemma of protecting what is theirs
(i.e., their man, their relationship), while dealing with how this effort may make
them vulnerable to further control and domination by their boyfriends.
They described girls being extremely calculating in finding ways to sabotage
other girls’ relationships, not denying their own participation in this practice. One
girl had elaborated a plan whereby she and her friend watched over each other’s
boyfriends and for possible female predators: “I only have one friend that I let
come around my boyfriend . . . . I know her boyfriend and she know my boyfriend.
So we watch over each other.” These girls spoke of a general mistrust of other girls
and did not place much value on their friendships with girls, because they believed
“friends don’t stay forever.” This sentiment stood in contrast to the girls in the more
socioeconomicallydiversemiddle-schoolsample, whosetalkaboutboyfriendswas
not pervasively laced with the provision of needed material resources tied up in
heterosexual relationships.
Absent Accountability of Boys
It was clear that the girls were aware of the double standard that boys could and
should have a lot of sexual experience and not suffer negative repercussions, while
girls run the risk ofbeing branded withterriblereputations. Unlikethegirlsin Study
1, who stood in a primarily defensive posture towards this and other vulnerabilities,
these more disenfranchised girls narrated a more active stance. They tried turning
the tables on the boys by appropriating the very derogatory terms specifically and
obviously reserved for them by putting the word “male” first. For instance, they
called boys “male prostitute” or “male ho.” Exemplifying how impervious to such
outcomes boys feel by virtue of being male, one girl reported how a boy clearly
stated to her: “Oh, I ain’t a ho. Oh I ain’t a female.” However, her resistant view
was, “You sleeping around, you a ho.” This effort may possibly reflect how these
girls had internalized sexism and the right of males to dominate by setting the
terms (and in fact, may be viewed as a desirable moniker by the boys). However, it
may alternately or even simultaneously be an effort to gain some control over boys
by seeking to subject them to the humiliating experience of being categorized in a
negative way as a result of open sexuality. In contrast, a girl who dates a guy who
is labeled in one of these ways is then viewed in a similar manner, whether or not
her behavior is similar to the boy’s—“if they stupid enough to sleep around with
him, then they a ho too”—while the reverse is not true for a guy who dates a girl
who gets called these names.
The girls described how all of the boys would lie to their male friends about
having sex in order to gain status. The language these girls report boys using to
describe having sex had notably violent overtones. For instance, one girl mimicked:
“Just to get props [respect] from their boys, like, ‘Yeah. Yeah, I hit it. I hit it.’” We

Sowing the Seeds of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships
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note the absence of positive words to describe intimacy and an absence not only
of female sexual subjectivity but also of female humanity in this construction of
sexual relations as “it.” Fine, Roberts, and Weis (2000) suggested in their study
with Latinas that young women acquiesced to the double standard “to ‘protect’
their men—both out of economic necessity, a blind ‘respect,’ ‘embarrassment,’
and the cruel mandates of heterosexual ‘love’” (p. 102). Not only do boys have
a lack of responsibility and accountability in these girls’ stories, these girls carry
the responsibility and suffer the consequences for maneuvering through boys’
aggressive behavior—a heavier burden than armoring themselves from it, as the
majority of the girls in Study 1 described.
A Moment of Possibility: Entitlement to Pleasure
In general, we interpreted a high level of compliance in girls’ reports of being
objectified by boys and men (see Bartky, 1990; Frederickson & Roberts, 1997).
There was a focus on appearance throughout our sessions, valuing thinness, light-
skin, and big breasts. This emphasis was also extended to the boys to whom they
were attracted, and critiques of others’ looks were often extremely harsh. Although
the stories of these girls tended towards distressing enactments of compulsory het-
erosexuality, there were also glimmers of resistance. In one session, a conversation
about cultural and religious norms turned towards female genital mutilation, when
one of the participants brought up a story she had just read in a magazine:
Interviewer: Do you know what happens to you when you do female circumcision?
Uh huh.
You lose all feeling.
Interviewer: You lose all feeling.
You lose the feeling.
Eewwww!
There’s no feeling.
So you can have sex but it’s not pleasurable.
Interviewer: Right.
That’s wrong!
That is wrong!
That’s something you should never do that to no little kids.
The girls were unanimous in their outrage over this practice, an exception to their
usual disagreement and lack of support for one another. In a notable departure from
how they referred to their own and others’ female bodies, these girls conveyed their
knowledge that sexuality can and should be pleasurable for them, that they have a
right to the feelings in their bodies, and that denial of that right without consent and
at such a young age is “wrong.” Perhaps it is the extreme and egregious example
of female genital mutilation that can illuminate institutionalized denial of female
sexuality and subjectivity. This exchange suggests how these girls can reject seeing
women, perhaps themselves, only as objects of others’ desire. We were especially

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Tolman, Spencer, Rosen-Reynoso, and Porche
struck that girls named the theft of pleasure and desire, without consent, as the
primary reason that genital mutilation is immoral.
Conclusions
The school in which Study 1 occurred was staffed by aware adults committed
toending teendating violence, through classroomcurriculaandprogramson dating
violence, even including an annual performance of a play that depicts a girl who
resists everyone’s insistence that her boyfriend is abusing her and ends in her being
murdered by him (which is followed by comments from a police officer and a social
worker, as well as by classroom discussion). Some teachers were actively trying
to stop it, sharing with us their feeling of swimming upstream and their frustration
that the students didn’t “see it,” which was evident in such behavior as girls fighting
over boys. While the message that dating violence is “bad” is clear, a critique of
the larger systems which produce and perpetuate violence in intimate relationships
was missing, leaving girls feeling scared and boys feeling unfairly accused. This
approach bears an uncomfortable similarity to current overly simplistic tactics in
abstinence—only education, such as AIDS education and “just say no” to drugs
campaigns that gloss over the power dynamics of gender, race and class. This
analysis suggests the need to re-evaluate and reengineer dating violence programs
in schools that tend to focus on extreme outcomes rather than the more subtle, yet
insidious instances of domination.
When asked to reflect on their observations of sexual harassment in their
school, both boys and girls concluded that, although the gendered nature of these
behaviors did seem “weird,” it was simply the way things were. Despite separate
curricular efforts to offset sexual harassment and dating violence, male aggres-
sion and dominance were naturalized and normalized by both the girls and boys.
Information about equity and dating violence is woven into the reality of lived
and observed relationships that is more powerful than the lessons of school. We
would thus encourage schools to move beyond the defensive emphasis on legal
ramifications of sexual harassment and re-center efforts on the emotional toll of
compulsory heterosexuality for girls and boys as they build foundations for life-
long relationships.
The lens of compulsory heterosexuality, modified to incorporate resistance to
male homophobia, suggests that isolating dating violence and sexual harassment
as independent phenomena, particularly given their implicit socializing functions
during adolescence, may lead to largely unsuccessful attempts to treat the symp-
toms of a much larger problem that continues undiagnosed. The emphasis on “bad”
behaviors which remains de-contextualized and unanalyzed is a missed opportu-
nity for helping youth to develop critical perspectives, alternatives and alliances
with adults and peers in relational spaces where resistance to the multiple axes of
the institution of compulsory heterosexuality, rather than just its constituent parts,
could occur. Yet at the same time, while these adolescents may be exposed to

Sowing the Seeds of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships
175
critiques of dating violence and sexism, we note girls’ expressed sense, especially
among somewhat older girls, of the lack of viable alternatives to these forms of
gendered relationships, which contributes to the seeming inevitability of violence
in and around their romantic experiences. Without new maps of other possibilities
for a relational terrain in which boys are responsible, respectful and not having
to prove their manhood by publicly kissing or “dissing” girls, such critiques in
and of themselves may not provide much of a fit with girls’ actual circumstances,
choices, and lives.
The mentors of the girls in Study 2 all espoused strong feminist ideals and
commitment to social justice through the structure of the program and through
one-on-one relationships with the girls. The constraints of socioeconomic back-
ground and the daily insults of racial and ethnic prejudice the girls in the program
experienced seemed to overwhelm the relevance of feminism—in particular as
it pertained to their relationships with boys—in their current circumstances. Al-
though the girls were able to “talk the talk” that one way for girls to be strong is
to “be a feminist,” they could not define what that meant, nor critique the system
of gendered oppression, including male domination and aggression coupled with
female betrayal or lack of support in which they as girls were embroiled. These
girls reminded us that there are indeed some benefits to be gained by entering
into scripted heterosexual relationships; as one of the girls pointed out, having a
boyfriend is “something out of the ordinary.” The tolerance for boys’ dominance,
even to the point of violence, in heterosexual relationships seemed to be relatively
benign in comparison to other daily dangers. The vulnerability endemic in any
focus group discussions, and perhaps even especially with regard to the topics we
were covering, may have led to a glossing over of resistance or alternatives to the
scripted behaviors they described. In contrast to the middle school study, we have
only girls’ perspectives on which to draw for this more disenfranchised group, and
not that of the boys in their community. These findings underscore the importance
of expanding the research agenda on adolescent sexuality from its exclusive focus
on diminishing risk behaviors towards more developmental and gendered work on
adolescents’ romantic relationships.
By bringing the interpretive lens of compulsory heterosexuality to our under-
standing of girls’ and boys’ representations of themselves and their experiences,
we examined their stories with a politicized perspective that they themselves did
not evidence and/or may not have. This analysis of youths’ perspectives on vio-
lence forces us to confront the tension between our worry that we are foisting this
interpretive lens on them and our concomitant belief that in so doing we increase
our ability to learn about how the institution of compulsory heterosexuality is
placing seeds of violence in their adolescent heterosexual relationships. However,
this analysis illuminates primarily invisible choices and constraints which adoles-
cents negotiate with varying levels of consciousness and offers an alternative to
the search for explanations of teen dating violence which dislodges and displaces
a focus on individual pathology.

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Finally, while we are not surprised to hear the variegated narrated acceptance
of boys’ aggressiveness and normalization of violence in these two samples, we
are troubled by it and thus even more by the overwhelming attention paid to
understanding why girls get themselves into or stay in violent dating relationships.
This ongoing attempt to fix and fiddle with girls is coupled with a glaring lack
of attention to understanding boys’ aggression—how and why this way of being
gets produced, or finding ways to intervene with, or interrupt and resist with, boys
(see Sousa, 1999, for an exception). Research and interventions primarily geared
toward the role of girls in (failing to) identify abusive behaviors leaves them with
a “choice that is not a choice,” does not assist boys in dealing with their anger and
aggression, does not recognize boys’ vulnerability or the lack of social/relational
space for their emotional lives or for the development of possible critiques or
(safe) alternatives to becoming men. At best, current programming tends to be
focused on the teaching of identifying violence in relationships after they occur,
and at worst pathologizing girls for entering these relationships. There needs to be
greater emphasis on prevention for boys.
It is possible that, like the girls who lose their knowledge and voices in the
face of dominant norms of femininity (Brown & Gilligan, 1992), some boys may
lose track of their emotional responses to these externalized pressures or even their
ability to notice them as they move through adolescence. While the emotional and
relational difficulties of dominant norms of masculinity have been much discussed
of late (i.e., Connell, 2000), the significance of how these phenomena fit together
as complementary parts of the institution of compulsory heterosexuality needs to
be understood. The complexity of boys’ narrations of early romantic relationships,
and, at least via the reports of the some of the girls in the focus groups, ongoing
male dominant and aggressive behavior into adolescence, indicate that turning our
attention to boys’ experiences is not only necessary to understand the processes by
which they become men but also a crucial component of the empowerment of girls.
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The authors were all affiliated with the Gender and Sexuality Project at the Center
for Research on Women at Wellesley College during the course of this research.
DEBORAH L. TOLMAN is an Associate Director of the Center and a Senior Re-
search Scientist; she is the director and founder of the project. Her book, Dilemmas
of Desire: Adolescent Girls Talk About Sexuality, will be published by Harvard
University Press in Fall, 2002. Her current research program on adolescent sexu-
ality includes developing positive and comprehensive models of male and female
adolescent sexual health, the relationship between adolescents’ television viewing
and their sexuality, including the role of gender ideology, and theorizing female
sexuality development.
´
RENEE SPENCER is Assistant Professor of Social Work at Boston University.
As a clinical social worker, she developed and implemented psychiatric hospital
programs for women based on feminist relational theories of psychological devel-
opment. Hercurrentresearchjoinsherinterestsinrelationaltheoriesandadolescent
development by focusing on the development of empirically based explanations of
the often cited but poorly understood finding that a confiding relationship with at
least one adult is one of the best protections against many forms of psychological
trouble for children and adolescents.
MYRA ROSEN-REYNOSO is a doctoral candidate in the Developmental and
EducationalPsychologyprogramattheBostonCollegeSchoolofEducation. Sheis
also a Fellow at Children’s Hospital in Boston, MA. She is currently focusing on the
employment outcomes and career development of women with disabilities which
is funded by the National Institute on Disability Rehabilitation and Research. Her
dissertation is a qualitative study of the work experience and vocational trajectories
of Latinas with psychiatric disabilities.
MICHELLE V. PORCHE is a Research Scientist at the Center for Research on
Women at Wellesley College. She is also a Research Analyst at Harvard University
Graduate School of Education, working on a longitudinal project, investigating lan-
guage and literacy development related to motivation and academic achievement
for children and adolescents.